One thing I keep getting tripped up on with EV cars is the usability during an emergency. I grew up in SoCal when there were rolling black-outs. Just this week, a windstorm took out my parent’s power for 3 days. I don’t view electricity to be as reliable as gas. What fact am I missing that can change my view on this?
In the Miami area after Hurricane Irma in 2017, we couldn’t find gas for our cars for about a week. I think the pumps for gas stations require electricity (which was also out) plus deliveries were disrupted by downed trees, traffic signal outages, etc.
Just an anecdote that gasoline is not always available during crises. We did have electricity at home but neighboring buildings and neighborhoods had outages for a week or more.
I have also been through many hurricanes. A point you're missing is that places like a gas stations are prioritized to getting power back on over a place like your house. In one large hurricane as a kid, my house didn't get power back for almost a month.
With that said, many places on the coast have improved a lot by building power lines underground. We never even lost power in the last storm I went through a few years ago.
Probably not, but seems like they would as more people begin to own electric cars. Charging stations also tend to be on main thoroughfares, which tend to get power back before neighborhoods.
But it's not uncommon for people to have at least a gallon of gas stored in a typical suburban home. That's 20-30 miles of emergency travel if needed. I don't think most people can easily store enough electricity to give them 20-30 miles of EV range. Maybe that's possible with a powerwall type setup?
I'd be happy to pick up a cheap(<$15k) EV for work commutes(range of 30 miles is fine), but it would be supplementing my gas vehicle(hybrid or conventional).
The math may change as gas prices spike over the next year. I think that will really drive EV adoption. Time will tell though. So far, I see EVs appealing to a certain type of consumer(pro-technology and/or affluent).
Just use it to run a generator, they're generally more efficient than the average gas engine anyway. You can use the electricity generated to power your house and charge your car in an emergency.
And with a tri-fuel kit, you can run that generator on gasoline, propane, or natural gas depending on what's readily available. Even if the gas pumps are offline due to a power outage, you could hook up one of those prefilled propane cylinders that near every gas station seems to sell these days.
Modern EVs can have bidirectional charging so they can charge each other. Hence if you run out and the grid is down you may be able to buy electricity off somebody else’s car. Don’t see this flexibility with gasoline.
Well, you can put gas into a canister and manually refill it. That’s not possible with electric cars unless you want to use a hometrainer with a generator to charge your car.
Living in NYC after Hurricane Sandy, I spent a lot of time biking past mile+ gas lines. Gas stations ran out for a significant period of time and National Guard fuel trucks were eventually deployed, but didn't have enough for all comers.
This is such a good point - in every disaster / zombie movie they somehow have gasoline to run cars but no electricity, when in reality it would be the other way round - any existing gasoline would go off after 6 months.
It's an interesting topic, many view gas station and the oil supply as more reliable.. probably a too-big-to-fail aspect of it. But 'if' it crashes, it's indeed a lot harder to compensate for than electricity.
> It's easier to set up back yard solar panels than a back yard fuel refinery.
If you have lot of open space with sun exposure, true.
For the average small yard, it's easier to buy a 55gal drum of gasoline and a manual pump if you can anticipate the need.
Growing up in hurricane country, it's something some people did. Buy a drum in the summer and store it. If it wasn't needed, just use it up after November (end of hurricane season).
> For the average small yard, it's easier to buy a 55gal drum of gasoline and a manual pump if you can anticipate the need.
If someone on planning on doing this, make sure to get 'boat' gas or ethanol free gas. Gas containing ethanol is not made to be stored and separates/attracts water.
> CPSC also warns consumers that private storage of more than a limited amount of gasoline (usually five gallons or less) is illegal in many areas, and subsequent fire damage may not be covered by insurance policies.
That article (from 1979) indicates that the only legal restriction is that it must be dispensed into an approved container.
More recent advice from the API indicates that fire codes usually restrict the storage of more than 25 gallons (~95 L) at home. Many people in rural areas would have orders of magnitude more than that.
So it seems that, in the US at least, it's not illegal all over.
Your first link says the exact opposite of your claim. It says it's legal to store above 30L and below 275L of petrol if you inform the local Petroleum Enforcement Authority.
Even above 275L, it says you need a license - it doesn't say it's illegal.
Fuel does go off, but if you have reason to store it, you probably have a use for it, so as long as you cycle the fuel, you can store an emergency supply indefinitely.
'Even above 275L, it says you need a license - it doesn't say it's illegal.'
Its commonly said 'it illegal to possess plutonium', but obviously someone does operate nuclear powerplants, and thise are people with the right licence. Same applies to drugs, explosices, etc.
The question is - are requirements of the lisence realistic for you to meet as an average homeowner?
You can still store up to 275L without a license, which is surely enough for the use case we're discussing. I can't help but think you're nitpicking.
However, I picked a random Council to see, and it looks extremely doable for a homeowner with the space to do so to get a license to store up to 2,500L. It's not even particularly expensive (£44 pa)
We have a solar array on the roof. It’s great. But the dc->ac converter needs the grid to be active to do its conversion, so when the power goes out no solar. (I suspect it syncs with the grids 60hz...)
If you include a battery backup in your system, you can run without grid power.
When I worked at a power monitoring start up we had a demo house that was charging an electric rav4, so it’s possible.
Yeah, that's the actual reason. I've seen someone use a small Honda generator to generate the frequency required to trick the solar generator into going... it's a weird setup because you basically tie in your generator using a breaker, so both generator and solar can be enabled at the same time.
Most home solar installs are grid-tied. No utility power, no solar power.
It simplifies the system a lot, because the grid provides "instantaneous" load matching for your house. If the inverter is sourcing more current than your house is sinking, the grid will sink it. If the house is sinking more current than your inverter is sourcing, the grid will source it.
When there's a utility outage, you need something else to provide the load matching. Either a local generator, or a battery is common; but either way, it's a lot more expensive.
It is a more complex and expensive inverter that can operate both isolated from the grid and in sync with it I think because it has to know when to do which and if it is outputting power how can it tell if the system is live because it is grid tied or because it is keeping the system energized itself.
I think they need external signals to tell them which mode to operate in.
Maybe the external system sees the frequency and voltage dropping or lower than normal range and decides to disconnect the load from the grid and opens a breaker and tells the inverter to operate in isolated mode.
When the external system sees the utility power is good again it could tell the inverter to shut off, close the breaker to connect the load to the utility, and then the inverter can go back to grid tie. The outage can be very short unless the load is large motors they don’t like the instantaneous change in phase when switching between different sources that are out of sync.
It's a safety reason. If the company disconnect the grid upstream to work on it, and your house is still powering it, they have a problem. You need extra equipment to automatically disconnect the house from the grid too.
I understand why grid-tied systems are built this way, but from an engineering standpoint this is really inefficient. Converting from DC to AC and back to DC, for no reason. In fact, most solar controllers are already designed to use and charge batteries.
It doesn't help that most car manufacturers use locked battery charging protocols that don't allow you to easily change this process.
AFAIK other car makers in the US use either CCS or ChaDeMo.
In Europe, all car makers (including Tesla) support CCS.
CCS allows DC charging and has support for load balancing, so I assume it could be feasible to create a home CCS charger that directly charges an EV with DC from solar panels.
However, considering how expensive power electronics are, and how difficult it would be to integrate such a charger into an existing solar installation, I have doubts that many people would buy such a charger. Also, I don't really know how CCS works in detail, so I may be totally wrong about this.
solar panels are the wrong dc voltage, so some sort of conversion is needed. I'm no EE, but my understanding is you go through AC and a transformer anyway in most cases.
Virtually all off-grid solar installations use some kind of an MPPT controller with a battery setup. The controller is always charging the battery (when there is power output from the panels), and the consumer power output is supplied by the batteries. This way you get much higher peak current output than the panels could provide, you also ensure stability.
In fact, many cabin installations don't even use inverters to convert into AC. They instead use DC appliances. So no, going through AC makes no sense in this scenario.
As for DC voltage levels, that of course is dependent on solar panel configuration and battery cells configurations/packing. Virtually all electric cars have a built in charger with a switching power supply that's already doing the DC voltage conversion. What I was remarking was that there is a lot of duplicate electronics that perform the same function and that a lot of intermediary steps can be eliminated.
Off grid is going to be designed to fit and probably cheap. Not always best. If you panels are near the batteries and near the load what you say can make sense (though I wouldn't be surprised if the charger had a AC step internally, that is clearly optional)
That isn't what you would do for anything tied to the grid. This is far more common (economies of scale mean the parts are cheaper). There you would take advantage of AC's ability to change voltage easily to allow the panels to be farther from the rest of the system. You would also want to use the grid as a backup for any system failures in the solar setup.
With a charger that goes down to 750w you can charge your ev off grid with an inverter.
I currently do it with 12 100w panels. I run ac/dc converters to supplement additional dc from the grid to charge at 1500w, but have a 750w charger for emergencies that will charge directly from the sun with no grid. It does require a small buffer battery to work reliably.
at 750W, even with perfectly efficient energy transfer, you're looking at adding ~2.75 miles of range to your car every hour it's charging. That means during winter, if it's sunny, you might be able to charge your car all day and get 25 miles from it.
You'd be a lot better off with a jerry can and a $500 gasoline generator....
The article is citing needing 6-8 panels between 320-330 watts to charge a Tesla Model S; 8 if you live in the northeast United States (it's not backyard orientation, it's about where you live geographically), 6 if you live in the southwest United States. The "small" Tesla panel arrays that I mentioned are 4.08 kilowatts [1], which is more than enough even in the northeast to charge a Model S, or any EV. They take up 240sqft, which would fit in most backyards, although a roof mount would of course be preferable both because it'll get less shade and because it won't take up backyard space, unless you have a lot of open backyard space away from any existing structures.
Really. There's a reason Tesla sells solar panels, and it's because they can charge the cars Tesla makes. They can also lower your electric bills (or drop them to zero, or make you money depending on the region you live in), since even the smallest panel array they sell produces more electricity than an average American driver needs per year for an EV.
Do you own Tesla solar panels? I've heard mixed reports about them. I live in Northern California where there is a big solar presence but most of the solar people I've spoken to (installers and owners) say Tesla is too expensive and not particularly great.
I'll be doing solar panels on our roof when the battery storage tech becomes viable and PG&E start being sensible about individual electricity production.
I don't own Tesla solar panels! I'm just going off publicly available info. I'm willing to believe that Tesla is not competitive on price, although I would be surprised if their wattage numbers were fake.
Besides, if the power outage brings society into such a disarray that you can't just call an ambulance if something happened, then there is a high likeliood that having a petrol-powered car wouldn't be much better than an electric one anyway.
Europe is a big place, though. There's a lot of people living in the countryside and with much less reliable utilities compared to urban areas. Power outages do occur here too and they're even frequent in some areas. :)
Can confirm this is true for Australia. We frequently have outages and the network is in shambles.
Just to make sure, rather than provide any incentives (there are NONE) we're going to introduce extra taxes for EVs to make up for lost fuel excise taxes, which contrary to popular belief doesn't pay for our roads.
I guess the minimalist (by Norwegian standards) yet growing sales numbers in spite of our soaring electricity costs and Zero CO² taxes on ICEs (they're eg 40% in Norway) must be scaring the fossil fuel sponsored politicians (both Libs and Labor alike).
Here in Japan, blackout is very rare event but Leaf and Outlander PHEV supports V2H from first release. Normally it's not needed but it's helpful when disaster happened.
I only charge my car once a week, as it has almost exactly the same range as my old gasoline car (~300 miles). So if there is going to be a bad storm in the forecast, I will top it up, just like a gasoline car.
If the outage is extended, there are plenty of DC fast chargers near enough to me that its unlikely that both me and them would face an extended outage, just like how in a gas car you might have to drive a few gas stations over to find one with power. If I had solar installed, I would be able to recharge during the day if I am somewhat careful in driving as the estimated surplus power for area I have for solar is ~7-20 miles a day.
I have lived in SoCal for 22 adult years. I’ve lost power maybe 3 times, and for at most 6 hours. A Tesla should have enough range for a few days commute w/out recharge.
I don’t think power reliability should be a concern... except for when the big one strikes. But in that case all the freeway overpasses will collapse, so an ICE car won’t help you anyway.
Sure but PG&E wasn't doing these outages 10 years ago as much as it is now.
In the Bay Area, it's regularly an occurrence where people in the Santa Cruz Mountains will not have power for 2 days to a week. With little to no notice too.
You come home with a low battery to refill it at home, you might not be able to get very far. Hopefully you just drive with 50+ miles ready all the time.
Later this week I'd expect multiple areas in the Santa Cruz Mountains to lose power (from the coming storm). It's very common, happens multiple times per year (fires, winds, rains can all cause it). Sometimes it's just a day, sometimes many more.
Unless I someday get to live somewhere with a very substantial solar system, I won't ever be with only an electric car. Grid-delivered electricity isn't reliable enough to bet on.
And consider storms like hurricanes Irma and Maria which left many areas of the Caribbean without power for multiple months.
I don't agree with OP in that I think power reliability is a concern with EVs. However PGE does not handle power for SoCal. In SoCal you have San Diego Gas and Electric(SDGE), LA Dept. of Water and Power, Southern California Edison, and maybe others. PG&E, along with its numerous problems, is NorCal.
I lived in SoCal for 24 years and the only major(>3 hours) power outage I remember was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Southwest_blackout and IIRC it lasted less than a day. That said, a major seismic event could occur anywhere in CA and cause outages for much longer than that.
PG&E's safety outages are a fact of life of living in California
Is this due to natural disaster risk or lack of maintenance for infrastructure? I've lived in Austria & Germany for 15 years now and only once experienced a power outage (I think it lasted about 15 minutes).
It’s because their electric grid equipment has been the source of ignition for wild fires in the past and the state fined them for causing fires which in part drove them into bankruptcy last year. So to avoid fines they cut off power whenever conditions make fires likely. Their poor financial management over decades is also likely responsible for poor equipment maintenance which increases likelihood of equipment causing fires.
A fact of life in the past couple of years only. It's a(n over)reaction to their legal woes, and I suspect it will snap back as regulators crack down on these actions.
I have a similar sensibility when it comes to generators. I grew up in the northeast and there were two ice storms I remember where we lost power for over a week. After the second, my parents got a gas generator that could be refueled when it ran out - even while the power was still out.
If they were buying today I'm sure many would recommend some type of electric powerwall to store energy but I'm doubtful in the situations you need it the most it would be there. And the whole point of getting a generator is not to provide you with electricity for the time you lost it for three hours - but for the one in ten year storm that leaves you without power for a week.
I have an EV. After I drive it home, I plug it in. Except when I'm lazy, it's basically never below a couple hundred miles of range remaining.
Rolling blackouts wouldn't really cause an issue, and when I've experienced blackouts, it's never been a problem. When the power is on, the car would charge back to the limit I set (I usually keep it at 80% charged to preserve the battery, which is still nearly 250 miles of range). When the power is out, it's anyway very rare that I drive hundreds of miles in a day and actually need to charge — and as other posters have mentioned, you could hit up a charging station that isn't in a blackout at that point.
When I owned a gas car, getting below 50%, or even below 25%, was completely normal. So I can see how if you're used to gas cars, it would seem worrying that there might be a blackout: how do you "refill" if you're low? But the truth of electric car ownership, at least in my experience, is you basically never go below 50% charge in daily use. So the idea that you'd likely get stuck at some point because the power went out just isn't really a concern.
IMO assuming you have home charging (either a garage in a house, or if your apartment building offers chargers) — which to be fair is a reasonably big if — electric is much, much more convenient than gas. You never have to stop at a gas station equivalent in your day-to-day life, since you just plug the car in when you get home, like you'd charge a phone overnight. You barely need to do any maintenance, because the moving parts are so simple. And electricity is much cheaper than gas.
For people without access to home charging, I think EVs are currently more annoying than gas cars. But not because of blackouts: it's just because charging to full is considerably slower than filling a tank of gas. If you're not able to have it charge at home while you're asleep, regularly hitting up charging stations and waiting is annoying.
When I was commuting, my daily driver gas car got 36 MPG. My commute used 0.72 gallons. At $3.55/gallon, the trip cost $2.56 or about 9.9 cents/mile.
At the same time I had a Fiat 500e. The same commute consumed 11kWh.
So the breakeven point (between my two cars) is $0.24/kWh in electric cost.
Looking at my PG&E bill, peak time (4pm-9pm) cost is $0.35/kWh and part-peak (9pm-midnight) is $0.34/kWh. These are winter time prices, they are much higher in the summer (but I only have my current bill handy).
So if I had to ever charge the electric car during peak or part-peak times, it is quite a bit more expensive than gas.
Now, of course, I only charge it at night (PG&E price $0.17/kWh) so it is a bit cheaper. Just need to be careful to set the timer so charging never starts before midnight.
Oh wow, 11kWh to go 26 miles... I guess it depends heavily on the car, then. The Tesla Model 3 (the car I own) gets a little better than 4 miles per kWh, which would mean the trip would take around 6kWh — so about half the cost, making it cheaper than gas even at California electricity prices.
Going uphill would also burn more gas though, so I'm surprised a pure gas car was getting 36 mpg under that scenario. And at least the electric car would regenerate a portion of the electricity on the way back down; it's not like brakes can produce gasoline, after all.
Generally people don’t have their cars sitting around at close to zero miles of charge left. So you can drive to a charger that does have power, if your house doesn’t. You can always come up with fearful scenarios though. What about pumping gas during a power outage? I guess they have battery backups for the pumps? Many Superchargers have battery backups as well, built in. And some are powered by on-site solar with battery storage. But again you can always come up with a worst case scenario.
During COVID lockdowns I was wondering if the national guard would be deployed to gas stations to enforce limits on driving by limiting gas purchases. If we want to just make up scenarios, this is the kind of scenario you could avoid by having an EV with your own solar and backup batteries.
Can't you just... drive to a charging station? I mean, it's not like the whole continent lost power for three days. Just go fill up and come back and park it at home.
Note that with a gas car, you can't fill it up at home ever, for any reason (unless you have a well and refinery I guess).
> Note that with a gas car, you can't fill it up at home ever, for any reason (unless you have a well and refinery I guess).
Or a drum of gasoline and a hand pump which is very practical. If you live anywhere where outages and natural disaster are a thing, it's good to plan ahead.
Wikipedia says the 2000-01 California energy crisis was caused by Enron. I believe it will take years of engineering-driven investment (upgrade lines; trim trees; clear flammables from the transmission corridors) to make power reliable in California again, but the California energy companies are bankrupt (again?) after judgments in recent years' wildfires.
I believe the reliability problem is worst in California and is less of a problem in other states and countries. (But offset in part by the large number of charging stations in metro areas, at least in SFBA.)
That said, a replacement doesn't need to be as reliable as its predecessor, it only needs to be reliable enough. Cell phones, for example, will go down a few hours after a power outage, whereas POTS phones were engineered to stay up (and provide power to corded phones) during power outages and weather events. Cell phones are more convenient.
EVs have two nice properties: faster acceleration than gas cars (which some view as a safety feature), and they're cheaper to fuel than gas cars. This can tip the balance in favor of an EV for day-to-day use.
If you are prepping, I think it still makes sense to have at least one conventional gas-powered car. Just make sure to keep the tank at least 3/4s full; gas pumps tend to go down during blackouts.
> If you are prepping, I think it still makes sense to have at least one conventional gas-powered car. Just make sure to keep the tank at least 3/4s full; gas pumps tend to go down during blackouts.
If you're really prepping, also have a fucking bicycle. You provide the fuel and they're cheap to maintain.
The irony is that the only time it's actually safe to ride a bicycle in an average American city is during a post-apocalyptic event when there are no cars on the road =)
Nothing inherent to cell phone networks causes them to go down during power outages. Just like POTS they need a backup power supply for their infrastructure to remain functional when the power grid is down. Usually this takes the form of diesel generators.
The main difference is that the cell network doesn't power the handset but modern cell phones use so little power than a $50 consumer UPS would recharge a cell phone many times over.
Keeping phone networks up during power outages is very important for public safety.
I've got a PHEV; when I need to exercise my portable generator (it's supposed to run for at least 30 minutes once a month), I plug in my car to at least have some load, rather than letting it just idle.
Personally, PHEV makes a lot more sense to me than full EV. My particular model (Ford C-Max Energi) has pretty low EV only capacity (20ish miles, if you stay under 60 mph and relatively flat), and the battery interferes with cargo space, but if you got the capacity up to about 50 miles, that would do a lot of people's (non-covid) daily commute with a single charge (either overnight at home, or during the day at work; but you wouldn't need both). And when you need to go farther, 500+ miles per tank, 5 minute fillup.
Look at how many chargers are nearby and how far you'd have to drive in a typical rolling black-out to charge. I bet it isn't that much worse than how far you'd have to drive a gas car to refuel, as those stations tend not to have reliable backup power either.
On the US southeastern coast, the big concern is hurricanes. Gas stations are far from 100% dependable in regional emergencies both before and immediately after the event. Electricity tends to only be a problem afterward.
How much is that irrational fear worth to you? In the end that's the question that needs answering. Very soon, you'll be paying extra to buy a petrol vehicle. And that's before you drive it anywhere and get to deal with taxes, fuel cost, and maintenance cost as well.
In any case, a typical EV would have about 50KWH of battery; more than enough to power a house for a while. The more EVs there are, the more stored KWH of energy will be around in any area if a blackout happens. Much more useful than oversized SUVs burning up all the remaining fuel in your area while fuel logistics are being disrupted.
For your parents, an EV and vehicle to grid technology could have seen them through those 3 days. More, if you drive it to some fast charging access point in between to top it up for 10$. It's perfect especially for remote setups. Add some solar panels to the mix and you are basically not dependent on the grid.
I have SCE, but I just keep my Model 3 plugged in when I’m not driving, and it’s always at 90% when I need it: it’s better than gas, because home charging means I don’t have to remember to keep my tank full for emergencies.
Tesla put a bunch of their charging stations onto solar panels with battery backup and they have large batteries on trailers with chargers they deploy to meet demand during peak travel periods. In a world where everyone or a lot people have a home battery system with solar neither gas stations nor the electric grid will matter as much possibly not at all. Think about it this way. Is there a way for you to buy equipment to make your own gas from resources on your property? Is there equipment you can buy to generate your own electricity?
We have thought about this as well. If there is an emergency that affects a metro area, you need to be able to get out of the area and then refill. In an ICE, it's easy to drive 200 miles and then tank up in 5 mins. In an EV, you might be able to get 200 miles, but it's much less likely that you'll be able to refill in under an hour. If many people are evacuating, charging stations will be overloaded. Trickle charging can be done almost anywhere, but that can take a really long time.
You can't pump gas if there's no power to the pump. Electric is also nice because you don't have to queue up at a fueling station, this is especially convenient in situations where an outage is anticipated like in advance of inclement weather. Also, in a typical emergency situation if you're using your vehicle, it'll be taking you out of the disaster area into a place where electricity (and gas) will be available.
Just wait a few more years, gas stations will start being phased out, rooftop solar will be even cheaper, and the economical side of your worry will be eviscerated. The learning curve solar and batteries are on means their relentless March of improvement will render gas scarce and expensive by comparison. Gas will still play a role for older cars and antiques, but it'll be harder and harder to find over time.
I'm more worried about range of EVs and charging stations being absolutely swamped in times of crisis. Gas stations lines were bad enough during hurricane evacuations, imagine roadside charging stations.
I think I will always hold onto a reliable ICE car for the rest of my days.
Buy rooftop solar. You'll be vulnerable to standard California chaos, but if the world truly collapses, you can disconnect from grid power and cruise around the post-apocalyptic gas-free wasteland as a zero-carbon road warrior.
