EV charging and hydro generation/distribution challenges

[plam]

However, the projection is that the electrical grid will become less and less clean in the next few years as there is a shift to more natural gas away from some nuclear. I think EVs efficiency should be based on the average energy emissions, rather than emissions at the time of charging...I suspect getting that detailed is probably irrelevant and at that level of detail, is going to be missing other side-effects like infrastructure investments to support charging anyway.

Solar is also going to continue to become way cheaper. It's really cheap already. It also isn't the time of day when people are charging their cars though: presumably many people are at work and not charging their cars there.

Most multi-residential buildings have little spare capacity, and I suspect the neighbourhood substations may have the same challenge.

Something that could help is that it would be the neighbourhood substations that I would hope to need more demand for charging at night rather than multi-residential buildings. That depends a lot on urban design. I've read about condos in Montreal where people just leave the condo by car in the morning and come back in the evening, so no better than suburbs. But with our fewer-spaces-than-units condos that are coming up, I can hope that there is also less of that car commuter usage pattern.

If tomorrow, everything we ever built was electric, it would still take 10-15 years to convert the existing fleet. More likely everything going electric means a 30-50 year timeframe.

This is more than enough time to transition.

I'm tired of this defeatism. We need to change our society, we CAN change our society. We need to stop making excuses for NOT changing our society.

Average age of car in the Canadian fleet seems to be somewhere between 9 and 12 years. There are going to be network effects too so I wouldn't be surprised at no gas cars left in 10 years.

I've seen some news about airplanes going renewable too. "Sustainable aviation fuels" might be a thing. I'm somewhat skeptical for various reasons, but we'll see.

I am generally really also skeptical of people saying "oh but we ship things across the world" without actually considering how low-emissions it is to ship. Yes, it would be better to emit less sulfur, but that's not as bad as CO2 (says the person who lives far from a port). There are of course also benefits to having less disposable crap, and of making things in Canada, sure.

Do full EV's charge themselves to a degree as well? Perhaps increasing that capacity should be the focus, to have an EV that rarely needs to be plugged in.

I don't think the physics works out, since perpetual motion isn't a thing and we lose a lot of kinetic energy to air friction and road friction. Certainly cars are more aerodynamic than in the past, and I bet that regenerative braking also helps reduce particulate emissions from braking. But I'd rather redesign cities to require less driving.

Indeed. Economic models are nice, but rarely capture the full human condition. Even leaving externalities aside, I don't really believe that most people spend their money smartly. And that's before we even touch on inequalities.

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Ultimately, economics and more centralized planning are both tools, neither is inherently good or bad, but each has different strengths or weaknesses. When it comes to something as complex as a hydro grid, there is no clear answer as to what is the right tool, or even that a single tool is sufficient. But it's entirely reasonable to keep all options open.

And ultimately, social priorities are not modeled in economics, there is no value in being a good person beyond what you believe you get from others, or at least I refuse to subscribe to nihilism or whatever you want to call it and believe that economics are the only basis for human behaviour.

It is good to keep all tools open. We sometimes like to reject possibilities out of hand based on ideological reasons that we shouldn't.

I don't really feel like I know enough about this smart grid / economics stuff and it's hard to say. Empirical economics is becoming more of a thing so we get more insight into how people behave in practice. It's somewhat rational and also based on heuristics. There is a lot of irrationality though. Mostly we do what we've done before (which is why nudging works well as an intervention).