That’s nonsense and mostly a big oil talking point. In the south every single home has at least one large A/C unit, most of which draw the amount or more as an electric car being charged and yet the grid doesn’t fall over when it’s noon and everyone’s air conditioning is running full blast during the summer. This is like that old fable about the English power companies having to fire up peaker plants during the commercial breaks of soccer games because of so many people putting the kettle on.
Further, most electric car owners I know charge at night when the grid usually has excess capacity. I personally am on a time of use plan where I get free charging from midnight to 3AM, and that’s the window in which I charge my electric cars every day.
> In the south every single home has at least one large A/C unit, most of which draw the amount or more as an electric car being charged and yet the grid doesn’t fall over when it’s noon and everyone’s air conditioning is running full blast during the summer.
Texas has had grid problems because of this. It was especially bad in the winter.
> This is like that old fable about the English power companies having to fire up peaker plants during the commercial breaks of soccer games because of so many people putting the kettle on.
This isn't a fable, I've seen interviews with National Grid staff where they talk about tracking the TV schedule. This is one of the reasons why we have pumped-hydro capacity, to handle quick spikes.
I think this issue may end up being less of an issue than the doomsayers go on about. When I looked into this in ~2012 the solution was going to be "smart grids" where components would collaborate. Now, we've pretty much got there with electric cars being relatively smart, energy pricing being quite dynamic on some tariffs, and smart meters understanding that relationship.
Texas had grid problems because of the natural gas demand was off the charts, along with peaker plants being offline, renewables being offline, and a perfect storm of other issues during an unusually cold spell . I assure you it wasn’t from people running their air conditioning during a freeze.
It happened because they assumed that high demand and gas plants being offline, would be independent events. It turns out if it's very cold people use a lot of power to heat their homes and gas plants can develop issues due to the cold.
Renewables weren't a major contributing factor in the winter outage.
> I assure you it wasn’t from people running their air conditioning during a freeze.
I think conversation is best if you don't assume the other person is an idiot.
First: stop muddying the waters by accusing people of shilling for big oil. That's explicitly against the guidelines here. Now for the substance of the reply.
The US doesn't consist entirely of the South, and guess what? The South is buying some of that AC power from the North. The Eastern Interconnect is a lovely thing, don't get me wrong, but you can't just handwave off the effect of some 20-40 million 9 to 5ers in the Eastern time zone getting home at the same time and plugging their cars in.
It is a solvable problem, most of those cars need to charge for ~90 minutes any time before the morning, but it will be a serious problem if it isn't addressed.
Yeah, it's basically a software update to the cars, and suddenly the cars are only pulling from the grid at 4am based on the average spot price of electricity.
I think the biggest issue is that if nobody charges during the day, and all the energy is coming from solar, demand for energy during the night will skyrocket.
But that's solvable by literally putting some power plugs into parking spaces.
Yea I imagine it’s not difficult to have a system where the charging station at your house gets the real-time cost of electricity and honors and system where you pay the lowest if you charge cooperatively. Don’t need to fill the battery every day? Skip today, get a better price tomorrow. Absolutely need to charge full throttle right now? The price just went up.
Yes, there are literally grid issues right now, with electric cars being a tiny portion of car sales. We will get there but its not necessarily cheap and easy.
"Big oil talking point". You people are brainwashed into believing everything is a conspiracy.
Imagine believing you and the 2% of EV owners are on to something by charging at night, and it'll look the same at 20%+ EV market share.
The English tv-related power spikes thing isn't a myth, but it's also not as huge a thing thanks in part to streaming.
The reason the peaker plants aren't the first step is that they take up to ~30 mins-1 hour to spin up. They use hydro or imported power from France to cover until the plants can cover.
Just FYI, I live in the humid mid-Atlantic region of the US. My 2500sqft house has a 2-ton conventional AC system that draws about 1.5-1.7kW at full power. My Model 3 long range draws about 11kW while charging off of the Tesla Wall Connector (48A 240V, 60A breaker).
> every single home has at least one large A/C unit, most of which draw the amount or more as an electric car being charged and yet the grid doesn’t fall over when it’s noon and everyone’s air conditioning is running full blast during the summer
We get paid by the electric company to power our farm with our 80kw diesel generator on hot afternoons in Kansas, precisely because of the high demand during that time.
We've run the numbers, and it actually does pay for us to do it.
If A/Cs draw the same amount electric cars do then everyone switching to electric cars could double or triple (most households have two working parents) the power draw during parts of the day (around 5 when it's the hottest and everyone is coming home from work.)
People aren't going to have the vehicles charge at 3:00 AM, they don't like managing automatons like that. I grew up in a family where our ISP did something similar and I was the only one who would schedule downloads to start at midnight (including my dad who worked as a software dev at a large tech company.) They'll just suffer whatever consequences of having the thing charge when they plug it in are.
I like electric vehicles, I'm actually in the process of upgrading my boat to use electric propulsion. I think a lot of people overlook many of the downsides though and it's a bit concerning. The battery situation is particularly bad, the used electric vehicle market is going to look very different than the used ICE vehicle market.
If every car needs a daily high speed charge for their 20 mile average commute on a 200 mile range car.
- daily vs nightly is important as grid capacity increases as commercial use decreases down by 7pm
- high speed charging is important because if either car will be parked for 12 hours it will be better for the grid and batteries if it uses low speed charging
- if electric cars (and hvacs) have no "time of use" functionality to reduce usage during peak billing rates.
Further, most electric car owners I know charge at night when the grid usually has excess capacity. I personally am on a time of use plan where I get free charging from midnight to 3AM, and that’s the window in which I charge my electric cars every day.