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April 3, 2012

[SSJ: 7338] Re: A couple of reasons why the electricity has keptflowing despite the nuclear shutdowns

From: Smitka, Mike
Date: 2012/04/03

For electric vehicles, 10 years is too soon to be feasible, merely because of the ramp-up time.

With a company-level design cycle of 8 years (since engineers can only work on so many vehicles at the same
time) and a 3-year gap before the last of models already under development would hit the market, it would be around 2015 before the first of the "new"
vehicles would arrive in any volume, and 2023 before most vehicles being made were electric (or any other "new" drivetrain). A similar time horizon comes from looking at supply chain issues, many, many plants would have to be built to produce batteries and motors in the requisite volumes. With vehicle lives of (say) 8 years
-- the figure is over 10 years for the US for passenger cars, even longer for commercial vehicles -- it would thus take until sometime around 2025 and probably longer before most of the "parc" (vehicle fleet) was electric.

But then you'd need lots of new electric generating and transmission capacity, and the infrastructure at the local distribution level to handle the recharging demands (more / larger transformers -- if you pay attention, there are lots of transformers, it's not a trivial issue -- and potentially new wiring, because the current draw from large numbers of households recharging overnight would far exceed the capabilities of what's in place). And I suspect (to understate
things) that it will be harder for the next several years to site new power plants than it was in the recent past, nuclear or otherwise.

A related challenge is that, depending on the market, it's not clear electrics are the way to go. Brazil has lots of natural gas and ethanol (given the relatively low cost of using sugarcane bagasse). Vehicles there are already tri-fuel: CNG (compressed natural gas), ethanol, petrol, and the transition among fuels is seamless to the driver: you pull into a refueling station, and fill up with whatever is cheapest. It turns out the sensors already in the engine & exhaust system can sense what proportion of gas/ethanol is in the tank, merely by using software run on the engine control unit, and adjust the air mix and so on automatically. Switching over from the gas tank to a CNG tank and vice-versa is also seamless, and the same engine / exhaust system can handle it, with very modest up-front adaptations, particularly seals and tubing that is robust to the different solvent characteristics of the three fuels. (Retrofitting after the car is built is however a pain.)

So Japan could mandate a switchover to electrics tomorrow (assuming away political issues in today's Diet!!), but vehicle manufacturers would still face a commercial imperative to continue developing and producing vehicles using "legacy" and newer alternative fuel systems (diesel combined with rapid start-stop looks better and better, emissions are now lower than for a gasoline engine).

Of course if the facilities discussed are small enough, then those using it could be "taxed" by forcing them to be early adapters of the Leaf and the succeeding generations of electric vehicles (Mitsubishi Motors has one in production, if I understand the timing). By 2020 it looks like a much larger range of such vehicles will be available, presumably at a lower price, even without a specific mandate, since it seems reasonable that manufacturing costs will in fact continue to fall. So ... maybe given the time frame for actually putting ventilation in place. A modest bet, and not an unreasonable one, to hope that a mandate on users would substitute for building such ventilation -- and that such a mandate would be quite cost-effective and (because users would pay the cost) fair. But the electric grid issues remain, if the total "parc" of electrics becomes substantial.

mike smitka

> ... another 10-15 years ... Why aren't we assuming we
can mandate that
> any vehicle that wants to use the facility has to be
electric ...

Approved by ssjmod at 11:44 AM