Biden administration to dole out $900m for electric vehicle infrastructure Electric vehicle charging is about to get a boost in 34 US states and Puerto Rico, as government officials have approved plans to start spending infrastructure bill money on building EV chargers. Announced yesterday by the US Department of Transportation, the awardees are set to receive portions of $900 million in funds from …
California currently (pun not intended) has the largest grid-scale switchable battery storage in the world at 6000 megawatts. Every new solar field in California includes battery storage. However, they must increase the power available (now about 52000 megawatts) by 68% to accommodate a complete replacement of ICE vehicles and add fully electric buildings without natural gas heating.
Batteries at the Grid level are a red herring, for a lot of reasons.
What this state needs is a nuclear program. And it needs it thirty years ago.
Lots of cheep nuclear power will also solve the other problem: WATER ... Desalination is the answer. We have the entire Pacific to draw from for raw material.
The third problem is comparatively easy: Homelessness. Simply stop throwing money at people who came here from out of state and they will stop coming. We can take care of our own. More cheap to free electricity will help.
No, it's not good news.
The nation doesn't have the power for this boondoggle. It's greenwashing at its finest.
Remember, this kind of electrical power doesn't magically appear anywhere that an electrician hooks up a plug ... it has to be generated somewhere first.
We should be working on increasing the nation's nuclear infrastructure. It is the only real way forward. Unfortunately, the greenaholics put the kibosh on that back in the '70s.
Whodathunk the hippies would be solely responsible for ruining the Earth?
Shows what a whole lot of ignorance & very little science gets you ...
You mean you don't get power from a plug? PSSSHT! Next thing you'll be trying to tell us food doesn't come from the grocery store and water doesn't come from the faucet!
What's sad is how many people really believe that their food, water and power really come from the point if sale/use, and that millions of people aren't engaged in doing the grunt work necessary to supply it to them.
I'm with you though, rolling out the tens of thousands of chargers Puddin Head is calling for will be useless without also rolling out a few hundred nuclear reactors to power them IF you don't want them supplied with fossil fuels. Wind and solar cannot provide enough to do the job.
Remember, this kind of electrical power doesn't magically appear anywhere that an electrician hooks up a plug ... it has to be generated somewhere first.
Capacity will come as demand increases. Unless you're in Texas.
While I do believe we should be building new nuclear plants using this century's technologies, there is also a lot of new solar and wind generation coming online every year. Something the Federal government should be addressing are distribution networks.
"Capacity will come as demand increases."
Demand won't increase until there is capacity. California had rotating blackouts every day last week (a fact somehow missed by the local ultra-green news broadcasts, but quite visible on PG&E's "outages" map). We quite simply can't charge what we have now, so why would the proverbial thinking man throw away a perfectly good hydrocarbon car that will get him to work every day, regardless of the state of the electrical grid, for a very expensive all-electric car that can't be charged when the grid is down?
"BTW, why are 10 year old cars getting more popular ?"
You don't want a ten year old car. You want a car from the 1960s. Nearly all of them can be converted to run well on Ethanol in about half an hour. It'll last a lot longer after a restoration, too. And have a little bit of style, to boot.
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