Charging cars at home at night might be too much for California’s electric grid. Switzerland is pondering the possibility of a ban on EVs in emergencies. An SNC-Lavalin report says that, if we really want to be carbon-free by 2050, we’ll have to build the equivalent of 19 Bruce nuclear power plants. Throw in a scarcity of public chargers, an even smaller number of which are reliable, and even reports that some wayward chargers are destroying EV batteries and there’s precious little good news on the EV charging front. Were it not for the robustness of Tesla’s Supercharger network — by far Elon Musk’s greatest contribution to the electric revolution, and the best reason to buy a Model 3 – there would, in fact, be no good news at all.
Closer to home, what is becoming more plainly apparent is that the federal government has no master plan for rolling out a public EV charging infrastructure. Oh, it knows exactly how many electric cars will be on the road, and by when — its expectations on EV sales are very specific — but how many public charging points will be required and how much electricity will be required to service them is not nearly as meticulously mapped out. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be any plan at all.
And that’s not a good thing. As Motor Mouth previously pointed out, an MIT study trying to gauge the future popularity of ZEVs imagined a scenario in which the sales of EVs is promoted more vigorously than the construction of a supporting infrastructure — exactly what is happening in Canada right now. According to the simulations in the report — The Diffusion of Alternative Fuel Vehicles: A Generalised Model and Future Research Agenda — the popularity of battery-powered vehicles increased dramatically (again, what’s happening currently) but then started to falter when empty batteries started overwhelming charging ports. In MIT’s imagining, EVs never regain their popularity after that, the threat of 1973 Oil Crisis-like lineups for ‘fuel’ eroding their burgeoning popularity.
The question, then, is are there lessons — or at least warnings — from the aforementioned bad news that might prevent such an EV recharging roadblock?
Indeed, there is. California’s problem, for instance, might be one of focusing more on the optics of green-ness rather than its mechanics. America’s most populous state is, of course, the spiritual home for Tesla, and it has the EV density — there are already more than a million EVs registered in the Golden state — and Supercharger stations to prove it. It has also focused on equally environmentally-friendly power production, with windmills and solar farms literally everywhere.
What it has not done, according to a Stanford University report, is figured out what to do when the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing. When EV penetration hits 50 per cent in the western states, says the study, California will need some 5.4 gigawatts of energy storage — the equivalent of five nuclear stations — “if charging habits follow their current course.” The solution, says Ines Azevedo, one of the co-authors of the study, is for Californian EV owners to charge their EVs during the day; either at work or at public charging points. That, of course, puts a serious damper on one of the major selling points of the ZEV, namely being able to charge your battery at night while you are sleeping.
Installing more charging stations along routes is just one of the measures provinces must implement to drive up EV sales in Canada Photo by John Mahoney /Montreal Gazette
Switzerland’s problem would seem (at least initially) more dramatic, headlines screaming that the land of secretive banking is banning the use of electric vehicles.
And indeed, it is. But only in emergency situations. In fact, only in the most dire of emergency situations. The third highest of the country’s four ordinances “on Restrictions and Prohibitions on the Use of Electric Energy” — think the DEFCON II of energy emergencies, here — says the use of EVs would be limited to only the “absolutely necessary journeys (e.g. exercising one’s profession, shopping, visiting the doctor, attending religious events, attending court appointments).”
Of course, much of the problem is caused by recent geopolitically-induced energy shortages (that should be read “Putin’s puerility”). It is exacerbated also by the rapid increase in popularity of BEVs amongst the Swiss, battery-powered plug-ins accounting for more than 18.3 per cent of new-car registrations in the third quarter of this year. Far more importantly, however, it points out that the weak link in the EV pipeline may turn out to be energy. Indeed, as Adam Rozencwajg, managing partner of Goehring & Rozencwajg, pointed out in our most recent Driving into the Future panel, the entire planet has become addicted to cheap energy over the last two decades, and the resultant lack of investment in the industry has come back to bite the Swiss right in the charging port.
Register for our free Driving into the Future virtual panel!
Nor are the Californians and Europeans the only ones facing a potential energy shortage caused by — or diminishing the utility of — electric vehicles. Closer to home, an SNC-Lavalin report — Engineering Net Zero: Our Net Zero Blueprint for the Future — says that our 2050 net-zero-carbon promise will require an additional 1,500 terrawatt-hours of energy per year. According to SNC, those 1,500 tWh will require more than a doubling of our current energy production — from 150 gigawatts to 300 GW, or perhaps even 350 GW.
Work that out and it means we need to add five to seven gigawatts of new capacity each and every year between now and 2050. To put all those gigas and terras into better perspective, the authors calculated that we’ll need to build no fewer than 115 hydro reservoirs the size of BC Hydro’s Site C (each producing 1,100 MW of power) to meet our future electricity demand. Or, if damning up a whole slew of our vibrant rivers isn’t your cup of tea, it would require the equivalent, say SNC’s engineers, of 19 Bruce nuclear plants (6,232 MW combined, from Bruce A and B) here in Ontario.
An electric vehicle charging parking spot in Vancouver Photo by Gerry Kahrmann /Postmedia
Neither choice would seem likely. The environmental lobby is, of course, suspicious of anything that damages flower or fauna. Nor is it likely that we’d get approval for 19 more anything remotely nuclear. Much more palatable, of course, would be something renewable. So, how many wind turbines would we need? Well, supplying all that electricity would require about 20,000 of those ginormous beasts, the biggest examples of which generate 10 MW each. We have the equivalent of a little over 1,400 across the country right now.
As for solar power, SNC says we’d need 400 gigawatts worth of sun-soppers. For a bit of perspective, the average residential solar panel puts out about 325 watts in ideal sunlight. That means we’ll be needing about a little over a billion of them. And remember, using California as our example, we’d still need to build a huge network of storage batteries to accommodate their intermittent output, something neither hydro nor nuclear power would require. No matter which way you slice, though, it still represents, as SNC calculates, an “unprecedented deployment of new energy” never before seen in Canada. The last time we added anything like seven gigawatts in just 12 months, for instance, was more than 40 years ago.
And even with that formidable task, we still haven’t even begun the discussion surrounding our desperate need for more — many, many more — charging stations. Or how to deploy radical new technologies such as inductive chargers built into our roadways that might solve some of those grid problems, not to mention reduce the cost of electric vehicles. (Hint: if your car is constantly charging when you’re driving on the highway, you don’t need as large a battery!)
But, for all the answers to these questions and more, you’re going to have to tune in next Wednesday, December 14 at 11:00 AM for Driving into the Future’s “Is an EV charging infrastructure the last roadblock to EV domination?” You can register here for FREE.
David Booth
Canada’s leading automotive journalists with over 20+ years of experience in covering the industry
See More Articles From This Author
Keyword: Motor Mouth: Is this the last roadblock stopping EV domination?