How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails
nytimes.comBig infrastructure projects I feel like is where America's democratic system starts to fall apart, and we honestly need a better solution.
It seems that in the US we want both good infrastructure but also to have out hands and inputs in every project. We all need to collectively understand that you can have one or the other but not both. That new rail project may not go down the exact route you want but realize that if you start suggesting changes, it will never go down the route you want because it will never be built.
This rail project could have been completed years ago if political leaders didn't always change the plan to benefit themselves.
I used to live in Chicago. In my old neighborhood, there is a right-of-way reserved for future high-speed rail. Most of it is now “tunnel” because high rises and stores have built out around it, taking all the space except that reserved portion. The grocery store has a parking deck cantilevered over the right of way; a high rise literally has a tunnel through it, etc. it looks crazy in the present, but that’s what planning ahead looks like.
The US can do big infrastructure projects. It is happening all over the place. You just don’t notice because nobody is writing about non-failures.
Can you give an example of successful recent (say, from last 30 years) passenger rail project that, unlike your Chicago one, actually exists? I mean, it is easy to set out space for project in advance, it’s actually building it that is the hard part.
$2.1 billion 10 mile light rail extension, completed last year:
https://www.sdmts.com/inside-mts/current-projects/uc-san-die...
Dayyyum, that is cheap compared to our 2 mile tunnel here in Seattle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Route_99_tunnel
$210 million a mile for rail is a great value compared to the cost to build here in the Puget Sound region. Sounds Transit 3 is adding 62 miles of rail for $53.8 billion and central portions like Ballard and West Seattle are still over a decade away from starting construction.
Do you have an example? Your example can hardly be called a success. The last big infrastructure project I recall that can even be called a success is the Big Dig in Boston, which came at a huge (unplanned for) cost.
You don't have to leave the area:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_and_Reservoir_Plan
Though decades-long, is on schedule and budget. In Chicago.
The infrastructure projects being done take much longer and cost a great deal more (even after adjusting for inflation) than a few decades ago.
This is a feature not a bug. We have a system of government designed to prevent abuse not to maximize project completion.
We like low taxes so we need voters to either directly approve a project’s budget or politicians who approve the budget need to keep getting re-elected. Politicians know that increasing taxes during their term for a project that will be completed after their term or career is a difficult sell. We Starve the Beast so we don’t have a Ministry of Transportation with career workers but rather everything is contracted out. We like federalism instead of a unitary state to avoid the problem of distant inaccessible decision makers. But then any projects that cross jurisdiction boundaries require the equivalent of negotiating a treaty. And each town controls zoning and can refuse to give up land unless they get a stop. Rural areas are overrepresented in Senates. We have environment review, lawsuits, and anti-racism laws so the little guy doesn’t get steamrolled like in the Robert Moses era. But this slows down projects tremendously.
When there is a strong mandate things get done.
It's a bug. Nowhere in any of the rationale you lay out is there anything about competence and active involvement/oversight on the part of the government. Neither major political party in the U.S. focuses on this, though the Republican mentality is largely that the government can never be competent. However, at a minimum, the government is the buying agent of the people in procuring infrastructure or infrastructure improvements. It sets the requirements, oversees execution, and signs off on the delivered products. Companies perform work, but their interests are not aligned with the interests of the taxpayers. Incompetent or unempowered government employees cannot prevent the abuse of the taxpayer by companies, nor can they establish boundary conditions for successful project completion. The checks you indicate, e.g., environmental review, are procedural devices that can have radically different outcomes depending on the competence of government employees.
The U.S. system will not get appreciably better until we focus on government competence. The layperson's go-to explanation for these outcomes is something in the tree of corruption but the truth is likely closer to Hanlon's razor.
Sometimes.
The replaced I-35 bridge went up fast. It would have cost radically less to maintain the old one properly.
America was a democracy when we built the Interstate, TVA/Grand Coulee/Hoover, Manhattan Project, space program, etc. Many of these overran budgets and schedules, but they are there to see.
A bigger problem than our democratic system is our Republican ideology, which has lost the stomach for large-scale cooperation.
Most people wouldn't mind bringing back a non-military federal job guarantee in the form of returning the WPA in some form. It won't be a particularly glorious or high paying job but I definitely believe such a program would have a place in rebuilding various pieces of infrastructure.
1) America is a constitutional republic. 2) Don't blame America for a state's failure to build a train.
You do realize that there is no contradiction in being both a republic and a democracy right?
Your point 1) is the equivalent of you rebutting someone’s claim that their hair is black by saying that their eyes are brown.
Ah, that tired old cliche. Basically every country on the planet is a "republic" (See People's Republic of China/etc, Islamic Republic of Iran, et al) and has a constitution. Your statement could be rephrased "America is a country". Turns out adjectives matter.
In any case, it doesn't really effect my first point, because whatever America's system of government is today, it's the same one as it was before.
To the actual point, all of these great projects for which we will be remembered by 25th century historians, ran over budget and over schedule, and we had people talk sh*t about them, and they got built anyway. Who remembers the naysayers (today it happens to be the Reagan/Trump Republicans, yesterday it was 'Whitey's on the moon')? Nobody. They are not memorable.
That said, as is always pointed out on HN, high-speed passenger rail doesn't make a lot of sense for this country at this point in time, it's a high-hanging fruit without that much juice. Better places to spend our billions.
> Basically every country on the planet is a "republic"
Not true, there are quite a few monarchies.
Fair enough but it doesn't make the phrase "constitutional republic" any less meaningless in the context it was offered (saying America is not 'a democracy'), does it? Incidentally, aren't most of those monarchies constitutional (ie ceremonial) in which the public elect the actual government, thus in practice democratic?
Yes, many (constitutional) monarchies are also (representative) democracies, just like some republics are.
or just turn off scripts =)
telnet works too =)
> Only now, though, is it becoming apparent how costly the political choices have been. Collectively, they turned a project that might have been built more quickly and cheaply into a behemoth so expensive that, without a major new source of funding, there is little chance it can ever reach its original goal of connecting California’s two biggest metropolitan areas in two hours and 40 minutes.
I received some good advice a long time ago, which is that don’t spend too much time beating your head over your weaknesses, because then you’ll be spending your life focusing on what you’re bad at instead of what you’re good at.
I feel like Americans should do this about trains and transit. We can’t do it. Just let it go. Find some other outlet that harnesses our strengths as a society instead of playing into all of our weaknesses.
Being able to build infrastructure is a core state/social capacity that has to be improved; there's nothing special about trains. There's also no alternative, because roads, bridges, pipes, water filtration plants, transmission lines, fiber, power plants, refineries, etc. are all impacted by the exact same forces.
America did a spectacular job of redesigning society around maximizing car usage and continues to subsidize that pattern of land and resource use.
There is always that available $54 billion surplus of the California state government budget.
#headduck
Even it's opponents, underestimated the cost. We knew it would never be $10 billion. It's rare that a boondoggle is such a doggle that even the opponents underestimated how much of a budget overrun it would be.
https://dilanesper.substack.com/p/people-who-draw-lines-on-m...
This kind of thing is what, to me, puts into doubt the idea of a full migration to electric ground transportation in anything less than a scale that could range between fifty and one hundred years.
We need to double our power generation and transportation infrastructure before full electric transportation is possible.
We can't build anything at scale any more. The CA high speed train started as a ten billion dollar promise. It quickly became $33 billion. Now it is at over $110 billion and no idea of when or if it will be completed. I would not be surprised if it ends-up somewhere between $250 to $500 billion dollars. People will work on this thing their entire lives, retire and die before it is finished.
Cost overruns and what is indistinguishable from systemic incompetence means we cannot possibly afford both the time and cost of doubling our entire power infrastructure in support of electric transportation. In other words, before we can dream of such things and approach large projects, we have to fix the cultural, bureaucratic and structural problems this nation has.
BTW, for all his faults, Trump was the first US President to seriously engaged in some of this work. I don't remember all the details. I do remember reading about such things as the permits and process to build a road or bridge being reduced from decades to perhaps a few years. We are in desperate need of more work on this front.
Today electric vehicles exist in this gray area where they don't demand enough electricity to create serious problem most of the time. Here in CA we've already have the government ask electric car owners to alter charging behavior due to power grid problems. At some point we will start to approach various thresholds that will make electric vehicles very problematic without matching infrastructure enhancement at local, city, regional, state and national levels.
Not sure we can make that happen. We can't have every project cost ten times more than planned and take ten times longer to complete. That's not a formula for success at all.
> Here in CA we've already have the government ask electric car owners to alter charging behavior due to power grid problems.
This bit of propaganda has been surprisingly successful, especially since it doesn't really make any sense.
Someone referencing it while being skeptical about high speed rail reinforces my supposition that the high speed rail is just a boringly average big project and that most of the negative coverage is barely coherent lies.
> > Here in CA we've already have the government ask electric car owners to alter charging behavior due to power grid problems.
> This bit of propaganda has been surprisingly successful, especially since it doesn't really make any sense.
What doesn't make sense to you? California did ask electric car owners to charge off peak hours to avoid overloading the grid. See https://www.newsweek.com/california-facing-power-crisis-fret...
It was not a legally binding request, so electric car owners could ignore it if they wanted to.
Very few people charge their cars at the most expensive time of day anyways.
For about a 3-day period during a historical heat wave throughout California we all did have to reduce our electricity usage for about 3 hours each day, which was mainly AC but also charging electric cars.
To conclude based on this that the grid is broken or that electrical cars (which mostly charge at night) are going to result in the grid deteriorating further makes no sense through.
> To conclude based on this that the grid is broken or that electrical cars (which mostly charge at night) are going to result in the grid deteriorating further makes no sense through.
No, that is not what leads to the conclusion. The conclusion is based on two things: Physics and mathematics.
What is happening now is merely a preview of things to come if we don't have the right conversations or people, as you are doing, dismiss the warnings some of us are issuing without making any real effort to understand.
About five years ago I designed and built (as in, I did it myself) a 13 kW solar array at home. Far more than we needed to supply the house. The plan was to use some of that for electric vehicles once they became viable. Note I didn't just say "affordable". The term "viable" is meant to include the entire ecosystem. As a comparison, a gasoline-powered vehicle is viable because you can easily refuel it without even thinking about it and it can be maintained and repaired anywhere and almost by anyone.
Anyhow. This led to me devoting a lot of time for about a year to try to understand energy, climate change and electric transportation realities. What I mean by that is that I invested time and effort seeing just how well the math and physics of what we were (and are) being told, actually align.
What I discovered was a surprise to me: They do not.
I wrote some code to simulate power requirements for a varying scale of EV adoption, all the way up to 300 million vehicles --our current fleet. The simulation predicted a need of between 900 GW and 1400 GW in addition to existing capacity. The current US capacity is 1200 GW. In other words, we need to double our power generation capacity and double (or more) our ability to transport power. As it turns out, this prediction was reasonably accurate.
One of the often hand-wavy things people talk about or write in articles is energy, rather than power. This is a huge mistake. Energy is power delivered over time. One can make outlandish claims about energy while ignoring the time element.
When, in a state like California, you have 31 million [0] EV's plug in to charge at, say, 6:00 PM every night, what you need is power, instantaneously, not energy. The fact that you generated <pick a number> of energy in the prior n days means nothing in that moment unless the energy was stored for delivery as power to each car in that instant.
What I discovered is that, at the end of the day, the hand-wavy stories just don't hold up. As a hypothetical, if you consume ten days worth of stored energy in one to nine nights, you are still short. The truth turns out to be that the EV problem, ultimately, is about power, not energy.
One way I think of this is that all 13 million+ households in CA [1] suddenly get TWO 5-ton air conditioning systems that are turned on every night at 6 PM for several hours. That's what we are talking about. And, no, we don't have the power and, if we had it, we could not deliver it.
So, yes, very much so: The grid is broken (in that it just can't cope with these loads) and a large installed base of electric cars will cause severe grid deterioration in multiple ways.
We can stick our heads in the sand an pretend this isn't so today because EV owners live in a privileged environment where they can take as much power as they need from the system and people, for the most part, don't notice any issues. I am going to guess that if we double the installed base of EV's in CA --which is mostly concentrated in large urban areas-- people will start to notice and this will lead to very interesting outcomes. I could get ugly for EV owners in so many ways.
I don't know how else to say it. I have written a lot about this. People prefer to be dismissive and continue to exist in ignorance of our future reality. We can't even build a high speed train and now we are talking about a transition to EV's that will require a doubling our our power generation and delivery capacity (this is absolutely indisputable). Why aren't we talking about mass adoption of nuclear power? It's because the easy political gains are not there, that's why.
[0] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2010/m...
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/CA/RHI725221
Why do you assume that every EV is going to charge immediately at 6 PM? Any reasonable software controlling those chargers is going to a.) at least delay that till 9 PM so that you aren't at peak rates and b.) stagger charging so that not everyone's EV charges at once.
Please do the math?
Please think it through?
I'll try to create a very simple hypothetical case to illustrate the problem and how to think about it:
Assume the average vehicle is driven 50 miles per day.
This includes commercial vehicles, long and mid haul semi trucks, work trucks, delivery vehicles, etc. In other words, the average daily per person numbers do not apply here (that would be around 25 to 45 miles per day, depending on location). I feel an average of 50 miles per day, regardless of vehicle class, is a reasonable number to use as a thinking tool to try to get a ROM (Rough Order of Magnitude) of the problem. The models I developed years ago were far more accurate than this, however, that kind of detail in a simulation is hard to convey in a post like this.
Assume, then, this to represent an average for all 30 million vehicles in CA.
The question:
How much POWER would this require?
Let's assume we use a Level 2 charger that would replenish 60 miles in an hour at 7 kW. Again, we are super-simplifying things here. For example, a semi truck or delivery van will be far less efficient and require charging at a much higher power level and longer charge duration. I am just trying to simplify this for the purpose of illustrating the problem.
Assuming 30 million vehicles charged simultaneously, this means we would need 210,000,000 kW
Let's have them charge with a uniform distribution across 24 hours. That means we need 8,750,000 kW
That's 8.75 GW.
A typical nuclear power plant produces 1 GW. In other words, in this evenly distributed scenario we would need the output of 9 nuclear power plants for 24 hours to charge all vehicles in CA.
We need 9 NEW nuclear power plants in CA. I would round that to ten.
This is power over and above current generation and transport capabilities.
How long does it take to build just one nuclear power plant? Well, certainly longer than a high speed train. I think the range is between 25 years and impossible.
How about 10 of them? Never. Unless we stop talking about EV fantasy and start discussing reality. And that is: If we want EV's to take over we need to get serious about being able to massively expand power generation and delivery and we need to do that immediately.
No, it cannot happen by 2030. That's preposterous.
And, no, solar isn't going to do it. That's wishful thinking. A solar installation that can match a 1 GW nuclear power plant and deliver 1 GW 24/7 has to be built with a peak capacity of at least 10 GW. This is massive and more than most people can imagine in terms of land use, materials, batteries, etc.
And, BTW, the above super-simplified hypothetical isn't even close to just how bad things will be in reality. For example, if you assume that, say, 25% of vehicles will need fast or high power charging, the power demand will skyrocket. Remember that I said the problem is power, not energy. Power is what you need when you have to charge a bunch of cars simultaneously. That's because you have to do it given the time constraints of the task. You don't have 48 hours to charge a semi truck that just completed a thousand mile journey. At best your might have eight hours. And that requires power. A typical truck stop might have fifty to one hundred long-haul trucks in need of charging. What they demand is power in order to deliver the requisite energy in a given amount of time. The other thing it does not take into account is concentration. A city like Los Angeles will require a staggering amount of additional electricity to deal with EV's and it will have massive peaks that will dictate the size and shape of the required feeds.
Again, we can go head-in-the-sand or understand we have a very serious that requires at least a doubling of our power generation and distribution capacity. If we don't wake up to that right away it will be an absolute mess.
I could get into your comment about delaying charge and staggering. I have including that sort of thing in my models. It does not change peak power demand. Here's the simplest explanation: Imagine you slow charge 30 million cars for 12 hours and stagger 1/12th of them every hour as you proposed. Well, 12 hours into this charge methodology you have 30 million cars charging simultaneously. And, because cars are used every day, you pretty much end-up with 30 million cars charging 24/7. I am over-simplifying. The point is that the stagger idea seems to be an intuitive solutions (I thought so before I modeled it), yet it does not eliminate the fact that you have to deliver so many kWh (now talking energy) to so many cars within a narrow window of time. In real use very few will adopt EV's if they have to spend 24 hours charging.
So build 9 new nuclear power plants? In 1972 alone, 13 new nuclear plants were ordered. [1]
Be careful with mixing physics/mathematical arguments and economic ones. If you want to talk physics, assume your (fairly generous) numbers of 8.75 GW. That's 9 nuclear power plants, as you mentioned. Or for solar, mean solar flux in CA is about 5 kWh/m^2 over a day, solar panels are about 20% efficient, that's 1 kWH/m^2/day = 24 m^2 / kW of panels = 24 km^2 / GW * 8.75 GW = 210 km^2 = an approximately 21 x 10 km solar array in the Mojave desert. That's well within the range of plausible land use. For wind, a typical offshore wind turbine generates about 8 MW of power, so we'd need about 1000 of them, turbine blades are about 750 feet across, figure 1/4 mile spacing, we'd cover 250 miles ~= less than half of California's coastline.
The reason these haven't been built yet is because of economics: it's not cost effective to invest this much when the demand isn't there yet. But then we're not going to get 31M car owners suddenly switching over to EVs. We'll get maybe 2-3M each year, switching over as they retire their old vehicles, and then we build one nuclear power plant, or 2 km^2 of solar, or 100 wind turbines, each year until the transition is complete.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancelled_nuclear_reac...
> In 1972 alone, 13 new nuclear plants were ordered.
You are making my point. We can't build them.
> Or for solar, mean solar flux in CA is about 5 kWh/m^2 over a day, solar panels are about 20% efficient, that's 1 kWH/m^2/day = 24 m^2 / kW of panels = 24 km^2 / GW * 8.75 GW = 210 km^2 = an approximately 21 x 10 km solar array in the Mojave desert.
I am so incredibly tired of this argument. The only people who reach for this are those who know nothing about the reality of solar. They think in terms of the fantasy they've been sold and, therefore, know nothing about what happens in real life.
> and then we build one nuclear power plant, or 2 km^2 of solar, or 100 wind turbines, each year until the transition is complete.
Please. I beg you. If you have a Excel or something equivalent and have at least a high school understanding of Physics and mathematics, slow down, do some research and try to understand. You really do not. You are confusing a google search for reality.
I'll provide with a quick fantasy vs. reality education as a starting point. The rest is up to you. You can either continue to believe in fantasies or start to understand.
Here's a graph showing the power output of my 13 kW array about a month ago:
https://i.imgur.com/aNnbmDp.png
Notice the parabolic shape with a peak at about 8 kW.
Wait, what? Not 13 kW?
Right. Output changes through the year. I have yet to see it reach the full rated panel output. The most I've seen is around 10 kW. Do you know why? Because the fantasy you quote in terms of efficiency (and everything else) is a rating had under ideal laboratory conditions, starting with an operating temperature of 25 degrees C. This is great for marketing and laughable for real-life conditions.
It doesn't end there. Check this out:
https://i.imgur.com/pB1WgQ0.png
This was the very next day!
What happened? How did the array go from 8 kW all the way down to 2 kW, then back up to about 7, down again, up again, etc.? How did that happen?
Clouds!!! That's how that happened. F-ing solar idealists make me sick. I was one of them, BTW, until I built this system and learned that my fantasy did not match reality at all.
Clouds!!!
Do you think that's it? Check this one out. One day later:
https://i.imgur.com/FiaENVI.png
Clouds. Again! Are you starting to understand? Does this start to paint an image of why all these hand-wavy solar flux arguments are complete and utter nonsense?
Do you know when peak solar production occurs? Which month of the year? Most people will say June/July.
Nope, it's April/May. Here's a full year:
https://i.imgur.com/EQc8EDD.png
Because solar panels have a negative temperature coefficient. That's why! Which means their output is reduced as the panel temperature increases. In June/July it's just too hot. April/May happen to be the right balance between solar input, temperature and other factors.
Remember the graphs showing power generation loss due to clouds? What does that look like through the month. Well, here's what my output looked like this last April:
https://i.imgur.com/8lYKImD.png
See that? On any given day your power output can be reduced by anywhere between 25% and 50%. And that's in a good month. Look at what happened in January:
https://i.imgur.com/bGuCH2F.png
80% reduction in power output! 80%!
For goodness sake, abandon this fantasy and take the time to learn about reality. What's even more frustrating is that people like you will actually engage in intense arguments armed with nothing more than fantasies. Please.
I have no problem with someone not knowing something. We all have tons to learn. I certainly did not have the level of understanding I have today until I built my own solar array and started to try to understand why my output did not match my expectations. What a lesson that was.
What rubs me the wrong way is when people pretend to know something. I have never acted in that manner in my life. If I don't understand something to a good degree I keep my mouth shut and try to learn from those who actually do. That does not mean I don't make mistakes, but I try really hard not to say anything I don't know or have researched to a reasonable depth.
Let's talk about the consequences of the above graphs and your "and then a miracle occurs" calculations (because that's what they are when compared to reality).
The parabolic power output curve means you have to build a solar array 1.5 times larger in order to deliver the same energy over a roughly 12 hour period as that of a constant-power system (nuclear) producing your peak power.
Why?
Because energy is the integral of the power curve over time. The integral of an inverted parabola is 2/3 the area of the enclosing rectangle (the constant power curve). Therefore, my solar array produces 2/3 the energy of a source that can deliver constant power in the 8 kW to 10 kW range. In order to deliver that energy I have to grow my system by the reciprocal of that, which is 1.5. And, of course, I would have to add batteries if what I am after is power. In other words, I have to fill the areas outside the parabola with power I have stored in batteries.
Wait. There's more. This only covers, say, 12 hours of the day. Now I need to overbuild the system yet again in order to provide power at night. That means, at a minimum, a 2x multiplier. I am now up to 3x (1.5 * 2). In other words, my humble 13 kW system would have to triple in size to 39 kW.
Are we done?
No.
Why?
Remember the damn clouds? Here's a graph from March of this year:
https://i.imgur.com/yvTdNX0.png
Horrible stuff. You have to account for this. Believing that one is going to have perfectly shape parabolic output 365 days per year is part of that fantasy I have been referring to. That's not reality.
How do we account for that? If there are no nuclear power plants and no coal (whatever) power plants and we depend 100% on solar (please don't say "wind"), well, there are days when you could fully lose 80% of your output. Heck, you could lose 80% of your output for days or weeks due to weather or fires.
How to size a system to mitigate such events if an entire city and all of the EV transportation in that city depends on locally generated solar energy to exist?
This is where statistics comes in. If we had to mitigate that day when output was 1/5, we would have to build a solar power plant 5 times larger yet. That's not sensible. Reality probably lies somewhere around 50% to 100%, this being a guess and something that is very highly dependent on geography, weather and statistical probability of fires and other events. Build it in the desert? How much output do you lose to sand storms and sand on the array? Build it where there's lot of rain? You might need to overbuild by 10x to get constant power at the required level.
If I assume a 50% overbuild, we go from 3x to 6x.
So now, in order to be able to deliver 1 GW of power 24/7, you need to build a 6 GW photovoltaic solar array with a massive amount of storage.
The real number, when other factors are taken into account, is likely to be closer to 10x overbuild or more. What factors? Failures, maintenance, fill ratio, etc.
Connecting it to my prior post, if you need to add a true 10 GW of power generation capacity that is available 24/7 to support EV's you probably have to build at least 100 GW worth of photovoltaic solar generation and so many batteries I hesitate to count them.
Instead of this fantasy, we need to get our heads out of our collective behinds and build nuclear power plants. That's the only way. Solar alone can't do it, it can (and should be) be a supplemental add-on.
There's more to the story, of course.
You're excessively fixated on nameplate capacity. Compare net watts to net watts, or more accurately joules of radiative forcing avoided per dollar. You're also triple counting those inefficiencies.
The reality is real net power from real utility PV plants is being sold without subsidy, sweetheart loans, or unlimited publicly funded insurance for as little as $15/MWh in some places. A tenth of the cost something like Vogtle or Hinkley C needs to break even. Even at mid latitudes (north of 90% of the world's population) it's a third of the price. Include all the failed projects, or the public holding the bag for underfunded decommissioning and it's even worse.
Nuclear isn't even free of the need for storage and backup. It is capacity limited, so you can't even provide for variable demand without storage or paying double again for your already absurdly overpriced power. And it's not all that reliable -- stations in france are approaching similar capacity factors to new offshore wind -- AND the failures tend to be correlated which is a huge issue.
Also why would you need 24/7 power to serve EVs? EVs ARE storage. Weeks of it for many people.
> You're excessively fixated on nameplate capacity.
Sorry, my perspective is precisely the opposite. Nameplate capacity is a farce --I have said this much-- because it is only valid under ideal laboratory test conditions. Solar zealots are the ones who use nameplate ratings, or worse, solar radiation per square meter, to justify solar fantasies. Building and actually looking at the data from my system (something most solar panel owners don't do) delivered an education I probably could not have gotten any other way. If anything, it made me think and eventually decide I needed to to understand it the way I do any other engineering project I approach.
> Nuclear isn't even free of the need for storage and backup.
These are not problems.
> Also why would you need 24/7 power to serve EVs?
You'd have to model this in order to understand it. Beyond a certain threshold or concentration of EV's in an area, you eventually get to a situation where you have a massive number of vehicles plugged into the grid 24/7. That's the simplest way I can put it.
Here's a simple attempt to show the mechanism at play:
https://i.imgur.com/arNVRea.png
Again, super simplified. The idea is you have 25 vehicles, all charging for 12 hours. The charge start time is staggered by 1 hour. The bottom line shows how many cars are charging simultaneously.
What this shows is that you eventually get to a peak simultaneous charge requirement that will remain pretty much constant 24/7.
What if you rapid charge in 15 minutes, or 1 hour?
Well, sure, the number of simultaneously charging vehicles will be reduced, however, the power and energy requirements will not. In fact, due to efficiencies and losses one might very well require more power under such scenarios. Power is the killer (not energy) because it has to be delivered instantaneously.
The other thing this oversimplified illustration does not show is a distribution of vehicles of different types (from motorcycles to semi trucks) requiring more or less power, different charge durations, usage patterns (delivery van vs. working from home and barely driving) and varied power and energy demands from the grid. Including that requires writing a reasonably detailed simulation with hundreds of variables, which is what I did years ago in order to try and understand the relationship between EV's, power and energy.
In short, we need to create a complete doubling of our entire power generation and distribution system. In some cases, more than double. We need at least 1200 GW of power; which is equivalent to 1200 nuclear power plants (this should give anyone pause and a real sense of proportion). My model predicted a range between 900 GW to 1400 GW. I believe this range represents a confidence of 95%. In other words, the real answer is in there.
It is amazing to me that this isn't front-and-center in the national discourse. EV's at scale will not happen without the equivalent of about 1200 new nuclear power plants being built and the power distribution system adapting to delivery that power.
Your model is simplistic. No sane electrical engineer would build a system where EVs charge on a uniform schedule evenly distributed across all 24 hours.
Rather, you can build a system where EV chargers are basically the inverse of natural gas peaker power plants. They turn on when grid supply is high relative to demand (and hence get off-peak rates), and then turn off when grid demand is high. Most peoples' EVs would charge while they're plugged in at work; the few stragglers would charge late at night when everyone's lights are off. Unless you are about to make a cross-country trip overnight, there is no reason to charge an EV during peak hours between 5-9 PM.
That's what GP is alluding to when they say EVs are storage.
Technology for this is already being worked on:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03787...
https://www.energy.gov/eere/evgrid-assist-accelerating-trans...
>Your model is simplistic. No sane electrical engineer would build a system where EVs charge on a uniform schedule evenly distributed across all 24 hours.
Unbelievable.
Your comments are pointless, insulting. Now you are calling me insane.
My findings were confirmed by none other than Elon Musk --who I had the pleasure of working with for two years, BTW--. Here he is, confirming what I have stated when asked the question during a conference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcI6FaaDp8g&t=3510s
Regarding my simplistic model:
I went out of my way to point out that this model was "super simplified" and an "oversimplified illustration". We use oversimplified examples to illustrate points, not to provide precise models of reality.
I further explained that creating a proper model "requires writing a reasonably detailed simulation with hundreds of variables"
And then I said "which is what I did years ago in order to try and understand the relationship between EV's, power and energy."
Please. Pretty please. With sugar on top. Stop insulting people with zero-effort, zero-knowledge comments. Instead, try asking questions, engaging in constructive dialog and, perhaps, learning a thing or two.
You are arguing against conclusions that were confirmed by Elon Musk. Not sure what else to say other than, you might want to reflect on just how little of this topic might actually understand.
This is why we go nowhere with this and other issues.
On top of that you post nonsense links. What do you think you are going to accomplish, other than confirming you truly have no understanding of the problem?
We have a 1200 GW deficit in power generation and distribution. No amount of intelligent management is going to make up for this. Not one bit. Not enough. Not even close. This isn't a rounding error, this is a serious hole in future power capacity; a precondition for EV deployment
That's what you need to grok before continuing to post comments anyone with a reasonable command of the subject would easily classify as noise.
> Your comments are pointless, insulting. Now you are calling me insane.
> My findings were confirmed by none other than Elon Musk
> We have a 1200 GW deficit in power generation and distribution. No amount of intelligent management is going to make up for this. Not one bit. Not enough. Not even close. This isn't a rounding error, this is a serious hole in future power capacity; a precondition for EV deployment
There are a few possibilities as to how you could get to 1200GW
You could have gotten there by looking at the energy content of every gram of oil that enters the US and assuming it would all need to be replaced with electricity. Which would indicate that you at least failed to understand what a combustion engine is.
You could have gotten there by assuming that every EV is a tesla and needs to be fully charged every day. In which case you have at least failed to understand what an EV is.
You could have gotten there by assuming around 10kWh/day per car, but assuming that peak demand would be 10x average. In which case by proposing enough idle capacity to meet said demand will be provided by nuclear power you are assuming people will be happy to pay $1.50/kWh wholesale for their electricity and $150 to fill their teslas.
Or finally you could be intentionally spreading disinformation about renewables.
> Sorry, my perspective is precisely the opposite. Nameplate capacity is a farce --I have said this much-- because it is only valid under ideal laboratory test conditions. Solar zealots are the ones who use nameplate ratings, or worse, solar radiation per square meter, to justify solar fantasies. Building and actually looking at the data from my system (something most solar panel owners don't do) delivered an education I probably could not have gotten any other way. If anything, it made me think and eventually decide I needed to to understand it the way I do any other engineering project I approach.
This sounds like pretty big fixation to me. I'm sorry you had unrealistic expectations for your solar install, but that doesn't change the inviability of nuclear. Also did you think to get a system with bypass diodes or are you also suffering from reduced efficiency of the whole system during partial shade?
> These are not problems.
Then why are they suddenly problems when renewables are involved?
> You'd have to model this in order to understand it. Beyond a certain threshold or concentration of EV's in an area, you eventually get to a situation where you have a massive number of vehicles plugged into the grid 24/7. That's the simplest way I can put it.
Charging things in a stupid way far more than they need it is stupid. News at 11.
Simply charge whichever EVs are stationary and not full, wherever they happen to be, whenever there is surplus power (4 extension cords, 4 transformers and 4 metal boxes per person is hardly a big investment compared to $40-200k of nuclear reactors to meet peak demand so they can all charge at once at 5pm). This is one of the few problems that is actually very simple to solve with markets (put a price on charging outside of the hours with approximately free solar power).
Mean driving distance is about 30 miles. With a reasonably efficient EV this is about 7kWh/d or 350GW if it happens only when solar electrickty is cheap.
Why would you spend $12 trillion on this problem when $1 trillion of solar, wind and storage would solve it (and this will halve or better before your first nuclear plant comes online)?
Additionally you can solve it from the other end. Forcing people to drive monster trucks 30 miles a day is an intentional policy decision. If you stop forcing the issue it will correct itself. If you put some of those $12 trillion into decent infrastructure, driving will halve or better. Even throwing LEVs into the mix for any family's second+ vehicle reduces that 7kWh/day to around 2.
Here's another simple model to play with (only uniform demand unfortunately). https://energy.model
Main caveat for somewhere like the US is it will aggregate weather over the entire country without considering problems like interfacing with texas. Maybe consider a smaller country with similar weather to get a more realistic estimate. Compare US nuclear capital costs ($10-12 per nameplate watt) to the 80c/nameplate watt non tilting or $1.3/nameplate watt tilting of recent US projects, or about half that for projects still in the permiting phase.
> 4 extension cords, 4 transformers and 4 metal boxes per person
Oh, please.
You don't need fast charge for every joule. A regular 20A cord (or 2A 1kV to reduce copper investment) can keep a car topped up just fine. Then the only issue is producing enough net watts per week (which dovetails excellently with variable production)
If we correct our insane legal framework around the use of streets then a vehicle which consumes 100W average when in use, charges itself with a single 300W panel and does 20mph covers 95% of uses.
Either option is vastly more viable than a multi trillion dollar handout for infrastructure to help sell luxury cars.
Thanks for this detailed comment and that above. Have you got links to any blog posts or code that we could look at to review in detail?
I don't, but I am so sick and tired of the nonsense that I have been thinking of creating a site with more detailed data on this, methodologies, calculations and perhaps a better version of the simulation that anyone can try, reproduce and challenge (it would not be science without it being open to honest review).
BTW, I built my model many years ago, way before anyone was talking about this. While it seemed to be a reasonable rough-order-of-magnitude model, it wasn't until the end of last year that I finally got confirmation that my model produced reasonable numbers. This by non other than Elon Musk himself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcI6FaaDp8g&t=3510s
In this interview he says we at least double our power production capacity. We (US) have 1200 GW of installed capacity. That means we need at least another 1200 GW. Which means 1200 nuclear power plants.
That number, for me, gives the problem a dimension, a scale, that is difficult to understand in any other way. 1200 nuclear power plants is nothing less than daunting. In the context of not even being able to build a high speed train, I am not sure what the reality of nuclear power in this nation might look like in the next 50 to 100 years.
Of course, Elon is pushing solar. Great for some areas, not so for a good deal of the nation. Imagine, for example, if Florida depended 100% on solar. Yes, that's an extreme example, of course. Sometimes these are necessary to jolt people away from thinking about the fantasy of something and focus on reality. Solar in Maine or Illinois has very different prospects when compared to solar in Southern California, Arizona or Texas.
Solar isn't the solution. It is part of it, of course.
In theory, electric vehicles could help stabilize the California grid, if we could charge them at times of peak solar production. There are definitely logistical challenges with doing this, though.
> In theory, electric vehicles could help stabilize the California grid, if we could charge them at times of peak solar production
Can you clarify what you mean by this?
I read it as "EV's are storage that can feed energy back to the grid". The problem with this is that it assumes you charge your car and use it as a battery, rather than drive it. I don't think that's realistic at all. In addition to that, they still have to be charged. Which means we need additional power, over and above current demands, in order to do so. The energy has to come from somewhere, and we don't currently have it.
Also, the idea of charging at peak solar is a fallacy. This is what solar production looks like during an ideal and non-ideal day (source: My own 13 kW array):
https://i.imgur.com/aNnbmDp.png
https://i.imgur.com/pB1WgQ0.png
The peak lasts minutes, if not seconds. Peak solar, in this context, is pretty much useless. What you need is steady power delivery over a period of many hours (for slow to mid charge rates).
What a lot of people tend to ignore is that the current grid and power generation capacity is pretty much built to supply current needs. A large EV installed base expansion requires an equally large expansion of power systems at all levels. Solar isn't the solution. It's part of it, of course, just not the solution. The same is the case for wind. We need nuclear. Lots of it.
I was mainly thinking people could charge EVs at non-peak times. It's interesting to think about using the cars as batteries, but I don't know if they're set up for that.
> The CA high speed train started as a ten billion dollar promise.
No, it didn’t.
System cost estimate referenced in the ballot booklet for Prop 1A was $45 billion. $9.95 billion was the Prop 1A bond issue, which was explicitly never intended to represent full funding.
I am reading prop1A, and it seems to propose that 9.95 billion is enough for a 800-mile railway.
http://vigarchive.sos.ca.gov/2008/general/argu-rebut/argu-re...
> I am reading prop1A, and it seems to propose that 9.95 billion is enough for a 800-mile railway.
What you linked to is the “argument and rebuttal”, which has…very little information, one way or another (though even there, both the argument for and the argument against clearly indicate that the bond issue is not the whole cost, the former noting “Matching private and federal funding to be identified BEFORE state bond funds are spent”, the latter indicating a potential $90 billion system cost.) The “analysis” has, as one might expect, the actual analysis, including this:
“The authority estimated in 2006 that the total cost to develop and construct the entire high-speed train system would be about $45 billion. While the authority plans to fund the construction of the proposed system with a combination of federal, private, local, and state monies, no funding has yet been provided.”
Exactly. It's amazing how uninformed people are. And then they go and vote.
People are lied to by politicians with agendas, they vote out of ignorance and then we all end-up paying for it. No state in the US is immune to this, but CA seems particularly good at it. This is why moving out of CA (personal and business) is a high priority for me. It just isn't as easy as one would wish it to be. When the time is right, we are gone and I'll take all the jobs we created with us.
> Matching private and federal funding to be identified BEFORE state bond funds are spent
I think that line suggests it's at least 3x the Bond value.
It was sold as a ten billion dollar project. That what politicians drove into people's minds with their ads.
Find me one mainstream media political add, just one, that discloses anything other than ten billion and I'll retract my statement.
Voters don't read ballots in detail at all. They vote based and what got pounded into their heads during the election cycle. Politicians know this well.
Article misses the point that the cost and schedule overruns are really the whole point of the project. A project's nominal purpose -- train, tunnel, nuke plant -- is just there to fend off pressure to pull the plug. Sunk-cost fallacy keeps the money coming.
Solar and wind megaprojects seem to avoid this fate by a combination of easy accounting -- unit cost x total units = expected cost -- and incremental delivery -- they can start delivering power almost immediately, both demonstrating progress and helping fund further work. Those that fail to deliver early and on-budget are easier to cancel. (Cancelled big solar and wind projects are called failures, but are successes of project management; and equipment can often be sold on to other projects.)
For most big infrastructure projects, nobody really knows how much it ought to cost at each stage, or how far along it really is. The stakeholders who gave it the OK expect a piece of the action, continuously. They never want the money flow to cease, which would happen on completion.
America's innovation is that the corrupt money flows to stakeholders are wholly legal, with no risk of indictment. This makes it easier to start projects, even though harder to finish them. The people promoting the project can't afford to buy off gatekeepers, but the project budget itself can. The bigger it is, though, the more backers it will need, so it is easier to estimate low, and overrun.
Sometimes, if the money will be cut off anyway, it can be face-saving to deliver something at that point. Thus, Olkiluoto, Second Avenue, and Bay Bridge. NASA is required by law to buy a new, useless SLS every time they shoot one, but can delay launching pretty easily. The sooner SpaceX SuperHeavy starts launching cans, the sooner the obligation might be lifted. Expect to see a big new missile program approved immediately after that.
Thing is, most things somebody would like government to spend $billions on really shouldn't be built. So we need gatekeepers. And, some should be, so they need to be overcome sometimes.