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Comment by nprz | Hacker News Reader

Where will they get the energy to power all these new electric cars? Is the grid capable of handling the demand necessary to charge everyones car?

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Short answer is yes, current grid is capable of handling demand of everyone getting electric cars. It will add around 10% extra demand during off peak hours so no new generation/transmission capacity is necessary.

Obviously there could be local needs (like old apartment building with original electric wires from 1930) but nothing major.

When do most people charge their cars? If it's when they get home from work, they'd be adding to grid load at peak times. Although maybe cars are smart enough to wait until 5am to start charging

Cars are smart enough. My 2022 Mini Cooper SE lets you set or schedule departure time. Most new electric cars let you set desired charge level as well, and will delay charging until it's needed.

Almost all EVs come with built in charging schedule settings and people use them because the alternative is throwing money at your utility company to charge during peak hours for no reason. You just plug it in and wake up charged in the morning.

Most vehicles/chargers have the ability to optimize for using off-peak hours (and if a utility financially incentivizes using power in those hours, users tend to use that capability).

Demand response EV charging is already widespread.

The general rule for most people with EVs and a place to charge at home is just to always plug it in when they get home, with charge settings (battery charge limit, scheduled departure time etc.) set on the car or using the car's app.

In addition, utilities in almost every grid that has capacity issues - Texas, California, downstate NY - offer heavily subsidized or free 240v Level 2 smart chargers that are enrolled in demand response programs.

So you get home at 5pm in July, plugin to your utility provided charger. Demand response will prevent charging until 7pm when the peak passes. You can override it, but if you observe the curtailment you receive either a credit on your bill or a reduced rate for off-peak charging.

There are options to set your charge time in the cars so you can choose your times. They can also do it intelligently too, like start charging at a time so that it's full by 7AM.

You think Europe is setup to handle this? Have you seen the electricity prices in Germany??? They are barely able to keep the street lights on, and struggling with the current EV usage. Not only that most Europeans are not rich and they would struggle with even more power being spent on EV charging.

Short answer is yes, current grid is capable of handling demand of everyone getting electric cars.

Horseshit. At current adoption rates states will have no troubles expanding power generation to keep up but instantly transforming every vehicle into a BeV would require nearly 50% more generational capability than we currently have.

This study [0] suggests that depending on adoption rates, the induced demand from commuting alone would be closer to 35-45%. The authors don't address how challenging scaling generation by that much would be, however.

Another article [1] suggests that it's not actually raw generation that will be the constraining factor, but actually power quality -- the authors suggest that cleaning and converting the power for high-voltage DC charging could be a much bigger task than scaling generation.

[0]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=883...

[1]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=933...

So then how do you explain this?

https://twitter.com/firstsquawk/status/1564771213506818048?s...

A lot of these replies certainly amaze me. The infrastructure for gasoline is under constant maintenance and construction: rail cars spill oil, trucks have to be driven by humans, pipelines take maintenance, gasoline has to be refined at a small number of places, gas pumps at stations have to be constantly inspected etc. etc. Electricity also has maintenance, but the grid already exists and will continue to, and access exists almost everywhere. High speed car chargers require a fair amount of investment, but for apartment dwellers etc. slower speed chargers where parking exists would be fairly easy to add. Cars are also interesting in that they store power in a battery, so can be charged whenever electricity is most available or cheapest.

I suppose there are people who regularly drive more than the long-range vehicles currently available, but last time I took a long road trip I rented a car instead of taking one of my ICE vehicles. For me the future is definitely electric, and I'll have a charger at my house, and probably solar.

The interesting point will be when gasoline is less available, as a kid I lived in BFE and my parents had like a 300 gallon gas tank they had to buy and maintain and get refilled from a tanker truck. Places where selling gas already has thin or negative margins will no doubt stop at some point, and ICE will become even more expensive in a lot of places.

No, we already have rolling blackouts and they keep shutting down power plants (San Onofre, Klamath River).

California is restricting water usage but they refuse permission for private companies to build desalination plants (Huntington Beach).

I could see banning gas-powered cars, but after 90% of the people have already switched to electric and it's working great.

Even the very smallest Tesla Solar (21 KW/day) setup can generate x3 times more electricity than needed by a moderate commute. Most EVs use roughly 3 miles per KW. So, 7 KW would allow you to travel 20 miles per day 7 days a week or about 45 miles per day 3 days a week.

there's more than enough electricity to go around.

That doesn’t seem very far. My commute is 20 miles per day and I live quite close to where I work by most standards. How are the people that commute for 45 minutes each way going to fair? There are a good number of people that drive further than that too.

45 minutes in traffic or 45 minutes of actually driving 80mph on the highway?

The average commute from home to work is about 15 miles each way, or ~26 minutes.

Yeah my concern was for the people who make up the right hand side of that distribution.

California already mandates that all new home construction include solar. This both increases power generation and reduces stress on the grid since power is used where it is generated.

They'll probably upgrade it over the next decade.

Because California has a "great" track record with energy management?

The infrastructure needs to be ensured before the mandate kicks in. Could be conditional on infrastructure targets, like X charging station within Y miles for all Californians

So the answer is... do nothing? Aim for nothing? Just give up?

Maybe 50 million people won't notice when the power stops working.

Because that's the only possible outcome?

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