Inboard engines and a changing world

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by gonesail

good reason to stay far and away from California

California is fine great resupply when going to the sea of Cortez for winter cruising .
Also some decent VA medical facilities .

[Chotu]

This wasn’t really supposed to be a political thread. It’s more about boats and how our engines and our fuel supply are changing quickly.

[Statistical]

Originally Posted by Chotu

This wasn’t really supposed to be a political thread. It’s more about boats and how our engines and our fuel supply are changing quickly.

I don't think there will be much change for boats at least recreational boats for at least 20 years. Electric propulsion is just starting to become viable for sailboat auxiliary power. Even then probably want a generator as a backup. Sailboats are as easy as it gets. Everything else is vastly more difficult.

While new vehicle sales are changing quickly new vehicle sales are only ~5% of fleet totals. So hypothetically lets say in 2040 100% of light duty passenger vehicles are BEVs. Even if that happens it will be easily a decade before 50% of vehicles on the road are BEV and probably two decades before it is 90%+ and 30 years before the last of the laggards age out.

Some large commercial shipping may move to LNG diesel electric in the coming years but that isn't happening as the recreational level. New boat in 2050 might be different (hybrid drives, high efficiency low emission direct injection engines) but existing boats last decades so again even when new sales change you are still looking at 20-40 years for the existing fleet to age out.

"Sin" taxes on fuels might happen and that could affect boating as well but not before a majority of vehicles on the road (not just new sales) are electric. So again you are probably looking at 2050+. Some places like CA or EU might ban new non-electric outboards in the next decade or so but not to be a broken record it would be new sales only so existing fleets plus sales in rest of world will last many years beyond that. By then I expect electrics for dingys to be a bit more common.

[Chotu]

Originally Posted by Statistical

I don't think there will be much change for boats at least recreational boats for at least 20 years. Electric propulsion is just starting to become viable for sailboat auxiliary power. Even then probably want a generator as a backup. Sailboats are as easy as it gets. Everything else is vastly more difficult.

While new vehicle sales are changing quickly new vehicle sales are only ~5% of fleet totals. So hypothetically lets say in 2040 100% of light duty passenger vehicles are BEVs. Even if that happens it will be easily a decade before 50% of vehicles on the road are BEV and probably two decades before it is 90%+ and 30 years before the last of the laggards age out.

Some large commercial shipping may move to LNG diesel electric in the coming years but that isn't happening as the recreational level. New boat in 2050 might be different (hybrid drives, high efficiency low emission direct injection engines) but existing boats last decades so again even when new sales change you are still looking at 20-40 years for the existing fleet to age out.

"Sin" taxes on fuels might happen and that could affect boating as well but not before more vehicles on the road (not just new sales) are electric. So again you are probably looking at 2050+. Some places like CA or EU might ban new non-electric outboards in the next decade or so but not to be a broken record it would be new sales only so existing fleets will last many years beyond that. By then I expect electrics for dingys to be pretty common.

Yet, fuel prices and fuel markets are changing incredibly quickly. This could change a lot about what it means to have auxiliary propulsion in a boat.

[Pegu Club]

Originally Posted by Sailmonkey

What I see as a looming problem is the current electrical grid.

No-one likes to address this weakpoint. Sections of the US already experience rolling blackouts during times of peak demand.

For the foreseeable future electric cars etc are fine as a novelty, but in order to mainstream them, large changes will need to be made in the power generation and distribution grids globally.

From what I have read and heard, the electric grids at present are not even close to being robust enough to handle the demand. A large amount of infrastructure upgrades are needed to accommodate the move to an almost all electric fleet.

[malbert73]

Sheesh all the politics. Calm down folks, Ca set a target 13 years from now. Think where we were 13 years ago. Already my neighborhood is buzzing with electric Amazon trucks. No reason we shouldn’t be pushing battery tech along. I expect all of this will be a “pull” not a push. No one has to buy an EV right now yet many do.
Diesels won’t be prohibited in boats for a long time - there will just be every reason at some point to repower with electric.

This commercial from 10 years ago helps show how you just need to frame shift your mind.

https://youtu.be/Nn__9hLJKAk

[Adelie]

Originally Posted by Pegu Club

From what I have read and heard, the electric grids at present are not even close to being robust enough to handle the demand. A large amount of infrastructure upgrades are needed to accommodate the move to an almost all electric fleet.

Originally Posted by derfy

BTW, your generation figures are off by 2x.

This is the max week in the past 12 months, mid July 2022. ref https://www.eia.gov/electricity/grid...view/US48/US48. The troughs are a little above 400 Mw (at night) and the peaks are 750 Mw. The Base Load is Nuke, Coal, and Nat Gas, with a little hydro and wind. The Peak (during the day) is handled with more Nat Gas and Coal with some Solar.

What happens when we add 100 MW to this in the middle of the night? A lot more coal, nat gas, and nuke, that's what. The lights are going out as it is when we get this kind of mid-summer load. Don't kid yourself that there is a whole lot of unused reserve generating capacity waiting in the wings. You and I will be buying and building it when the EVs really get rolled out.

An then, there is the upgrade to the last mile of copper residential grid, which we have not even discussed yet.

An then we can contemplate what happens when we get hit by a solar Carrington Event or EMP from a nuke attack. Unlikely, you say? Read about the Carrington Event of 1859 and its impact on the telegraph network.

According to the US Federal Hiway Admin cars are driven about 3.3Trillion miles per year.
https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10315

Electric vehicles get 3-4mi per kWhr, lets say 3.3mi/kWhr.

So if all the vehicles in the US were currently EV then we would be using 3.3trillion miles/yr / 3.3mi/kWhr = 1 trillion kWhr/yr.

1 trillion kWhr/yr / 365d/yr = 2.7TWhr/d.

There is 250-500GW of excess capacity to meet peak daytime demand compared to overnight demand. Lets assume 250GW which is the worst case. 2.7TWhr/d / 250GW = 10.8hr/d use of the excess demand in order to meet daily vehicle charging needs for all cars currently on the road. Most of the time there is more like 400-450GW of excess capacity, that's 6.75hr worth.

On days with very high peak demand there will not be enough excess capacity to recharge all cars fully every night. Either there will be overnight outages or more likely some sort of arrangement will be made to partially recharge some cars. This shifts the burden of recharge to a later date, but periods of very heavy electrical demand tend to come in short bursts, less than 1wk, so by slowly letting one's car become more discharged for a week crisis can be avoided.

Cars for the most part are not recharged during the day when other demands are at their peak, cars are mostly charged at night when other demand is lowest.

In cases where there are rolling blackouts, they occur during the day only during the hottest parts of the summer when AC demand is the greatest and even then in specific areas, not throughout the US. Once again, not a conflict with vehicle charging which is generally overnight.

The excess capacity of the generation extends to the physical infrastructure. Homes with 200Amp service have plenty of excess capacity to recharge vehicles overnight when folks are sleeping and not using electricity for much else. For personal residences there will be no need for major upgrades except to run a charging line from the breaker box to where the vehicles are parked normally.

This extends to apartments and condos, the service is there, it just needs to be wired out to the garages. The problem is with folks that only have carports or on-street parking. Cities have a couple decades to come up with a solution for that.

Carrington event. If one happens the grid going down is going to take down fossil fuel facilities too, refineries that depend on electricity to run, pipelines that require electricity to pump the products and gas stations that need electricity to get the fuel out of the tanks under ground and into a car's fuel tank.

As time goes on more wind and solar are being installed and more coal fired plants are being retired. Currently there are about 198GW of coal fired capacity. No plants larger than 100MW have been finished in the last 10yr and more than 1/4 of the current capacity (55GW) is expected to retire in the next 7yr.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/de...20the%20future.

There are 55GW of electrical projects expected to come on-line just in 2023.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55419
Admittedly 2/3 of that is wind and solar which are intermittent and 17% is battery storage which does not produce electricity only store it when excess is available and discharge when there is a deficit of production capacity.


Yes, we need to upgrade and expand the grid for the future. But we could magically convert 2/3 of all existing cars into EVs overnight and the existing system would handle it just fine.

[derfy]

Originally Posted by Statistical

GW not MW and we don't need to add 100 GW of new capacity there are hundreds of GW of existing idle capacity.

Also this isn't happening overnight. We aren't tomorrow forcing everyone to scrap every existing vehicle and buy brand new BEVs and plug them all in the same day and charge all of them 300+ miles everyday 365 days a year. The phase out of ICEV is going to take litterally decades. You I and most people reading this likely will be dead before it is complete.

Having lived with a BEV for years the daily consumption is modest. You keep thinking like a gasoline powered mindset where you wait till the car is empty and then grab a full tank. I drive 30-40 miles in a day, plug it in when I get home. The car smartly waits until midnight when rates are cheapest and then recharges not 340+ miles but the 30 miles I used. It isn't 340 miles added every 10 days it is 30 or so miles added each. Tomorrow and everyday the tank is full again when I leave in the morning.



Using the highest/worst numbers we are looking at a 50% increase in electrical demand ... over the next 40 years. That is an annualized growth rate of ~1% (1.01^40 = 1.48).

In the short term if next year there were 1M new BEV sold and they averaged 3 miles per kWh and averaged 13,500 miles per year that is an extra 4.5 billion kWh per year in electrical demand which sounds like a massive number until you consider that existing demand is >4000 billion kWh so even 1M new BEVs in a year is increasing demand by 0.1%.

It is going to be ok man. The transition is going to take decades. The grid is already expanding continually to deal with over increases in demand and population. This is just another one which will occur on a generational scale. The numbers are big because the country and timelines are big. We added 150 million airconditioners to the country and the grid didn't explode ... because we didn't add them in a single day.

My bad (Giga not Mega).

100 Gigawatts is what we will need, all night, to fill the tanks of 10 million EVs. When will we ever have to do that? Does not matter. When we do, it will still take 100 GW for 8-10 hrs. All I know is, we have to fill 25 million gas tanks everyday now. Average it out all you want, but it is 100 Gigawatts more than we generate now, and it will all be fossil fuel or nuke.

The conversion to EV is accelerating. In three years we will easily have 10 million EVs in the US and 5 million will need a full tank every Monday morning. 33 more nuke plants at ~4 $G each or 100 fossil units at 1.5 $G each. That is $13K per EV for the incremental generation. Another $7K for transmission and the last mile copper. Easily 20K per EV of hidden cost. It will be $40K per EV if you tried to do it with wind or solar. This is just an engineering issue. Make it political all you want, but its about volts, amps, and watts. The US Grid has never been expanded even close to this fast.

Meanwhile diesel has gone from $3 to $6. I am to believe it will be plentiful and cheap in the future? Glad my boat has sails.

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by derfy

My bad (Giga not Mega).

100 Gigawatts is what we will need, all night, to fill the tanks of 10 million EVs. When will we ever have to do that? Does not matter. When we do, it will still take 100 GW for 8-10 hrs. All I know is, we have to fill 25 million gas tanks everyday now. Average it out all you want, but it is 100 Gigawatts more than we generate now, and it will all be fossil fuel or nuke.

The conversion to EV is accelerating. In three years we will easily have 10 million EVs in the US and 5 million will need a full tank every Monday morning. 33 more nuke plants at ~4 $G each or 100 fossil units at 1.5 $G each. That is $13K per EV for the incremental generation. Another $7K for transmission and the last mile copper. Easily 20K per EV of hidden cost. It will be $40K per EV if you tried to do it with wind or solar. This is just an engineering issue. Make it political all you want, but its about volts, amps, and watts. The US Grid has never been expanded even close to this fast.

Meanwhile diesel has gone from $3 to $6. I am to believe it will be plentiful and cheap in the future? Glad my boat has sails.

And where is all that copper? How about the lithium and cobalt for the batteries or the REM for it all

[Statistical]

Originally Posted by derfy

My bad (Giga not Mega).

100 Gigawatts is what we will need, all night, to fill the tanks of 10 million EVs. When will we ever have to do that? Does not matter. When we do, it will still take 100 GW for 8-10 hrs. All I know is, we have to fill 25 million gas tanks everyday now. Average it out all you want, but it is 100 Gigawatts more than we generate now, and it will all be fossil fuel or nuke.

The conversion to EV is accelerating. In three years we will easily have 10 million EVs in the US and 5 million will need a full tank every Monday morning. 33 more nuke plants at ~4 $G each or 100 fossil units at 1.5 $G each. That is $13K per EV for the incremental generation. Another $7K for transmission and the last mile copper. Easily 20K per EV of hidden cost. It will be $40K per EV if you tried to do it with wind or solar. This is just an engineering issue. Make it political all you want, but its about volts, amps, and watts. The US Grid has never been expanded even close to this fast.

Meanwhile diesel has gone from $3 to $6. I am to believe it will be plentiful and cheap in the future? Glad my boat has sails.

Your off by a factor of 7x because you keep assumming every vehicle recharged in full every day. Average American drive 13,500 miles, average BEV gets around 3 miles per kWh. So average vehicle needs 4,500 kWh annually to go 13,500 miles or 12.4 kWh per day.

So 100 GW of capacity would provide in 8 hours off overnight off peak charging 800 GWh or 800,000,000 kWh which at 12.4 kWh per vehicle is enough to charge 65 million BEVs. Some individuals will drive more and require more some less but when we are talking about 65M people all that matters is averages. Even with optimistic growth it will be 15+ years before we have 65 million BEVs on the road.

Of course you also ignore that we could do that without building a single new power plants because we have 300 GW+ of idle capacity every day. That is enough for almost 200 million BEVs. Every day a huge number of powerplants spend 8 to 16 hours a day doing absolutely nothing waiting for demand because the grid is built to support peak demand and thus every hour that isn't the peak demand there is excess capacity. More overnight demand evens the grid out it makes utilities more efficient. Still even if we had to build that it would be a non-issue.

You can't say "the timescale doesn't matter" and also say "the grid has never had to expand this fast before". The timescale determine how fast the grid will have to expand to meet that demand.

Yes eventually when 100% of all ground transportation is 100% electrical demand will have increased by about 50%. If timeframe from <1% electric (today) to 100% electric (last ICEV off the road) is 40 years we are looking at electrical demand growth of around 1% a year.

It isn't going to be a problem. If it is a problem then BEV sales will slow and phase out will be pushed back a couple years. As it relates to boating well boating is a whole different ballgame. Electrifying ground transportation is downright trivial compared to boats. Today the only thing which can kinda be electrified would be sailboats (due to most power coming from wind) and short range ferries (due to short predictable range). My guess is marine diesels will exist at least in some capacity 50+ years from now. Maybe in small numbers, maybe no new sales, maybe paying $10/gallon but still around in some niche.

[derfy]

Originally Posted by Adelie

According to the US Federal Hiway Admin cars are driven about 3.3Trillion miles per year.
https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10315

Electric vehicles get 3-4mi per kWhr, lets say 3.3mi/kWhr.

So if all the vehicles in the US were currently EV then we would be using 3.3trillion miles/yr / 3.3mi/kWhr = 1 trillion kWhr/yr.

1 trillion kWhr/yr / 365d/yr = 2.7TWhr/d.

There is 250-500GW of excess capacity to meet peak daytime demand compared to overnight demand. Lets assume 250GW which is the worst case. 2.7TWhr/d / 250GW = 10.8hr/d use of the excess demand in order to meet daily vehicle charging needs for all cars currently on the road. Most of the time there is more like 400-450GW of excess capacity, that's 6.75hr worth.

On days with very high peak demand there will not be enough excess capacity to recharge all cars fully every night. Either there will be overnight outages or more likely some sort of arrangement will be made to partially recharge some cars. This shifts the burden of recharge to a later date, but periods of very heavy electrical demand tend to come in short bursts, less than 1wk, so by slowly letting one's car become more discharged for a week crisis can be avoided.

Cars for the most part are not recharged during the day when other demands are at their peak, cars are mostly charged at night when other demand is lowest.

In cases where there are rolling blackouts, they occur during the day only during the hottest parts of the summer when AC demand is the greatest and even then in specific areas, not throughout the US. Once again, not a conflict with vehicle charging which is generally overnight.

The excess capacity of the generation extends to the physical infrastructure. Homes with 200Amp service have plenty of excess capacity to recharge vehicles overnight when folks are sleeping and not using electricity for much else. For personal residences there will be no need for major upgrades except to run a charging line from the breaker box to where the vehicles are parked normally.

This extends to apartments and condos, the service is there, it just needs to be wired out to the garages. The problem is with folks that only have carports or on-street parking. Cities have a couple decades to come up with a solution for that.

Carrington event. If one happens the grid going down is going to take down fossil fuel facilities too, refineries that depend on electricity to run, pipelines that require electricity to pump the products and gas stations that need electricity to get the fuel out of the tanks under ground and into a car's fuel tank.

As time goes on more wind and solar are being installed and more coal fired plants are being retired. Currently there are about 198GW of coal fired capacity. No plants larger than 100MW have been finished in the last 10yr and more than 1/4 of the current capacity (55GW) is expected to retire in the next 7yr.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/de...20the%20future.

There are 55GW of electrical projects expected to come on-line just in 2023.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55419
Admittedly 2/3 of that is wind and solar which are intermittent and 17% is battery storage which does not produce electricity only store it when excess is available and discharge when there is a deficit of production capacity.


Yes, we need to upgrade and expand the grid for the future. But we could magically convert 2/3 of all existing cars into EVs overnight and the existing system would handle it just fine.

When they use the "spare" (ie. Variable) capacity at night to charge EVs, it will be almost all nat gas and coal. Just look at the profile during the day.

But at night, no solar. Just wind and nat gas. It won't be long till they say "oops, we need some more nukes - dozens and dozens of them - at 4-6 billion a pop. But, duh.. we are instead shutting down our nukes and coal units.

So what we will end up with is nat gas-powered cars on more nights, with some "green" power when the wind is really honking.

It will never be cost efficient to have enough batteries in the grid to charge the batteries in the cars. That is more than double to total quantity of batteries in the EV fleet. Never mind the environment impact from mining and recycling all the toxic metals.

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by Statistical

Your off by a factor of 8x because you keep assumming every vehicle recharged in full every day.

Average American drive 13,500 miles, average BEV gets around 3 miles per kWh.

So average vehicle needs 4,500 kWh annually to go 13,500 miles or 12.4 kWh per day. If charging overnight lets assume 8 hours.

So 100 GW of capacity would provide in 8 hours 800 GWh or 800,000,000 kWh which is enough to charge 65 million BEVs.

Even with robust growth it will be 10-15 years before we have 65 million BEVs on the road.

Of course you also ignore that we could do that without building a single new power plants because we have 300 GW+ of idle capacity every day. Powerplants that spend 8 to 16 hours a day doing absolutely nothing waiting for demand. More overnight demand evens the grid out it makes utilities more efficient.

You can't say "the timescale doesn't matter" and "the grid has never had to expand this fast before". The timescale determine how fast the grid will have to expand and we are looking at growth in demand on the order of 1% a year.

Yes eventually when 100% of all ground transportation is 100% electric electrical demand will have increased by about 50%. If timeframe from 1% electric to 100% electric is over 40 years we are looking at an anualized growth rate of 1% a year.

It isn't going to be a problem. If it is a problem then BEV sales will slow and phase out will be pushed back a couple years. Of course as it relates to boating well boating is a whole different ballgame. Electrifying ground transportation is downright trivial. My guess is marine diesel will exist at least in some capacity 50+ years from now. Maybe in small numbers, maybe no new sales, maybe paying $10/gallon but still around in some niche.

All of that really means nothing to us.
What are your electric aux motors batteries being charged by? How much solar did you have to purchase and I stall?

My case going e,strictly would cost about $7k over the diesel I just acquired for $100 $6,900 will buy more diesel than I will ever need on my boat in my lifetime.

[Statistical]

Originally Posted by derfy

So what we will end up with is nat gas-powered cars on more nights, with some "green" power when the wind is really honking.

Which is still vastly lower emissions than running 100% of vehicles 100% of the time of low efficiency fossil fuel engines. You began with how it is impossible and now it is possible just less than ideal so at least getting closer to reality.

[Statistical]

Originally Posted by newhaul

All of that really means nothing to us.
What are your electric aux motors batteries being charged by? How much solar did you have to purchase and I stall?

My case going e,strictly would cost about $7k over the diesel I just acquired for $100 $6,900 will buy more diesel than I will ever need on my boat in my lifetime.

Agreed. Today even for aux motor electric propulsion isn't economically competitive. People may do it for other non-economic reasons. I mean yachts aren't economically competitive. The cheapest boat is no boat.

I was just pointing out that of all marine applications the easiest one would be sailboat aux motors. Everything else is a magnitude more difficult. Sailboats the easiest of the "easy" is only barely possible and at high cost with significant limitations today. Will that change someday? Maybe but probably going to require something better than LFP.

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by Statistical

Agreed. Today even for aux motor electric propulsion isn't economically competitive. People may do it for other non-economic reasons. I mean yachts aren't economically competitive. The cheapest boat is no boat.

I was just pointing out that of all marine applications the easiest one would be sailboat aux motors. Everything else is a magnitude more difficult. Sailboats the easiest of the "easy" is only barely possible and at high cost with significant limitations today.

And rhe most expensive is a free boat.

The best application for going electric on a sailboat IMO is the tender motor a minotaur saltwater series #55 with a 100ah 12v lifepo4 battery which easily recharges off the house bank and the solar in between uses .