First, thank you for your detailed and reasoned reply. A few thoughts:
- Do you have any evidence of residential distribution issues, due to more EV's, heat pumps, etc.? If so, please provide the evidence.
- Renewable energy is variable. Solar is obviously periodical. Wind obviously fluctuates. The output from fossil fuel and nuclear plants also vary for maintenance, refueling and unexpected downtime, like the 'Big Freeze' in Texas. So all sources need backup. 'Peaker' natural gas plants are common, but with the recent jump in prices they are not economical. Have you read about new grid-level battery storage solutions?
See:
- How the massive ‘flow battery’ coming to an Army facility in Colorado will work
Fort Carson is getting a 10-megawatt-hour redox flow battery system, which includes large tanks of liquid electrolytes.
Read in Popular Science: How the massive ‘flow battery’ coming to an Army facility in Colorado will work — Popular Science
- www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8082841/Elon-Musks-Tesla-battery-farm-saved-South-Australia-116-MILLION.html
- www.popularmechanics.com/science/a31350880/elon-musk-battery-farm/
- Plus did you consider how much renewable energy is contributing to the total mix for large states in the USA, e.g. Texas, and other nations? Here is the energy mix for Texas -- clearly not a 'liberal' stronghold:
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- Lifecycle emissions: You raised a lot of issues, without any evidence. Here are answers to the 'lifecycle emissions' question:
I think that you are missing my point about the forest and thinking about the trees.
- "Do you have any evidence of residential distribution issues [...]": My point is not specifically about EVs but about the general state of our grid. For example, in your other message you mention the blackouts. If our grid struggles with these events which happen on a recurring basis, why wouldn't those problems be potential exacerbated by adding the load of charging EVs. In fact, if you read the technical journals (e.g., IEEE Transactions on Power Systems - IEEE Power and Energy Society, Electric Power Systems Research - Journal - Elsevier), there is much discussion on potential ways around this (like the phased time to charge the car I mentioned earlier) but it is going to be anything but simple.
- "grid-level battery storage solutions": Flow batteries are very promising indeed but, again, they are not economical at scale. Scaling them up in an economical (all the while taking into consideration environmental risks, etc.) was the whole reason why previous employer had a whole bunch of people working on them. Of course, for the army, the price premium is worth it because the real reason they are buying it is insurance against potential events take the grid down.
- "life-cycle emissions": The references that you included actually support my point about "short-" vs. "long-term". The emissions from building an EV are higher than an ICE car and therefore they need to be driven for a substantial number of miles before the break even point in terms of life-cycle emissions. Even if one is charging the car entirely from solar panels on one's roof, the break even point is like 50k miles. But lets be honest, if the car is charging from one own's solar panels then the car must be at home in the middle of the day, in which case probably not many miles are being driven. Otherwise, the car is being used to commute, in which case the first point above is crucial. Note that I don't have references at hand but I didn't get this from the internet either; I was fortunate to be able to watch many presentations from professor and scientists that research on these topics (i.e., the ones publishing articles on technical journals).