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Comment by tamaharbor | Hacker News Reader

I would be more worried about producing enough battery chargers and upgrading the electrical infrastructure to support all the charging.

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Counter-intuitively, having more and cheaper batteries will help with that. Given cheap enough distributed battery storage gives you leverage on scaling back the current requirement that all electricy currently produced needs to be consumed at the same time.

So combining distributed generation (solar) with distributed energy storage can dial down the need for the currently planned, highly contested HVDC links by buffering the capacity and making the load less spiky.

I think there will be more spikes, assuming people go back to commuting. As soon as folk get home they will plug in their car and draw large amounts of power. This article is fairly informative: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...

If you are on 15 min based pricing and charging when at home is 5 - 20x more expensive vs at nought or during the day, I think it’s a matter of time before someone releases a software update for your charger or car that coordinates charging your car with optimal energy prices.

In NL you can already get prices by the 15 minutes and sometimes I get paid to use electricity on windy and sunny days. eg see easyenergy.com. You get the prices 24h in advance, so you can even plan optimally without the need for advanced predictions.

Agree, connected smart charging is the way to go. But the fact is if a car needs to be charged by the morning you are going to see spikes in the evening. I am rather ignorant about how often people with plug ins actually change, maybe you don't need to charge every evening.

I plug my car in whenever I get home, but it only ever charges between 1:30 and 8:30 am because thats when my electricity is cheapest, so thats when ive set it to charge.

It's crude but if what you're saying actually became an issue, you could solve it by doing the same thing and charging people more at those high demand times.

What's actually more likely to happen though is covered in the article you linked: cars hooked up to the grid will charge when there's excess electricity, and discharge when there's a demand for electricity. See page 8 here: https://www.chademo.com/wp2016/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/CH...

Infrastructure is something that can be accomodated. Providers have a ~20 year window to ramp up production and infrastructure. I think the providers are well aware of the direction electric cars are headed and are able to plan for expansion. Charging stations will be taken care of by whoever sees the opportunity and is able to act on it.

The problem with batteries is far greater as the technology relies finite resources that are already stretched.

Load is already lower at night. Increasing grid peak load times at night first can provide substantial a buffer as well as total usage ramps up ~80,000,000 killowatt hours [1]

Do you have estimates on "100%" electric usage for today's currently miles drive on gas?

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915

In my area in Norway there are now over 50% EVs. Not new sales but total cars. Since it's a "villa area" everybody charges at home.

No issues with the grid :)

Norway is awesome. Y’all could ban new fossil fuel vehicle sales tomorrow and it’s be a non issue.

Norway’s leading exports are fossil-fuel extraction.

Well, 20% of new sales are still fossils so you'd have some grumpy men in the outskirts but I think that would be it.

Even in the most northern county (Finnmark) the new sales for EVs are approaching 50%.

I have two EVs myself, and going back would be a hassle. Imagine having to go to the gas station every time you need to "fill up" :)

I imagine you're not regularly driving 500km in a day. :/

Not every day but once every two weeks I have a trip with about 500 km each way.

When I came home yesterday I had 4% left from 100% on my model x.

Still if I had to charge a bit it would have been included in my 20 minute "pee and hot dog break" on the trip.

The biggest issue I have with fast charging is that the car charges so fast I don't have time to eat properly.

The tax rate on a new car in Norway is over 50%. So you can expect a compact gasoline car to cost almost double what it would be in the USA, while EVs are exempt from the taxes.

We already have quite a bit of extra capacity overnight while commercial and industrial are "offline".

My energy provider already allows a separate EV charging meter that charges a reduced rate if you charge at night. I suspect they are not alone in this.

I wish utilities were more open about this data. I would love to see if EVs have done a good job (or maybe too good a job*) flattening out the overnight demand curve. Back in 2012, Georgia Power evangelists were marketing this as a path to greater efficiency: The "base load" caters to minimum demand, and if the curve flattens out, the way I understand it, they can get rid of some of that temporary/spiking demand generation.

But that's not saying it's better for the environment. Here in georgia, my impression is that base load is coal generation, and the more expensive natural gas peaker plants are actually cleaner-burning? The desire for more data is to really just verify all these half-baked impressions in my brain.

Base load plants like thermal and nuclear are retiring, therefore the load shifting to night time provides less benefit over time. Ideally, load is shifted around renewable generation, with only demand that is most inelastic relying on battery storage, pumped storage, or natural gas.

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