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EarlOfCarrick

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<NERD ALERT. Please forgive my idle musings.>

I don’t have my Taycan yet, but I’ve been thinking a lot the electricity it uses. I live in the Pacific Northwest (upper left corner of the US), so I think of the range of the Taycan as the distance between Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. Driving the Taycan just transforms electrical energy into kinetic energy to move the mass from one place to another.

Our electricity comes from hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River. Generating power from a river happens when the mass of a turbine (blade) is moved from one place to another, and the energy is transformed into electric energy.

Moving mass is transformed into electricity which is then transformed into moving mass.

I have a good sense for what it means to move a car from one place to another. (Anyone who has ever push-started a car gets this.) But what’s the best way to get a sense for what that means for the turbine, where the electricity is generated?

A couple of days ago, my (very smart) son and I put our heads together and did some simple calculations. My Taycan will have the larger 93 kWh battery. Grand Coulee Dam, the largest dam on the Columbia River, and one of the largest dams in the world, generates a total of 7079 MW (that’s megawatts) of electricity.

That means that the electricity needed to charge my car completely is generated by the entire Grand Coulee Dam in only 47 milliseconds. That’s 0.047 seconds. So in only 47 milliseconds, the dam produces enough electricity to move a 5000-pound car from Seattle to Portland, heat the seats, play the radio, adjust the air suspension, raise the spoiler, etc.

Along the same lines, a single average turbine at the dam generates a full charge of electricity in only 1.28 seconds.

Conclusions: Wow the turbine blades must be super heavy. And that water has an enormous amount of potential (gravitational) energy stored in it.

How is your electricity made? How can you quantify it?
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haesoph

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<NERD ALERT. Please forgive my idle musings.>

I don’t have my Taycan yet, but I’ve been thinking a lot the electricity it uses. I live in the Pacific Northwest (upper left corner of the US), so I think of the range of the Taycan as the distance between Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. Driving the Taycan just transforms electrical energy into kinetic energy to move the mass from one place to another.

Our electricity comes from hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River. Generating power from a river happens when the mass of a turbine (blade) is moved from one place to another, and the energy is transformed into electric energy.

Moving mass is transformed into electricity which is then transformed into moving mass.

I have a good sense for what it means to move a car from one place to another. (Anyone who has ever push-started a car gets this.) But what’s the best way to get a sense for what that means for the turbine, where the electricity is generated?

A couple of days ago, my (very smart) son and I put our heads together and did some simple calculations. My Taycan will have the larger 93 kWh battery. Grand Coulee Dam, the largest dam on the Columbia River, and one of the largest dams in the world, generates a total of 7079 MW (that’s megawatts) of electricity.

That means that the electricity needed to charge my car completely is generated by the entire Grand Coulee Dam in only 47 milliseconds. That’s 0.047 seconds. So in only 47 milliseconds, the dam produces enough electricity to move a 5000-pound car from Seattle to Portland, heat the seats, play the radio, adjust the air suspension, raise the spoiler, etc.

Along the same lines, a single average turbine at the dam generates a full charge of electricity in only 1.28 seconds.

Conclusions: Wow the turbine blades must be super heavy. And that water has an enormous amount of potential (gravitational) energy stored in it.

How is your electricity made? How can you quantify it?
This is Amazing. You sound like you've read a few Vaclav Smil books. I am waiting on a Taycan 4s as well and also in Seattle. We're super fortunate to have so much hydroelectric here in this state.
 

tigerbalm

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Or think about how long it took to reach you. Grand Coulee Dam appears to be around 368 kilometres from Seattle. At a very simplistic level, electricity travels as electromagnetic waves at about the speed of light which is around 300 million kilometres per second.

Ignoring battery storage, transformers, convertors – all which add some tiny delay – when you plug in your Taycan to charge, the electricity its using may have left the hydroelectric generator a mere 1.2 milliseconds before it hits your car charger.
 

tigerbalm

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And if my use of the metric system for US locations is annoying, just remember, the USA uses the metric system but just applies a local conversion factor back to imperial statues.

Watch first 1 minute 20 seconds of:

 


bootsie

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Grand Coulee Dam, the largest dam on the Columbia River, and one of the largest dams in the world, generates a total of 7079 MW (that’s megawatts) of electricity.
7GW? wow.

In the UK we reached nearly 50% of our power generation from renewables earlier this year and also ran 2 months without any coal power generation at all. 30% of our power comes from wind farms, mainly offshore. Total capacity of wind power is 22GW.
 

redrocket

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Nice write up and analysis. For me, I really don’t have a reason to quantify it, although it would be an interesting exercise. The electrical power for my Taycan, and for all of my house, comes from my roof. The roof generates so much excess that each year I have to give credits back to my electricity provider. Now that pisses me off, but then I knew the arrangement going into it. House is bigger than it looks @ 3200 sq. ft. Cool thing about our solar system is you can’t see any of it from the street, so the house looks the same as it did before the installation.



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