EV Vehicle recharge

[ALBERTAFARMER4]

I'm curious how much gravel you are travelling on AF4? And what are you seeing with regards to under body road rash?

We have a more direct route to town that takes 8 miles of gravel, or can get to blacktop in 2 miles but makes the trip 4 miles longer.

Two biggest issues I have with today's vehicles are their inability to stand up to road-rash! Seems that if it isnt built on a truck chassis, the undersides get thoroughly trashed by both gravel roads, and the friggin gravel the road departments seem intent on spreading all over our highways in the winter... fuel lines, brake lines, electrical harnesses, sensors, etc all have to be wrapped with heater hose or else you end up with serious issues.

I could see an EV eliminating alot of those sorts of things, but are the battery packs protected well enough? Any exposed wiring harnesses/sensors? Are there nooks and crannies that have salt and gravel get into them that you cant wash/clean out? I'm thinking of the galvanic reactions caused by the road salt that rot out steel fuel tanks around here, or the jamming of small rocks between said tanks and their protective shells that eventually wear holes into the plastic ones.

I do 4miles of gravel per day. Gravel is going to be tough on any car. Most of my problems are rocks getting in the brakes. The bottom of the vehicle is very well covered and the battery pack has a steel plate underneath it. Ground clearance is about 6”.

I did have one issue with a rabbit getting inside and chewing up my wiring harness.

[rodd]

Wow, my post got some great responses, thanks. I have learned alot. This is what this site should be for.

We burn 25% of the diesel per seeded acre that we did in 2002. I have the records to prove that, but I really don't brag about being ecofriendly. We live hour away from farm (retirement home), keep both houses heated, I spend time at farm when needed in winter. Commute a lot because of choice. We travel a lot, by car and plane, so we are definitely not carbon neutral. I admit we are energy pigs, but the farm offsets that. Yeah right.

On the efficiency note, I use a Diesel Jetta over 50 MPG to commute around 30,000 kms/year, 3/4 ton stays at farm unless I am hauling something big. Truck gets around 6000 km/year. I wish we had more diesel options in Canada for small vehicles. Diesels in cars and suv's are a great option. Rented a diesel Mitsubishi 8 passenger in Costa Rica, amazing vehicle. Have been in an Audi 8 diesel at 240 km/hr on Autobahn, amazing power, clean and quiet also. Biodiesel and a diesel make sense I think (ignore cold debate on biodiesel)

I have looked at solar panels for farm and if I were 10 years younger they would be installed. I'll let next generation do that. Looks like an 8 year payback, but would be quicker with increasing power rates.

I really hope small nuclear reactor power plants show up soon. Yes, in my back yard. Not worried, US puts 5000 people on a nuclear aircraft for months at a time, no problem. 400 in a nuclear sub for months. Think about that. Nuclear is the next energy source to power our EV's

[WiltonRanch]

How long will everyone transition from fossil fuels before unintended consequences present themselves. With so many industrial processes intertwined with use of byproducts from oil coal and gas where do these products come from? For instance sulphur is a byproduct of sour oil production. With a sustained push for sweet Oil over sour supplies of sulphur are lower. Sulphur is essential in a host of manufacturing and mineral extraction processes. We will always adapt but how many transitions can we stand at once?

[AlbertaFarmer5]

Please?

What improved infrastructure? Have you seen the militant opposition to any new power lines, or generation? Chuck's NFU has invested more energy in opposing any new hydro dams such as site C, than have into any ag related issues. Interestingly enough,Chuck just refuses to acknowledge that contradiction, while promoting hydro as the renewable solution.
The greens and NIMBYs are now protesting not only the power lines, but the solar and wind installations as well.
Paying for it is the least of our troubles.

[Hamloc]

Except chronic naysayers like you and A5 never seem to acknowledge that many EVs can be charged by low carbon renewable sources of electricity including hydro in many provinces. Canada has a lot of hydro relatively speaking.

Even in Alberta which is switching all its coal facilities to NG there is about a 50% reduction in carbon emissions with gas over coal.

And just because there are some periods of the year when wind and solar don't provide much electricity that doesn't mean they can't provide a lot of electricity to charge EVs throughout the rest of the year.

As always the naysayers always focus their criticism on the windless and sunless periods to "prove" that solar and wind are not feasible. Wrong!

Saskpower and several Alberta utilities have demonstrated over and over again that both solar and wind are part of the transition away from fossil fuels.

On our farm solar is providing more than our average annual electricity usage. Most months our solar puts out far more than we use. Except for aeration grain drying in the fall. And in some winter months close to or more than we use.

Any excess in the surplus months can easily be stored in an EV battery and help reduce reliance on fossil fuels and reduce carbon emissions.

And as I mentioned in a previous post its clear that EVs can have a lower energy cost than ICE vehicles. Up front costs are still higher, but as EVs take over market share those upfront costs will come down.

Chuck explain to me how in Alberta utilities have demonstrated over and over again that both wind and solar are part of the transition away from fossil fuels?!

Let’s look at simple numbers Chuck. Alberta’s total generation capacity is 17224 megawatts. At 1:13 pm today Albertan’s are consuming 11432 megawatts. Let’s say Alberta had 17224 megawatts of wind generation capacity. Right now the wind farms are producing at 9.7% of capacity. So if we had 17224 mw of generation capacity producing at 9.7% we would have 1670 megawatts of electricity being produced or 14.6% of what is required. What that proves to me is that wind generation is nothing more than expensive virtue signalling that doesn’t create dependable electricity. Groups like Greenpeace firmly believe renewables are the only future path, this drought in wind power is going on six days now during a period of extreme cold, no battery storage could last that long. Hydro is not considered environmentally friendly by groups like Greenpeace, personally I have no issues with hydroelectric power. And I think Nuclear is fantastic. Apparently Germany doesn’t, I read a headline in Reuters that Germany was closing down 3 of their remaining 6 nuclear power plants. As for transitioning away from fossil fuel generation, if you take a realistic look at the numbers the proof is that renewables aren’t the answer! Oh LOL!

[farming101]

What improved infrastructure? Have you seen the militant opposition to any new power lines, or generation? Chuck's NFU has invested more energy in opposing any new hydro dams such as site C, than have into any ag related issues. Interestingly enough,Chuck just refuses to acknowledge that contradiction, while promoting hydro as the renewable solution.
The greens and NIMBYs are now protesting not only the power lines, but the solar and wind installations as well.
Paying for it is the least of our troubles.

Pumped storage too

https://www.owensoundsuntimes.com/news/local-news/petition-against-meaford-pumped-storage-plan-filed-as-company-proceeds

[checking]

Does it get any better than radical environmentalists fighting environmentalists over EV vs. lithium procurement.

Super volcano in Nevada has a mega lithium deposit. Should it be exploited, cc.

[helmsdale]

Pumped storage too
https://www.owensoundsuntimes.com/ne...mpany-proceeds

We've gone BANANA's... We have decided to "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything". This same crowd is in tight collaboration with NOPE or Not On Planet Earth.

[AlbertaFarmer5]

Quoting chuck Any excess in the surplus months can easily be stored in an EV battery and help reduce reliance on fossil fuels and reduce carbon emissions
What a brilliant solution. Did you come up with that all by yourself? So we each just need to buy enough $50,000+ EVs to store the excess solar during the summer, so we can use it in the winter when the sun doesn't shine. Sounds like a carbon neutral plan to me.
But perhaps I have misunderstood you, and you only expect to store it for one day at a time, not seasonally. In which case the typical commuter will plug their car into the solar panels to charge it when they are not using the car. According to the car and driver article where I was reading the Anderson report, they used the number of 90% home charging. So 90% of commuters who don't happen to work the night shift, will be plugging their electric vehicles into the solar panels at night to charge them up to store the electricity for the next day's commute during the daylight hours.
That sounds almost as practical as storing excess June solar energy in an EV to be used in December.

Unfortunately, Chuck hasn't responded, so I'm not sure which way he plans on using electric cars to store solar power. But I did the math anyways.
A Tesla model 3 (depending on year and range options) stores 75 kWhs of electricity when new.
In Quebec where they already use electric heating and cooking( which is where we are all supposedly heading in order to be carbon neutral, so it is a good proxy), annual electricity consumption for a single detached house is 24,000 kWh.
As we previously discussed, in a real world application where downtime is not acceptable, in this case using solar panels to run small injection pumps at remote oil wells, they are installing 3 months worth of battery storage at our latitude. I would say heating a house in a climate that can be -40 degrees is a situation where downtime is not acceptable, so we need to store 1/4 of a years worth of power.
3 months worth is a mere 6000 kWh's assuming the load is eveny distributed throughout the year, which it obviously isn't, considering that 55% of the 24,000kWh is for heating. But I'll stick with that for simplicity.
So at 75kWh per car, it would only require 80 Tesla model 3's to store enough electricity from solar in the summer, to keep your house warm and lit ( and most importantly, keep the internet functioning so you can troll agriville) all winter.

Base model is only $60,000, so it would only cost $4,800,000.00 to buy enough Tesla cars to be self sufficient year round using solar power.

Unless of course you also want to drive the Tesla's during the winter, after charging them during the summer, then you will need quite a few more than the 80 calculated above, since they can't both power your house all night, and then drive to work and back the next day.

And as mentioned above, a garage big enough to heat all these EV cars and their batteries, in order to get the full 75 kWh of charge out of them, so add the heating requirements of an 80 car garage. Definitely going to need a few more Tesla's just to heat the garage with electric heat. But then that will require a bigger garage, which will require more EV's...
This could snowball to an unmanageable number of cars in a hurry.

Alternately, we could listen to the resident Tesla owner.
Last time you brought up this genius idea, AB4 told you that is was a completely impractical waste of time and technology.
But as usual, you don't come here to learn, so you repeat the same mistakes over and over.

[chuckChuck]

Good one A5. I already said using renewables and storage to replace all fossil fuel generation sources was impossible. But you already forgot that because of your short memory. Just like you seem to forget that 60% of Canada's electricity is already from renewable hydro?

But that doesn't stop you from going on a rant about how many Tesla batteries we would need to do that, wasting your time and ours.

As I said we have many months where our solar system produces more than we use. On a daily basis that surplus can be used to charge an EV. Did you really think I was suggesting that you can store the surplus for a season? LOL Only fools would believe that. But maybe that is part of your problem.

When most commuters go to work their cars generally sit doing nothing for the day during which time utility scale renewables can provide a lot of electricity for recharging. Since most daily commuter trips are short city trips, EVs work well for that purpose

And not one utility is currently planning for intermittent renewables to supply all their electricity. But that dosen't mean renewables won't make a significant contribution to low carbon energy supplies.