Not really.

As we transition to more electrical use for motive power, a larger infrastructure will have to be built.

Computers alone stretched our capacity. Certainly some sort of method of progressively programming recharging will have to be found.

This is why I have progressed beyond greater use of electricity and more towards a Biodiesel Hybrid. I would still want to recharge from the grid overnight. It's possible that the diesel would never have to start.

Different charging rates could be implemented to keep things within the grid's capacity.

ie. If you want to charge in a minute, it'll cost you $x/kw. If you charge in 30 minutes, it'll cost you less, and if you charge overnight, even less.

That way, most people would charge overnight and only use the fast-charge option when they really need it.

Engineer:

Your 360kW figure got me thinking, so I dug up some power plant data from 1999 to try to wrap my head around just what that number means.

Hoover Dam, for example, has a maximum capacity of a smidge over 2 GW. That is with all generators humming and requires, I presume, full reservoir capacity.

Ignoring transmission losses, that's sufficient to simultaneously power about 5500 5-minute electric car chargers.

Guessing by my own average home electricity usage of ~ 1 kW, it's also sufficient to power about 1.3 million households (VERY rough estimate, there).

Those two statistics are pretty useless for any practical purpose, but you can point to them and say, "Ooh, lookit the big numbers..."

More practically, let's say each 36kWh car must be recharged every other day (a wild-ass-guess). That makes its average power draw 7.5kW, regardless of how much time it takes to charge. Every million electric cars will add a 7.5 GW load to the electrical grid, requiring the addition of nearly FOUR times the capacity of the Hoover Dam.

The only load a internal combustion car puts on the grid is the power required to move the gasoline, power drawn from capacity that already exists. This load, I am guessing, is entirely insignificant compared to 7.5 kW.

The grid is already maxed out. If the magic battery were invented that would allow an average sedan to drive 300 miles on a single charge, there's no way to provide enough electricity to power any significant number of them without extraordinarily aggressive power plant construction.

I am going to be very embarrassed when somebody points out my arithmetic mistakes.

"That makes its average power draw 7.5kW"

If it took 48 hours to charge (another way of envisioning your scenario), then a 30 kWh battery would have a 625W draw. That's a little over 5 amps at 120 volts - about half of a toaster oven.

So, you would need 1 GW of net generation capacity for 1.6 million cars. Of course. there's no way there's going to be a steady demand curve over a day, a week, or a year, so obviously more capacity would be necessary to meet peak demand.

But sticking with your scenario and assuming a flat demand curve, you'd need 112.5 GW of net generating capacity to power 180 million vehicles (the rough size of the private vehicle fleet of the US).

Now hopefully my numbers aren't wrong. :)

Here's another way to look at it.

In 2002, light vehicles (cars, SUV/light trucks, and motorcycles) traveled 2,855,756,000,000 miles.

At the 250 W/mile efficiency level, that would mean it would take 713,939,000,000 kWh to move a fleet over that distance at that efficiency level.

Once again assuming a flat demand curve, that would mean an additional 81 GW of net generating capacity would need to be added to the grid.

Keep in mind, though, that the average light vehicle on the road today consumes energy at a rate of about 2 3/4 times that of the Prius.

I think you need to distinguish two cases for recharging. One is local use. Right now we all have to get gas every few days, just to cover shopping, commutes to work, and so on. This type of usage would be eliminated for electric cars. They would be routinely charged when at rest, at home or at work. That's how the EV-1 and other electrical vehicles were designed to work, and it's fine for local driving.

The other case is long trips, where you have to stop every few hours of driving and recharge. This would be the only usage for the equivalent of gas stations, in the EV scenario. You probably want to take a break, go to the bathroom or whatever, so it doesn't need to be a one-minute charge, but it can't be much over ten minutes or so without becoming an inconvenience.

This is the case that seems problematic for electric vehicles. That's an awful lot of power to find a way to safely feed into a car.

I think in most east coast cities the additional power demand would be easy to accomidate, LA and other places that already have power problems are a different story...

Also I think that in places like NYC, were people park at parking garages/lots, the cars could be recharged while they are parked, so only a little charge at a time, and it would be pretty transparent... this doesn't work very well for rural areas, but most cars are in urban areas anyway :)

In response to Shirley E's comments up at the top, let's play with a few numbers.

Industrial power is normally 480 VAC, 60 Hz (in the US, at least), three phase. Each 1 amp, if you combine all three phases, is approx 1.5 kW (480 V * 1 amp * 3 channels). And yes, we're talking a lot more than two wires for the whole thing. It's a more complex connector, but three separate electrical channels will, after all, supply more power than just one electrical channel. From these three channels, you can easily derive 240 VAC or 120 VAC (single phase) needed for a household, so we're talking about the power going to the transformer, outside of your house. Yes, this class of power is already widely distributed under the existing infrastructure.

I'll keep playing with the 250 Wh/mile mentioned above. That's 4 miles / kWh. We're looking at approx 100 miles worth of driving (124 miles expanded range * 80% charge on the "fast charge" = 99.2 miles). We'll need approx 25 kWh of energy stored. We could feed:

* 17 amps for one hour
* 167 amps for six minutes
* 200 amps for five minutes

Plenty of industrial consumers draw more than 200 amps. Indeed, I believe you mentioned that most houses have a 200 amp service. If we could draw that 200 amps from the distribution lines BEFORE the household transformer, we could get the power needed to fast-charge 25 kWh in five minutes. That is, of course assuming 100% efficiency in the charging. Adjust the amps as needed for less than that.

In short, it would be do-able. Not terribly easy, as you'd be playing with some substantial power levels, but do-able.

Take a look at:

http://www.greencar.com/index.cfm?content=topstory4

for an example of such a fast-charge service which is ALREADY IN USE. The quick charge is anywhere from 10-30 minutes (depending on battery technologies used). That's not as quick as five minutes to fill your gasoline vehicle, but it's not the "overnight" charge most people associated with electric vehicles, either.

A typical "gas station" type charging station, with multiple chargers, simultaneously charging multiple vehicles, would draw about as power much as a small 30-50 employee company doing heat treating, metal forming, etc. In short, the distribution infrastructure is already there.

You'd probably want to have some flywheels providing "smoothing" in the inbound current for the station; the infrastructure has a difficult time dealing with surges in demand. There are problems with using such things in vehicles, but they are already in use in stationary applications, such as the New York subway (storing regenerated energy from braking trains, and supplying it back when the train leaves the station; the only article I could find on it was on the NY Times, and they want money for past articles).

Paul mirrors my thoughts. Pundents have said that the benefits would never recover the costs involved. Hmmmm. How would this work? I know there are flexible solar cells. I know some of the best cells are approaching 22% efficency . Surface area X output = ? watts.

seems like a lot of unknowns. My take on it is this. The addition of solar cells to a vehicle would be at least as benefitial as streamlining. Every little bit helps.

Someone already put solar panels on a first gen Prius and actually managed to reduce fuel consumption. Considering it was done in Canada, and on the Prius I where you cannot force it to run on electric motor only, that's a pretty impressive feat. Imagine what could be done with more efficient panels and a charging system that operated when the car is off, on top of a Prius II? I think there's plenty of potential for solar EV systems, especially if the cost can be reduced and the efficiency increased.

See the post about the Solar Prius here

Gosh - Subaru always seems to behind in developments and prefers to run SportsCar Races.

Again as we can see in the industry - Anything other than the original way of making cars is going thru tought ways to implement solutions.

Until we hit domino effects of draining all our resources and must resort back to Bicycles and Horse Buggies and RikShaws.

We the consumers are going to be the ones that are hit hard while the rich ones just be content on making money selling vapor convience.

This is a great discussion. The only problem with the electric car concept is when I'm going on a long drive. If my (future) electric vehicle has 300 mile range, and can be fully recharged over night, then I only have a problem if I'm driving over 300 miles. If I want to do, say 700 miles in a very long day, I would expect some inconvenience to recharge on two occasions. I suppose that I might be willing to wait an hour for a full re-charge. If I pull into a freeway specialty "filling" station equipped with a high voltage and high capacity charging system it might look like: Wait up to 40 minutes for an available station and charge for 20 minutes. Perhaps the internal voltage of my battery bank has to be 2000 volts. Perhaps theres a way to switch so that the voltage is 2000 (or more) when charging, but less when using (change the way the multiple cells are connected). Perhaps the speciallized station has a very high voltage feed and charges more for this premium service. The electric vehicle has the advantage of simplicity (read cost and reliability). Perhaps we will be willing to modify our impatient impulses a little to adapt to the realities of limited resources. And mabey we should stop for a meal and a walk a couple of times if we are going to drive 700 miles in a day.