Comment Curious (Score 2) 62
Would the savings be marginal or make a big impact?
And this is why it's not a good idea to play games with herd-immunity. The more people who get infected, the more opportunities for mutations that make the situation worse.
^This
Many people don't realize how often mutations happen. Regular RNA viruses have a mutation rate of 1 out of every 1000 replications. This RNA virus is lower than that because it has some mutation 'spell checkers' but it's not nearly as low as DNA replication. Scientists had already catalogued 12,000 mutations back in September.
There are millions/billions/trillions of viral particles in each infected person, so each person is a vector for mutations. Most of these will be benign. The trend across all viruses is to make the pathogen less deadly. But there's always the possibility that the virus will be better able to spread combined with becoming more deadly - like what happened with the second wave of the 1918 Spanish Flu.
We don't want enough mutations to occur for COVID that we can't develop vaccines fast enough to keep up with the never ending waves of new virus strains. It would be like the whack-a-mole game that is our vaccine response to the seasonal flu.
As for 70% of the population living in their own homes- its a bit less than that, and that includes condos, coops, and other high density buildings.
63% of all residents in the US have a garage or car port. This doesn't include the homes that have no garage or carport but do have a dedicated laneway. So it's not unrealistic that my original source that quoted 70% is accurate.
It will be at least a 20 year process and cost hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure. In some places the power grid will need to be increased to support it. You're living in a fantasy world.
Funny, if you had asked me for an estimate on how long it would take, I would have suggested something like 20 years. And I don't doubt that in some places the infrastructure would need to be beefed up to accommodate a higher load. But back to one of my original points. Since this only represents 30% of the population, and this 30% are already in a position to take alternate transportation because they live close to their destinations and have public transportation at their disposal, it's not as large of a problem as you make it out to be.
Even if businesses did build the chargers it would more likely destroy electric cars than popularize them. The reason that charging cars at night works so well is that peak electricity hours are during the day. Electric vehicles charging at home charge at night. If any significant number (relative to the US population) started charging in the day, especially in summer, the electric grid would fall over. Oh, and it wouldn't be even a fraction as cheap as it is now. Electric cars can only work if they are charging on off hours, and doing so at businesses is the opposite of that.
Again, 70% of the EV owners would be charging at night taking advantage of the off-peak electricity. But let's think more critically about the 30% apartment dwellers. What's their average mileage in a day? This source from 2009 data says 26.1 miles for city dwellers or, to convert this to electricity usage, 6.525 kWh per person per day (an EV can go about 1 mile for every 0.25kWh, Tesla's are higher, some are lower). Assuming all 30% of the population who don't have their own garage/laneway are city dwellers, this puts their electricity consumption up to 642,451,500 kWh per day or 234,494,797,500 kWh per year (population of America is 328.2 million, making the population of city dwellers 98.46 million). Compare that against the current average electricity use in the states of 3.9 TRILLION kWh per year, peak demand is roughly twice the nightly low, so let's assume 2/3 of that electricity is during the day or 2.6 trillion kWh per year.
Also, from a country's perspective, we can look to save electricity from fuel refinery, which is about 0.2 kWh per gallon. This would apply to 100% of the US population, rather than just 30%. This would save the US 28.5 billion kWh in electricity, roughly, based on the number of gallons the US uses in a year - I'm assuming all fuel refinement would stop for 100% of the population here, which isn't accurate, but it gives you a picture of the scale we're looking at. Assuming this refinement process is spread out evenly across the day, that puts half of that during peak usage, or 14.25 billion kWh
So, to summarize, you're making a big deal about an increase of about 8.5%. Not nothing, but it's also not crazy either. For example, from 2004-2010, electricity demand rose 5.7%. Admittedly this is overall electricity demand, and my 8.5% figure is just my peak hours estimate, but using the 2/3 figure from before, you would get 3.8% over 6 years. Assuming the same rate of increase is possible, we can get to 8.5% increase in 14 years.
For comparison's sake, if the other 70% of the population switch to EVs, that would increase the electricity demand by 873 billion kWh (67% of off-peak demand). Considering that off-peak is roughly half the peak demand, this increase wouldn't put us over capacity and require new power plants to be built. Infrastructure to the homes shouldn't need to be improved in almost all cases because the home can already handle its peak load. Individual home owners may need to invest in poly panels or wiring to be installed to put in chargers, but the existing infrastructure to the home should be sufficient.
I've done the math. I'm not "VASTLY" overstating how easy it will be.
"A car is just a big purse on wheels." -- Johanna Reynolds