Curiosity: Report says we have 35x more HP in our driveways than our power plants
It may not be a particularly glamorous definition of the automobile, but it's true on some level that cars and trucks are individual little power generators on wheels, a fact pointed out here by WIRED staff writer Alexis Madrigal. Interestingly, when viewed in that light, the United States has an embarrassment of riches in overall latent power availability.
In fact, Madrigal calculates that the U.S. has 35 times more horsepower sitting there in our driveways than in all our power plants combined. Like numbers? Says Madrigal:
That's mighty impressive, no? While we're not sure we'd follow Madrigal's logic all the way to the conclusion that we should all be driving Tata Nanos, we do agree that the average passenger car doesn't really need 200 horsepower to get its lone occupant to work on time. We also can't help but consider the potential of a national electric car infrastructure as a way to store excess power that could be called into action in a jiffy, if required.Turns out we have something on the order of 51 billion peak horsepower sitting in our driveways. That's an incredible 38,276 gigawatts of power available. That absolutely dwarfs the nameplate capacity of our electrical power plants, which total up to a mere 1,087 gigawatts. In fact, each week of 2008, a horrible year for car sales, almost 38 gigawatts of capacity rolled into the streets of America.
[Source: Inventing Green]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Ron Wagner 7:11PM (8/18/2009)
This is a very important fact. We should be able to buy accessories to take maximum advantage of this. Electrical plugs, accessible for backup and camping. I have AC converters for camping with my van, and for my computer etc. This is a wonderful form of distributed energy, that we already own.
Unfortunately a electromagnetic pulse attack would take out almost everything we own, and the grid too. This could also happen from a large solar flare also. We need to start protecting our grid and everything else with shielding. This is an option I would buy.
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Doug 7:44PM (8/18/2009)
We should also protect our heads with shielding. Grounded tinfoil makes a good shield against electromagnetic radiation. ;)
Ron Wagner 8:35PM (8/18/2009)
Doug, I will consider the source.
Critter 7:15PM (8/18/2009)
I only need 1.21 gigawatts of available power. . .
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Ernie 3:41PM (8/19/2009)
I was about to say that that is roughly 1 million horsepower.
How the hell Doc Brown couldn't figure out to put an electric motor into the Delorean in 1885 to leech 0.0001% of the powerplant's total output to get up to 88 mph is beyond me.
I mean, besides the fact that it would look really cool to run a steam locomotive off an unfinished bridge trailing orange smoke.
Doug 7:41PM (8/18/2009)
What exactly is the point of this?
It's like saying everyone with a desk job (or no job) could peddling on little bike generators. Think of all that untapped power!!
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Zeph 7:52PM (8/18/2009)
Take those engines, convert them to ethanol. Either run them for transportation or just recycle them for home generators. This would help massively with environmental problems.
It's something I'm considering doing, making a home with solar and win generation, some sort of battery system and also a ethanol generator made from a reclaimed small ICE engine for when needed, on an autostart circuit should the battery go low. With this system I would either run an electric car or ethanol cars. Fuel would come from my own land, crops and distillery.
Hey presto, 100% green, no taxation required. If the land owning middle class did this we could then sell the surplus for everyone else to have access to green fuels too. We solve the environmental problems by cutting big business and big government out of the equation, by doing it ourselves. All we will get out of them is lies and manipulation because they are, for the most part, parasitic entities that care about nothing but their own survival and growth, much like a cancer. We need to cut them out and return to more organic governments and corporations that are in cooperation with the population, that exist for the good of the people. Wake up and stop being slaves to elitist interest groups and stop being manipulated into elitist agendas. We can solve all the big problems, but only if the solutions become part of our culture, top down impositions won't work because we are lead by the least of us, sadly.
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3PeaceSweet 4:41AM (8/19/2009)
Yes to everything you said except use methane instead of ethanol, the infrastructure is already in place, the US has large resources of unconventional gas which needs a high price (high demand) to sustain production, and biomethane can be made from waste and almost any other biological material.
Power from car generators would only be required to meet peak demand, perhaps only a couple of hundred GW. Assuming each car would provide 20kW electrical supply (and heat for domestic use) you would only need about 10 million cars. Easily do able within 20 years to work alongside the high penetration of wind power by that time and a new fleet of nuclear power plants.
Ron Wagner 8:47PM (8/18/2009)
You might like the ethanolcanbeagas.com website. It is very informative. Bypassing fuel taxes, transportation costs, and marketing costs could make it worthwhile. The ethanol could also be used for home heating etc. Many ethanol fans share your political leanings.
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biznut 10:06PM (8/18/2009)
That's a ridiculous comparison.
First, there is no practical way those cars can be put to work to do any electricity production, plus the efficiency would be horrendous. Plus, while the power generators are designed to (or at least targeted) to operate closest to their full capacity all the time and have their highest efficiency there, cars are designed to operate at their full power only a very small fraction of the time, with the worst efficiency (and emissions) at that operating point.
A more suitable (although equally useless) comparison parameter would be steady-state cruising power at worst case rated payload (GVW or GCVW -car terms, non-car people ignore it) that is usually the continuous power capability of the engine.
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Jon 2:18AM (8/19/2009)
The point of the article wasn't to suggest using that power for electricity generation - it was to show how overpowered modern vehicles are.
lne937s 12:28AM (8/19/2009)
We currently use 3,816,000 gigawatthours of electricity per year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption
As we rarely use peak horsepower of our vehicles (most cars could not maintain peak horsepower for an hour straight). Our cars are also not used all the time- total cumulative lifespan of a vehicle (if running 24/7) adds up to a matter of months. The argument is a bit off.
BTW, I crunched my own numbers for electric car adoption:
In terms of the electricity impact, based on Nissans numbers, the LEAF (which does not use all of its battery capacity for endurance purposes) will go more than 5 miles per kWh- let's use 5 for a round number. If you figure 12,000 miles per year (or 1000 per month), that is 200 kWh per month or 2400 kWh per year for each car. Based on energy consumed per mile driven, electric vehicles are dramatically more efficient than gasoline cars.
In this country, we use 3.8 Trillion kWh (3.8 Billion MWh) per year or about 13,000 kWh per year, per person (includes industrial and personal use). If 3 Million new electric vehicles are sold every year (~20% of typical new car sales) and none go off the road, for an additional ~7.2 billion kWh per year, it will increase electricity consumption by less than 0.2% per year. Hopefully, we can adjust for that, maybe by buying more efficient appliances and HVAC systems- maybe better insulated houses and fewer McMansions- or maybe by adjusting generating capacity (preferrably to renewables). If we were to replace 200,000,000 cars (basically equivalent to every privately owned vehicle), it will increase our consumption ~480 Billion kwh or ~12.6%, which is less electricity than lighting and dramatically less than what we use for heating and cooling. Even if every man woman and child would get an electric car (300 Million) and drive it 12,000 miles a year, it would increase our consumption by 18.9%.
In Germany, they use about half as much electricity per person as we do here (and much of that comes from renewables). So the difference between us and an industrial (but progressive and efficient) county like Germany in terms of electricity consumption is basically 2.5 electric cars worth per person.
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Kyle 1:36AM (8/19/2009)
This is a very poor comparison, there is no real reason to compare the peak power production between the electric companies and our cars. Not to mention that when we do use out cars, we usually use an order of magnitude less than the peak power for average driving. There article proves only that our vehicles could produce over and order of magnitude of power than our power plants for a short period of time.
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Tman 2:44AM (8/19/2009)
This comparison is totally unscientific. It is absolutely meaningless. The only thing it succeeds in doing is bringing attention to the situation.
First off like biznut stated cars cannot operate at their claimed peak output for very long. In most cases depending on the torque characteristics, ICE engines for cars would produce 30% of their claimed output if operated continuously at a more realistic rpm. We are talking between 1200rpm-2000rpm. which is where most portable generators operate and not the 5500rpm - 7000rpm that car outputs are quoted.
Following this it is safe to readjust that figure from 38,276 gigawatts to about 11,000 gigawatts. That's still a lot of available power, but this is just to illustrate that the claims of the article are misleading.
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BlackbirdHighway 6:12AM (8/19/2009)
So, it's possible that V2G could really work!
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jpm100 9:30AM (8/19/2009)
I highly doubt most people have ever used 100% of their full power more than a few hours in the life of the vehicle total.
Yeah, there's massive potential that doesn't come close to be fully utilized but is necessary to be there at times for reasonable functionality and safety in most cars.
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nrb 10:06AM (8/19/2009)
Does this mean we need 36 times more power plants if we all convert to EVs?
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KK 11:30AM (8/19/2009)
In case you're not joking - no, of course it doesn't mean that. Most cars sit idle most of the time. And when they ARE on the road, most of the time the engine is operating at a small fraction of full power. Power plants are in continuous operation, and can operate at full power continuously.
It's much more useful to look at actual energy consumption. The US uses abut 140 billion gallons of gasoline per year. If you just consider the amount of energy stored in that gasoline, that's a usage rate of about 580 gigawatts. But gasoline engines are only about 25% efficient, so the average power output from all the cars in the US is about 150 gigawatts. If we assume that electric cars are no more efficient than gasoline cars, but half the inefficiency is in the power generation, then we need about 300 gigawatts of electricity on average. That's still only 30% of the current generating capacity. If you also consider that electric vehicles would likely be more efficient than gasoline engines, and that most of the battery charging would be done at night (when other electricity demands are low), it doesn't seem like a big problem.
nrb 12:21PM (8/19/2009)
"In case you're not joking"
I was having fun, but also hoping to spark conversation.
After reading your post, I did a little digging. You're numbers seem reasonable, but I would be concerned about such a large consumption, even at night.
It also got me thinking about something else. A barrel of oil gives us about 20 gallons of gasoline. The rest goes for synthetic textiles, plastics, fertilizers, bubblegum(!) , diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, tar for roads etc. I know it's far fetched, but if we were to cut our gasoline usage by 90%, would we be processing enough oil for these other products?