EV Prognostication Problems
Here are two facts of life:
Many of the stories that you read with headlines like:?
.....are just absolute garbage.??
The stories get written because:
Here's a real world, time-stamped prediction failure...but in a good way!
I've been blogging/writing clean energy stuff for over 15 years. 13 years ago I wrote a post on "Where does USA Electricity come from" and in that post I linked to a report titled "Natural Gas and Renewables: A Secure Low Carbon Future Energy Plan for the United States" by Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisors. The report stated:
"We forecast wind and solar energy increasing to 14% of the US energy mix by 2030 compared to 2% today"
Well guess what?!
I saw this Bloomberg story this week: Solar and Wind to Top Coal Power in US for First Time in 2024
"Electricity generated from US solar and wind systems will surpass power produced by burning coal for the first time next year, driven by surging panel installations.? Coal will produce about 599 billion kilowatt-hours in 2024, according to government data released Tuesday. That will be down from 669 billion kilowatt-hours this year as utilities continue to shutter coal-burning power plants."
And so I went to the Energy Information Administrations page on USA electricity generation and saw that wind/solar made up 13.7% of electricity generation in 2022! Basically a full 8 years before Deutsche Bank's prediction!
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The majority of what you see about EV and EV Charging future predictions are written by folks who - quite frankly - have no idea what they're doing. And then they take those predictions to investors or policy makers and they pass them off with authority and then those people make decisions based off bad predictions and then are upset when the erroneous predictions turn out to be erroneous!
I tend to shy away from making number based predictions (ie X % by 20YZ) but instead predict the direction of clean energy trends...and I have a 15 year track record that basically shows I've been right (at least in predicting that clean energy is not a "fad" and is indeed the future)! My point isn't that I'm right, but rather that it's futile to try and accurately predict something far off in the future, and it's much easier to predict a general trend.
And all this is obvious but it's nice to have reminders so when dumb, hyperbole filled stories come out about "The collapse of EV adoption!" we know that the people who are saying this are basing their thesis ON PREDICTIONS and not actual facts (and they may also have ulterior motives).
Here's what I know to be true:
And here are my predictions!
And that’s it for 2023 for Amped about EV Charging!? The newsletter has almost 4,000 subscribers so please share and spread the word!? I predict I’ll have 3,574,433 subscribers in 2024!
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1 年Wireless charging of EVs will certainly improve adoption rates: https://www.noathebrand.com/
Passionate about implementing Clean Energy solutions!
1 年https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/michael-dunne-a696901a_predictions-2024trends-electricalvehicles-activity-7141833240960483329-pxOS?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios
Visionary Cleantech Leader | Solar, Storage, EV Infrastructure | Innovator in Renewable Energy Policy
1 年Chris, I have long ignored the actual analysts predictions, but have found that the actual trends can be found by looking at the year over year change in the analysts predictions. (Is that the first derivative of the predictions?) This indicates something closer to the acceleration of observed change (since analysts follow the pack and analyze based on the past). The acceleration of change can then be projected forward to yield something closer to what actually happens. This only works for rapidly changing / emerging industries, such as energy storage and EV charging are now.
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1 年Vineyard Wind finally comes online here this month. Happy to see a small piece of your long-observed trend here in the Bay State, despite the endless predictions that it was doomed! More broadly, I'm looking forward to all of the pieces in the energy management puzzle starting to be put together. Many of the automakers seem ready to do more with bidirectional power heading into 2024 and I'm here for it ????
“There wont be enough electricity for EVs!” That's something that requires work. Currently 20% of our energy use is electricity, and electrifying cooking and heating is likely to bump that to 40%, with transport taking it to 60%. A "Smart Grid" with DC transmission on existing lines only gets you to 40%, and significant chunks of the USA don't have power lines in place for charging interstate traffic. If you add to that that the price of renewables is low and falling; it's likely the energy consumption will increase in industry to take advantage, it's not easy to see how it will all work. Permitting new power transmission infrastructure can take decades. If you follow "theory of constraints", constrained resources tend to go up in price even if the underlying price is going down, and that can get in the way of progress for EVs and renewables.