Tuesday, January 23, 2024
What Happened With The 'Stranded Teslas' EV Charging Panic In Chicago
Frigid weather and electric cars: it’s known for quite some time now that they’re not the best of friends. Even though this frosty relationship isn’t breaking news, a new furor sparked this week following a FOX 32 Chicago report that showcased several Tesla drivers struggling to charge their EVs at a Tesla Supercharger in Oak Brook, Illinois.
As temperatures in this Chicago suburb plummeted to under zero this week for the first time in ages, the situation seemed to have become dire, with owners having to tow their Teslas out on flatbeds because chargers weren’t working, and their EVs had run out of juice. The TV station didn't mince words: “Public charging stations have turned into car graveyards,” reporters said, while calling depleted EVs “dead robots.” A barrage of similar stories emerged out of this report, with several major publications echoing this voice.
The FOX station mentions that some of the stranded owners were those who had just landed at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, which is just 14 miles north of the Oak Brook Supercharger. Tesla’s official documentation says that its cars use around 1% of its battery per day at idle. But if Sentry Mode—which remotely monitors outside conditions via the car's cameras—is enabled, the car can sap as much as 15% of pack capacity in 24 hours. That means someone who leaves Sentry Mode enabled while parked at the airport may return with a significantly reduced battery capacity.
Fortunately, there are several Supercharging stations close to O’Hare. There’s just one problem: at least three of these stations, including the two closest stations (Rosemont and Oak Brook) were reportedly non-functional. In fact, across 13 stations in the region (which, to be clear, is just a handful of the total number of charging locations near Chicago), nearly 50 stalls were said to be out of order.
Our friends over at The Autopian also found reviews on plugshare about Supercharging problems at many of these locations, some of which outlined fights breaking out between owners looking to charge.
Chemistry And User Error Challenges
Battery chemistry is an issue here too. Tesla most commonly uses two different battery chemistries in its cars: Lithium-Iron-Phosphate (LFP) and Nickel-Cobalt-Aluminum (NCA). LFP batteries are found in the standard range-trimmed Model 3, for example. The prismatic cells are cheaper to produce and not as energy-dense as cylindrical NCA cells found in the Long Range and Performance variants of the Model 3 and Y.
While both NCA and LFP batteries are affected adversely by cold weather, LFP batteries perform slightly worse. For starters, the overall range is reduced more so than NCA cells. LFP packs also have a harder time charging in colder weather. This means that if the battery pack is unable to precondition—a process that warms the battery up to an optimal temperature making charging more effective—before arriving at a DC fast charger, the overall charging speed will be significantly slower. Couple that with the reduced range in extreme cold, and you’ve got a recipe for arriving at a Supercharger with a state of charge (SoC) in the single digits.
One major thorn in the process was probably the lack of knowledge about battery preconditioning. Preconditioning itself requires energy, so leaving your EV at a low SoC can hamper that process. Owners have pointed out that preconditioning can consume between 7.5 to 12 kilowatt-hours, and those figures can vary depending on the set defrost level and set cabin temperature.
And since Teslas typically stop preconditioning at a lower SoC to avoid running out of charge ahead of reaching a fast charger, that battery conditioning isn’t started until the car is plugged in, which means a slower fast charging session, assuming the charger is functional. If it’s not, it could mean a SoC too low to reach another Supercharging station, thus leaving the car stranded.
It’s also possible that those who were routing to the out-of-service Superchargers were doing so out of memory. Perhaps those individuals rely primarily on Supercharging due to not having a charger of their own at home. The cold weather sapping the range and efficiency coupled with the lack of preconditioning may have caused these owners to become stranded at the Oak Brook Supercharger.
Moreover, owners have highlighted how charging performance declines in bone-chilling weather. One owner said on Reddit that even after preconditioning the battery for 20 minutes, with an additional 10-minute “preconditioning for fast charging,” the Supercharger didn’t immediately add real driving miles.
It’s something Kyle Conner of Out Of Spec Reviews also highlighted in a video that showcases how batteries behave during “deep freeze” conditions. Superchargers often don’t add range until batteries are first heated to optimal temperatures, and even then, stalls engineered to deliver 150-250 kilowatts only deliver 20-50 kW.
Also, it’s high time we accept the reality of EV range in winter, and instead focus on solutions to optimize it.
During the 2022-2023 winter, battery health and data startup Recurrent collected data from 10,000 EVs to analyze the impact of cold weather on the range. After analyzing over two dozen models in the U.S., Recurrent found that the average observed range in winter—range after factoring in real-world variables like climate, terrain, and driving patterns—was 70.3% of their normal range.
Chicago is a busy hub, and this would be similar to many gas stations running out of fuel with a bunch of cars running on fumes pulling up to the pump. Of course, such failures can attract a lot of media coverage. But our readers told us that the cold weather in nearby Michigan has been just as harsh to chargers in that area—five Supercharging locations with 56 stalls outside of Detroit, 12 were recently reported as unavailable.
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Legacy Manufacturer Slashes Production of EV Truck Biden Drove to Promote Green Agenda
Ford is cutting back production of its F-150 Lightning electric vehicle, a model that President Joe Biden took for a test drive to market his administration’s EV agenda.
Ford made the official announcement that it will be reducing its F-150 Lightning output in 2024 amid slower-than-projected growth in EV demand. Biden test drove a F-150 Lightning in Michigan in May 2021 to promote his administration’s EV agenda, which aims for EVs to make up 50% of all new auto sales by 2030.
“Ford is reducing production of F-150 Lightning, the top-selling electric pickup in the U.S., to achieve the optimal balance of production, sales growth and profitability,” the company announced on Friday. “Ford expects continued growth in global EV sales in 2024, though less than anticipated, and is preparing to launch next-generation EVs.”
The company is not currently sharing specific details regarding changes in production volume for the model, a Ford spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation, but earlier reports indicated that the company could slash production by about 50%.
“We see a bright future for electric vehicles for our customers who value their advantages, especially with Ford EV drivers’ access to Tesla superchargers beginning this quarter,” the Ford spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We are engaged with the regulators to help ensure the emission standards align with the market, and Ford will comply with the standards.”
The F-150 Lightning typically costs approximately $50,000 compared to the conventional F-150’s $36,570 price tag, making the EV version considerably more expensive even with the help of $7,500 consumer tax credits provided by the Inflation Reduction Act.
The Biden administration is using enormous government subsidies and aggressive market regulation to push EVs on Americans. Despite these efforts, the industry as a whole finds itself in a tenuous position to start 2024: Ford and several of its competitors are losing vast sums of money on their EV product lines while executives are backing away from short-term production targets.
Additionally, the nation’s charging infrastructure remains highly concentrated in coastal, densely populated regions rather than in the vast American interior as the Biden administration’s $7.5 billion spending blitz to build out a nationwide charging network has been slow to develop. The charging infrastructure that does exist, meanwhile, does not always function properly, whether because of hardware issues or weather conditions.
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Climate chiefs admitted net zero plan based on insufficient data, leading physicist says
Key committee only looked at ‘a single year of data’ when making controversial green energy claims. Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith says the Climate Change Committee admits that a mistake was made
Britain’s climate watchdog has privately admitted that a number of its key net zero recommendations may have relied on insufficient data, it has been claimed.
Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, who led a recent Royal Society study on future energy supply, said that the Climate Change Committee only “looked at a single year” of data showing the number of windy days in a year when it made pronouncements on the extent to which the UK could rely on wind and solar farms to meet net zero.
“They have conceded privately that that was a mistake,” Sir Chris said in a presentation seen by this newspaper. In contrast, the Royal Society review examined 37 years worth of weather data.
Last week Sir Chris, an emeritus professor and former director of energy research at Oxford University, said that the remarks to which he was referring were made by Chris Stark, the Climate Change Committee’s chief executive. He said: “Might be best to say that Chris Stark conceded that my comment that the CCC relied on modelling that only uses a single year of weather data ... is ‘an entirely valid criticism’.”
The CCC said that Sir Chris’s comments, in a presentation given in a personal capacity in October, following the publication of his review, related solely to a particular report it published last year on how to deliver “a reliable decarbonised power system”.
Enshrined in law
But, in response to further questions from this newspaper, the body admitted that its original recommendations in 2019 about the feasibility of meeting the 2050 net zero target, were also based on just one year’s worth of weather data. The recommendations were heavily relied on by ministers when Theresa May enshrined the 2050 target into law. A CCC spokesman said: “We stand by the analysis.”
In October 2021 The Sunday Telegraph revealed that assumptions underpinning the committee’s 2019 advice to ministers included a projection that in 2050 there would be just seven days on which wind turbines would produce less than 10 per cent of their potential electricity output. That compared to 30 such days in 2020, 33 in 2019 and 56 in 2018, according to analysis by Net Zero Watch, a campaign group.
Sir Chris’s report for the Royal Society, published in September, concluded that a vast network of hydrogen-filled caves was needed to guard against the risk of blackouts under the shift to wind and solar generation, which the Royal Society described as “volatile” because it depends on wind and sun to produce energy.
The report was one of the starkest warnings to date of the risks faced when relying on intermittent weather-dependent energy sources without sufficient backup.
Overestimate
It stated: “The UK’s need for long-term energy storage has been seriously underestimated... Studies that do not consider long sequences of years underestimate the need for long-term storage. Studies of single years cannot cast light directly on the need for storage lasting over 12 months and overestimate the need for other supplies.”
In a presentation delivered on Oct 31 2023, Sir Chris said: “By looking at one year you underestimate storage and you grossly overestimate the need for everything else. That’s exactly what the Committee on Climate Change have done.”
He added: “The Committee on Climate Change, as I already said, looked at a single year and they have conceded privately that that was a mistake. But they are still saying they don’t differ that much from us. Well that’s not quite true.”
The Royal Society report found that up to 100 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of storage will be needed by 2050, to mitigate variations in wind and sunshine. This was based on 37 years of weather data rather than the single year relied on by the CCC.
Real weather data
The report noted that the CCC model required “a much greater level of supply ... from other sources, and/or wind and solar than would have been required if storage had been allowed to transfer energy between years.”
A CCC spokesman said: “Our recent report modelled the 12-month operation of Britain’s power system in 2035 using hourly energy demand and real weather data from a low-wind year, stress-tested to simulate a 30-day wind drought.
“We welcome Sir Chris’ work, which considers other aspects of the energy challenge in 2050, under different assumptions about the future energy mix.” Asked if the CCC disputed Sir Chris’s account, the spokesman said: “We’ve got nothing further to add.”
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Energy bills must rise to pay for Net Zero, says Siemens Energy boss
The German boss of Britain’s biggest wind turbine maker has warned energy bills will have to keep rising to pay for the green transition as he attacked “fairytale” thinking about net zero.
Joe Kaeser, chairman of Siemens Energy, suggested higher energy bills were inevitable as turbine makers grapple with huge losses, forcing them to pass on costs to their customers.
The company is the owner of the UK’s biggest wind turbine manufacturing site, in Hull, and employs thousands of British workers.
Mr Kaeser said manufacturers had become locked in a harmful “rat race” to build ever-bigger turbines and claimed developers and governments were in denial about the costs this entailed.
He also warned that inflation is battering industry balance sheets and warned of separate growing problems with faults and breakdowns in the sector.
Mr Kaeser told The Telegraph: “Every transformation comes at a cost and every transformation is painful. And that’s something which the energy industry and the public sector - governments - don’t really want to hear.
“I believe that for a while [customers] need to accept higher pricing.
“And then there might be innovation – about the weight of the blades, other efficiency methods, technology – so the cost can then go down again.
“But the point is, if there is no profit pool in an industry, why should that industry innovate?”
His comments come after the UK Government bowed to industry pressure in November and increased the power prices offered in future renewable energy auctions, after a competition in the summer received no bids from offshore wind developers.
The earlier auction flop triggered serious doubts that the UK would be able to meet its target of 50 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr Kaeser criticised what he described as “a lot of big mouths but little action” that had gone on for years in the wind industry.
Governments and developers are failing to follow through on their own green transition promises quickly enough, he said, while many are reluctant to admit the full costs of their plans to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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