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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

We don't all even have our electric cars and at home quick chargers yet.

The electric utilities have been singing "We need more generation capacity" for a couple decades.

EVs provide flexible demand, they are parked 22 hours+ a day, can charge whenever power is negative (which happens 100s of millions of times/year) or power is zero. Right now, there is excess production from renewables, which is wasted. EVs can absorb all that.

We don't need quick chargers at home, unless you mean 240V chargers? Which is in some of the countries with 110V/120V.

We don't need more generation capacity. Utilities are keen on increasing costs, their profits are a percentage of cost, there is a nexus between generation, transmission and distribution companies to keep adding capacity. This was pointed out by many commenters, a recent out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39487714

Energy demand will down with EVs and renewables: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/iea-energy-scenari...

Whats needed is demand response. But utilities won't do it, because it won't increase their profits.

How does the amount of energy necessary to recharge the vehicles compare to the amount of energy required to run the additional industry?

The idea is to a) use V2G vehicles over a day / night cycle to "buffer out" gaps from renewables and b) incentivize high-demand consumers during low-production times to shut down by the power of the free market.

Point a) has already been explained by GP, but b) is the interesting one. Right now there's barely any incentive for large consumers such as aluminium smelters to shut down or limit consumption during the night (where there is no solar energy), the only incentive these kind of consumers get is a premium for short-term load shedding. We would, as a society, need far less of generation capacity buildout if we can get the large consumers to drastically reduce their consumption at night.

But don’t we want them running at night today vs during the day when more power is used. Scheduling those work shifts at the smelter is going to be annoying. “Sorry Bob, the power market is spiking now, you’ll need to come in 8 hours later to start your shift.”

We can solve this problem simply by closing all our plants and importing more aluminum from Japan.

Sure but you can predict that there will be no solar power available at night.

We can also predict that higher AC use correlates with more solar power.

Solar power is greatest at noon. I think Bob would be thrilled to be told that he will be required to work during the day rather than at night.

Other energy uses peak during the day, like AC in the summer.

Not enough to compensate.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56880

California is the wrong state to look at AC usage (most people live in big metro areas where AC isn't even ubiquitous, nor needs to be).

Which is exactly why California has the highest growth in Air Conditioning usage. Most places were at 90%+ a decade ago; not much room to grow. OTOH SF has grown from 30% to 50%.

A lot of that growth is just people moving to heat pumps that can do either, and are perfect for mild climates.

California does have a nice advantage in that it has lots of solar near populated areas that have mild climates (well, that mainly means the LA area).

>. Right now there's barely any incentive for large consumers such as aluminium smelters to shut down or limit consumption during the night

You cannot shut down smelters period. They must be kept running or the entire smelter has to be rebuilt taking months.

This point seems to be overlooked very often.

You cannot shut down smelters completely, but AFAICT you can idle them, substantially reducing their power requirements.

Note the energy demand going down is due to the inefficiency of fossil based transport and heating that gets replaced with electrical versions.

But it'll still mean an increase electricity production/consumption.

It's not a big drama, and it's already planned for, but it'll still be an increase (even after accounting for efficiency gains).

Electric cars will take ~30 years to transition (~10 years before almost all new cars are electric, and then another 20 years before the old cars are off the road). They will increase electrical demand by 20% over 30 years, or under 1% a year increase to demand.

The US increases its generating capacity by about 4% per year. (50GW added per year, 1.3TW total).

EV's are a very small part of demand increase.

The other day I was at a Target parking lot plugging in the EV at an island of about 6 superchargers. I looked over the rest of the parking lot at hundreds of ICE cars and it just struck me that getting the whole fleet electrified has got to be a substantial power demand increase, but maybe not. Which raises the question, what the heck is all the power being used for? :-)

The easy answer is bitcoin, AI & data centers. Those are noticeable because they're new. That's some of it, but AFAICT it is mostly air conditioning. Hotter days with more places being conditioned.

I don't think so, the adoption rate has done nothing accelerating since WWII. Once EV will be mainstream enough the switch will probably be quite brutal.

I don't think it is economically viable to maintain two sets of power distribution (electricity and petrol) at the same time so countries will probably "push out" traditionnal petrol stations once they think EV distribution is okay enough

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