Also, power generation - if everyone wants to charge at night, we need to completely change the concept and stop the move to solar energy in favor of nuclear.
Also I think that workplace charging is the future of EVs. With the peak of the duck curve at mid-day, the obvious way to match that up to battery demand is to provide incentives for ubiquitous EV chargers in office parking lots, as well as charging the consumer for electricity consumed by their car.
This is probably why California continues to warn that rolling blackouts may become a thing. They raised that specter last year, and they're preparing to do it again this year.
Total system capacity is not improving at a rate commensurate with the forced adoption of EVs in the state.
Which may be fine on it's own, but if you're planning on bringing a bunch of new demand on to the grid, you're headed towards an uncomfortable corner.
https://calmatters.org/environment/2023/01/california-electr...
Wind is now opposed by people here because it ruins the landscape. Funny but it's what it is. And there's not enough physical space for solar arrays of this size.
The average population density of California is 250 per square mile, for Germany it's 620. Considerably less than one order of magnitude in difference.
> For most people here, workplace is 15-30 minutes walk/public transit away, that's not going to solve anything about car charging.
If people are not driving to work, their cars can charge at home during the day, so it's already solved.
> And there's not enough physical space for solar arrays of this size.
There most certainly is. People overestimate the required space to a ridiculous degree.
Anyways, the average is deceiving - I think you should compare the average of a city like Berlin, Cologne or Amsterdam, not the average of an entire large state like Germany.
The city where I live has nearly 3 million residents on just 50km2, and it's not even the most dense city around. Compare that to San Francisco (second most dense US city) - which has 815k residents on 120km2.
People here live in very dense cities with agricultural/natural space in between, you don't have that in US cities which are mostly long stretches of single-family households. We don't have single-family households at all except for the few villas of the ultra-rich and the few people living in the villages around the cities.
> If people are not driving to work, their cars can charge at home during the day, so it's already solved.
That's not solved at all! That's exactly where the issue is - the grid isn't able to provide that much power and especially not during peak hours, not to mention the missing power generation capacity. The grid is already nearly overloaded. It would need significant capacity upgrades and the people here don't want to pay for it.
Curiously, how many cars need charging(at night even) in this area? Maybe I missed the intent behind your comment.
But it doesn't sound like there is much daily driving.
Perhaps "...hands wet on the wheel..." like in the Golden Earring song often? )))
Many households have multiple cars - one or two for the parents, then maybe one for the eldest child that still lives with the parents. Each car is used daily or almost daily.
There definitely is less daily driving per vehicle - but there's much more vehicles per square kilometer.
IMHO the usage patterns and the population density make this a much harder problem here than in the US.
This flexibility has to be managed, and there are many companies working on this. For example: https://ev.energy/
You better believe, however, that the distribution networks are planning around this. I was in a meeting with someone from the National Grid (UK central grid authority) who is responsible for planning for the transition. Basically, all new housing developments are being provisioned assuming heat pumps and EV chargers. Existing areas are being monitored and upgraded as they near the grid limits. Plans go out years in advance. It is a lot of work, but I am confident that it is being well managed. I cannot say that everywhere is as well managed, but I think it is safe to assume that many of these people and organisations do, in fact, know what they are doing. It sounded like the biggest problem in the UK was NIMBYs fighting against the new distribution networks needed to land the power from the offshore wind farms which are rapidly replacing the old fossil fuel generators.
The power distribution company is competent, I have full confidence in that. Yes, they have plans and know what they're doing and what's coming - but they need money to do it, and they're not going to get it anytime soon.
At least this country is very pro-nuclear.
https://www.sibelga.be/en/about-sibelga/projects-challenges/...
The rest of Europe has 230V, 3 phases + neutral, with 400V between phases.
They even stopped allowing people to connect their solar arrays without large batteries because the grid is that overloaded.
(of course they're doing work on it - but definitely not the sort of work required to allow everyone to charge their 1-3 cars per household).
The most likely solution is house battery backups attached to a virtual grid.
if we think that's somehow relevant here.