@FSH 210 Sport I think the premise of selling and instantly having to support 50% of the automotive public is a quite far fetched. Nothing at this scale happens overnight. According to
this article, California only purchases about 1.8mil cars a year (or rather registers them). That's 1/10 of what you predicted above. And you have the full year to find the capacity. So we're not talking about adding instantaneous demand here.
Now, the chart
found here, basically shows a flat line in growth for the state (those power plants that didn't get built certainly aren't helping). This article (although a few years old) shows decent growth in renewables and imports, despite total generation being somewhat down for the year. While not a rosey great story, I suspect it's not as bleak as you portray either. That being said if I was in power generation and looking at the trends I would be worried as well.
The problem is, that the generation capacity isn’t there, anywhere, and furthermore the transmission capacity isn’t there to import the power. You don’t just add another, 6,300 MWs on an annual basis, for the annual upgrade of 1.8M cars. Thats, 12.3 % a year of the current peak, that’s a huge increase, read not sustainable, in growth. Renewables are not going to solve this problem because the largest is PV, and it comes off line around 1700hrs in summer, that’s currently 11,000 MW’s, and most people don’t get home from work until 1800hrs. Thats right at the time when the day peak is finally starting to fall off, and all those fast start peaking units are coming off line, and those units are not meant or designed to be online continuously, besides the fact they are very expensive to run, and this is when folks are going to get home and plug in their cars. Delay plugging them in I hear you say? Well now you have this load curve that extends well beyond what is called super peak. Have them charge in the middle of the night? You mean when all the generation is backed off during the wee hours? Now there will be a new load curve to deal with say from 0000hrs to 0500 hours when prices have been historically cheaper, and they will no longer be cheaper as there is more load and growing on annual basis.
I appreciate your remarks about being a power generation guy, but, again, the enormity of the situation is not what’s realized, and it is a bleak as I portray, unless power plants, transmission and distribution systems are upgraded to meet that load, and that takes decades to do. Its not just the materials, its the qualified personnel to build the infrastructure. Not to mention the lead time to build all that equipment, the typical lead time on a large transformer used to be two years. If you get too much generation / load on a given system its easy to exceed the fault breaking capacity of existing Ultra High 750KW +, High 500KV / 230KV / 138KV transmission systems, as I said eluded to before, we are talking about building up a completely new system just to support this EV load.
On the distribution side you have substations that by and large are heavily loaded, these are stations are redundant systems, for example, in a typical unit you have an A bus and a B bus, each has its own transformer, there is a bus tie between the busses, in the event of a sub transmission line failure the bus tie automatically closes to keep the other buss going, thereby doubling the load on the remaining bank, so these systems have to have that level of redundancy built into them. Theses units are designed for that amount of load, you can’t just add larger transformers to these units as that would exceed the load capacity of the busses in the units, the load break capability of the circuit breakers, and ultimately will exceed the fault capacity of the subtransmission systems. Now then these unit subs that take sub transmission voltage, say 35KV / 69KV and step it down to the 12.5KV, 4.16KV etc.. that goes on the lines into your neighborhood.. try and imagine that, all of the infrastructure you see in and around your home having to be doubled or even tripled in capacity to meet the demand car chargers, and now CA wants to make everything electric, heating both comfort and water, cooking etc… its mind numbing to me to think about the amount of capacity increases that will be necessary. Then you start to get into Frequency Demand response in the ACE (Area Control Error) Equation from the generators when this massive amount of load is applied within a very short time frame, this requires a lot, read massive, amounts of inertia from the all the power plants that have connected but unloaded amounts of generation this is known as spinning reserve and is part of the redundancy that is required for a reliable power system. So, top all of this off, you have to build a system wherein the MSSC or most severe single contingency must be met, that is, if you loose the largest single piece of your system, say a 3000MW transmission line, the system must not suffer a cascading collapse or in other words must have dynamic stability, think of an oscillation that who’s magnitude dampens out over time, time in this case is somewhere in the 60-120 cycle range, otherwise you have dynamic instability which leads to a collapse.
Now realize that CA can barely keeps the lights on as it is in the summer. the grid is right on the edge for most of the summers. If their MSSC happens during the summer, there will be a massive UFLS (under frequency load shedding) event.
Those are just the highlights of how the system works.
My Dad used to tell me, “all you can do is tell people”. I told my leadership at my job on many occasions about what was coming. Let me give you an example, when San Onofre nuclear generating station was taken off line that was a loss of 2400 MW’s. All the experts were saying oh no problem that’s not going to affect us, including my bosses, they wouldn’t listen so I went to the General Manager and told her that we are going to have a problem next summer and now is the time to secure other resources. She told me that the experts said we will be good, I pleaded with her to at least take some precautionary steps, nope. Guess what? The next year a study came out and it detailed exactly what I said was going to happen, I’m not clairvoyant, I just know my job and how the system works. I sent her the power point of the study and she said you were right what can we do about it? I told her the time to do something was when I came to you a year ago when I told you about it. Much drama followed.. including $5000 MWh prices on peak, that’s $5 per kWh at your house. If it wasn’t for the fact that the people who were supposed to destroy the steam turbines on huntington beach units 3&4 hadnt done so in a manner that was repairable there would have been daily rolling black outs. This was supposed to have been done per CARB as the smog credits for those units had been traded so a new peaking generation plant could be built up north. As it was, it took a Herculean effort by those who had worked at this gas fired plant to get it on line within a couple of months. Other wise there would have been daily rolling black outs because there was no way to import the power, and in this case, the reactive power to support the power factor for the system in that area.
That is just one of the several cases wherein disaster was avoided. The difference is that those resources were in place already and just needed to be pm’d and brought back on line. There a few gas fired units along the coast that were decommissioned in 2020 but who know what state they are in, and those were shut down for “environmental” concerns about these plants using once through condensate cooling with ocean water.
Think these are the ravings of a mad man? We’ll see. If CA doesn’t change its ways and really fast they are headed for a real problem. Remember, 2035 is only 12 years away, I sincerely doubt CA leadership has the political where with all to do what is necessary. Oh sure, CA leadership can come up with some sort of lame excuse (reality) why they will push back that 2035 number, and they will have to if they are going to be adding 12% load growth per year. I’m sure that CA is not alone in its situation, in fact I know its not, Tennessee just had rolling black outs last year due to energy constraints caused by the political decommissioning of some large super critical coal fired units.
