Nighttime charging of EVs may overburden the grid
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Higher earners live closer to work. In addition to being able to afford the higher nighttime rates, their workplace may also offer charging as a perk. So you see, those with money form their opinions about electricity pricing schemes involving the invisible hand that has already been so kind to them.
There are already day-ahead electricity markets with prices that vary throughout the day. You _already_ pay a premium over those variable prices, for the convenience of a fixed rate. All I'm saying is that it would be good if consumers had the _option_ of eliminating some of that premium, in exchange for demand shifting.
So the correct answer is c) buy a 2005 Honda Civic.
Electricity will become an expensive commodity.
Look at prices in the UK and Europe. It's already starting to happen (but not because of EVs). Just wait till EVs become pervasive. All that demand for electricity.
It's a cautionary tale about moving too fast in the right direction.
It's easy to say "stop oil now" and things like that, but the reality is that there is only so much suffering the population will take before they turn to right-wing populist politicians who promise to roll back the progress that has been made, or their governments bankrupt themselves by subsidizing the pain away. These changes need to be made gradually.
Or not at all. Not everyone believes as you do.
The price floor for used EVs is going to be higher than the price floor for used gas cars. You won't be able to buy a $1000 hoopty EV with 200k miles on it because it will need several thousand dollars in replacement batteries to be drivable. Therefore the price floor will be the cost of replacement batteries.
At the same time, banning new gas car sales will drive up the value of older gas cars as people scramble to hoard them, resulting in price increases for used gas cars which will also hurt low-income people.
They still can't keep the lights on during a heat wave because people run their air conditioners and are willing to pay the peak rates to do so. Imagine the same level of demand, but with mass EV adoption on top of it, as well as the state planning to ban gas appliances and shift all the load for cooking and heating onto the grid. That is the future we are headed toward.
Right now, EV ownership is largely restricted to homeowners who can install charging stations. Building more EV charging stations without beefing up the power grid, which will make it more practical for apartment dwellers to own electric cars, will result in even more demand for electricity at all times of the day.
You can tinker with time-of-use rates all you want, but the only real solution is to have a much better power grid.
People talk about EVs putting power back into the grid. Frankly I think that's a pipe dream in the near future. Our power companies are barely competent enough to run the grid without causing forest fires -- they aren't going to be capable of implementing that at the kind of scale that would make a difference anytime soon.
how about $1000 (10kwh @ EV prices) battery or so at every household?
> People talk about EVs putting power back into the grid. Frankly I think that's a pipe dream in the near future. Our power companies are barely competent enough to run the grid without causing forest fires -- they aren't going to be capable of implementing that at the kind of scale that would make a difference anytime soon.
It's not realistic to expect a broken utility like PG&E to pull that off anytime soon. Most utilities in the United States are as bad as, or worse than, PG&E.
Another aspect of this, which I am going through myself with my own EV charger install at my new house, is that many homes need retrofitting to be able to charge an EV or install one of those batteries. I need my electrical panel replaced.
Every other house in my neighborhood was built at the same time by the same builder and is going to need a new panel too, if they haven't done it already -- and we aren't talking about old houses, these were built in the 1960s. For many homes, a charger or a battery will require $4k-6k of additional upgrades.
FWIW 1kW for 8 hours is ~50km which is enough for most daily drives
> I need my electrical panel replaced
How much is that, really? Panel itself cost nothing, just some labour which I take is very expensive. You are improving your house tho and cost is likely negligible compared to car cost.
FWIW it cost us ~$500 (eastern europe) to get 7kW charger purchased + installed. Which we never used cuz free municipal charger.
The panel install, including parts and labor, is around $4k. Add another $2k or so for the EV charger parts and labor.
To replace the panel, my electrical company must make a special appointment to disconnect my house from the grid and reconnect it later the same day. The earliest appointment they were able to offer was one month away.
There is no such thing as a cheap electrical panel upgrade, solar install, or battery install in the United States.
Yes, I am improving the house, and I would probably need a new panel eventually anyway, but this still goes to show that there is a lot more involved than some people might think.
Managing time of day for charging isn't a more complicated problem than any of those.
The way that power companies "communicate" about load is by slightly changing the frequency.
If the frequency is 60.5, then there's an abundance of energy on the grid and some less profitable generators can cut back or storage systems can charge. If the frequency is 59.5 then there's a lack of available power on the grid and other generators should go on line and unnecessary load should stop doing its thing (and if it has the ability, it could discharge instead).
People in US were so flipped when they heard this
It people drive to work and cannot plug in their car, then most of the time it will only be plugged in at night.
Universal-ish WFH dramatically undercuts the need for both energy and infrastructure (which also takes energy) and will allow us to scale back both dramatically (e.g., multi-lane roads), while saving lives and giving employees more life flexibility.
Advocates for public transportation (for environmental reasons, particularly) risk fighting the last war. They should shift focus to WFH instead. I really don't understand why Greens and Labor don't push for WFH mandates (for environmental and quality of life reasons, respectively). Probably too tied to the commercial real estate industry.
Or, do we just raise power prices for everyone and then give them a break if they allow a third party device to restrict their power usage? Seems like a great way to subsidize "the solution" on the backs of people who can't afford a new EV of their own.
Also.. when are there times of "excess power?" The grid operator tracks demand and then orders power from stations, or it doesn't. There is "excess capacity" but that's set against not running the plant at all, so I'm not sure there's some "free lunch" to be had here.
This is not a penalty situation, it is an enticement. Smart charge rates of 4 cents instead of 20 cents a kw/h. People will voluntarily do this to save themselves money.
And you're going to have those renewables available at night, when this charging is expected to take place and be straining the grid?
> This is not a penalty situation, it is an enticement. Smart charge rates of 4 cents instead of 20 cents a kw/h. People will voluntarily do this to save themselves money.
So where does that 16c/kWh come from? Subsidies? From taxes? So again, everyone has to pay to benefit a small group of consumers who can afford the product in the first place?
I think you are misunderstanding curtailments. It's when renewables are producing more power than what is needed and they are shut off or throttled. For the power producers getting 4 cents is better than getting 0 cents. Everyone involved in the transaction is better off. Customers get cheap power to charge their cars, and power producers get to sell energy that they otherwise couldn't. No one is subsidizing anything, the system is just more efficient.
Buying EV before getting rooftop solar (and potentially batteries) is incredibly dumb. FWIW gov shouldn't even allow this.
Life is unpredictable, and I have had emergency 2 AM phone calls that lead to situations where 20% battery is not sufficient. I don't have an electric vehicle yet, but my concern with smart charging would be finding myself in another situation where I need to drive to the nearest trauma center (2 hrs away) in the middle of the night and my battery is dead.
"Charging infrastructure access and operation to reduce the grid impacts of deep electric vehicle adoption"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01105-7
The suggestion to use more daytime charging is specific to California, since California's future energy trajectory is weighted toward more solar. A state like Texas which has more renewable energy output at night, from wind [1], wouldn't necessarily need more daytime charging. If California ends up installing more offshore wind than currently projected, that could also change the optimal charging strategy.
[1] https://www.vaultelectricity.com/what-is-the-impact-of-wind-...
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-unlocks-vehicle-to-grid-abil...
The fail condition needs to be: What happens if 80% of EV owners are trying to charge their EVs to 80%, all at once?
I personally this that’s stupid, but old slobs like me have been out-voted by young bucks who evidently don’t mind freezing in the dark.
You mean authoritarian technocrats.
My parents would regularly set the dishwasher to run at ~5am, and sometimes the washing machine. In the 1990s this used a timer plug. Nowadays these appliances have built-in delay-start functions.
I was on a wholesale program in Texas for about 2 years. Every 5 minutes my rate would change to reflect the wholesale pricing. There were certainly issues - winter 2021, but at the same time I was forced to conserve energy due to the economics.
Until we can actually store energy at grid scale across multiple days, I feel like consumers should pay what the real-time cost is. Right now, fixed rate electricity is effectively fraudulent.
I suspect this capability will only improve over time up to an including the ability to dump power back into the grid from the battery if the electric co is willing the pay enough to make the battery wear worth it.
You just configure a time in the morning you want it to be fully charged and the charger do the rest.
Edit, people with their own house and thereby their own charger.
People charge at night because home charging is the only practical way to own an EV and most people work during the day.
Fix the charging situation first — but be aware that more convenient charging will induce more demand for EVs from apartment dwellers, which will increase demand for electricity overall.
The only real solution is to improve the power grid so that EV owners can charge whenever they want.
The actual report from NREL (1) linked to the article is far more informative and interesting and eludes that clickbait headline, but still makes ham-fisted assumptions that make the whole report a little goofy. To list a few:
- "Absent systemic changes in customer behavior" (you mean no changes except mass customer purchasing of EVs? what's the point of assuming nothing changes)
- Slide 18 shows, for high EV adoption with no charging logic, effectively, "everyone definitely plugs in their EVs at 9pm because thats when TOU kicks in", while also showing "Almost nobody charges at work during the day". Most people will plug in whenever they get home. With WFH, that is basically any random time of the day. Also, they acknowledge people respond to TOU, but dont acknowledge that TOU can change?
- "At-work charging makes up a small portion of total EV charging, so the system benefits are likely to be small" (are they really assuming no changes here over a decade? I would love to charge at work but my office building has no services. These will become commonplace over time. Is this really their
EDIT: this is fun! here's the actual model from the NREL report! This launches a virtual machine, which might take a minute to boot up. Once the model has opened, click on ‘Cell > Run All’ to initialize the script’
https://hub.gke2.mybinder.org/user/skoeb-co-ev-model-rkichrt...
I don't think so. It takes forever for anything to get built in this country. I have zero confidence the grid will improve fast enough to make mass EV adoption practical in many parts of the US. During the intervening period we will see higher energy bills, rolling blackouts, and rationing.
I mean, if our governments and utility companies were good at building this sort of thing, then why are the power grids in such a poor state today?
GP, why should we believe you?
These are significant changes and have happened in the last 10 yrs. The grid can continue to make major changes. Nothing I've said is particularly wild or opinionated.
The article and the report make a very plain fallacy of assuming a millions of EVs get dumped on the grid at the same time with no other material changes. It's just not a helpful discussion or presented conclusion/headline. Bold claims extrapolated from sparse data. Reminds me of the peak oil articles way back when, media sought to cast an image of cars stranded on apocalyptic interstates.
That feels dramatically optimistic.
The California Camp Fire was started by PG&E transmission lines about a 100 years old that were not being maintained. That is the rate of change and maintenance on the electrical infrastructure.
Now, sure, EVs are shaking up the electrical grid needs so perhaps the future will see faster evolution than a 100 year cycle. But dramatically different in 13 years? I don't think so.
But more broadly, the grid is evolving whether a Utility embraces it or not. On a residential basis, I have an EV and a backup generator. Software and policy are the primary inhibitors that prevent me from feeding a few kws back into the grid. But even if I never get to feed back into the grid, if the grid is insufficient, I can always kick on my gen to provide the power I need. That private generator is part of the grid, part of the network. Who is to say utilities or even EV supercharging stations don’t start installing large generators on site to shave demand. New Grid interconnects are possible between regions. These can be massive thousand mile deals or they can be across a river.
People love to complain about their power utilities, and there have been some dramatic shortcomings in recent years across the country, but waving away the opportunity to adapt is a curious approach to me, especially for the HN crowd.
Shouldn't you try to at least give a reason why you think so?
You can both be right here.
There are many current challenges that prevent people from choosing an EV or against rapid majority adoption. We also have to consider that alternative methods of taxation (how to pay for roads) and the eventual reduction in tax incentives are problems that still need to be solved.
I'm also looking forward to the EVs that come out 1-2 decades from now with batteries that should have 4x+ density and/or half the cost. The biggest downer for me is all the damn tech that comes with them currently. If cost can come down, then I hope I can get one with less tech. Or that conversion kit will be common.
Are roads really payed from gas taxes? Everywhere? I perhaps naively assumed all the taxes go into a big bucket which is used to pay for all kinds of things, including roads.
Somehow even relatively poor countries manage to have good roads. We will save elsewhere. Most of the taxes go into the social bucket in most countries (retirement, social security, health, education) anyway.
Fuel taxes are quite common. In some areas they do make up a large component of the road funding. Finding a replacement for them is a major issue.
"Somehow even relatively poor countries manage to have good roads. We will save elsewhere. Most of the taxes go into the social bucket in most countries (retirement, social security, health, education) anyway."
This doesn't make any sense and lacks factual support. How do the poor countries pay for the roads, and which counties are these? What are we saving and where? The majority of current taxes going to social programs has no relevance to this discussion. If we're eliminating a current tax and having the same service costs (or more due to increased weight), a new one will need to take it's place.
Sure, there are grid issues. There are resource issues(Li, Ni, Co, Al, Cu, rare earths) with both temporary and long-term shortages combined with geopolitical issues. But overall EVs are more efficient and will win in the long run.
Should we be more focused on hybrids right now? Yes. But, in the long run, electric wins(along with mass transit, walking, biking, etc).
> Should we be more focused on hybrids right now?
I think most people overestimate the distance they really need. I have not charged at a public charger for months. Charging at home is so convenient, I never want to go back to the hassle with gas.
And for the occasional road trip, superchargers are fine.
Additionally, PHEVs have unlimited range like ICE while using less fuel so they are good for people who frequently need more range than a BEV can provide.
So there is no reason for BEV to be cheaper, more less it will keep being expensive or will get even more expensive than it is today.