250KW. JFC! That's enough to power 100 average houses, all going into one car. I'm both impressed and slightly terrified.
https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2014/01/29/how_tes...
>The power of the Tesla coil lies in a process called electromagnetic induction, i.e., a changing magnetic field creates an electric potential that compels current to flow. Conversely, flowing electric current generates a magnetic field. When electricity flows through a wound up coil of wire, it generates a magnetic field that fills the area around the coil in a particular pattern, shown with lines below: [...]
>Eventually so much charge has accumulated that it breaks down the electrical neutrality of the air in the middle of the spark gap. The circuit closes for a fleeting second and a huge amount of current blasts out of the capacitor and through the coils. This produces a very strong magnetic field in the primary coil.
Which leads us to ask: Fucking magnets: How do they work?
So that is about 5 houses. You could buy that service. I hope Tesla would sell you the supercharger for it.
The expectation is that people drive 30ish miles a day. This is about 11kwh. Over 8 hours a night, well within reasonable limits.
Problem is that you have to size for the worst case, which may happen only once a year, but it will happen. Everyone coming back after Thanksgiving. Everyone reaching a vacation place on a Sunday evening in the summer. Bam, 20 kW sustained for a few hours.
It takes only a few big condos before you need to bring 400 kV lines downtown...
Lots of plugged EV’s are also the perfect pairing to rooftop solar — in Hawaii, they’ve had to stop people from installing panels on their homes because the neighborhood feeder circuits can’t handle the power being generated by all of the homes. Just redirect that power to the EV in the driveway (or your neighbor’s driveway), problem solved!
Everyone can use as much power as they have subscribed to whenever they want. Your panel is rated for a certain amount of power and protected by a breaker or fuse if too much is used. Same for the transformer your panel is connected to. Same for the distribution line your transformer is connected to. Same for the transformer it is connected to. And so on.
There is enough capacity in the system to meet the demand. If there wasn't the lights go out due to some overload.
When demand grows more capacity has to be added before the limit is reached. Capacity takes years to build. Utilities have planning departments that decide where they need to add capacity next and how much.
A house with a 200A service at 240 V is about 50 kW. You might see a 250 kVA padmount transformer feeding half a dozen big houses but that is not the same thing as a substation.
5KVA per residential lot is not an uncommon allocation rule. The network is simply not designed to supply every house 200A simultaneously (the same is true of water services: the maximum flow rate of your connection to the water main cannot be sustained if every house in your neighbourhood tries to consume at that rate).
Granted you can probably overload a transformer a fair bit on a cold night. I'll ask next time I'm talking to someone in distribution what their allocation rule is.
I feel like I'm used to seeing a 3 x 33 kVA cans feeding only a few houses (that incidentally had natural gas heat and hot water...)
My sister-in-law has an induction stove, so she gets 40 A and the stove is connected directly to a separate bigger fuse.
Are you lacking a meter? Is the utility company unable to read your meter remotely and unwilling to send a truck out to read it? This would explain things, in which case you'd want to charge batteries (for free!) whenever you don't need all the power you have purchased.
Fuses are weird too. Those went out of style 60 years ago.
Maybe you will find this weird: I have a device that lets the utility company cut the power to my water heater. They can remotely activate it if they are having problems. In exchange for having this, I get a discount.
It is just the standard here to only buy 3.3 kW unless you have induction stoves. Having more power available costs a little more, and on top of that you pay for what you consume.
As to "fuse", my mistake as I am not a native speaker. I meant breaker.
In my language a breaker is called an automatic fuse, so easy mistake to make
I don't have an electric hob but electric heater + dishwasher + oven certainly triggers the breaker.
My house was built in 1950's. Used to have two 20amp fuses. One for the lights and one for the outlets.
In the US houses typically have 100-200 amp service now.
A microwave will consume 8-12 amps. A desktop computer is around 3-5 amps. I don't know what my electric stove used when I still had one, but it needed a 40 amp breaker on its own.
Heating and stoves are gas based (ovens usually not though); going over the limit is not usual, the only common problem is when using air conditioning in summer which is becoming more widespread, and so are higher power contracts (we're not talking more than 6kW, though).
According to my utility, I consume annually 2660kWh, that is 300W average, much less than the 1.2KW for an American household.
Note that for home contracts the limit (and billing) is on power, not amps, so using inductive or reactive loads will not penalize you.
So, I'm paying around 20€ (before taxes) just for having a 5.75kW contract, and then I have to add my kWh consumption. So reducing your consumption doesn't reflect that much on your bills.
Is that the same on Italy ?
Here, in Madrid, most of my friends are running 10 to 20 amps. I'm an outlier, running 25amps (5.75 kW) because all my stuff is electric (water heater, cold/hot air conditioning, microwave, glass-ceramic stove...).
My Ryzen 5 desktop is consuming 0.3 to 0.5amps (being 50 to 120watts at 220V), supposing you're using 110volts your desktop computer must be a big gaming rig if it's consuming 350 to 550watts ;)
Yup. :-D
Not a BIG rig, but certainly respectable. i9-9900k [0], GeForce GTX 1070 [1], 32 gig of DDR4, 1 TB NVMe, 1 TB SSD, 2 TB HD.
[0] Yes, I know I don't need an i9 for gaming. I don't even need an i7. But I wanted future proofing and bragging rights.
[1] "An i9, but only a GTX 1070?" you might ask. I got the 1070 for free by winning a contest sponsored by MSI. At the time I had an i7-3770k. When I upgraded to the i9 in December, I didn't feel it was worth spending hundreds of dollars for an RTX 2080 (or even 2070) as the performance difference wasn't enough. I'll probably get something from the next gen RTX (3080? 2180? Whatever they call it).
BTW, have you metered your consumption? Doing some math on the top of my head, on regular use you "shouldn't" go over 200W and I don't think you should get over 400 in your use peaks. Just out of curiosity because I'm not used to those relatively power hungry GPUs :)
You're comparing average with peak usage. Doesn't really make any sense.
400amp service is usually 2 200 amp panels.
Done with 2/0 cable. It's rarely, if ever, 1 400 amp panel.
1. There is no way you would get "1000amp service" at 250v. It would be a minimum of 480v 3 phase (and not 1000amp). You may even want a lot higher, because as you'll see, getting that many amps is ... very very hard.
2. You can't even buy 1000amp cable gauge anywhere commercially, because it would be insane.
The NEC ampacity table doesn't go anywhere near that high it tops out at 2000kcmil, 665 amp cable.
Due to various factors[1], doubling the cable mils will only get you a hundred or so amps here, so it's probably close to 4500kcmil (i'm too lazy to do the mm^2 math, it's 1.89" conductors) Which doesn't really exist for purchase (if you really needed it, you have the means to make it :P).
To try to also put the size in perspective: 2/0 cable has conductors that are about 3/8" in diameter.
2000kcmil cable, which again, tops out at 665 amps, has conductors 1.6" in diameter (they are often also segmented, so while the bare size may be 1.6" in theory, you don't find that). Generally the insulation size on them is ridiculous as well (because they are usually used for like 10kv+ applications)
[1] Current is related to surface area of conductors, or combined surface areas of all the strands in a conductor. So you'd need to double diameter, at least, to come close.
Staring at things like http://bpu.org/electric-service-rates-commercial/
(and similar pages on other utilities)
make me believe they'd end up with some medium voltage application here (IE take it in as somewhere between 3.3kv and 45kv and do step down themselves)
In fact, it is becoming standard in high-power chargers, with the new 175-350kW CCS units also using liquid cooling.
Somebody is buying this service. It's probably delivered more in line with your reasoning here.
There is actually a home not far from me that gets 3-phase. It is hooked up to a commercial-style air conditioning unit (huge house) and has a separate power meter; the home has separate 2-phase service as well.
I'm sure there are some utilities somewhere that will offer you that :)
480 volt at 500 amps is actually fairly reasonable in terms of cable requirements (it only requires 800 kcmil cable, which, while, i'd never want to buy a ton of it, is not completely bonkers). I would be a little surprised if they offer 500 amps though, because that's a lot more than you'd ever need.
Remember that a 3 phase amp carries a lot more kilowatts than a single phase amp.
In particular, 20 amp 240 single phase = 4800watts But 20 amp 240 three phase is a factor of sqrt(3) more = 8313 watts
so 500 amp 480v 3 phase would carry 415692.19382 watts, while 500 amp 480v single phase (which nobody uses) would only carry 240000 watts.
So you'd be getting 415kw service out of that, not 240kw service. Which is a lot of power.
Usually i've seen them offer 250kw service (IE not in amps) and let you do the stepdown. This would step down to 300 amp 480v 3 phase.
240v 3 phase in residential areas is also more common (I can get it), but it's only 100-200 amp service at least here, and i pay for power factor, blah blah blah.
Or kW with a power factor of 1, but that is (almost) never the case