Fire risks are also much greater at night if you are charging a BEV in your house while asleep. Far safer to charge in an open area preferably away from other vehicles and stuctures.
Yes! It surprises me that the reliability issues in charging an EV are not discussed more. This bears more discussion and subject to regulations. It is not ok for companies to push EVs to general consumers without creating a good safety record.
I think we already have enough regulations to hold companies liable for creating a dangerous product, we simply need to use them to hold corporations accountable.
None of this 'oh, our owners manual says you should only charge in these special conditions or we can't be held responsible'. Nope. You make a product and it hurts people or destroys property? You better make your peace with punitive damages that'll make you wish you properly tested before shipping to customers.
'Battery-powered vehicles have not been shown to catch fire at rates higher than gasoline cars, but when fires do erupt, they burn longer and hotter, propelled by lithium-ion batteries that supercharge the blazes, experts say.'
I've had several recalls for spontaneous combustion of my ICE cars suggesting I don't park in the garage. At least one car had multiple fire risk recalls for starting fire while parked.
I guess ICE cars should never be parked in a garage.
Musk just needs to throw 1% of his AI talent at optimizing charging times via realtime grid negotiating and nobody will need to even think about this. Cars will turn into one of our most valuable assets as they help stabalize the grid by being both sinks when energy is plentiful and sources when it's not.
There are certain problems we all need to think about, but this is not one of them. It will effectively solve itself because all the incentives are aligned.
So electric car owners need to just cover all the battery wear out of their own pockets? Wouldn't that make electric cars even more expensive since battery replacement will be needed more often?
Batteries are lasting far longer than anticipated.
Anecdotally, I have fast DC charged my 2018 Model S (100kw pack) for the majority of the 100k miles I’ve put on the car, and only have 7% battery degradation. Others are seeing similar longevity well into hundreds of thousands of miles.
That doesn't really matter. If you own a resource, and I utilize it, are you going to let me do so without compensating you in some fashion? If so I'll take you up on that offer.
I have no problems with encouraging people to charge at certain times. Using personal batteries for energy storage and draw without any compensation however seems to cross a line.
Your argument seems to me like justifying petty theft because in the end it doesn't really affect the store owner.
I think your position comes from a lack of understanding of energy markets and pricing mechanisms. Powerwall owners are paid roughly $2/kwh when called upon to support the grid in California. Compensation is absolutely available for discharging and charging at specific times.
If you’ll charge me a fraction of the cost to charge off peak or when there are excess renewables on the grid, and you’ll pay a premium to pull that power back if the car is parked and I can set a minimum state of charge to maintain, yeah, I’ll take that deal any day. I’ll come out ahead in almost all cases based on EV battery longevity.
If I am being compensated a premium $/kwh for each kwh drawn then we have no problem. Otherwise I'll just not offer my battery by disconnecting it when not charging.
Presumably the cost savings from charging when rates are the cheapest and potential incentives for feeding into the grid when necessarily will make up for that.
The Tesla Model 3 SR ships with a battery expected to last ~750,000 km. If you had that vehicle, how much would you need to get paid to compensate for reducing that range by 1km? I'd accept 0.1 cents, how about you?
But I'm never going to get 750,000 km out of a model 3, the suspension or other moving parts are going to give out first. So I can sell ~500,000 km worth of battery range without losing any actual range.
That would be the best part. Cover all that parking with solar panels, use those panels to partially or completely offset the charging demands of the cars parked under them. An average parking space has enough room for (napkin math...) 6kW of solar output. That's more than enough to offset a level 2 charger while the driver of that car is in the office.
And it leaves the car cooler at the end of the say.
Costs a bit upfront, sure. But I think we'll continue to see these costs come down, and the incentive to build out parking lot solar arrays will increase as the grid has to adapt to the demands we're placing on it.
Putting solar on the roof (adding a roof if necessary) should help a lot. You'd run into issues where it won't scale with garage height of course, but most garages aren't that tall anyway (at least in my area).
Future is SAE J2954 (aka Witricity): you have a wireless charging pad under each parking spot. No screwing with power plugs, just park and go. This isn't ideal for fast charging, but for the slower charging you'd get from being somewhere for 6-8 hours, it's perfectly fine. You still need to run power to every parking spot, but now it's embedded in the ground, and you don't have to worry about someone just coming around with cable cutters and stealing it.
Losing 30-70% of the power and adding a bunch of cost doesn't seem like the way forward. Cables exist for a reason. They are the best way to move charge.
These can actually be cheaper than the alternative to install, and get greater use (assuming the standard gets widely implemented). Definately going to be a thing. Loading/waiting areas for taxis and delivery vehicles seem like an early adopter market.
Cheaper than an equivalent EV charger. Safety requires an isolating transformer in the charger, which adds costs and an efficiency loss. The wireless charger is the isolating transformer in their case, leading to surprisingly high efficiency and low costs in comparison.
The pitch isn't a 1 for 1 replacement, it's that the Witricity system (which is like a level 2.5) provides via convenience the extra charging that would otherwise require the speed and power of a level 3 charger. You're trading off speed of charge for time fiddling with the system.
This trade-off may not work for someone with one car they plug in when they get home and unplug in the morning, just like they don't need a level 3 charger anyway, but might for an airport taxi firm, where they can charge their fleet while boarding passengers, or a loading bay for EV delivery vans.
If that demand is enough to make it a standard item on the car side, then it'll likely displace plug in charging in a lot of places where both are possible for silly reasons like "nothing for drivers to crash into", feeling more "luxurious", "cheaper install" and so on.
They claim it's 10% total loss, not 30%. And yes, it's got a cost, but depending on how things shake out, it might not be much more if any. Cables are the best way to move charge, assuming you don't have to worry about the cables. But once you factor in damage from vandalism or theft or just accidents, how hefty the cables actually are, etc, compared to having the cable buried nice and safe.
As for the difference in power loss between qi and this? Part of it is scale : they can fit a much larger diameter pad compared to a phone, which gets them much better coupling. You're essentially talking about an air core transformer, and there's plenty of transformers in the grid.
I'll believe 10% when I see it. you can definitely get that in a lab, but once you bury it under asphalt, and the driver parks 6 inches off center, does the efficiency still hold up? also, most cars are largely metal. how much energy do you lose from inducing current through the rest of the car?
This includes have almost 10 inches between the plates, so including the asphalt. And probably will just not charge is you're really off center. Yes cars are mostly metal, but there's ways to focus the magnetic field so it doesn't go too far laterally.
Musk does not control power utilities, nor what they charge, nor what power they have access to at a given time, nor the load of the rest of the grid outside of Telsa vehicles.
> Cars will turn into one of our most valuable assets as they help stabalize the grid by being both sinks when energy is plentiful and sources when it's not.
In fantasy land, sure. In reality there are a lot more players with a lot more variables and most of them don't give a shit about some grand unified solution through cars. Just because in theory there is one great universal solution to one problem (demand for power) doesn't mean everyone is going to work together to achieve it. We have more than enough agricultural land around the world to feed the entire planet every day, yet millions of people go hungry every day. Just because a solution is possible doesn't mean it happens.
By the way: if we had fewer cars, we wouldn't have this huge demand for additional power. The simpler solution is to replace cars with public transit and micromobility. Then we would pollute less to make the cars, require fewer chips and rare earth metals, require less power generation and distribution, require fewer people to sink huge amounts of money into car ownership, free up cities for more pedestrian and bike traffic, provide easier access to jobs and education for poor rural areas, and have 30,000 fewer fatalies in the US every year.
But instead let's just buy more cars and build more nuke plants to power them and expand the grid because I want my own zoom-zoom machine!
If there's excess demand at night, you increase the price at night. If there's excess supply in the morning/afternoon, you lower the price. It's not complicated, and the problem fixes itself. You don't need AI to simulate what groups of people making rational, independent decisions do themselves. That's how you get cars that won't charge because "AI says so", similar to how all of these dogshit smart thermostats can be completely shut off from heating if "AI says so".
The car needs to charge for 4 hours overnight (say, before 7am). It's currently 9pm and the price is currently 7c/kwh, should it charge or not?
That question is obviously underspecified, you can only answer it by knowing whether or not the price will be below 7c/kwh for 4 of the remaining hours in the night. You answer the question with a predictive model of the price, and you build that predictive model with "AI" because that's how we build all our best predicitve models.
AI doesn't get to say "you can't charge", you get to say "and I'll delegate the question of which 4 hours to charge during to the AI".
> similar to how all of these dogshit smart thermostats can be completely shut off from heating if "AI says so".
I assume you're referring to the instance where texas power companies remotely increased the temperature on peoples thermostats? That's not AI, or even remotely related to AI, that's humans controlling other peoples stuff without permission. That risk exists whether or not you use machine learning models to predict electricity prices.
You don't get what I'm saying. I'm saying market dynamics (ie, setting the price lower when the grid needs less power) plus the inevitable AI that will game it to everyones advantage will solve this problem automatically.
There is no reason to worry about this. This is trivial AI.
Some other people have mentioned that you just need to vary the price, but the price is set by bids from providers. Code that can learn demand patterns and integrate weather forecasts will let Tesla bid lower and so earn more money in the market while also lowering energy costs for everyone.
This is not simple. The batteries in cars can be used to help load-balance but they cannot offer grid-scale storage.
The following is back-of-napkin figures but there are close enough to make the point.
Take a country the size of the UK. It currently uses 1600 TWh a year. Once fully-electric it should need around 1100 TWh a year, so 3 TWh a day.
The UK, despite being a windy place, still has weeks without wind once or twice a year. We had a week without wind power in the middle of August this year and had to generate 60% of our power using gas. A windless week with a frost snap is something you often see in January and February. A cold week, with everyone using electric heating (when solar power does basically nothing) is why the UK might need TWh of stored energy to be secure without fossil fuels.
7 days at 3 TWh is 20 TWh.
A big home Tesla Powerwall can store 14kWh and if run at full power it will be empty in 4 hrs. You'd need over a billion to store 20TWh.
In the UK an average home currently uses around 10kW of electricity a day, but also has a car, a cooker and central heating, all using fossil fuels. Add those in and were looking at 40-50kWh: 20kWh for the heating, 10kWh for the cooking and another 10kWh for the cars.
There are savings to be made of course, the electric versions of all of those items are way more efficient. There's insulation; there's heat pumps; there's electric cars.
The average UK car sits idle for 23 hours of the day. An average-ish car is around 100kW. Even if that hour is slow and often stationary, it's not unreasonable to expect it to be another 10kWh. And the average UK home has more than one car.
A mid-range electric car has a 50kWh battery, so has a bit more beef than a Tesla Powerwall battery. If they are being used for 1 hour a day they are probably going to need a top-up of around, say, 10kW. So let's say they have 40 kWh to spare.
20 TWh / 40 kWh = 500 million cars.
There are only 33 million cars in the UK.
You can, of course, quibble with these figures. There's subtleties everywhere here, but the orders of magnitude are plain. We need to be able to store renewable energy—desperately, and in enormous amounts. Car batteries will help—no doubt—but more in load-balancing and smoothing rather than long-term storage. We need something like grid-scale hydrogen storage to solve this.
See here for 1100 TWh figure. This document has loads of other really interesting details too:
Shouldn't it be an opportunity to match energy generation to how it's consumed? No industry survives long by offering a worse product to consumers than what they had before
If consumption has a good reason to be as it is maybe. The whole reason we have lower night rates and such was due to how it was generated in the past though. Why would we continue that if it no longer makes sense?
It's something that should be looked at on the whole and tradeoffs considered.
It's not just about the rate. Charging at night happens because the car is conveniently parked at home doing nothing and EV owners want a car ready to go in the morning. Charging at EV station during the day is time consuming and is often expensive. I'm sure that the lucky few that can charge at work already do so...
It's almost as if the logical conclusion is to invest in convenient workplace charging infrastructure so charging is simple when the car is conveniently parked at work doing nothing and the owner wants a car ready to go home in the evening...
> “We encourage policymakers to consider utility rates that encourage day charging and incentivize investment in charging infrastructure to shift drivers from home to work for charging,” said the study’s co-senior author, Ram Rajagopal
Most EVs charging at home are plugged in from say 6pm to 7am. It would be most convenient to charge immediately but the electric rates (in california at least) are highest at 6pm and lowest at 7am.
Not as many as should. The state can probably incentivize creating some more, and job seekers can prioritize it as well. Not to mention workers just asking their employers to do it.
> “We encourage policymakers to consider utility rates that encourage day charging and incentivize investment in charging infrastructure to shift drivers from home to work for charging,” said the study’s co-senior author, Ram Rajagopal
The term "charging station" is hinting at a too big infrastructure. All you need is a power outlet per car. If the car parks for 8 to 9 hours, you don't need a huge amount of power to recharge it.
You need more than just a power outlet per car, with regular 120vac, you pretty much need a breaker and circuit per car, because you shouldn't put two of those on a single circuit, since they'll usually pull up to the 15A rating of the plug, and code restricts you from using more than 20A breaker on a circuit with 15A plugs, so you'll pop the breaker if you've got two 15A loads and they don't communicate to share. It probably makes more sense to get a two or maybe four car charging station per breaker and circuit, and set it for the appropriate amps on the circuit, it can share that appropriately amongst the cars plugged in.
I works out to about 12.5 amps for a normal 15 amp plug. You can't draw the full rated current continuously.
With an MWBC circuit you can however supply two different 15 amp plugs with a single cable 14/3 cable fed off a 15 amp duplex breaker. So it slightly reduces the amount of copper you need to run.
Our main campus has parking for roughly 450 cars. We just added EV charging; two entire parking slots. There's no way our company would outfit every spot with charging in any reasonable future. We already have roughly 35 EVs on the lot.
When a car is parked for 8 hours, even the slowest 3kW charger will charge 70-90 miles of range.
Low-power AC "chargers" are dumb devices, basically just wire. They don't require active cooling, and all of the expensive hardware is in the car. They could be installed on every single parking spot.
Our lot isn't closed, and it's adjacent to a mall. So the only way we'd electrify each spot is with pay outlets (which is what the current 2 are). Otherwise we'd have people leeching off of the company.
You're overthinking this. The solution can be as trivial as putting a padlock on the power outlet. More practically, there are dispensers that read RFID cards, so employee badges can be used to grant access. It can be a raspberry-pi level tech, not a full-blown payment terminal.
This is a well-solved problem. My previous employer had all the chargers on the chargepoint network but only available to accounts which verified as employees.
>We're doing it wrong, according to a new Stanford study
Wrong according to what metric? Cost? Raw efficiency? A lot of people are more than willing to give up efficiency so that they don't have to actually worry about finding a station during the day. To say that something is just outright "wrong" based on their personal preference of priorities comes off as unhelpful to me.
The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available, and people will use it. You don't need any complex "AI" like people in this thread are saying, you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself. Too much energy being used at night - price increases. It's not complicated, and it's what we're doing already. People don't need a Stanford study to convince them to get their energy for cheaper.
Yeah it is. I hate having to have a process in my brain thinking about optimizing everything. So I bought solar panels and batteries. Now I no longer care. The grid can keep getting more expensive and less reliable without causing me grief.
Hawaiian islands have struggled with this for a decade. Rich people put up solar cells with usage offsets and get grid scale reliability on the backs of those who can't put up solar cells due to being poor or living in an apartment.
For the small amount I consume, tiny potential savings are not worth the mental hassles. I switched a residence to flat rate to avoid these mental games.
My house uses around 3-4MW/mo. I hyper optimized when I had true spot pricing before Griddy energy was disbanded by the state. My bill was extremely low compared to what I pay now.
What? My house used 4 MWh a year in 2020, with two people working from home and two kids. Of these about half (IIRC) is self-produced solar. Stove and heating are gas and I do not have a tumble dryer, but does that justify a 10x difference??
My home uses over 2MWh/mo over the summer, I think our peak bill this year was ~3200kWh.
Average highs these last few months has been around 100F or so and very sunny, with at least one month >100F for the high every day. Its finally "cooling off" around here, with our highs being in the upper 90s most days. Cooling >2000sqft of space, even with some decent insulation and keeping the AC to 78F in the day, uses a lot of energy. It uses ~30A @ 240V, so ~7.2kW. If it had to run 12 hours in a day, that's 86.4kWh in just a single day. Doing that for a month straight, that's 2,592kWh.
I was going to write up the math on how much my pool pump uses, but honestly it kind of turned into peanuts compared to the amount our AC usage is. The pump is 3/4HP. Running ~600W on the schedule of 8 hours a day + 12 hour once a week shock it really only worked out to 172.8kWh/mo of usage. Still though, that's 52% of your entire usage for just my pool.
Last year we probably used ~3,000kWh charging the EV. That's on average 250kWh/mo.
There's only a narrow band of land then where we would be able to live without expending large amounts of energy to stay warm or cool.
Colder places use just as much if not more energy in wintertime. They just don't often use it as kWh from their electricity provider so they don't normally compare it this way. Instead of electricity they burn natural gas or propane or fuel oil or even wood pellets to heat their homes. Many people in this chat which talk about having pretty low energy usage then acknowledge they heat with gas.
For many, changing to heat pumps would drastically increase their electric bills in the winter offsetting their gas bills. Just look at my comparison of energy usage of my heat pump cooling my home compared to the energy usage of other big usage areas. It's not even close.
Running a heat pump for 12 hours to keep the house warm would be a similar amount of energy usage. It's the same tech. Raising the inside temperature from 0F to 70F (70F degrees of difference) takes more energy than cooling from 100F to 70F (30F of difference). So a place that spends half the year around 100F but then is close to comfortable inside for the other half requires less energy than a place that gets down to 0F half the year and then is close to comfortable the other.
My gas usage is 1400 m3/year, corresponding to roughly 15 MWh/year. A condensing boiler would lower it to at most 10 MWh, even less for a heat pump. Add in the electricity, and that would still be roughly 1 MWh/month or a third of what the user above mentions.
It's rather hard to compare unless we know the spaces involved. My energy usage was significantly less when I was on the ground floor of a large apartment complex, using maybe 500kWh/mo at the highest. But I had less than half the space I do now, no private yard, no private garage. I couldn't install amateur radio antennas however I wish. I couldn't make changes to the unit however I wish. My family has grown and I now work from home significantly more than before.
I don't need to use as much energy as I do, I could go back to living in a much smaller space and not have all the private spaces and rights I have now. But I'd rather not raise a family in <900sqft when I can afford not to and I get a lot of enjoyment of the private spaces I have.
Sure, we could get everyone to use <500kWh/mo, even if we don't have to ask everyone to move to the narrow space that's close to room temperature year round. But that would mean massive changes in a lot of lifestyles, limiting a lot of people to far less space and property rights than they've been used to.
It's 90-100F from 9AM to 9PM (and sometimes longer than that) with 100% humidity 3600sqft mutli story house. 2 adults, 2 kids at home. 2 electric vehicles.
What are are you using that much power for? I can’t think of much that uses that much per that you can shift to time of day pricing, perhaps pottery kilns?
Even 2MWh per month is enough to drive 2 EV’s around 50,000 miles per year each. If you’re very flexible with time of day rooftop solar could probably save you quite a bit.
Except constantly running can’t benefit from time of day pricing. Essentially it needs to be some 15kWh load that only needs to run for 6 hours per day.
Your average constant electrical load is 4.2-5.5 kW? That seems excessive, are you running crypto miners or a small manufacturing operation/welding shop out of your home or something?
Poor people don't use/waste electricity in large volumes because they are poor and don't have money to waste.
Rich people can waste enormous amounts of electricity and not be financially affected. It benefits rich people to schedule running the two clothes washers and two clothes driers at off-peak rates. Poor people don't have energy fat like this to cut.
If poor people don't have much to timeshift then it doesn't much benefit them. A single parent working 1.5 jobs and then juggling laundry hours may not be useful for that family nor for society. Maybe the first nnn kilowatt hours each month should be flat rate - like minimum wage sets a floor likewise exempt some small base of electricity usage from the pricing games.
it is, but that's the part that technology can actually help us with. all the internet-connected smart home stuff that companies have been trying to sell us is a bit silly when electricity is sold at a flat rate, but if my car charger, my clothes dryer, or my or my dishwasher could sit idle until electricity prices drop into the cheap zone and then turn themselves on, that internet connection becomes useful.
an attitude of "i don't want to deal with the stress of thinking about the electricity i use" is absolutely the sort of luxury that you should pay extra for, the people willing to schedule their power usage to reduce peak demand should be paying less than the people who aren't willing to do that.
this just makes me think of the situation that resulted in Global TCP Synchronization flapping problem; when everyone is operating on the same premise without some random delay or other way to 'shard' the load it seems like a Slashdot effect is bound to happen.
You are comparing a complex, out of band, auction-based organization system with a simple, no added overhead, parameter-guessing system. Those don't fail on the same ways.
Yep that could certainly work if appliances and cars have an option to say "have my dishwasher finish or car charged by 9am tomorrow" and it knows how long a cycle takes and picks the best time.
For anything real time it wont work - here in Australia we had a discount for a box that you connect to your air conditioner which would throttle back its use during peak, and a lot of people ditched it due to impact on their comfort.
It's probably not "taking from those who consume in off-peak." The utility knows when people who use flat-rate power use it, so they can bake that into the flat rate. But if it makes consumers feel better about the price...
Power companies can offer more than one pricing formula.
People who want to minimize their power bill can choose to pick the time of use pricing and shift some of their consumption off peak. Others can choose to pay more for the convenience of not having to worry about all that stuff. How much more, that can be determined by market forces.
Ontario Canada did a mass $2b implementation of smart meters for time of day pricing.
Unfortunately most people don’t care (or the technology to take advantage of it just isn’t there), and demand shifted less than 1% over several years.
But it’s hard to find this info, because it doesn’t fit the (expensive to implement) narrative of “let them pay market price and people will respond to incentives”.
> The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario's 2015-16 Energy Conservation Progress Report found "a 0.7 per cent reduction in peak demand among residential customers" attributed to time-of-use pricing over a four-year period.
I mean, people keep their foot on the gas when the light ahead is red and sometimes even speed up to get ahead of you only to slam on their brakes.
they can afford not to care. this doesn't mean it's not a good solution.
it's no surprise the general population in one of the richest regions on Earth doesn't immediately change their consumption habits when a small fraction of their monthly bill gets variable
It’s not a good solution when you spend a ton of money to force people to pay the averaged out market prices per time segment and they still don’t care.
It’s like making me spend $$$ to measure and charge me for how much co2 I exhale.
It’s technically correct: that co2 does contribute to global warming.
But it’s going to cost more to meter it than I could possibly save in conservation through this newfound incentive.
for example bandwidth used to be 95th percentile priced, but Netflix quickly run into problems because its peers did not want to upgrade linecards, switches, etc. (and as some of those peers were also in the media disturbution business they explicitly wanted to keep those ports maxed out)
the point is that if the network provides a close to constant capacity, then of course it makes no sense to try to price on that.
but with more and more variable supply it seems prudent to prepare the demand side too.
in Norway currently electricity prices fluctuate like crazy, and the supplier sends an email each day about the prices for the next day (though I'm not sure how guaranteed those are, of course the current price is also online)
The pricing model isn't appropriate to make people care.
What they could do instead of time-of-use pricing is a sliding multiplier that multiplies your total bill based on the ratio of on-peak to off-peak use. Make the multiplier worse based on what the total usage is.
I wouldn't judge this framework on a few year time horizon, but the time horizon to migrate to 100% EV fleet for Ontario.
The problem with 100% EV fleet a regular grid will be overloaded and customer's will not be incentivized to care.
This framework future proofs the Ontario grid from such a "wall".
Now that the framework exists in Ontario, prices at certain times in the day can grow 10x, 100x, 1000x where appropriate and people will care and will change their behaviors.
If time of use had even a 10x premium, people in Ontario would simply switch to simple tiered pricing which is available as an alternative to time of use pricing. Each Ontario electricity company is required to show you which would be cheaper for you and allow you to switch to the cheaper tariff to obtain cost savings.
Got it, so then Ontario has good hardware and no incentives. Everywhere else has no hardware and no incentives. Still one step better for Ontario.
If/When the Ontario grid starts to feel the pressure of EVs, it is a choice between (No Electricity + Tiered Pricing) XOR (Electricity + 10x premium Time of Use Pricing).
I have a feeling everyone will complain but understand that the only option was to keep the grid running.
The price is the same at all these times, unless someone acts to make it different. The whole discussion is about how to adjust energy price to incentivize the health of the grid (which is a shared resource individual market actors don't care about).
A very small amount of people really care about "grid impact" enough to change their behavior. They do care about "I can make my electricity cheaper" or "My electricity bill went up".
That seems fairly reasonable to me? Most people are just trying to get by. They have bigger problems on their plate like getting paid so they can pay their bills on time, and keep a roof over their head. Adding additional stuff on top of that is a cognitive load that most people would rightfully push back against, because they don't have the spare capacity.
I think this is a big part of why, to-date, the environmental movement is comprised of the relatively wealthy, and what I would characterize as "true believers" who don't have much, but are okay with that, and okay with living their lives in a way that minimizes their impact. The first group have the spare capacity to do something about their impact, and the second group take it on as a mandate that often (but not always) affects their ability to function in broader society (or: how do you hold down a decent job if you ride a pushbike everywhere?).
My personal belief is that any successful environmental movement needs to go hand-in-hand with a more equitable distribution of wealth in society, and focus on quality-of-life, so that the people in the middle have the spare capacity to give a shit. Otherwise, you're going to bump into the ugly reality of people's day-to-day, and your movement will be perceived as rich people -- who make up the bulk of consumption to begin with -- telling everybody else how to live their lives. Which is exactly what's happened. I don't think it's an accident that the countries farthest along the path to decarbonization also have some of the best income equality, and quality-of-life on the planet.
This is precisely what the linked article says. From the section "Charging Incentives":
“And it’s not just California and Western states. All states may need to rethink electricity pricing structures as their EV charging needs increase and their grid changes,” added Powell, who recently took a postdoctoral research position at ETH Zurich.
The article also includes other interesting and more nuanced policy details than just "change pricing structure", such as:
Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. [...]
So yes, there are weird red herrings in this thread from people who want a technology first and a solution second (or never) and/or who don't understand design of incentive structures. But this work doesn't appear suffer from those problems.
> Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. [...]
Well, I don't know what to say aside from we would need a lot of work to have it 'both ways'.
By that I mean, if we expect everyone to charge their cars during the day, especially 'peak hours' in a given industrial area, there's a chance that the line and/or station capacity would have to be increased. A large part of the allure of 'night charging' is that it avoids requiring major grid upgrades, and also possibly opens up better uses around certain energy sources quirks. Nuclear, water power, geothermal, all three to some extent have 'consistent load' properties where either it takes time to adjust power output, or power output can be consistent both day and night with minimal incremental cost, vs the need to install additional capacity for extra day load.
> This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs.
> So yes, there are weird red herrings in this thread from people who want a technology first and a solution second (or never) and/or who don't understand design of incentive structures.
Speaking of incentive structures, one of my former employers installed EV chargers in all of the bottom floors of our parking garage while explicitly not allowing non-EVs to park in those spaces. I was left parking my hybrid on the roof in a desert climate where my car would continually get covered with pollen.
Naturally, I did what they were trying to incentivize: I looked at EVs. I quickly discovered that the cheaper models have limited usecases; for instance, the road trips I go on would now be out of the picture. The more expensive ones are much more functional but come at a high price that I've never personally spent on a car.
There's also the fact that I didn't have anywhere to charge it except public spaces where I'd have to awkwardly wait for hours because I lived in an apartment. In order to get a 240v plug in my garage I would need to pay for it myself.
These policies, as they invade the workforce, need to be looked at from a lens that doesn't end up doing harm in the end.
> Speaking of incentive structures, one of my former employers installed EV chargers in all of the bottom floors of our parking garage while explicitly not allowing non-EVs to park in those spaces.
Sounds like it worked out great for them — people who could afford living in single detached houses (generally the richer ones, and therefore generally the management) now get reserved parking out of the pollen. The people who are inconvenienced (i.e. you) weren't the people involved in the decision anyway.
Buy a small EV for everyday trips and rent another car for road trips. Nobody in our car culture, where people drive F150s just in case they need them; nobody is going to do that, but environmentally it'd be much preferable to everybody getting a big Tesla weighing several tons.
Financially it works out for a couple of road trips a year, not so much if you're doing it a couple of times a month.
Seems that commercial power costs less than residential. Sometimes the difference is negligible but other times it's significant. I know residential lines cost much more to maintain because of the distances but that doesn't apply to residential apartments buildings in cities and I believe there's a seperate charge for that.
I rent an office very near my house. The PG&E rate for peak time at the office is over 20c cheaper than at my house. Not very fair to residental usage.
>> you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself
We're talking about electric vehicles here. There has already been massive interference in the market forces through both push and pull mechanisms - push would be things like outlawing internal combustion engines going forward, pull would be huge subsidies for electric vehicles.
It's pretty late in the game to say, "Hey! let's just use natural market forces! Problem solved!"
Natural market forces would be a tax on carbon equal to the cost of removing it from the atmosphere when it is burned and then let people buy whatever kind of car they want and can afford. There is no popular support whatsoever on either left or right for those kind of natural market forces.
I think you're conflating two separate markets; there can be as many subsidies or taxes added to buying an EV as you want, but the "what time do I charge my car" problem is an electricity market problem, not a car market problem.
For all the hype, that is less true than it appears. A lot of EV owners pay annual fees and also sales taxes on power. On top of that, the most popular EVs in the US aren't subsidized in every state.
My comment is US-centric, but in the US the adoption isn't really regulatory driven. The regulations are following reality while the politicians try to position themselves as "leaders".
That’s how we do it in Denmark. We have hourly prices on electricity, so for me it’s cheaper to start the dishwasher outside peak hours. In some areas they are experimenting with car chargers hooked up to this electricity price info, so it charges when it’s cheap.
No it won't. An phone has around 5 watt hours. So: 5 watt hours / day * 150 million people * 365 days = 273GWh / year / 4,116 billion kilowatthours / year = 0.006651% of electrical usage.
Yah, it's virtue signaling, not anything real. And keep in mind 0.006651% is total electrical usage - this time shifting might save 10%, so actual savings are even less than that.
There are over a billion iPhones in use worldwide. This technology is also being brought to MacBooks (100 million+), Watches (100 million+), and iPads (150 million+).
Your fundamental numbers are staggeringly inaccurate.
And, most crucially, representing it as a whole of the electric usage instead of peak hours intentionally misses the point of reducing peak hour usage. It's called "peak hour" for a reason.
They're using US numbers both for iPhone count (which they overestimate by ~40 million) and total electricity. That should bias their estimate against their point, as the US is particularly consumerist. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would think that measuring as a fraction of total usage would also bias their result upwards- x/avg(y) > x/max(y).
And the total worldwide use of electricity is 22,848 TWh/year, (according to the IEA [0]). So that would be 5Wh/day * 1 billion phones * 366 days = 1,830 TWh = 0.0008% of world electricity consumption.
Getting data about peak hour usage is much harder, but I would wager it's at most as much of that. So yes, completely insignificant at a large scale.
If anything, the biggest impact will come to individual consumers, if and when electricity prices start varying more widely across times of day.
Do you have some data? Or some reason to believe that iPhones are a much larger part of peak hour consumption than they are of overall electricity consumption?
Based on the data we do have, there doesn't seem to be any reason to care about iPhone charging - so, if you don't come up with some data or rationale for why we should, then I still feel it's justified to say that this change has little chance of helping the world in all but the most minor of ways.
Recent price rises due to gas in Europe have exposed more people to the idea that the market price is set at the margin.
If 1W of gas fired power needs to be brought online in the middle of the night to charge your phone, then all the wind power gets the same price. That's why peaks have always been the most economical place to target investments.
It would be interesting to compare the charge rate of a Tesla Powerall * the number of them deployed. I can see iPhones alone winning that depending on some assumptions you make.
You'd then probably be able to find stats on what Tesla gets paid for providing that service to get some idea of scale.
Phones are rarely plugged in unless the battery is dead.
This strategy actually works with laptops though. I know that one company set up all their laptops to stop drawing power from mains and run from the battery at peak hours, even though it was still plugged in. This was for cost savings and not for environmental ones, but the same strategy would work.
"virtue signaling" is doing something useless in order to make yourself look good to a particular group.
Could it be that this isn't "virtue signaling", but rather people overestimating the impact of the action? In other words, an honest (if mistaken) attempt at doing a good thing rather than just wanting to be perceived as doing a good thing?
I think you didn't read @JohnFen carefully enough.
If the reason I am doing something is that I believe it will create results independent of being seen to have done it, I am not virtue signalling. Which is what @JohnFen said.
Conversely, if the reason I am doing something is because of the signalling value I believe will be attached to the way others see my actions, I am virtue signalling. Which is what you said.
I think the OP just overestimated how much electricity charging their phone actually uses, and not intentionally trying to claim they're being useful by saving 1 cent of electricity.
Very short sighted to think it's about "your" individual power consumption.
There are over a billion iPhones in use today. Assuming 10% of them get charged during peak times, each one shaving a watt off of its peak is 100000 kilowatts of load reduced from the energy grid.
Considering the number is probably a lot higher, and the load reduction a lot greater, my estimate is probably pretty conservative. And then further consider that this is being rolled out to iPads, Macbooks, and Apple Watches as well. It starts to add up!
It's still a rounding error, 100MW is 0.003% of the average global electricity generation. It's probably still worthwhile doing, especially if sets a trend for other categories of devices.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=100+megawatt%2F%2828500...
Charging your phone from flat will cost you about 90 yards in range. At the most expensive electricity on the planet of about 70c per kWh it will cost you about 1c.
Engine > alternator > rectifier > wireless charger > battery isn’t particularly efficient so you could be looking at closer to 2c/charge depending on setup and gas prices. Still trivial compared to an iPhone.
This is different to optimized battery charging. As of iOS 16 (in an as yet unreleased point version) Apple plans to add support for clean energy charging, which will charge your iPhone when the grid has a cleaner mix of energy. I think this is US only to begin with.
my 2014 BMW i3 could be set to start charging when electricity was cheap (defined by me onscreen). it was a little buggy, as far as systems go, but it was the original model year (for north america, i think 2013 in europe).
A lot of newer charging stations in the US also have this built in, as well. You can hook them up to the internet, or do it manually. How mine works is pretty clever: you plug it in, and it asks you if you'd like to go to 100% now or wait until charging is cheaper. If you don't reply, it will fast charge your car to about 40%, and then wait.
that's EXACTLY the oversight in the 2013-2014 onboard firmware :
even though i didn't need a full charge at 8am, the car would realize it couldn't get to (the not important) full charge by 8am, which was the previous day time of departure, and would start charging while electricity was still expensive, because it decided maximal charge at previous day departure time was more important than cheap electricity.
For me, it's $0.67/kWh in peak hours, and $0.12 during super off peak (12am to 4am). I will, obviously, continue to charge at night. All electric cars, that I'm aware of, and most charges, have scheduling built in.
Right, and all it will take is "major investments and changes in charging habits." Note those major investments are seldom accounted for when people talk about solar cost.
Speaking of which, California is 17% solar, 8% wind, and 7% hydro[1], and their retail electricity costs 19.9 cents/kWh.[2]
South Carolina is 58% nuclear, 0.1% solar, no wind, and 2% hydro,[3] and their retail electricity costs 12.9 cents/kWh.[2]
It's almost like solar is super cheap on the margins, but it's easier to make a cheap grid with lots of nuclear than lots of solar....nah, that can't be it.
All the nuclear plants in S.C. are old. The most recently completed one came online in 1986. Power from old depreciated plant can indeed be cheap (although sometimes not cheap enough; TMI 1 was cash flow negative the last six years it was in operation). Trying to REPLACE those plants, or build new ones to provide additional power, is another matter entirely. Look at the sad experience at V. C. Summer, also in S.C.
A similar story is playing out in France, with Flamanville 3.
Where's the part where you have to install enough batteries to charge most electric cars at night? That was your scenario.
Good choice of states, though: I grew up in SC and live in California. California uses time-of-day rates to nudge people away from charging during the early evening peak.
> The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available, and people will use it. You don't need any complex "AI" like people in this thread are saying, you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself. Too much energy being used at night - price increases. It's not complicated, and it's what we're doing already. People don't need a Stanford study to convince them to get their energy for cheaper.
This is exactly what they were doing in Texas right up until the moment the Blizzard hit last year.
Suddenly electricity became unavailable (because you know, giant blizzard), and consequently it was something like $6000 a kw/hr[1] for some users
Your market force solution for electricity pricing almost bankrupted me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Set thresholds on your meter that notifies you when price rises to high and turns it off automatically? Maybe some household batteries or a small generator?
I had a related epiphany regarding car traffic today. When thinking about how autonomous cars could increase efficiency of taking off from stop lights by doing it syncronously, I realised that to put it bluntly, nobody would actually give a shit. We drive cars for personal autonomy and a level of freedom and protection from the car centric cities we build. Making that efficient is nice, but no one is willing to sacrifice the core point of driving for the various minor efficiencies.
It was an epiphany I had in relation to my staunch pro-bike/public transport internal discourse. It occurred to me that we need to focus on the main motivations for driving and public transport in order to make them both better. Road networks should focus on freedom and personal autonomy, and public transport should focus on throughput efficiency. Making PT better at throughput by expanding the networks would give people more freedom on the road network too by reducing traffic.
Glad you were able to make the connection. Too many folks passionate on reforming transport focus primarily on the moral/technical problem/solution Vs the actual "job to be done" for people of owning a personal car.
Where I live, I don't own a car largely because the "jobs" for which having access to a car is critical is handled by a reliable, efficient and safe cab/taxi on demand system (you need to get somewhere quickly, carry a lot of stuff, take your family/friends to A&E at night etc). So then I can rely on the very good Public Transit system for the bulk of my regular commute needs confident that I can get a cab when I need to.
If the reliable cab/taxi on demand didn't exist (which was indeed the situation before Uber and it's ilk), I would buy a car irrespective of how good the public transport system was (it was good even then) and irrespective of taxation dis-incentives. Once you own a car, for many use cases it becomes a lot more convenient and has low incremental cost to just drive.
As you may note, these "jobs to be done" vary by geography, lifestage and income - so while general principles can be drawn up, they need to be locally customized.
> Make electricity cheaper when it's more available, and people will use it.
It’s _not_ like that in the states? In Denmark people are sharing spreadsheet that can tell you when to run the washing machine to save on electricity since the energy crisis following Russias invasion of Ukraine has pushed prices enough that these optimizations become valuable to regular consumers.
EDIT: to answer the question: yes, these apps use something called "Nord Pool" which publishes hourly electricity prices (in Swedish): https://elavtal24.com/blogg/tibber-greenely/
All the usual communist elements (Jimmy Carter, California) have been slowly making progress on introducing it since the 1970s, but mysteriously a lot of lies sprung up about how it would harm the poor. And the USA is really caring about the poor not using as much fossil fuels as they possibly can so it got kind of squashed.
I would be curious about a study done for the Texas market.
From what I understand, you'd definitely want to charge at night due to the vast amounts of wind power available and the otherwise low demand.
Even better would be to plug the car in at all times when parked either at work or home and it just charges when the rate is cheapest. You don't need to charge every day to refill that 20 or 30 miles.
I guess the issue with this report is that it is specific to the unique mix of energy that the (west of the) USA has compared to other areas/countries. Countries with a lot of nuclear see that energy wasted at night because you can't just dial down the level very quickly, in that sense, in most of Nothern Europe this would be desirable.
In countries that have extreme levels of solar, clearly this only works during the day and perhaps leaves the night being covered by fossil fuel plants instead where they are happy to use less/dial it down.
The massive missing piece, at least in the UK, is a genuine Smart Grid that can drive usage to meet supply. I have precisely zero appliances in my house that can make any use of cheap electricity and even worse, if I want a dual-tariff to get cheaper overnight electric, I get punished for it costwise.
> I have precisely zero appliances in my house that can make any use of cheap electricity and even worse, if I want a dual-tariff to get cheaper overnight electric, I get punished for it costwise
No dishwasher or washing machine? I have a hog water tank with an immersion switch on it, I would love to heat that with cheap electricity overnight. I agree on the stupidity of punishing people for taking on the cheaper night tariffs - we should be goint for as much carrot as we can over stick!
The other aspect of this is price and consumption. I work from home with a workstation PC and an electric over that we use maybe every other day. Meanwhile my annual electricity bill is 1/4 of what my annual heating (gas) is, and of that, hot water is only 1/4 of that. Well over half of my annual bill and energy consumption is just heating my house during winter.
The real goal is to get storage heat sources heated by renewable sources for those of us in the UK.
>Even better would be to plug the car in at all times when parked either at work or home and it just charges when the rate is cheapest.
99% of people have a fixed rate 24/7/365. I live in NYC and I'm not even sure if it's possible for me to pay time of use rates. The time of day that electricity is cheapest is... all the time.
I sincerely doubt there is any public or political will to change this engrained billing method. People will not willingly change their habits, and any politician proposing reducing quality of life will just get thrown out
In Texas right now you can get two meters to your home. One meter you use a fixed rate plan and the other meter you use a "wholesale" plus fee type plan, infamous example being Griddy. When the rate is nearly free you enable the outlet that charges your car.
Of course hiring an electrician and all of that would probably have a long payback period.
That's one of those things that works great if you use a huge amount of power.
The fixed rate cost of charging for my commute would probably be less than the connection fee for the 2nd meter. In that scenario it wouldn't pay off it all (and of course you wouldn't bother doing it).
Many electricity co-ops and providers in Texas offer a choice of plans, one of which is higher rates during daytime but free electricity during nights and weekends. But that allowance doesn't kick in until later in the night, so a programmable clock on the charger would be a killer feature for electric car sellers.
I believe most electric cars already support charging on a timer. I have a ChargePoint charger that does the same thing on the charger side. The app even has a choice of all the electricity providers and plans to choose it so I don't have to look it up manually.
Hamburg the city is currently funding a fairly interesting research project. The problem here is that solar + wind at times overproduces, and we have no grid scale energy storage to keep that power. So, a short-term idea is to equip most larger garages with EV chargers and to include a central control unit for these chargers. This way, the grid can bring the EVs to 40% - 60% charge slowly during off-hours, or dump as much power into the EVs as possible if the alternative was to shut down solar plants or wind turbines.
And additionally, centralizing the power usage simplifies transmission issues for now. It's much easier to have a few big cables to a few big buildings, than having every single home pulling a lot of power all of a sudden.
This is nonsensical. You are taking away extremely useful technologies from people who can afford a parking space next to a power outlet, all because it's not fair to people who don't have that.
There are people who suggest banning private schools so that the wealthy and powerful will be incentivized to improve public schooling. GP seems to apply the same logic to EV charging.
Which is a bad idea, considering public school admissions are generally district based, so only only rich districts, the ones with already generally better schools, would (maybe) improve. This fixes nothing.
> Current time-of-use rates encourage consumers to switch electricity use to nighttime whenever possible, like running the dishwasher and charging EVs. This rate structure reflects the time before significant solar and wind power supplies when demand threatened to exceed supply during the day, especially late afternoons in the summer.
So, if you have a grid that doesn't heavily rely on solar then charging at night makes sense.
> Today, California has excess electricity during late mornings and early afternoons, thanks mainly to its solar capacity. If most EVs were to charge during these times, then the cheap power would be used instead of wasted.
How are people going to charge their cars during commutes?
> > Today, California has excess electricity during late mornings and early afternoons, thanks mainly to its solar capacity. If most EVs were to charge during these times, then the cheap power would be used instead of wasted.
> How are people going to charge their cars during commutes?
Come on, you're saying most commutes are "late morning and early afternoon"? I too would like a job where my commute in is at 11 and my commute home is at 2.
Rather than spreading EV FUD, can we instead discuss what the article is actually talking about, like installing charging infrastructure in daytime parking lots so we can take better advantage of the cheap, plentiful, and often curtailed solar energy?
We should install solar panels over those lots at the same time. It covers some of the capacity need, cools the lot and the cars, and is an efficient use of space.
My post wasn't not about criticizing EVs. My post was about criticizing the energy grid. I think "slow" charging over night is the best way to use EVs and an energy grid that cannot accommodate that (because of a predominance of PV) should be criticized.
Most people wouldn't be commuting then, but this could be an argument for employers to supply infrastructure to facilitate charging during the day while at work.
Late morning and early afternoon.
So, basically, people would charge their cars where they park them during the day while they work, not at home while they sleep.
"Electric vehicles will contribute to emissions reductions in the United States, but their charging may challenge electricity grid operations. We present a data-driven, realistic model of charging demand that captures the diverse charging behaviours of future adopters in the US Western Interconnection. We study charging control and infrastructure build-out as critical factors shaping charging load and evaluate grid impact under rapid electric vehicle adoption with a detailed economic dispatch model of 2035 generation."
The opening lines of the actual study paper. Wanted to put that out into the mix before this turns into another Soleus Pushup debacle.
That said, I think University of Houston actually did a better job with their press release than Stanford did, both in clarity of explanation and in the quality of presentation. I'd like to hear some thoughts for/against though.
My understanding was that it helps countries with nuclear powered base electrical load to use that power at night, when there isn't a lot of demand.
With further development, a key side benefit is that the grid can then tap into about 5% of your cars battery storage during the day when demand is higher (if you allow it).
The same issue applies to almost every country's baseload generation infrastructure, with a small exception of hydro (that has some small degree of dispatchability), it is not exclusive to nuclear power generation. Traditional thermo-electric plants also can't ramp up and down their power levels instantaneously.
This is very interesting and perfectly logical. I wrote a fairly recent report looking at a very similar question, and reached the opposite conclusion: night time charging is far better for the grid. That study however focuses on Sweden, where solar power only marginally impacts day-time supply.
If the western US has a surplus in mornings and afternoons, you guys really should invest in dynamic charging using electrified roads (commonly referred to as wireless inductive charging in California, but there are conductive solutions as well).
Inductive charging seems like a horrible solution as it must surely be extremely inefficient? Also, if dynamic charging refers to charging while in motion, why would that be a good solution? It seems way more complicated and inefficient than charging while stationary, and personally owned cars are stationary more than 90% of the time.
Surprisingly, transmission efficiency (grid to motor) does not appear to be lower with inductive methods than conductive. Numbers above 90% should be expected. A bit lower for the dynamic (in-motion) solutions, but not so much that it’s a deal breaker. There seem to be much larger savings/costs elsewhere in the system that make transmission efficiency of less importance.
Cars that are stationary most of the time are a pretty good reason to put charging infrastructure on the only land they actually share - the roads.
From what I have heard, the transmission efficiency of the dynamic inductive solution is quite sensitive to alignment and they still have some R&D left to do there.
Remember, when you charge your cell phone, you charge at ~15W (or less), so 80% efficiency is something like 3W of power loss. You can dissipate that pretty easily.
For a car charging, you're charging closer to 7-11kW. Dissipating 2.2kW (20% of 11kW) as heat is basically impossible. The inductive charging they're using for cars (which, are basically mostly prototypes at this point) are different and use much more closely coupled coils... so they can get better efficiency. Whether it works in practice, I don't know, but that's what companies are claiming who come out with these solutions.
I worry that my phone’s battery gets hotter while charging so it’s getting double damage when it comes to lifespan. Maybe we should add a fan to inductive phone chargers…
(Doesn’t help that 99% of people run a case on their phones, and I doubt the manufacturer’s inductive
charging efficiency tests account for that)
> you guys really should invest in dynamic charging using electrified roads
The state of our roads is already atrocious. Electrifying them would make them worse (installing any significant amount of road would take away from repairing the existing issues), and also dangerous.
I would be okay with a "give me at least x range by tomorrow" button, so that the car can also feed back to the grid if I happen to have more in the tank than I need.
We really need a way for power hungry smart devices to charge by spot pricing. By default your car charges when rate is low eg windy nights and sunny lunch times and not a heatwave. Having Night and Day rates is too simplistic.
It sounds like the real issue is that the time-of-use rates are wrong. Just adjust them to match the actual energy production/demand, and the behavior change will follow.
My solar, battery, and car setup automatically adjusts to the rate for power. It sends all my energy to the grid when costs are high and I get the most back, and uses the battery at that time... and then charges the battery when rates are low.
Set the rates to be accurate and the system will work itself out. I am not going to use more expensive electricity just because the rates are set wrong.
It seemed obvious to me that time of use rates will have to change when you switch from thermal generation to solar because when you have over/under-provisioning is different.
Thermal plants have excess capacity late at night, early morning. And under during the late afternoon early evening. Solar will have excess during the late mid morning. And nothing in the early evening.
I don't think you need smarties at Standford to figure that out.
EV’s are only a solution as far as renewable energy can keep up with electricity demands. And that doesn’t appear to be the case right now. Coupled with the mining of minerals, violent venting of batteries, and non-recyclable/non disposable nature of the batteries it’s not obvious that EV’s are more environmentally friendly.
It is very easy to keep up expanding renewable energy with the ramp up of electric cars. In Germany (which is pretty far north), about 10 solar panels are enough to cover one cars electric needs.
And it is not true, that batteries are non-recyclable. Currently, they can be recycled to about 95% and of course this is cheaper than to mine the minerals for a new battery and also saves a lot of energy. It is just that it will quite a few more years before we need much recycling capacity, as the bulk of the batteries will live at least 10 to 15 years.
EVs become carbon neutral after around 6 months of existing, taking into account emissions to manufacture them. Solar panels are between 6 months and 3 years. And batteries are highly recyclable, and only getting better.
The US doubled its solar capacity in 2021, and adoption is only speeding up.
Skimming the article it seems the crux of the matter is that with home charging people charge either a) when they come home b) with a timer, at 9pm, or c) with a timer, at 12am (with b and c driven by fixed changes in electricity prices). Electricity demand for everything else is highest at about 7pm, so both a and b charge at times where there isn't a lot of unused grid capacity. And to make things worse, at all three times you don't get a lot of solar power.
I wonder why the recommendation is to go to daytime charging, instead of timers staggered around 4am (when grid utilization is lowest). Sure, no solar, but potentially lots of unused wind, and lots of spare capacity on the power lines that already exist.
This article does a poor job of explaining why there is going to be a problem and relaying the point of the study.
To model the grid and power infrastructure into the future, assumptions must be made about where the power is derived.
The article fails to provide the basic factors contributing to the problem, even though the study itself does a fine job.
So California wants to legislate electric cars. That means higher demand in a shorter period of time. Meanwhile Calofornia wants to legislate 'clean' or 'green' energy production. If that's a design limitation then the outcome is a shift away from what is the normal situation we face with energy use today.
Energy use at night with a highly solar derived power system requires significant storage and efficiency loss. Charging all of California's electric cars in 2035 will be a demand that far surpasses anything seen today. These things that we see causing rolling black outs and brown outs, like AC use spikes in summer will be a blip compared to the consistent vehicle charging demand.
Interesting, though, the electric vehicle adoption basically negates the storage problem if a parallel infrastructure of charge back from homes at night is implemented. Charge your car at work in the sun and use it to power your home at night.
If you're regularly committing a certain percentage of your car's battery capacity to powering your house, wouldn't it make more sense to just have a stationary battery at home? Otherwise you can't rely on that extra range in your car if you need it to power your home anyway, and you're just spending extra energy carrying around extra battery weight in your car every day.
I wonder if there's any correlation between times someone travels 400 miles and times when they are not home... we probably need a study or something to figure it out.
The problem is, you need a full charge in the morning if you're leaving on a road trip, so then your car will not be powering your house the night before. This would likely lead to big spikes in demand the night before the start of holiday a weekend, for example.
I don't have an electric car, but I can't imagine this is a challenging problem at all. All you need is a target charge level. If you're going on a trip tomorrow, set it to 100%. If your normal commute is 20 minutes, no reason to charge past 75% or even 50%.
They were saying this creates huge problems for the grid. Let's assume people will want to destroy their car battery by draining it to power their house every night, and that this indeed supplements the need for grid storage overnight. However, when holiday seasons comes around, all of a sudden a significant percentage of homes will start demanding much higher power usage from the grid, as people co-ordinate in setting their cars not to drain power into their homes on the night before.
If only there were a way to encourage upwards of 50% of trips to be done via methods that take a tiny fraction of the energy with no or negligible battery without invasive freedom limiting legislation just by spending roughly as much as EV manufacturers have received in subsidy on infrastructure.
Oh well. Guess we'll have to give another billion to elon.
My point isn't that we should actually shrink EV batteries and use the excess for stationary storage, my point is that car batteries as a demand-leveling mechanism is not likely to be an optimal solution.
That said, it's not something that's really happening right now anyway, so the "power your home with your car at night" idea seems unlikely to take off unless there is a (possibly misguided) legislative push for it.
Batteries are a bit too expensive to make sense as stationary storage outside of some specialty cases right now. But EVs have been economical for a while. So while we wait for battery prices to drop, two way EV charging absolutely make sense as a transition technology. Most of those EV batteries are sitting unused for large chunks of the day, and the entire capacity of the battery is often only needed by the driver a few times per year. Adding two way charging is not a prohibitive cost, and that installation can be reused if/when an onsite battery is added in the future. The rest of the program can be managed with software.
> Most of those EV batteries are sitting unused for large chunks of the day
Yes, that is the point of having a battery, or any fuel storage of any kind. Especially one that degrades with use and that doesn't even change its weight based on being full (which could potentially offset some of the costs).
They are making politically expedient decisions that move the state towards its clean energy commitments. Yes, there may be some hiccups down the road, but that is the price to pay for putting off the transition for so long. And as one of the faster movers in this space CA will almost undoubtedly move the market in a way that will make it cheaper and easier for everyone else. Look at the "California Solar Initiative" (CSI) for example. It incentivized solar installations across the state, well before small scale installations were economically viable. And across the lifetime of the program, solar prices came down and adoption grew.
Have you seen BART?
The freeways in every major metro of CA?
You are defending politics and not engaging the reality of failed infrastructure in the state.
Now they are going to lead the country in developing a new paradigm in power infrastructure? The same that has PG&E blowing up neighborhoods because the company got so much tax incentive to continue building they failed to record where they placed capital assets and can't complete maintenance.
California isn't putting anything off, they just can't get anything done.
Giving tax incentives to get more people to buy e-cars won't fix that problem
Turn off fox news for a bit and try getting your information from reliable, nonpartisan sources. Currently, over 60% of Californias electricity comes from clean sources (hydro, renewables, and nuclear). And we are well on target to hit 100% before our goal of 2045. These are facts.
PG&E has nothing to do with this. Most power plants in the state are owned by third party investors, not by the utilities. Perhaps you should read up on CA power markets before commenting.
And who benefits from that? Owners of single family detached housing and megalandlords. Maybe there is some positive environmental impact, but really the main motivation is wealth transfer to the politically connected classes.
This requires extra cost for the consumers and will drive up battery demand. It will be cheaper for the consumer to use their car to help balance the grid, as long as they have the required range for when it's needed (with current smart charging solutions already providing this).
Each car is typically driven 35 miles daily in the USA. Against a capacity of ~250 miles, this represents many days of non-charging, and thus a lot of flexibility in when charging occurs.
EVs can potentially strengthen the grid: if they are charged smartly, to balance demand.
We need manufacturers, regulators, grid operators to align on how to figure this out.
At the least, grid conditions/pricing should be sent to the car for smart charging.
Mandating 240volt connections in all garages and a large portion of apartment parking lots would also enable the solar excesses of the day to be quickly utilized.
This is spot on. Kaluza (https://www.kaluza.com/demand-response/) are working on this problem, by giving EV drivers reduced prices for EV charging as long as the Kaluza platform controls when you car is charged, with the Kaluza platform using price signals to decide when to stop/start charging.
The larger impact will come from V2G (Vehicle-to-grid) charging. This will require manufacturers to add this capability to vehicle but the savings for customers are significantly greater than just smart charging (see see https://www.kaluza.com/case-studies/case-study-kaluza-enable...).
I’d happily let the utility decide when to charge the car for best pricing and load usage so long as I can override it when I need from time to time at prevailing price. I’d also be happy to sell power back to the grid if I can set the price floor threshold since batteries do have cycle limits.
> Charge your car at work in the sun and use it to power your home at night.
And fill your coffee thermos at work and drink free coffee at home all weekend. And toilet paper and pencils from work can also be taken home and maybe resold at a flea market.
I live in a cold climate and it would take only take more than 50% of charge to keep the house warm overnight with an air source heat pump. Since I rarely use more then 10% of range per day driving this would easily work for me. With an LFP battery car the cycle usage wouldn’t even be a big deal.
I live near Santa Fe at 6000'. I have a 6.6kW array out front. It generates 3x what we need in the summer, and 1/3rd of what we need in the winter, when we heat with an air source heat pump. Yes, it's an old adobe and not well insulated, but even with those things fixed, the amount of power we'd need to stay warm would require a battery system of immense size, much larger than a car (for now, anyway).
That is about a third of a typical modern vehicle range.
Sounds like an adequate amount for your needs, but what you really should do is install passive solar heating like a thermal mass. If you're in Santa Fe then you already know the what and how. There's about 325 days of sunshine over there
The average daily home consumption does not typically include electric heating. Most homes in the US use oil or gas for heat. Even though heat pumps are very efficient, it still requires quite a lot of energy.
Given that our house is mostly constructed of double adobe (24" thick) walls, we have lots of thermal mass, and some notable passive solar design features too.
-Charge your car at work in the sun and use it to power your home at night.
This doesn't make any sense. If you don't need the capacity, why do you wanna carry a ton of battery everywhere with you wasting energy? Buy a smaller battery for the car. Keep another battery installed at home. The battery at home is also more flexible to draw power at the optimal time for the grid.
Not to mention that this constant charging and recharging would decrease the lifetime of the battery, causing more environmentally unfriendly waste and inefficiency.
Of course, it is far more efficient system-wide to charge electric cars around noon, where photovoltaic energy produces a surplus of energy with zero marginal economic value.
It is an elegant way of solving at least part of the storage problem and the mismatch between peak power and demand times.
The article predicts that even with the proposed changes, 4.2 GW of storage or other generation capacity will be necessary, as opposed to 5.2 GW without the changes. I'd advocate getting on the power supply or storage solution immediately rather than trying to change consumer habits by e.g. funding or legislating power station installations in workplaces (a nice convenience, but not one that will solve this problem).
Obviously the notion of building >5GW of generation capacity on fossil fuels or nuclear in under 10 years seems wild. So it's probably going to have to be solar + storage.
What? Peak electrical consumption is during the day.
The big challenge for electric companies is the swing between the night trough in demand and the day peak. Night charging is excellent because it flattens that curve. Bringing demand into a straighter line and allowing electric companies to generate at a steady rate without having to cycle production up and down.
I glanced though the article and found no mention of that.
You can’t write a piece like this and begin anywhere else.
This article gets an F- for effective communication and persuasion.
The article (and paper) is saying that in solar-dominated generation regions, peak electrical production is during the day when the sun is out, and the trend seems like it's not stopping. I haven't actually read the full paper, but to quote the abstract:
> We study charging control and infrastructure build-out as critical factors shaping charging load and evaluate grid impact under rapid electric vehicle adoption with a detailed economic dispatch model of 2035 generation. We find that peak net electricity demand increases by up to 25% with forecast adoption and by 50% in a stress test with full electrification.
The assumption that a flat electrical load is desirable is less and less true as renewables go on the grid; of course, if we just took the (imo sensible) step to go all-nuclear, hydro, and geothermal for baseline load, then diurnal electrical consumption would not be desirable, but with the solar that might not be the case.
I have TOU based electric plan in CA, and the summer times are about to shift to peak starting at 4pm (from 10am). This huge shift is because of excess capacity from installed solar. 4pm is early enough that there's lots of use, but late enough that solar is tapering off.
Crazy concept: instead of banning cars, forcing electric cars, mandating specific efficiency, etc... we _could_ work towards a world less dependent on personally owned vehicles. And yet, huge companies will continue to just get a pass for forcing people to commute to jobs to sit on a computer all day.
Sounds like the problem is simply that the US doesn't seem to have real time pricing of electricity.
In Norway we pay what the market determines is the current price. Most people don't have flat rate charges. I can see the spot price in real time in an app.
>Residents with variable-rate power plans are being hit the hardest. Such plans charge different prices for electricity depending on how much demand there is. The more demand, the higher the price.
This is a thing for some power companies in Texas, but during peak times or in a crisis like TX experienced in winter of 2021, the prices skyrocketed because demand was out of control trying to keep warm. People ended up with a $5k electric bill trying to keep a modest single family home "warm" (in the article they mentioned they kept lights off and thermostat set at 60F/15C, not very warm).
This is all true, but I think the Texas issue is an outlier. Many things went wrong and all of them were preventable issues caused by mind-boggling terrible governance. Somehow these people are still in power.
"The US" doesn't have a single system, not even within each state. Anecdotally, I have Time-of-Use billing with my PG&E electricity, but AFAICT, I was only allowed get that because I have BEVs.
I think the "problem" is that someone needed to publish. This is a complete non-issue and utilities will shift the load as needed by adjusting the billing. Also, the notion that everyone going "in to work" is some antiquated pre-covid thinking.
> the US doesn't seem to have real time pricing of electricity
"The US" is a big place. Depends which city/county you're in and who is providing the electric service.
> I can see the spot price in real time in an app.
That sounds like a nightmare. Does it really change hourly? How can you program your systems to use the most efficient rate if you have no idea in advance what it is?
Here in PG&E California we have time of use tiers, but they are known. So I can for example let the EV start charging only at midnight when the cheapest tier kicks in. But I know it is cheap midnight to 3pm, brutally expensive 3pm to 9pm and fairly expensive 9pm to midnight.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] threadhttps://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20210113.as...
None of this 'oh, our owners manual says you should only charge in these special conditions or we can't be held responsible'. Nope. You make a product and it hurts people or destroys property? You better make your peace with punitive damages that'll make you wish you properly tested before shipping to customers.
Can you give a source for how many cars catch fire spontaneously when they're stationary and charging?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/04/tesla-f...
'Battery-powered vehicles have not been shown to catch fire at rates higher than gasoline cars, but when fires do erupt, they burn longer and hotter, propelled by lithium-ion batteries that supercharge the blazes, experts say.'
I guess ICE cars should never be parked in a garage.
Musk just needs to throw 1% of his AI talent at optimizing charging times via realtime grid negotiating and nobody will need to even think about this. Cars will turn into one of our most valuable assets as they help stabalize the grid by being both sinks when energy is plentiful and sources when it's not.
There are certain problems we all need to think about, but this is not one of them. It will effectively solve itself because all the incentives are aligned.
Anecdotally, I have fast DC charged my 2018 Model S (100kw pack) for the majority of the 100k miles I’ve put on the car, and only have 7% battery degradation. Others are seeing similar longevity well into hundreds of thousands of miles.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32758881
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/08/01/electric...
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/03/29/tesla-founder-ex-cto-sa...
I have no problems with encouraging people to charge at certain times. Using personal batteries for energy storage and draw without any compensation however seems to cross a line.
Your argument seems to me like justifying petty theft because in the end it doesn't really affect the store owner.
If you’ll charge me a fraction of the cost to charge off peak or when there are excess renewables on the grid, and you’ll pay a premium to pull that power back if the car is parked and I can set a minimum state of charge to maintain, yeah, I’ll take that deal any day. I’ll come out ahead in almost all cases based on EV battery longevity.
And it leaves the car cooler at the end of the say.
Costs a bit upfront, sure. But I think we'll continue to see these costs come down, and the incentive to build out parking lot solar arrays will increase as the grid has to adapt to the demands we're placing on it.
This would help in many cases, but parking garages are a thing, even in my relatively small city. We would need a solution for them as well.
This trade-off may not work for someone with one car they plug in when they get home and unplug in the morning, just like they don't need a level 3 charger anyway, but might for an airport taxi firm, where they can charge their fleet while boarding passengers, or a loading bay for EV delivery vans.
If that demand is enough to make it a standard item on the car side, then it'll likely displace plug in charging in a lot of places where both are possible for silly reasons like "nothing for drivers to crash into", feeling more "luxurious", "cheaper install" and so on.
As for the difference in power loss between qi and this? Part of it is scale : they can fit a much larger diameter pad compared to a phone, which gets them much better coupling. You're essentially talking about an air core transformer, and there's plenty of transformers in the grid.
https://witricity.com/newsroom/blogs/what-is-efficiency-how-...
> Cars will turn into one of our most valuable assets as they help stabalize the grid by being both sinks when energy is plentiful and sources when it's not.
In fantasy land, sure. In reality there are a lot more players with a lot more variables and most of them don't give a shit about some grand unified solution through cars. Just because in theory there is one great universal solution to one problem (demand for power) doesn't mean everyone is going to work together to achieve it. We have more than enough agricultural land around the world to feed the entire planet every day, yet millions of people go hungry every day. Just because a solution is possible doesn't mean it happens.
By the way: if we had fewer cars, we wouldn't have this huge demand for additional power. The simpler solution is to replace cars with public transit and micromobility. Then we would pollute less to make the cars, require fewer chips and rare earth metals, require less power generation and distribution, require fewer people to sink huge amounts of money into car ownership, free up cities for more pedestrian and bike traffic, provide easier access to jobs and education for poor rural areas, and have 30,000 fewer fatalies in the US every year.
But instead let's just buy more cars and build more nuke plants to power them and expand the grid because I want my own zoom-zoom machine!
That question is obviously underspecified, you can only answer it by knowing whether or not the price will be below 7c/kwh for 4 of the remaining hours in the night. You answer the question with a predictive model of the price, and you build that predictive model with "AI" because that's how we build all our best predicitve models.
AI doesn't get to say "you can't charge", you get to say "and I'll delegate the question of which 4 hours to charge during to the AI".
> similar to how all of these dogshit smart thermostats can be completely shut off from heating if "AI says so".
I assume you're referring to the instance where texas power companies remotely increased the temperature on peoples thermostats? That's not AI, or even remotely related to AI, that's humans controlling other peoples stuff without permission. That risk exists whether or not you use machine learning models to predict electricity prices.
https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/texas/remote-thermos...
There is no reason to worry about this. This is trivial AI.
Found it: https://youtu.be/ggdYts4muu0
Some other people have mentioned that you just need to vary the price, but the price is set by bids from providers. Code that can learn demand patterns and integrate weather forecasts will let Tesla bid lower and so earn more money in the market while also lowering energy costs for everyone.
The following is back-of-napkin figures but there are close enough to make the point.
Take a country the size of the UK. It currently uses 1600 TWh a year. Once fully-electric it should need around 1100 TWh a year, so 3 TWh a day.
The UK, despite being a windy place, still has weeks without wind once or twice a year. We had a week without wind power in the middle of August this year and had to generate 60% of our power using gas. A windless week with a frost snap is something you often see in January and February. A cold week, with everyone using electric heating (when solar power does basically nothing) is why the UK might need TWh of stored energy to be secure without fossil fuels.
7 days at 3 TWh is 20 TWh.
A big home Tesla Powerwall can store 14kWh and if run at full power it will be empty in 4 hrs. You'd need over a billion to store 20TWh.
In the UK an average home currently uses around 10kW of electricity a day, but also has a car, a cooker and central heating, all using fossil fuels. Add those in and were looking at 40-50kWh: 20kWh for the heating, 10kWh for the cooking and another 10kWh for the cars.
There are savings to be made of course, the electric versions of all of those items are way more efficient. There's insulation; there's heat pumps; there's electric cars.
The average UK car sits idle for 23 hours of the day. An average-ish car is around 100kW. Even if that hour is slow and often stationary, it's not unreasonable to expect it to be another 10kWh. And the average UK home has more than one car.
A mid-range electric car has a 50kWh battery, so has a bit more beef than a Tesla Powerwall battery. If they are being used for 1 hour a day they are probably going to need a top-up of around, say, 10kW. So let's say they have 40 kWh to spare.
20 TWh / 40 kWh = 500 million cars.
There are only 33 million cars in the UK.
You can, of course, quibble with these figures. There's subtleties everywhere here, but the orders of magnitude are plain. We need to be able to store renewable energy—desperately, and in enormous amounts. Car batteries will help—no doubt—but more in load-balancing and smoothing rather than long-term storage. We need something like grid-scale hydrogen storage to solve this.
See here for 1100 TWh figure. This document has loads of other really interesting details too:
https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/264421/download
There will be significant problems with CA power infrastructure in the near future.
It's something that should be looked at on the whole and tradeoffs considered.
That's ... optimistic, but not really true.
It also doesn't seem to match what's happening here either. How is power generation when demand is highest a worse product?
> “We encourage policymakers to consider utility rates that encourage day charging and incentivize investment in charging infrastructure to shift drivers from home to work for charging,” said the study’s co-senior author, Ram Rajagopal
There is choice in that equation.
> “We encourage policymakers to consider utility rates that encourage day charging and incentivize investment in charging infrastructure to shift drivers from home to work for charging,” said the study’s co-senior author, Ram Rajagopal
With an MWBC circuit you can however supply two different 15 amp plugs with a single cable 14/3 cable fed off a 15 amp duplex breaker. So it slightly reduces the amount of copper you need to run.
Low-power AC "chargers" are dumb devices, basically just wire. They don't require active cooling, and all of the expensive hardware is in the car. They could be installed on every single parking spot.
Wrong according to what metric? Cost? Raw efficiency? A lot of people are more than willing to give up efficiency so that they don't have to actually worry about finding a station during the day. To say that something is just outright "wrong" based on their personal preference of priorities comes off as unhelpful to me.
The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available, and people will use it. You don't need any complex "AI" like people in this thread are saying, you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself. Too much energy being used at night - price increases. It's not complicated, and it's what we're doing already. People don't need a Stanford study to convince them to get their energy for cheaper.
From the parts of the world I come from the majority of people are vehemently opposed to time of use pricing. Because that's when they use it most.
They and their political representatives would much prefer to keep taking from those who consume in off-peak rather than fix the underlying mechanism.
...Mission accomplished?
Average highs these last few months has been around 100F or so and very sunny, with at least one month >100F for the high every day. Its finally "cooling off" around here, with our highs being in the upper 90s most days. Cooling >2000sqft of space, even with some decent insulation and keeping the AC to 78F in the day, uses a lot of energy. It uses ~30A @ 240V, so ~7.2kW. If it had to run 12 hours in a day, that's 86.4kWh in just a single day. Doing that for a month straight, that's 2,592kWh.
I was going to write up the math on how much my pool pump uses, but honestly it kind of turned into peanuts compared to the amount our AC usage is. The pump is 3/4HP. Running ~600W on the schedule of 8 hours a day + 12 hour once a week shock it really only worked out to 172.8kWh/mo of usage. Still though, that's 52% of your entire usage for just my pool.
Last year we probably used ~3,000kWh charging the EV. That's on average 250kWh/mo.
Colder places use just as much if not more energy in wintertime. They just don't often use it as kWh from their electricity provider so they don't normally compare it this way. Instead of electricity they burn natural gas or propane or fuel oil or even wood pellets to heat their homes. Many people in this chat which talk about having pretty low energy usage then acknowledge they heat with gas.
For many, changing to heat pumps would drastically increase their electric bills in the winter offsetting their gas bills. Just look at my comparison of energy usage of my heat pump cooling my home compared to the energy usage of other big usage areas. It's not even close.
Running a heat pump for 12 hours to keep the house warm would be a similar amount of energy usage. It's the same tech. Raising the inside temperature from 0F to 70F (70F degrees of difference) takes more energy than cooling from 100F to 70F (30F of difference). So a place that spends half the year around 100F but then is close to comfortable inside for the other half requires less energy than a place that gets down to 0F half the year and then is close to comfortable the other.
I don't need to use as much energy as I do, I could go back to living in a much smaller space and not have all the private spaces and rights I have now. But I'd rather not raise a family in <900sqft when I can afford not to and I get a lot of enjoyment of the private spaces I have.
Sure, we could get everyone to use <500kWh/mo, even if we don't have to ask everyone to move to the narrow space that's close to room temperature year round. But that would mean massive changes in a lot of lifestyles, limiting a lot of people to far less space and property rights than they've been used to.
Even 2MWh per month is enough to drive 2 EV’s around 50,000 miles per year each. If you’re very flexible with time of day rooftop solar could probably save you quite a bit.
This sounds.. astonishing. How can one consume so much in a house?
My average is around 500 kWh which results in a $200+ bill.
But it's also probably best for poor people, that will optimize their usage and get better deals out of it.
Rich people can waste enormous amounts of electricity and not be financially affected. It benefits rich people to schedule running the two clothes washers and two clothes driers at off-peak rates. Poor people don't have energy fat like this to cut.
Yes, poor people have less usage to move around in absolute values, but they have more relatively to their income.
an attitude of "i don't want to deal with the stress of thinking about the electricity i use" is absolutely the sort of luxury that you should pay extra for, the people willing to schedule their power usage to reduce peak demand should be paying less than the people who aren't willing to do that.
For anything real time it wont work - here in Australia we had a discount for a box that you connect to your air conditioner which would throttle back its use during peak, and a lot of people ditched it due to impact on their comfort.
People who want to minimize their power bill can choose to pick the time of use pricing and shift some of their consumption off peak. Others can choose to pay more for the convenience of not having to worry about all that stuff. How much more, that can be determined by market forces.
Unfortunately most people don’t care (or the technology to take advantage of it just isn’t there), and demand shifted less than 1% over several years.
But it’s hard to find this info, because it doesn’t fit the (expensive to implement) narrative of “let them pay market price and people will respond to incentives”.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/smart-meters-hydro-bi...
> The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario's 2015-16 Energy Conservation Progress Report found "a 0.7 per cent reduction in peak demand among residential customers" attributed to time-of-use pricing over a four-year period.
I mean, people keep their foot on the gas when the light ahead is red and sometimes even speed up to get ahead of you only to slam on their brakes.
it's no surprise the general population in one of the richest regions on Earth doesn't immediately change their consumption habits when a small fraction of their monthly bill gets variable
It’s like making me spend $$$ to measure and charge me for how much co2 I exhale.
It’s technically correct: that co2 does contribute to global warming.
But it’s going to cost more to meter it than I could possibly save in conservation through this newfound incentive.
for example bandwidth used to be 95th percentile priced, but Netflix quickly run into problems because its peers did not want to upgrade linecards, switches, etc. (and as some of those peers were also in the media disturbution business they explicitly wanted to keep those ports maxed out)
the point is that if the network provides a close to constant capacity, then of course it makes no sense to try to price on that.
but with more and more variable supply it seems prudent to prepare the demand side too.
in Norway currently electricity prices fluctuate like crazy, and the supplier sends an email each day about the prices for the next day (though I'm not sure how guaranteed those are, of course the current price is also online)
and it varies regionally too
What they could do instead of time-of-use pricing is a sliding multiplier that multiplies your total bill based on the ratio of on-peak to off-peak use. Make the multiplier worse based on what the total usage is.
The problem with 100% EV fleet a regular grid will be overloaded and customer's will not be incentivized to care.
This framework future proofs the Ontario grid from such a "wall".
Now that the framework exists in Ontario, prices at certain times in the day can grow 10x, 100x, 1000x where appropriate and people will care and will change their behaviors.
If/When the Ontario grid starts to feel the pressure of EVs, it is a choice between (No Electricity + Tiered Pricing) XOR (Electricity + 10x premium Time of Use Pricing).
I have a feeling everyone will complain but understand that the only option was to keep the grid running.
In areas that are going all-in on solar, there is power during the day, but at night it would have to be generated or come from storage batteries.
Off-peak traditionally means when demand is low. Now you have to change your thinking to be when supply is high.
teachable moment, all along you should have been using price
Have you read the study ? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01105-7
> you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself.
Never worked, never will, borderline sounds like a cult following, "The all mighty market will automagically fix it with no human intervention"
We already see this to some extent, as people with free workplace charging often choose that over home charging when possible.
I think this is a big part of why, to-date, the environmental movement is comprised of the relatively wealthy, and what I would characterize as "true believers" who don't have much, but are okay with that, and okay with living their lives in a way that minimizes their impact. The first group have the spare capacity to do something about their impact, and the second group take it on as a mandate that often (but not always) affects their ability to function in broader society (or: how do you hold down a decent job if you ride a pushbike everywhere?).
My personal belief is that any successful environmental movement needs to go hand-in-hand with a more equitable distribution of wealth in society, and focus on quality-of-life, so that the people in the middle have the spare capacity to give a shit. Otherwise, you're going to bump into the ugly reality of people's day-to-day, and your movement will be perceived as rich people -- who make up the bulk of consumption to begin with -- telling everybody else how to live their lives. Which is exactly what's happened. I don't think it's an accident that the countries farthest along the path to decarbonization also have some of the best income equality, and quality-of-life on the planet.
At the lowest level it's people plugging things in at specific times to save pennies.
But people can build systems to do this automatically, like the ripple signal that's been used for half a century to turn on water storage heaters.
People can build entire business around building widgets that will help other businesses save money.
The (soylent) green energy market is people.
“And it’s not just California and Western states. All states may need to rethink electricity pricing structures as their EV charging needs increase and their grid changes,” added Powell, who recently took a postdoctoral research position at ETH Zurich.
The article also includes other interesting and more nuanced policy details than just "change pricing structure", such as:
Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. [...]
So yes, there are weird red herrings in this thread from people who want a technology first and a solution second (or never) and/or who don't understand design of incentive structures. But this work doesn't appear suffer from those problems.
Well, I don't know what to say aside from we would need a lot of work to have it 'both ways'.
By that I mean, if we expect everyone to charge their cars during the day, especially 'peak hours' in a given industrial area, there's a chance that the line and/or station capacity would have to be increased. A large part of the allure of 'night charging' is that it avoids requiring major grid upgrades, and also possibly opens up better uses around certain energy sources quirks. Nuclear, water power, geothermal, all three to some extent have 'consistent load' properties where either it takes time to adjust power output, or power output can be consistent both day and night with minimal incremental cost, vs the need to install additional capacity for extra day load.
> So yes, there are weird red herrings in this thread from people who want a technology first and a solution second (or never) and/or who don't understand design of incentive structures.
Speaking of incentive structures, one of my former employers installed EV chargers in all of the bottom floors of our parking garage while explicitly not allowing non-EVs to park in those spaces. I was left parking my hybrid on the roof in a desert climate where my car would continually get covered with pollen.
Naturally, I did what they were trying to incentivize: I looked at EVs. I quickly discovered that the cheaper models have limited usecases; for instance, the road trips I go on would now be out of the picture. The more expensive ones are much more functional but come at a high price that I've never personally spent on a car.
There's also the fact that I didn't have anywhere to charge it except public spaces where I'd have to awkwardly wait for hours because I lived in an apartment. In order to get a 240v plug in my garage I would need to pay for it myself.
These policies, as they invade the workforce, need to be looked at from a lens that doesn't end up doing harm in the end.
Sounds like it worked out great for them — people who could afford living in single detached houses (generally the richer ones, and therefore generally the management) now get reserved parking out of the pollen. The people who are inconvenienced (i.e. you) weren't the people involved in the decision anyway.
The real harm I think is giving too many perceived privileges to something that is currently a luxury.
Financially it works out for a couple of road trips a year, not so much if you're doing it a couple of times a month.
Why?
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
We're talking about electric vehicles here. There has already been massive interference in the market forces through both push and pull mechanisms - push would be things like outlawing internal combustion engines going forward, pull would be huge subsidies for electric vehicles.
It's pretty late in the game to say, "Hey! let's just use natural market forces! Problem solved!"
Natural market forces would be a tax on carbon equal to the cost of removing it from the atmosphere when it is burned and then let people buy whatever kind of car they want and can afford. There is no popular support whatsoever on either left or right for those kind of natural market forces.
My comment is US-centric, but in the US the adoption isn't really regulatory driven. The regulations are following reality while the politicians try to position themselves as "leaders".
// Weird given tiny amount of energy for your iPhone. But perhaps reasonable in aggregate.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt
No it won't. An phone has around 5 watt hours. So: 5 watt hours / day * 150 million people * 365 days = 273GWh / year / 4,116 billion kilowatthours / year = 0.006651% of electrical usage.
Yah, it's virtue signaling, not anything real. And keep in mind 0.006651% is total electrical usage - this time shifting might save 10%, so actual savings are even less than that.
There are over a billion iPhones in use worldwide. This technology is also being brought to MacBooks (100 million+), Watches (100 million+), and iPads (150 million+).
Your fundamental numbers are staggeringly inaccurate.
And, most crucially, representing it as a whole of the electric usage instead of peak hours intentionally misses the point of reducing peak hour usage. It's called "peak hour" for a reason.
Getting data about peak hour usage is much harder, but I would wager it's at most as much of that. So yes, completely insignificant at a large scale.
If anything, the biggest impact will come to individual consumers, if and when electricity prices start varying more widely across times of day.
[0] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview...
That is the entire point of this exercise. My point is that OP fails to address that with data (as do you).
Based on the data we do have, there doesn't seem to be any reason to care about iPhone charging - so, if you don't come up with some data or rationale for why we should, then I still feel it's justified to say that this change has little chance of helping the world in all but the most minor of ways.
If 1W of gas fired power needs to be brought online in the middle of the night to charge your phone, then all the wind power gets the same price. That's why peaks have always been the most economical place to target investments.
It would be interesting to compare the charge rate of a Tesla Powerall * the number of them deployed. I can see iPhones alone winning that depending on some assumptions you make.
You'd then probably be able to find stats on what Tesla gets paid for providing that service to get some idea of scale.
You are the one making claims with poor data and assumptions, not me.
This strategy actually works with laptops though. I know that one company set up all their laptops to stop drawing power from mains and run from the battery at peak hours, even though it was still plugged in. This was for cost savings and not for environmental ones, but the same strategy would work.
???
Most people I can think of charge there phone as part of their nightly routine.
Good move.
Could it be that this isn't "virtue signaling", but rather people overestimating the impact of the action? In other words, an honest (if mistaken) attempt at doing a good thing rather than just wanting to be perceived as doing a good thing?
It’s right in the name. When you “virtue signal”, you are signaling morals to a wider audience. It’s “virtue signaling” regardless of conviction.
If the reason I am doing something is that I believe it will create results independent of being seen to have done it, I am not virtue signalling. Which is what @JohnFen said.
Conversely, if the reason I am doing something is because of the signalling value I believe will be attached to the way others see my actions, I am virtue signalling. Which is what you said.
So doing a #supportsoupkitchens on a twitter repost vs actually going and volunteering at one.
There are over a billion iPhones in use today. Assuming 10% of them get charged during peak times, each one shaving a watt off of its peak is 100000 kilowatts of load reduced from the energy grid.
Considering the number is probably a lot higher, and the load reduction a lot greater, my estimate is probably pretty conservative. And then further consider that this is being rolled out to iPads, Macbooks, and Apple Watches as well. It starts to add up!
Dumb dumb to use a gasoline engine’s generator to charge it, but I don’t want it to go dead either.
A typical car uses 330 Wh per mile.
Charging your phone from flat will cost you about 90 yards in range. At the most expensive electricity on the planet of about 70c per kWh it will cost you about 1c.
A few days ago the price was almost zero (plus tax) for several windy hours.
https://andelenergi.dk/kundeservice/aftaler-og-priser/timepr... (add 1.59DKK for the taxes.)
even though i didn't need a full charge at 8am, the car would realize it couldn't get to (the not important) full charge by 8am, which was the previous day time of departure, and would start charging while electricity was still expensive, because it decided maximal charge at previous day departure time was more important than cheap electricity.
Just an oversight...
My state's grid is over half nuclear, and our electric rates are not high.
Speaking of which, California is 17% solar, 8% wind, and 7% hydro[1], and their retail electricity costs 19.9 cents/kWh.[2]
South Carolina is 58% nuclear, 0.1% solar, no wind, and 2% hydro,[3] and their retail electricity costs 12.9 cents/kWh.[2]
It's almost like solar is super cheap on the margins, but it's easier to make a cheap grid with lots of nuclear than lots of solar....nah, that can't be it.
[1] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
[2] https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
[3] https://energy.sc.gov/node/3067
A similar story is playing out in France, with Flamanville 3.
Good choice of states, though: I grew up in SC and live in California. California uses time-of-day rates to nudge people away from charging during the early evening peak.
Oh, so just solve the problem that people since Edison have been trying to solve.
So simple!
This is exactly what they were doing in Texas right up until the moment the Blizzard hit last year.
Suddenly electricity became unavailable (because you know, giant blizzard), and consequently it was something like $6000 a kw/hr[1] for some users
Your market force solution for electricity pricing almost bankrupted me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[1] https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/natural-disa...
It was an epiphany I had in relation to my staunch pro-bike/public transport internal discourse. It occurred to me that we need to focus on the main motivations for driving and public transport in order to make them both better. Road networks should focus on freedom and personal autonomy, and public transport should focus on throughput efficiency. Making PT better at throughput by expanding the networks would give people more freedom on the road network too by reducing traffic.
Where I live, I don't own a car largely because the "jobs" for which having access to a car is critical is handled by a reliable, efficient and safe cab/taxi on demand system (you need to get somewhere quickly, carry a lot of stuff, take your family/friends to A&E at night etc). So then I can rely on the very good Public Transit system for the bulk of my regular commute needs confident that I can get a cab when I need to.
If the reliable cab/taxi on demand didn't exist (which was indeed the situation before Uber and it's ilk), I would buy a car irrespective of how good the public transport system was (it was good even then) and irrespective of taxation dis-incentives. Once you own a car, for many use cases it becomes a lot more convenient and has low incremental cost to just drive.
As you may note, these "jobs to be done" vary by geography, lifestage and income - so while general principles can be drawn up, they need to be locally customized.
It’s _not_ like that in the states? In Denmark people are sharing spreadsheet that can tell you when to run the washing machine to save on electricity since the energy crisis following Russias invasion of Ukraine has pushed prices enough that these optimizations become valuable to regular consumers.
Found these examples by quickly googling:
https://www.trueenergy.io/app/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sense.andr...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tibber.and...
EDIT: to answer the question: yes, these apps use something called "Nord Pool" which publishes hourly electricity prices (in Swedish): https://elavtal24.com/blogg/tibber-greenely/
https://fsr.eui.eu/time-of-use-and-dynamic-pricing-rates-in-...
All the usual communist elements (Jimmy Carter, California) have been slowly making progress on introducing it since the 1970s, but mysteriously a lot of lies sprung up about how it would harm the poor. And the USA is really caring about the poor not using as much fossil fuels as they possibly can so it got kind of squashed.
From what I understand, you'd definitely want to charge at night due to the vast amounts of wind power available and the otherwise low demand.
Even better would be to plug the car in at all times when parked either at work or home and it just charges when the rate is cheapest. You don't need to charge every day to refill that 20 or 30 miles.
In countries that have extreme levels of solar, clearly this only works during the day and perhaps leaves the night being covered by fossil fuel plants instead where they are happy to use less/dial it down.
The massive missing piece, at least in the UK, is a genuine Smart Grid that can drive usage to meet supply. I have precisely zero appliances in my house that can make any use of cheap electricity and even worse, if I want a dual-tariff to get cheaper overnight electric, I get punished for it costwise.
No dishwasher or washing machine? I have a hog water tank with an immersion switch on it, I would love to heat that with cheap electricity overnight. I agree on the stupidity of punishing people for taking on the cheaper night tariffs - we should be goint for as much carrot as we can over stick!
The other aspect of this is price and consumption. I work from home with a workstation PC and an electric over that we use maybe every other day. Meanwhile my annual electricity bill is 1/4 of what my annual heating (gas) is, and of that, hot water is only 1/4 of that. Well over half of my annual bill and energy consumption is just heating my house during winter.
The real goal is to get storage heat sources heated by renewable sources for those of us in the UK.
Heat is hard and it’s hard to get around the energy requirements. Ovens don’t use that much at all at normal home duty cycles.
Improvements in insulation can certainly help.
99% of people have a fixed rate 24/7/365. I live in NYC and I'm not even sure if it's possible for me to pay time of use rates. The time of day that electricity is cheapest is... all the time.
I sincerely doubt there is any public or political will to change this engrained billing method. People will not willingly change their habits, and any politician proposing reducing quality of life will just get thrown out
Of course hiring an electrician and all of that would probably have a long payback period.
The fixed rate cost of charging for my commute would probably be less than the connection fee for the 2nd meter. In that scenario it wouldn't pay off it all (and of course you wouldn't bother doing it).
But if we’re doing that might as well make it so it can pull from the car if needed and turn it into a powerwall.
Similarly for SoCal Edison, last year: https://ktla.com/news/local-news/socal-edison-moving-custome...
And additionally, centralizing the power usage simplifies transmission issues for now. It's much easier to have a few big cables to a few big buildings, than having every single home pulling a lot of power all of a sudden.
How is that rich people with homes charge at home while everyone else has to queue up and waste their time at charging stations.
Doesn't seem fair at all. Its a extra time tax on the poor.
Whats nonsensical is thinking people will vote to increase taxes on themselves to improve public infrastructure if it doesn't benefit them.
we shouldn't create public policy expecting ppl to vote for it purely out of goodness of their hearts.
No point rehashing the same logic again.
So, if you have a grid that doesn't heavily rely on solar then charging at night makes sense.
> Today, California has excess electricity during late mornings and early afternoons, thanks mainly to its solar capacity. If most EVs were to charge during these times, then the cheap power would be used instead of wasted.
How are people going to charge their cars during commutes?
> drivers should move to daytime charging at work
> How are people going to charge their cars during commutes?
Come on, you're saying most commutes are "late morning and early afternoon"? I too would like a job where my commute in is at 11 and my commute home is at 2.
Rather than spreading EV FUD, can we instead discuss what the article is actually talking about, like installing charging infrastructure in daytime parking lots so we can take better advantage of the cheap, plentiful, and often curtailed solar energy?
Seems very doable to me.
This requires further clarification. What is it that we want to optimize? How do we know we want to optimize that?
The opening lines of the actual study paper. Wanted to put that out into the mix before this turns into another Soleus Pushup debacle.
That said, I think University of Houston actually did a better job with their press release than Stanford did, both in clarity of explanation and in the quality of presentation. I'd like to hear some thoughts for/against though.
With further development, a key side benefit is that the grid can then tap into about 5% of your cars battery storage during the day when demand is higher (if you allow it).
Link to the study: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn%3Anbn%3Ase%3Ari%3Adiva-5752...
If the western US has a surplus in mornings and afternoons, you guys really should invest in dynamic charging using electrified roads (commonly referred to as wireless inductive charging in California, but there are conductive solutions as well).
Cars that are stationary most of the time are a pretty good reason to put charging infrastructure on the only land they actually share - the roads.
Some numbers are thrown around here (static inductive): https://insideevs.com/news/425972/momentum-dynamics-wireless...
And here (dynamic inductive): https://www.greencarcongress.com/2022/06/20220614-electreon....
From what I have heard, the transmission efficiency of the dynamic inductive solution is quite sensitive to alignment and they still have some R&D left to do there.
For a car charging, you're charging closer to 7-11kW. Dissipating 2.2kW (20% of 11kW) as heat is basically impossible. The inductive charging they're using for cars (which, are basically mostly prototypes at this point) are different and use much more closely coupled coils... so they can get better efficiency. Whether it works in practice, I don't know, but that's what companies are claiming who come out with these solutions.
(Doesn’t help that 99% of people run a case on their phones, and I doubt the manufacturer’s inductive charging efficiency tests account for that)
https://witricity.com/newsroom/blogs/what-is-efficiency-how-...
The state of our roads is already atrocious. Electrifying them would make them worse (installing any significant amount of road would take away from repairing the existing issues), and also dangerous.
My solar, battery, and car setup automatically adjusts to the rate for power. It sends all my energy to the grid when costs are high and I get the most back, and uses the battery at that time... and then charges the battery when rates are low.
Set the rates to be accurate and the system will work itself out. I am not going to use more expensive electricity just because the rates are set wrong.
Thermal plants have excess capacity late at night, early morning. And under during the late afternoon early evening. Solar will have excess during the late mid morning. And nothing in the early evening.
I don't think you need smarties at Standford to figure that out.
And it is not true, that batteries are non-recyclable. Currently, they can be recycled to about 95% and of course this is cheaper than to mine the minerals for a new battery and also saves a lot of energy. It is just that it will quite a few more years before we need much recycling capacity, as the bulk of the batteries will live at least 10 to 15 years.
The US doubled its solar capacity in 2021, and adoption is only speeding up.
No it didn't.
> The US solar industry broke records in 2021 with 23.6 GW installed, bringing the cumulative capacity to 121.4 GW.
So it increased by less than 25%, not 100%. You were only off by 4x.
Source: https://www.ny-engineers.com/blog/seia-publishes-the-2021-so...
I wonder why the recommendation is to go to daytime charging, instead of timers staggered around 4am (when grid utilization is lowest). Sure, no solar, but potentially lots of unused wind, and lots of spare capacity on the power lines that already exist.
To model the grid and power infrastructure into the future, assumptions must be made about where the power is derived.
The article fails to provide the basic factors contributing to the problem, even though the study itself does a fine job.
So California wants to legislate electric cars. That means higher demand in a shorter period of time. Meanwhile Calofornia wants to legislate 'clean' or 'green' energy production. If that's a design limitation then the outcome is a shift away from what is the normal situation we face with energy use today.
Energy use at night with a highly solar derived power system requires significant storage and efficiency loss. Charging all of California's electric cars in 2035 will be a demand that far surpasses anything seen today. These things that we see causing rolling black outs and brown outs, like AC use spikes in summer will be a blip compared to the consistent vehicle charging demand.
Interesting, though, the electric vehicle adoption basically negates the storage problem if a parallel infrastructure of charge back from homes at night is implemented. Charge your car at work in the sun and use it to power your home at night.
The thing is, California isn't making great policy decisions or even efficient power decisions. They are making virtue decisions.
Moving 1.5 tons of battery or 1.25 tons of battery isn't where the hairsplitting should take place
Oh well. Guess we'll have to give another billion to elon.
That said, it's not something that's really happening right now anyway, so the "power your home with your car at night" idea seems unlikely to take off unless there is a (possibly misguided) legislative push for it.
Yes, that is the point of having a battery, or any fuel storage of any kind. Especially one that degrades with use and that doesn't even change its weight based on being full (which could potentially offset some of the costs).
You are defending politics and not engaging the reality of failed infrastructure in the state.
Now they are going to lead the country in developing a new paradigm in power infrastructure? The same that has PG&E blowing up neighborhoods because the company got so much tax incentive to continue building they failed to record where they placed capital assets and can't complete maintenance.
California isn't putting anything off, they just can't get anything done.
Giving tax incentives to get more people to buy e-cars won't fix that problem
PG&E has nothing to do with this. Most power plants in the state are owned by third party investors, not by the utilities. Perhaps you should read up on CA power markets before commenting.
Don't try to couch my comment in your political view.
PG&E is an example of how the policies used in CALIFORNIA fail the people of CALIFORNIA.
That is relevant. These are facts.
If you DIED because of infrastructure failures, maybe you'd feel differently! You know? Because you'd be dead and all...
EVs can potentially strengthen the grid: if they are charged smartly, to balance demand.
We need manufacturers, regulators, grid operators to align on how to figure this out.
At the least, grid conditions/pricing should be sent to the car for smart charging.
Mandating 240volt connections in all garages and a large portion of apartment parking lots would also enable the solar excesses of the day to be quickly utilized.
The larger impact will come from V2G (Vehicle-to-grid) charging. This will require manufacturers to add this capability to vehicle but the savings for customers are significantly greater than just smart charging (see see https://www.kaluza.com/case-studies/case-study-kaluza-enable...).
And fill your coffee thermos at work and drink free coffee at home all weekend. And toilet paper and pencils from work can also be taken home and maybe resold at a flea market.
Completely infeasible in cold climates if your house is heated by electrically-powered air source heat pumps, as it probably should be.
It’s not impossible.
avg home consumption daily : 30kwh
Avg EV consumption per 100mi : 30kwh
That is about a third of a typical modern vehicle range.
Sounds like an adequate amount for your needs, but what you really should do is install passive solar heating like a thermal mass. If you're in Santa Fe then you already know the what and how. There's about 325 days of sunshine over there
Given that our house is mostly constructed of double adobe (24" thick) walls, we have lots of thermal mass, and some notable passive solar design features too.
This doesn't make any sense. If you don't need the capacity, why do you wanna carry a ton of battery everywhere with you wasting energy? Buy a smaller battery for the car. Keep another battery installed at home. The battery at home is also more flexible to draw power at the optimal time for the grid.
Not to mention that this constant charging and recharging would decrease the lifetime of the battery, causing more environmentally unfriendly waste and inefficiency.
It is an elegant way of solving at least part of the storage problem and the mismatch between peak power and demand times.
Tesla has already built a very large power storage station in Australia https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-battery-beg...
Obviously the notion of building >5GW of generation capacity on fossil fuels or nuclear in under 10 years seems wild. So it's probably going to have to be solar + storage.
I glanced though the article and found no mention of that.
You can’t write a piece like this and begin anywhere else.
This article gets an F- for effective communication and persuasion.
> We study charging control and infrastructure build-out as critical factors shaping charging load and evaluate grid impact under rapid electric vehicle adoption with a detailed economic dispatch model of 2035 generation. We find that peak net electricity demand increases by up to 25% with forecast adoption and by 50% in a stress test with full electrification.
The paper is at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01105-7, I only briefly skimmed through it but it seems plausible.
The assumption that a flat electrical load is desirable is less and less true as renewables go on the grid; of course, if we just took the (imo sensible) step to go all-nuclear, hydro, and geothermal for baseline load, then diurnal electrical consumption would not be desirable, but with the solar that might not be the case.
In Norway we pay what the market determines is the current price. Most people don't have flat rate charges. I can see the spot price in real time in an app.
Why isn't that good enough?
This is a thing for some power companies in Texas, but during peak times or in a crisis like TX experienced in winter of 2021, the prices skyrocketed because demand was out of control trying to keep warm. People ended up with a $5k electric bill trying to keep a modest single family home "warm" (in the article they mentioned they kept lights off and thermostat set at 60F/15C, not very warm).
https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-winter-storms-2021...
I think the "problem" is that someone needed to publish. This is a complete non-issue and utilities will shift the load as needed by adjusting the billing. Also, the notion that everyone going "in to work" is some antiquated pre-covid thinking.
"The US" is a big place. Depends which city/county you're in and who is providing the electric service.
> I can see the spot price in real time in an app.
That sounds like a nightmare. Does it really change hourly? How can you program your systems to use the most efficient rate if you have no idea in advance what it is?
Here in PG&E California we have time of use tiers, but they are known. So I can for example let the EV start charging only at midnight when the cheapest tier kicks in. But I know it is cheap midnight to 3pm, brutally expensive 3pm to 9pm and fairly expensive 9pm to midnight.