Further, most electric car owners I know charge at night when the grid usually has excess capacity. I personally am on a time of use plan where I get free charging from midnight to 3AM, and that’s the window in which I charge my electric cars every day.
I think the biggest issue is that if nobody charges during the day, and all the energy is coming from solar, demand for energy during the night will skyrocket.
But that's solvable by literally putting some power plugs into parking spaces.
Not a huge ask.
Texas has had grid problems because of this. It was especially bad in the winter.
> This is like that old fable about the English power companies having to fire up peaker plants during the commercial breaks of soccer games because of so many people putting the kettle on.
This isn't a fable, I've seen interviews with National Grid staff where they talk about tracking the TV schedule. This is one of the reasons why we have pumped-hydro capacity, to handle quick spikes.
I think this issue may end up being less of an issue than the doomsayers go on about. When I looked into this in ~2012 the solution was going to be "smart grids" where components would collaborate. Now, we've pretty much got there with electric cars being relatively smart, energy pricing being quite dynamic on some tariffs, and smart meters understanding that relationship.
I think the comparison the other poster make is useful. If Louisiana small town can handle AC usage, they should be able to handle charging EV.
Renewables weren't a major contributing factor in the winter outage.
> I assure you it wasn’t from people running their air conditioning during a freeze.
I think conversation is best if you don't assume the other person is an idiot.
People aren't going to have the vehicles charge at 3:00 AM, they don't like managing automatons like that. I grew up in a family where our ISP did something similar and I was the only one who would schedule downloads to start at midnight (including my dad who worked as a software dev at a large tech company.) They'll just suffer whatever consequences of having the thing charge when they plug it in are.
I like electric vehicles, I'm actually in the process of upgrading my boat to use electric propulsion. I think a lot of people overlook many of the downsides though and it's a bit concerning. The battery situation is particularly bad, the used electric vehicle market is going to look very different than the used ICE vehicle market.
- daily vs nightly is important as grid capacity increases as commercial use decreases down by 7pm
- high speed charging is important because if either car will be parked for 12 hours it will be better for the grid and batteries if it uses low speed charging
- if electric cars (and hvacs) have no "time of use" functionality to reduce usage during peak billing rates.
It's not a fable, it has its own Wikpedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup.
The US doesn't consist entirely of the South, and guess what? The South is buying some of that AC power from the North. The Eastern Interconnect is a lovely thing, don't get me wrong, but you can't just handwave off the effect of some 20-40 million 9 to 5ers in the Eastern time zone getting home at the same time and plugging their cars in.
It is a solvable problem, most of those cars need to charge for ~90 minutes any time before the morning, but it will be a serious problem if it isn't addressed.
Yes, there are literally grid issues right now, with electric cars being a tiny portion of car sales. We will get there but its not necessarily cheap and easy.
"Big oil talking point". You people are brainwashed into believing everything is a conspiracy.
Imagine believing you and the 2% of EV owners are on to something by charging at night, and it'll look the same at 20%+ EV market share.
Where is this being caused by EVs?
The reason the peaker plants aren't the first step is that they take up to ~30 mins-1 hour to spin up. They use hydro or imported power from France to cover until the plants can cover.
It does in California
We've run the numbers, and it actually does pay for us to do it.
This afternoon was one of those days.
In the UK for example, the Nation Grid reports that grid-source electricity use peaked in 2002 and has fallen 16% since then (due to increased solar panel installations, etc). If all cars switched to electric overnight with no time for additional planning, grid-source electricity use would increase 10%, still under 2002 numbers and still well within manageable limits. [1] But obviously in a real-world scenario, they have plans to better handle the pace of adoption more intelligently than that.
It is true that everyone charging at full speed simultaneously at 5pm would be an issue. So that's why every car sold is smart enough to charge when rates are cheap and skip charging during peak hours. This is further incentivized by fluctuating power prices. People vote with their wallet and if they can get the same result (a fully charged car) for half price or less, they are certainly going to skip charing during peak hours unless they are on empty.
I think people who haven't owned an electric car are imaging how home charging works in the wrong way. Most people don't need to supercharge their car every night at 5pm to fill up the battery from empty to full by 5:30pm. Most of the time, your car has lots of power left after a normal commute and you just plug it in when you park so it is full again tomorrow. It doesn't matter what time during the night it charges and the car will figure it out. It's just not a big deal.
[1] https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/5-m...
200 mile range cars and 20 mile average commutes make this not a necessity. The need to use fast charging even less, as slow charging from 5pm-5am provides more than enough miles for the average commute.
I wonder what your electrician thinks about HVAC systems? They all do turn on at roughly the same time (a top cause of brownouts in under prepared grids), don't have a slow charging equivalent (they even depend on large capacitors to start the compressors). The even worse case is a house with multiple heat pumps and auxiliary heating.
Or what does your electrician think about hot water heaters? Fast charging requires similar supply as every house coming home and taking a shower at 5pm.
Or, perhaps the most likely, every house starting the oven at 5pm, the stove, The microwave, With some hot water.
What about all of these combined?
Information; on circuit breaker size required
Low speed charger 120x15amp
Highest speed residential charger: 240x40amp
Water heater 240x30amp
Instant whole house hot water heater 240x40
HVAC 240x30
Aux heat 240x30
Stove 240x30
Oven 240x30
Microwave 120x15
Those are starting caps and have nothing to do with energy storage. The caps cause a lagging in the voltage to cause a phase shift in the starting winding relative to the running winding which gets the rotor spinning. Once it gets up to speed it disengages.
What I see are lots of people comparing charging loads to existing appliances but not the fact they these loads are in ADDITION. So we are still facing a large increase in electrical load.
If, every household drives 200 miles a day
If, those households fast charge at home instead of the commercial charging network that popular commercial entities have been installing (malls, gas stations, supercharger network)
If the lithium ion batteries are fast charging with no pausing.
If the modern electric car (or HVAC) doesn't pay attention to the rate plan that is based on grid capacity (they do)
Tldr; If everybody connected to the same substation gets home at precisely the same time from a 200+ mile road trip, while the day is at its hottest, preheats the oven, takes a shower, and manually turns down their dumb thermostat, and schedules their car to rapid charge to drive another 200 miles in a few hours, Then yes, the grid and individual house would have major problems. But this is obviously a straw man.
But, if we're arguing the semantics of HVAC, we should also argue the semantics of car chargers. They don't jump straight to fast charging on plug-in. They negotiate with the car, checking battery levels, first cooling the battery pack, then, chooses between fast charge and slow charge based on state of the batteries (and optional user input), it also checks with your utility rate plan to see if it's optimal to charge.
Not all single phase motors are cap start/run motors.
> the start ones do provide "storage" for initial energizing of the compressor.
No, they are phase shifting.
In that time, ~50% of people could be either not commuting or commuting in some other way than by car.
That gives the power grid plenty of time to adapt.