What? An electric grid? We can't possibly do that, what if everyone turns their oven on full blast, cranks the air conditioner, and runs the hot water with every light in the house on all summer long? I mean, people might!
I don't know if the electric grid servicing our area could handle 5,000 vehicles charging at 20,000 watts each either. That is 100 MW.
Fortunately, those numbers have literally nothing to do with the reality of EV use/charging/etc, which works out to about 500W per car additional load on the grid, and it's an
exceedingly flexible load.
The average US driving is around 35 miles a day. With an EV, this works out to in the range of 10-12kWh/day average, though a bit more in the winter from pack and vehicle heating. That's around 500W average load, and if you've got things set up to spread the load out, it should end up around there. So, your 5000 vehicle, on average, would be closer to 2.5MW, not 100. There are a variety of ways to ballpark the usage estimates, but I've used several, and you end up requiring around 25% more electrical grid energy delivery to get all personal transportation over to EV miles in the US. Fleet use is going to drive that up a bit more, but they're also going to be a good bit more sensitive to power delivery and are on rate plans that separately pay for energy delivered and peak power capacity (demand charges - they're a royal pain if you're peaky, and things like peak shaver battery systems can pay for themselves in a right hurry if you're in that sort of use case).
An awful lot of people are likely to be able to charge EVs during the "mid-day solar peak" - if you have slow chargers (2-3kW per stall) at work, paired with solar, EVs are going to be substantially charging in the 10AM-2PM window when there tends to be a surplus of solar on the grid, and not as much demand. Demand typically peaks in the afternoon to evening, with perhaps a spike in the morning some of the year, but adding solar, and adding mid-day charging mostly counteract each other.
I'd love to see a lot more unmetered charging stations (non-networked, donation if anything) scattered around - I've written about it before:
https://www.sevarg.net/2020/04/27/slow-dumb-charging-quit-charging-for-ev/ The summary is that a lot of the time, you spend more on expensive chargers and management fees than you'd just spend on the power. So stop doing that. I don't like Chargepoint because they operate under this "Well, of
course you have to recover your power costs, management costs, installation costs, have high power chargers, and pay us to monitor them, oh, and use our payment network..." model that I just do not like in the slightest.
And, as noted, this isn't an overnight change. It's a gradual change, over
at best probably two decades, if not more. Production capacity simply doesn't exist yet for personal transportation, and with the average age of cars on the road in the US being 11-12 years, it takes a long time to turn over the fleet anyway.
Moving home heating away from natural gas will have a far higher grid impact than EVs.
Will this be as bad for electric cars? Will one be beholden to the dealer? Will independent mechanics and service people be able to work on electric cars now and in the future?
Tesla is absolutely that bad. Very few other companies are. I've got "dealership access" to our Volt with some communication modules and software I picked up, and I can do anything they can do. I haven't had to use it, but the option is there, if you care about it. I would expect more independent EV shops in the future, though a real problem with them is getting insurance. Independent EV shops tend to end up with a concentration of weirdly behaving EVs, which are quite a bit more prone to fires than other shops. The details will get worked out eventually, but it's going to look somewhat different from your corner independent ICE shop.
On the flip side, there genuinely is less to go wrong. Unfortunately, when stuff does go wrong, it's hard to do things other than just swap whole modules around. I'm hopeful that there will be more shops doing deep level repairs going forward, but this sort of stuff is just going out of style across the board. Very few people do deep level repairs on laptops/phones/etc anymore, they just replace the things. :/
I think this has been mentioned, but a lot of you people seem to be the type to just bring it to the dealer without much concern about the cost. I'm just wondering if electric is the way to go for the type of people, for example, who nurse an old pickup along.
The early EV adopters do tend that way from what I've seen - "Who cares about the dealer service cost? It's just like any other luxury car." I've heard one person argue, halfway seriously, that if you're in a tech dense area like Seattle, owning a Tesla is worth it, just because of who you can rub shoulders with in the service centers.
But even if you're prone to keeping older stuff running, an EV as a "transportation appliance" will save you enough money over a lot of other options that even with a major repair or two, you can still come out ahead. If you've got, say, an old pickup, keeping miles off it means it will last longer. We have a 2012 Chevy Volt and a 1997 F350. The truck should last about the rest of my life at this point, since it doesn't get many miles on it. Having the truck (CCLB, diesel, 4WD) also means we can get away with a smaller, more efficient "people mover" (the Volt), because anything the Volt won't fit, the truck can do. There's no reason to have a mid-sized SUV or such for infrequent use. Stupid-cheap transport miles on the Volt, the capability to do anything we want with the truck (except extreme off road stuff, it's too long and heavy for that sort of thing - plus, leaf springs around, I'll pass on the long Jeep trails and just borrow an old Jeep).
I know people doing some interesting hacking on the Leafs, in terms of building higher capacity packs for them and such. It's doable to fiddle with stuff, just a different set of skills than ICE tweaking. It'll probably be about the same as the transition from carburetors and points to EFI and electronic ignition. A lot of people 20 years older than me grumble about the electronic stuff. I grew up on it, and I think the reliability of not having to fiddle with points, to have the computer whine about what's wrong ("Misfire on cylinder 3!" is way more useful to me for troubleshooting than "I've got a miss, somewhere, when I'm trying to merge onto the highway..."), and being able to remap stuff fairly easily is worth a lot. There's a learning curve for EVs, and it'll happen.
But, seriously, the cost savings unless you have crazy expensive power... it's huge. The Volt costs us around $0.03/mi in energy to run on grid power, and it's actually about half that because we have a large solar array (which over the expected lifespan is half the cost of our already very cheap power). My truck runs closer to $0.30/mi in fuel costs alone.
Just don't buy a Tesla if you want non-dealership service options.
Topic: Electric Cars: Can they finally become popular in the United States? (Read 533535 times)