- Recently, I saw Matt Farah on The Joe Rogan podcast
and in his description of the Porsche Taycan,
he had a little side note that he was concerned
about the infrastructure in Los Angeles
and whether or not it would support 100% of people in LA
going electric.
Now, before I had any time to actually research it,
I had a knee-jerk reaction of, "Of course, not."
But then I remembered that the energy
to power an electric car does come from the grid,
whereas gas to power a car
doesn't really affect the grid at all.
So these things are unique
and by having millions of people drive electric,
it would put an added strain on the grid, but how much?
And is this something we need to worry about?
Luckily, we have lots of data here to dig into
and try to answer this question
of whether or not if everyone went electric,
would the grid survive?
Let's free the data.
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As of 2017 in Los Angeles,
there were around 7.76 million vehicles registered.
If we ignore the publicly-owned and operated ones,
like buses and city vehicles,
then you're looking right around 7.6 million vehicles,
so 98% of that.
And if we consider that the average battery pack
of a long-range EV is just over 70 kilowatt hours,
which is averaging the Chevy Bolt, the Nissan LEAF,
the Tesla Model S, Model 3, and Model X, multiply that,
times the 7.6 million vehicles we're looking at,
well, you get 533,721,432
kilowatt hours of energy needed
just to charge all of the cars in LA one time.
Now, that is a ton of added energy.
And while in California, our energy needs
aren't driven by weather like other states,
we do drive a ton, so this would actually add a huge strain
on the existing infrastructure.
As of 2017, drivers in LA were spending
over 102 hours in traffic on average.
And idling alone can use quarter
to half a gallon of fuel per hour,
depending on the engine size
and whether or not you're using air conditioning.
So people drive a lot in LA,
which means there's gonna be
a huge amount of energy required.
Where is the energy going to come from?
That's the big question.
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Well, right now, Californians are paying billions
for power that they don't use.
Most of the big, new plants that regulators have approved
operate at or below 50% of their generating capacity.
California's also producing a huge amount of solar power,
so much that we've actually produced too much energy
and are now forced to cut back.
As of April 2018, California has been forced
to cut back at nearly 95,000 megawatt hours of electricity,
which is 95 million kilowatt hours
compared to that 533 million kilowatt hours
we talked about earlier.
That still leaves us 438 million kilowatt hours
in the whole, unanswered for in the worst-case scenario
with only the current solar operations coming back online.
So to handle that additional load,
the current infrastructure would have to produce
about 50% more energy than it does today,
and that is gonna be expensive and take time to build.
So that's it, I guess.
Elon was wrong.
This whole thing, wrong.
Let's not do it.
Well, not exactly.
You see, I left a big part of this equation out
because I wanted to paint this kind of doomsday scenario.
433 gigawatt hours or 433 million kilowatt hours
is a ton of energy, and yes, it would be really difficult
and really costly if we had to do that,
but that was if everyone drove their car all the way to zero
and charge all the way back up every single day.
That is not reality.
So when you add in reality to the equation
and we consider that people in LA
only drive 23 miles per day,
that ranks LA one of the highest
among the largest 37 cities,
it drops the energy requirement by an order of magnitude,
down from that original 533 gigawatt hours
to 57 gigawatt hours.
And again, if you go back to that solar that we have
in our beautiful state which gets tons of sunshine,
that generates 95 gigawatt hours
that is just currently being unused
because we had to cut back.
We were generating too much energy.
So even if people drove double the average than what they do
and all 7.6 million cars in LA were electric,
we'd have plenty of energy to cover it
coming from the thing
that makes our housing prices so expensive.
The sun. I'm talking about sunshine tax.
Never heard that? Sunshine, it's a thing.
It's why, nevermind.
So we're good and it turns out that it's not a big deal
but there is more to consider.
The other side of this would be the cost
if we don't go electric.
What's gonna happen then?
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Well, scientists have provided clear evidence
that carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels
are hurting our species and many others.
Collectively, cars and trucks
account for nearly 1/5 of all emissions
from the United States,
and they admit about 24 pounds of carbon dioxide
and other global warming gases for every gallon of gas used.
About five pounds of that
comes from the extraction production delivery of that fuel,
while the big chunk of it
comes from heat-trapping emissions,
more than 19 pounds per gallon,
they come right out of the car's tailpipe.
Now, of course while the companies
are doing a better job of this,
air pollution from transportation
contributes to smog, poor air quality,
and that hurts us all.
In the area of poor air quality,
this includes particulate matter or PM,
nitrogen oxides or NOx,
and volatile organic compounds or VOCs.
All that is to say that a study done in this area
found that more than 3,000 people in LA
suffer from pollution-related respiratory diseases,
including chronic bronchitis.
About 1,400 people in Riverside
suffer from pollution-related ailments as well.
So what's the cost of this?
What does it mean to you and me, the Californian taxpayer?
And in the San Joaquin Valley and South Coast Basin,
a study done shows that each year,
we're looking at 3,800 pollution-related deaths.
If you add in
all the other pollution-related healthcare cost,
this comes to $28 billion to taxpayers.
So that is a tremendous amount of money
that could go back into things
like schools, roads, all the other public programs
that we pay for as taxpaying citizens here in California
if people weren't dying
from these pollution-related premature deaths.
Just to put that in perspective,
in LA County alone, the number of people
that die from pollution deaths per year
is twice that from auto accidents.
I mean, these numbers are staggering.
For each year, there's about 2,000 new cases
of adult-onset chronic bronchitis,
16,000 cases in children alone.
Adults have had 3.5 million days of reduced activity.
There are 141,000 asthma attacks, 2,800 hospital admissions,
and 1.26 million days of school absence from kids,
not to mention, 470,000 days lost from work
due to these pollution-related illnesses.
And back in 2010,
a study from the RAND group in Santa Monica
said that air pollution is causing huge payouts
for healthcare insurers in California,
to the tune of $193 million.
So there's a lot of numbers there
and a lot of serious problems that are caused by pollution.
And yeah, the car companies are trying to improve it
and the state is trying to regulate it further,
but the bigger picture here
is the cost that us taxpayers have to bear
because of these pollution-related illnesses.
These are things that we can prevent.
We have to get there.
We have to offer incentives for people to go electric.
Not even out of the better for the environment standpoint,
just from the standpoint of it's gonna save me money
because you're not going to die
and I don't have to pay for your hospital visit.
Those are the kind of things
that, I think, really should move all of us,
regardless of your stance on climate change
or any of these other things.
We all would like to save money.
I think it would be easy for all of us to agree
that if instead of paying
for the pollution-related illnesses,
the added healthcare costs, that that money were to go
into the crumbling roads and bridges,
we all would be better for it.
However, we need to get there.
We need to make steps as consumers,
and that is why I do this.
That is why this channel exists.
It's to help you understand that this is a bigger goal,
this is a bigger thing that we're aspiring for
than just check out how cool this car is.
And hopefully data like this
helps put an end to any dumb arguments,
like if everyone went electric, the grid would collapse
because, as you just saw, it's simply not true.
So thanks for watching.
I hope this video helped you.
Please share it with anyone that is skeptical about this.
I'll put links to all the sources of information
I used in the video down below
so if they have questions or if you have questions,
you wanna dig deeper, please, be my guest.
And leave me a comment if there's anything I missed,
anything that was maybe out of line here
because I'm human like all of us,
and I do my best to try to present these things
in an objective way to move us forward.
So thanks again for watching.
Don't forget, when you free the data, your mind will follow.
I'll see you guys back in the next one.
Hey, thanks for watching the video, I hope you enjoyed it.
And thanks to everyone on Patreon
for supporting this channel and all the things we do here.
It really does help pay for the lights and the editing
and all the other things that go in
to each one of these videos.
Specifically, one thing I enjoy doing
is taking questions from you.
And so here's a question I got from a Patreon supporter
asking about GM's recent plan to invest $20 billion
into electric vehicles.
So if you're unfamiliar and with all the crazy stuff
about coronavirus going on the news right now,
this might have slipped by you without catching it.
GM just had their big EV day
where they announced over $20 billion in investments
over the next several years into electric vehicles.
They announced 10, I think maybe even 11 new models,
an upgrade to the Chevy Bolt,
which would give it added range which is great,
some higher end SUVs on the Cadillac brand
that they're looking at making all electric,
and they also talked about this Ultium battery
being better than Tesla, giving you better range,
and the Tesla community may have seen, jumped all over this,
because what they're saying
is we have a 200-kilowatt-hour battery
which is double the biggest pack that Tesla has,
and it gets over 400 miles.
Well, if you divide those two and you look
at how far they get per kilowatt hour, it's pretty bad.
So I think the Tesla community
had a really negative reaction to this
because GM was kind of taking a shot at them.
I, being a fan of EVs
and really want everyone to go electric,
I'm really excited about GM's move here.
I think it's maybe a little late
but it definitely isn't too little.
It's a good amount of investment.
It's a big, audacious kind of plan.
And the fact that they're taking a shot at Tesla
and claiming these things is what companies do.
That's what competition is.
It gets people riled up, and in the end, us consumers win.
I think we all would agree
that more bountiful EV options are better.
If all you care about is Tesla succeeding
and everyone else should just go out of business,
then you're just a fanboy
that doesn't see the bigger picture, right?
You're kind of missing the forest for the trees here.
The idea is that we want electrification all around
and when I see Ford coming out with compelling products,
and now GM at least kind of hinting at them
or announcing a few of them, I'm all for it.
So I really think we as a community
that care about the planet
and the future of humanity, really,
should applaud and embrace any company
that is coming out with a compelling product
and really putting their money where their mouth is.
I do think GM's doing a good thing here.
I want to see them have it come to reality.
They, outside of Tesla, do have, I think,
one of the most compelling EVs on the market
with the Chevy Bolt, so it's not like they're new to this.
Yes, they have a bad history.
Yes, there's some stain and some blood on their hands
from the EV1 in those days,
but look, we need to set that aside
if we wanna move forward.
So I encourage you and everyone else hearing this news,
thinking about this, to do the same.
If someone's coming out and making compelling product
which lead to more people going electric, I'm all for it.
So I say bring it on.
So thanks for the question from Patreon there
and thanks for watching.
Again, if you'd like to be a Patreon supporter,
you can check out the link down below
and join the community,
have these kind of chats, one-on-one,
and really just dig deeper and help push this thing forward.
So thanks again for watching.
I'll see you back in the next one.
(soft upbeat music)