America’s Power Grid Isn’t Ready for Electric Cars

Citylab.com has published some great articles, but this isn't one of them. It's not clear to me why they published this article or who the intended audience is. And I'm skeptical of the conclusions, given that the article doesn't mention the rise of wind and PV solar power generation coupled with energy storage capacity.

This piece is an obvious plant by the anti-electric lobby.<p>The article does not mention the word &quot;battery&quot; in any of its forms (&quot;battery&quot;, &quot;batteries&quot;) even once. And yet batteries are the proven solution to exactly the problem they are pretending is unsolvable.

Citylab forgets an important factor: the electricity consumption of oil refineries.<p>Almost all of it goes to making “branchy” isomers needed for gasoline, or things like hydro desulfurization. Reduce the demand for gasoline and diesel, and now you have surplus electricity, which so happens to be more per gallon than the equivalent electrical energy in a gge of EV usage.<p>This isn’t a panacea- if you don’t have refineries in the area, and&#x2F;or their power can’t be fed to the grid, you might have a problem.<p>California and Texas are solid, though.

Thanks to decades of stalling-off and fossil-fueled obstructive lobbying, so far we&#x27;ve largely failed to build anywhere-near-adequate de-centralized and alternative energy sources.<p>Originally the fossilers hoped to keep viable alternatives out of the public eye. Now that that&#x27;s failed, they&#x27;ve got paid foolers running around.<p>Rome&#x27;s burning. Nobody wants to make the small sacrifices, nobody wants to think about the Big Sacrifice. So it goes.

It is pretty average that they didn&#x27;t discuss the fact that the peaking power plants are very expensive, typically burning higher grade fuels like natural gas or diesel, rather than goal or nuclear. And, rather than encourage old style night time off-peak use, we need charging to occur during solar PV peak on colder days, and cars (mobile batteries) to supply to the grid during peak summer load, providing grid stabilisation to account for wind&#x2F;PV variability.

What if, as seems quite certain, much of the electricity is supplied from off the grid by solar energy at homes, work places, shopping malls, and so on?<p>It seems the me the article was designed to make the problem look more difficult than it really is, as a way of undermining the adoption of EV&#x27;s.

All that oil not used in cars could be used to power charging stations...

obviously bollocks