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Comment by dfadsadsf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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.

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