I have to wonder what other states may have to say about this. Specifically the other states whose electricity costs could rise.

The electric grid (again, ignoring Texas which, by and large, has its own grid) has two major parts in the US. If this does something interesting to demand, it is possible other states/entities could have something to say about it.

Personally, I kinda like the idea of CA exiting the union. They have huge taxes for "fluffy" things... that are subsidized by the rest of the country (state taxes removed from federal tax burden for people who itemize). I wonder if the state would be able to be solvent on its own. Or, easier to do, if the state-tax item had a nice simple cap on it...

It is now irrefutable that the majority of CA voters believe there is a money tree behind the governor's mansion; and they will never be asked to actually pay for all the unicorn bills that are passed.

Whatever you might think of the bigger issue, the graphic in this post should show you what the goal is: reducing the amount of waste heat - the gray on the right side.

Jay, exactly.

Shannon,

Even with a common grid you have a significant level of control where those electrons go. The states that feed power to California will just let California brown out when they consume more than their allotment. But if the price is high enough they will be happy to build a bright shinny new coal power plant just for the Californians.

In case you're wondering where California's electricity comes from...

Let me give you a hint. It ain't from all those windmills and solar farms. As of 2016, California imported 33% of its electricity from its neighbors, up from 25% in 2010.

And those neighbors are growing, with an increasing need to keep more of the electricity they are producing.

During the earlier brownout crisis that cost Gray Davis his job as governor, California politicians blamed neighboring states (and Enron) for price gouging. Well, when you make yourself wholly dependent upon someone else for a vital supply, you pretty much have to pay what they ask. California is setting itself up for another crisis, and another round of whining.

"Sure, people can charge their car in the middle of the night...but expecting people to behave in ideal ways isn't too smart."

People mostly *will* probably charge their cars at night, because it's most convenient. But to the extent the electricity comes from Solar, it will have to be stored somewhere between the time it is generated, when the sun is shining, and the time it is used for charging, when the sun is mostly not shining.

Hence, the battery capacity that needs to be manufactured for the cars themselves needs to be supplemented by an almost-equivalent amount of capacity to buffer the energy between the time of generation and the time of car charging.

Given the number of electric-car edicts and incentives around the world, and the need for increased storage in the grid driven by 'renewables', it seems that a major supply crunch in the materials used for battery manufacturing is likely.

The Californians will simply chant "wind and solar, wind and solar", and surely Gaia will judge them worthy and grant their wishes. The sun will shine 24/7, the wind will blow at a constant 20 MPH, and wind and solar installations will become outdoor Tardises, capable of growing to infinite size without consuming any land area.

"Whatever you might think of the bigger issue, the graphic in this post should show you what the goal is: reducing the amount of waste heat - the gray on the right side."

Given the inherent inefficiency of going through an extra energy-conversion step, I don't see how that's possible. Since a lot of power generation is going to natural gas (which a refinery can reform into gasoline), it's a matter of burning a fossil fuel to generate electricity which then gets converted to mechanical energy in an electric car, versus burning the fossil fuel in the car and converting it to mechanical energy directly. It seems to me that it only makes sense if the power generation is nuclear, and California sure as hell isn't going to do that. Unfortunately, I can't look at the graph; our ever-present net-nanny software at work blocks your site. (Don't feel bad; it also blocks vendor sites that we need access to.) I'll look at it when I get home tonight.

I'll also point out that a big increase in electricity demand will mean constructing new transmission facilities, of which California has put up a lot of legal and bureaucratic roadblocks.

Well, here's a reasonably safe nuclear power option. Downside, we're looking at probably 20 or so years before actual construction of a commercial reactor.

https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/608712/a-thorium-salt-reactor-has-fired-up-for-the-first-time-in-four-decades/

I was raised, early on, in Connecticut and when I got to the midwest, a couple of things caught my attention.
One is that "night" means any time after you get home from work.

So charging your car at "night", if CA uses the same terms, probably means as you get out of your car at 5:30, or 7:30 if you live in LA.

It doesn't mean getting up at midnight to plug the thing in.

Electric cars are so quiet, especially at a stop sign or stop light, that they really ought to have an audible signal that they're turning. Pedestrians who cross on the green might get hit by a Pious or a Tesla turning right. My suggestion is that, when the turn signal goes on, the car broadcasts, quite loudly, "Smug, smug, smug....."

Really, CA needs better voters.

I never hear of California proposing to spend money on the most vital resource it needs: water and ways to get more of it.

"Given the inherent inefficiency of going through an extra energy-conversion step, I don't see how that's possible."

Cousin, THE advantage to electric cars is that their motors do not eject over twice their rated power as heat when moving, and produce no heat at all when stopped in traffic. ~2/3 of fossil-fuel energy leaves the tailpipe; that and idling losses are completely recovered by converting to electric propulsion. Note also that a properly designed electric motor requires no lubrication or mantenance for a 20-year span and loses no efficiency with age. It also doesn't require a gearbox.

People think "tiny" when they think electric. A 150-HP induction motor can make over 600 foot-pounds of torque. You'd not be driving a sewing machine.

'Lectrics.

Keep your eyes on the ball, kids.

Nick is right:

I never hear of California proposing to spend money on the most vital resource it needs: water and ways to get more of it.

Short version: If you want an electric car, pay for it yourself. Same goes for a Lambo, a racing bike, a used Pinto, whatever.

California likes electric cars because the pollution from generating the power to charge them is deposited somewhere else, the rape of the land to acquire the elements to make the batteries is done somewhere else, while the dream of electric cars and being a technologically advanced society stays in California.

California is exiling all "ugly" industries to those "other" places it doesn't have to deal with (i.e., flyover land). San Francisco exempts "clean" companies from its payroll tax, while imposing it on "ugly" industries. Under this policy, Twitter is exempt, i.e., desirable to the City, while manufacturing firms are not.

Guess which one offers employment opportunities for non-college-educated folks. Yep, the "undesirable" company. Classism?

Raddy, I'll have to look at your charts when I get home. I still don't know if I'm buying it. Here is a quick and dirty comparison of a Tesla Model S vs. an unspecified gasoline-powered car getting 35 MPG. It shows the Tesla as 3x more efficient. I don't doubt the math used. However, the author notes that he omits the losses present in electricity generation (he doesn't even mention transmission) and battery charging/discharging.

I'm guessing that in reality, it depends a lot on what kind of driving is being done. One place where electrics and hybrids win big is regenerative braking. If you're driving around town, you are braking a lot and recovering a fair percentage of the energy that went into getting the car moving. But on the highway, you seldom touch the brakes. Another big consideration is cold weather. An ironic side effect of the internal combustion engine's waste heat is that you can use some of it to heat the car interior, and so there's not much loss of efficiency in driving in cold weather. An electric car has to expend energy running a heat pump or electric resistance heaters to make the cabin comfortable.

It still seems to me that electric cars only come out ahead if the power source is non-fossil, which as a practical matter means mostly nuclear. There seems to be no end in the efficiency gains still being made in internal combustion engines; I don't see large gains being made in electric motors or generators anytime soon. The one obvious way for electrics to gain is high-frequency generation, but that would be a major conversion of the grid and of electric appliances and device.

The most important factor here is TANSTAAFL. It's sort of a general application of the law of conservation of matter and energy.
If the electric car isn't wasting heat, it's because the generating station is.
Can't not.

I noticed the Wikipedia article on California's power ignores the fact that buys every last joule from the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant just outside of Phoenix

> he omits the losses present in
> electricity generation

A compelling omission, that. Coulda sworn I read in the LAT ten years ago that Burbank got all it's electricity from oil generators. Today they says it's mostly "natural gas and biomethane" plus a bunch of renewable sources from other states. The costs (including environmental) of refining these lesser sources are not well-described at the website, nor are their proportions in the generated protect.

Here in West LA, we generate energy from the body fat of failed starlets. This source is endlessly renewable.

Generating power with a new combined-cycle turbine, fired by natural gas, will get you about 60% efficiency...the remainder being lost as rejected heat into the atmosphere or a river. You are also going to lose something in electrical transmission and in battery charging. If we optimistically put the transmission and charging losses at 15%, then the total system efficiency is 51%, which is still better than the 40% or less you'll get with an internal-combustion engine.

https://www.gepower.com/about/insights/2016/04/power-plant-efficiency-record

Main problem with electric vehicles continues to be the fact that energy storage density of a battery is much inferior to that of a gas tank or a diesel tank.

Conan..."California is exiling all "ugly" industries to those "other" places it doesn't have to deal with (i.e., flyover land). San Francisco exempts "clean" companies from its payroll tax, while imposing it on "ugly" industries. Under this policy, Twitter is exempt, i.e., desirable to the City, while manufacturing firms are not."

About 15 years ago, there was a story about people in the towboat industry in Seattle who have had to wait between four and five *years* to get permits for minor facilities improvements. This was not just about bureaucratic delay and inefficiency–there is something else going on.

“It’s all cultural,” says Eugene Wasserman, executive director of the Neighborhood Business Council. If it were biotech, it would get the green light.

“Biotech is cool. Propellers and pilings are uncool,” is how the government’s attitude was summed up by columnist Bruce Ramsey of the Seattle Times.

Several years ago, I observed a local example of the cool/uncool phenomenon noted by the columnist above. A county government had an “incubator” program for new, technology-oriented small businesses..free or low-cost office and lab space, that sort of thing. Someone who was starting a metalworking business to make a new product applied…he was turned down, because the county government wanted “cool” computer-related businesses. (There were no environmental issues: this was clean light manufacturing.) Government officials, who most likely knew very little about any technology whatsoever, chose the currently-fashionable technology, which was web sites, not lathes and milling machines. (Wonder how many of the companies that they did sponsor are still around?)

See my post Faux Manufacturing Nostalgia:

http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/11680.html

Wonder how many of the companies that they did sponsor are still around?

Maybe 1 out of 10, but I'm thinking it is closer to 1 out of 20. These incubators are popular not because they work, but because they provide opportunities for graft and favoritism.

Considering that we only get to have high-speed rail if Feinstein's husband gets the bazillion-dollar contract, we should probably follow the money on this one.

Somebody received a brown paper bag delivered by a brown-shoed square in the dead of night, I'll wager.

One additional point: My above-linked post, Faux Manufacturing Nostalgia, was written in 2010. At that time, many Democrats were still singing the praises of the 1950s-style Big Company, Big Union world. That has changed substantially, as the 'progressive' wing (which now basically IS the Democratic Party) has pretty much written off the kind of people they once claimed to care about.

My family of 6 averages 125 gallons of water usage a day-inside, outside, total. That's WAY below the US average of 80-100 gallons per person a day. The government didn't pay me to conserve-we do it because it saves us money!!!!! Government can't pay people to be green. It's beyond stupid.

Yeah, the battery problem is what really kills the market acceptability of electric cars. I have a friend who has a Tesla S. One day he showed me the feature of the nav system that lets you plan a route for a cross-country trip such that there will always be charging stations within range the whole way. He plotted out a trip from here to Orlando. It involved having to take a route that is three hours longer than the shortest route, in order to hit charging stations. Batteries have made improvements, but only incrementally... this is a problem that, 25 years ago, I thought would be solved by now. It's been a tough nut to crack.

I saw a chart the other day showing the current production of the various sources of renewable energy. Hydro accounts for the bulk of it. Biofuels is second, ahead of both solar and wind, and the biggest winner among biofuels seems to be extraction of methane from garbage dumps. I discount wind as a useful source, but I think solar may have a role to play. There are people around here experimenting with commercial solar installations. The cost of the cells has come down a lot in the last 15 years. I've been trying to find some data, but the people who are doing it consider their data proprietary, which is somewhat understandable.

Good on David for mentioning transmission loss. It is a HUGE problem for the electricity industry. The farther away the power is, the more you need to generate.

Of course, the more ways there are for something to go wrong on the way to you as well, not to mention the environmental impact of miles and miles of high voltage wires and their support structures.