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Originally Posted by tonybelding
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you want to quote the actual study... here is the link:
http://www.pnl.gov/energy/eed/etd/pd...s_combined.pdf
now here is the issue. There is certainly additional capacity available at night for charging ev's, perhaps quite alot. I dont think that anyone is arguing that and it is certainly not a bad idea for the power companies to leverage their off peak availability; any generators that are spun down at night would certainly be a more effective use of capital equipment if running and making them money (and us electricity). There are however a few things to consider.
First, the study talks about PHEV's specifically, not pure electric vehicles so the comparison to vehicles like the whitestar or roadster are not an apples to apples comparison. Secondly, the study specifically talks about how the typical cost difference between a PHEV and normal vehicle is about 10K more and that the time to recoup this additional outset is 5-8 years which is not cost effective. Finally, concerning the whitestar while doing the research for this post I noticed that the whitestar is no longer going to be the accessible vehicle with a cost of $30K. The price is now at $60K which again puts this vehicle out of contention for a huge chunk of the populous.
Again, there is nothing wrong with trading our usage of imported oil for usage of domestic coal or natural gas... It will certainly help stabilize us and keep money in the country instead. The only issue is that this has to be done in a way that we can make this option available to the average car buyer (e.g. family that buys a $30K toyota or hyundai) and more importantly to the below average buyer (the people who buy up the used toyotas and hyundai's at $8-15K and cant afford to replace a battery pack for 10 G's or even 5). If we take the tesla solutions (e.g. roadster and whitestar) at face value we have an electric solution that maybe 5% of the country can afford...