Are these EV manufacturers offering to upgrade your service? Our house is old and I only have a 100A service, which would mean if I was to want to utilize an overnight charge I couldn't dry laundry or use the oven at the same time if I wanted to keep on the fridge or any lights or the computer, too.
Not to mention our main source of power in the region, the Craig generating station (1,280 MW, second largest station in the state after Comanche and about 10% of our overall capacity, which is about 16,600 MW with 75% of that being coal and gas that is available 24/7/365 for base load), is being shut down several years early to meet the governor's emissions mandates.
Comanche is slated to decommission one of their units this year or next. That takes 300 MW offline. Hayden will be closed (440 MW) by 2028. That'll leave only Rifle (85 MW gas), Blue Mesa (86 MW) and Morrow Point (173 MW hydro) as really significant sources between Denver and the state line. With Glen Canyon (1,312 MW) close to the point where it's no longer generating power we're going to be screwed.
Hydro right now is questionable due to snow pack. Both Powell and Mead are only near 40% of capacity and predictions are putting 2021 at a 53% of average inflow, which would require a lot of the stored water going downstream such that Glen Canyon wouldn't generate any power as soon as 2022. At least if we honor the Compact obligations and want AZ and CA to grow us food all year.
By 2030 there'll be essentially no coal generation in Colorado, which is 45% of our power right now (gas is 30%). When that's taken off line we'll need to replace 25,000 GW-hr of annual power generation (we generated 56,337 GW-hr total in 2019). Gas production and supply has been targeted as bad this year, don't you know. The Craig station can generate about 11,200 GW-hr alone.
Solar is 2% of Colorado's generation and makes up a tiny bit of the annual generation due to being dark half the day. Wind is 19% and can't be relied upon for consistent power every day, every hour. Incidentally Texas was only 17% wind and look at what one good storm did to them. They're only 19% coal, 53% gas.
St Vrain is the largest gas plant in Colorado and it's only 969 MW and Cherokee's 928 MW was already converted to gas (this used to be a coal plant). We need to add four St. Vrains in the next few years, but just one took about 10 years to build to it's current point. It was originally a nuclear plant that was decommissioned in the late 1980s and refitted, so they didn't even have to start from zero with new permits and environmental studies. Even if they could build them we'd have to more than double the supply of natural gas. But Congress just took one potential location (the 200,000 acres up on Thompson Divide) off the table and stopped a major pipeline that could have imported it from Canada.
So where's the power going to come from for this attempt to fast track EVs? By next year we're going to lucky just to keep the lights on at all, never mind adding a bunch of cars charging from the grid that's already really shaky and bursting at the seams. We need to replace a total of 4,464 MW of coal generation by 2030 (e.g. 27% of the generating capacity that's doing almost half the work annually). That's two Hoover Dams (but not actually since the Colorado is already plugged and over allocated by at least 30%) just for our state.
Eventually we're going to run out of other people's backyards for electrical production (like Wyoming who isn't nearly as aggressive about retiring their coal plants, which are 85% of their capacity). Utah will shut down their few coal plants all by 2042, which is 65% of their current capacity. So they're not going to be exporting power.
Music!
en.wikipedia.org
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