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Comment by bunabhucan | Hacker News Reader

"If they perform scheduled charges for times in which electricity is cheaper, the US power grid could deal with 65 million EVs."

https://insideevs.com/news/436665/24-million-evs-limit-curre...

2021 sales were less that 1% of that. At what point does the bottleneck kick in? I would imagine electric utilities have a huge incentive to make this work given that demand has been flat at ~4 trillion kWh for over a decade.

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Yes + people always forget second order effects. Increasing EV numbers will lead to changes in the power grid. It's like saying in 1886 "If all horses would be replaced by cars, the petroleum industry would collapse".

That's a little concerning that its only 65 million. For comparison there are almost 300 million cars in the U.S., so this would be just a 20% adoption rate we are capable of. The reason why I am concerned is not for lack of power, its that I know for a fact the red states in this country will favor making up the slack with fossil fuel based power, because that's significantly faster and cheaper to construct than the best alternative, nuclear power. Even in california nuclear power can hardly catch a break, diablo canyon is limping along, they've already closed san onofre, and I don't think any new power plant is in the pipeline currently.

I think your arguments would be more effective if you removed the tribalism from your politics. Leftists are not consistent friends to nuclear power and in fact nuclear power generation does not seem to have any relation to a states partisan lean: https://www.statista.com/statistics/187270/us-nuclear-power-...

I see no tribalism here, I mentioned red states and I mentioned california both having issues. It's hard not to single out the red states considering things like the texas power grid making national news for its lack of foresight, or how the coal industry in west virginia seems to influence any senator that comes out of that state. You even have shale politicians in Ohio these days.

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