I don't understand why this is a surprise and why they think they can muscle through it. I didn't think our current battery technology is built for this scenario.
> During the installation process, the Megachargers took down the power grid for a good chunk of the city
This is my fear with everyone eventually plugging in their electric vehicles at 5pm
If I plug my car in at 5pm, it won't start charging for 7 hours, when it's economically rational for it to do so. Time-of-use pricing seem to solve this. EV load is among the least time-sensitive of all power consumers. Set up your pricing right, and the EV charging will follow.
If I'd driven 300 miles earlier in the day, and know I need to drive more in the evening, I'd override the charging schedule. This literally never happens.
First off, it said during the install. So evidently it wasn't load related anyway.
Second, I used to live in a little town of well under 50k people. The local coop gave a couple hundred dollars in rebates for the installation of load management on their water heaters. I'd expect this would get solved in basically the same way. The total gwh isn't a problem, the gw is, and that's fairly easy to solve problem.
It's fine to say that electric is simpler to deliver and more efficient in theory, but our grid is not even a fraction ready for that, and heat pumps and induction ranges are a whole order of magnitude up the tech ladder from boilers and gas stoves, and by going all electric you lose the multiple sources redundancy which is literally a life saver.
I do actually welcome the cleaner future but I hate how people are pretending it's already here and making regular people deal with the discrepency.
Anything less, and you are losing something you currently have. Which is what will hapoen of course. And idiots will tell each other "this is better".
Electricity serves as a backup for gas because it's the grid, or a generator, not a battery. A big generator works for efficient heat pumps, but in the all-electric future (if it comes too fast like now, before we actually have enough grid and better storage), there will be no generators or gas to fuel them. There will be batteties and solar that can do everything light and nothing heavy. Even with a generator, it needs to be a pretty big generator that most people don't have, and if you tried to use space heaters you could only use a couple small ones and you've maxxed out the generator. A big but not crazy generator can run a whole house heat pump, and that almost uses up the entire generator.
Whole house non portable generators can run on piped natural gas, which gives you not only heat but electricity while the power is out.
If you only have power, there is no effective backup for it, unless as I said you actually have an entire 2nd grid that duplicates the efgective entire 2nd grid that is the gas pipes. Different physical distribution infrastructure (so 2 sets of independant cables) operated by 2 different organizations, in 2 different physical locations (one buried, one not, whena truck takes out a pole, it doesn't affect the buried, when a backhoe or ice heaving takes out a buried, it doesn't affect the poles, etc)
That level of redundancy sounds outlandish but we actually have that right now, and will be losing it.
Maybe it's not valuable enough to maintain, but there is no way around the fact that it is something that will be lost.
I honestly can't see the benefit to gas service to a house. I have no idea why anyone would chose it for a new construction in 2023 when we have so many options for electrification. It's cheap now but it's still a fossil fuel and prices will go up over the life of the home. The same way 1950s constructions faced expensive conversion from oil to gas the current cohort of natural gas homes will be electrified, or demolished to make room for electrified homes.
If every house had a fast charger, that would be a sensible concern. But everybody turning their dryers on simultaneously during off-peak hours isn't something worth worrying about. Especially since it's not going to just happen all at once some day.
Household- or neighborhood-scale battery banks make a lot of sense in the near term. Because they are stationary they don't need to emphasize light materials and can focus more on cost efficiency and charge/discharge rate than mass or energy density using more readily available materials and cheap production methods. With relatively simple BMS you can charge your EV now and recharge the battery at off-peak times if you need to use it again in the evening (lots of people do).
Right now people are buying charging systems that do things like only charge when there’s a surplus of self-generated rooftop solar, or offer a big discount on EV charging if you’re prepared to have it interrupted at peak times.
This is a huge burden on the electrical grids, and Tesla or EV's get to hand that problem to someone else.
The only way this makes sense at scale is if we had nuclear power, and charging was done at night.
They don't exactly get to push it onto someone else. Large loads like this come with demand charges. In some areas, they might be $5/KW, in others I've heard of >$10. A single megacharger would be $5-10k on top of the actual energy used.
It is high enough that I'd expect them to start thinking about battery buffers at charging sites to mitigate the cost.
That already happens at a smaller scale, with things like Freewire.
BTW my car charges at midnight. Super easy to set up that way. I override if I have to but 99% of the time midnight is just great.