>My EV chargers at night during low demand
Easy when EVs are 1% market share. If/when they are 25%+ you can't hide behind low demand at night time.
Easy when EVs are 1% market share. If/when they are 25%+ you can't hide behind low demand at night time.
But that's not that, clearly there is a solution, and that's to start improving the grid and increase the use of EVs. When every house has a battery backup system and charging infrastructure, and they build more power generation capabilities, nuclear or green, then you will see a hugely more robust grid and cars that will actually work well in even the coldest months.
Notably, one of these needs to occur before the other.
Cities are also the least effective place (in general) for solar, with lots of obstructions, higher density of demand, etc,
Ok, maybe I should have said "one of these depends on the other"
> that's to start improving the grid and increase the use of EVs. Notably, one of these needs to occur before the other."
The point was that while they are related, you don't need to wait for the grid to increase to also increase the number of EVs. They can happen in conjunction.
On a long enough timeline, setting aside money, sure, we can add:
- add a backup battery to each house
- add charging infrastructure to each house
- build more power generation (nuclear or green)
I don't think that's in dispute, and I'm not sure what to call it. Not off-topic, but...just sort of ramming forward describing something obvious, but as if it addresses something topical.
We also have the highest electricity bills of any Canadian province.
The issue in Alberta is corporate grift and a hegemonic government that has a revolving-door arrangement with oil and gas companies.
In the US, a century is NOT out of the question for a "temporary" tax:
> The Spanish-American War has been over for more than 100 years, and now so is the tax imposed in 1898 to help fund it. As of Tuesday, all phone companies selling long-distance phone service are legally required to eliminate the 3 percent federal excise tax on long-distance service, which had been established in 1898 as a luxury tax on wealthy Americans who owned telephones.
Ref from 2006: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/telecom-tax-imposed-...
That being said the key word, "Uncertainty." They're the first to admit that they really don't know. Too many factors to consider, and these are some pretty smart people that do this for a living writing these reports.
No, the electric grid is not constantly adding power capacity. In fact, capacity expansions are planned on the timescale of decades. the previous comment is accurate - everyone switching to EVs even on a single, 80 home street can cause havoc for which we are unprepared.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Link
https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/09/worlds-larg...
It's not even a "our society can't orchestrate this", but the opinion is usually "it's impossible for people to organize that way".
Hardly disagrees with the "timescale of decades" remark parent is making.
If there is a ten year pipeline, design decisions are made years in advance. Hence my claim that even a single street switching to EVs will cause havoc.
My strongest interpretation of this was you were saying that no capacity was being added. Any other interpretation doesn’t make sense. Everyone already knows that grids don’t have new capacity added on a constant basis, so nobody would say it. Even if it went through a growth phase, that would stop at some point for any number of reasons.
I’ve done some calculations elsewhere in the thread that ( I think ) show that a 25% uptake of EVs in the UK all charged during the same 6 hour off-peak period would still not meet peak day demand. Even without those calculations I don’t see how you can claim a streets worth of EVs would cause havoc.
The average home car charger is the largest consumer of power in a household, often by as much as 2x - 3x the next largest device. That next largest device is often a heat pump, radiant heat or electric stove. Calculations for the grid as a whole ignore the fact that there are local and regional capacity bottlenecks, where meeting demand becomes a problem and the solution requires years of planning.
The feeder running along my street assumes a maximum power at each house of 10 kW and that 33% of houses consume that peak power at the same time. Imagine now if all houses added a 7 kW car charger, all charging during the night, every night. That is the havoc i refer to.
Both the UK and US have this already.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/ele...
> Through smart charging EVs can in fact help to balance the system, helping consumers use green power when it’s plentiful (and often cheaper) and avoid times when there’s more load on the network. Vehicle-to-grid technology could even send that power back to the grid when needed.
> With this in mind, the UK Government has introduced Electric Vehicle Smart Charge Points Regulations, which ensure that EV charge points will have this smart functionality.
> Similarly in the US, Smart Chargers and Time of Use Rate programmes will support balancing the load throughout the day.
Many capacity projects are simply to replace aging, no longer economical plants.
Edit, from my article:
> Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we estimate demand would only increase by around 10%. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002, and this is well within the range the grid can capably handle.
So let’s say for 25% of people converting we would have a 2.5% increase in demand on a daily basis. If we spread that over a 6 hour period then we then get back to 10% uptick during that 6 hour period.
Here is the total energy production in the UK over a week: https://electricityproduction.uk/total/?t=7d
I can see that a 10% daily average (4 Gigawatt) bump at night would still put us much lower than daytime, so demand would still be considered low.
Not sure of all my maths and assumptions, happy to hear other views.