SkySchemer t1_ixw0mnr wrote
Reply to comment by moknine1189 in Electric-vehicle charging stations could use as much power as a small town by 2035 — and the grid isn't ready by Sorin61
>but rather in as we move to more EVs at home the current infrastructure of the grid is not equipped to deal with the new demands.
People run clothes dryers at home today, and they often do it at peak times because that's when they are awake and able to do laundry. They also run their AC during peak hours, which is also during the hottest part of the day.
EV charging happens at night, between 9pm and 6am, when nothing else is going on in the house, when residential energy demand is at its lowest. And it's the same power draw as these huge appliances.
So in 10 years, you have more people effectively running their dryer at night. If everyone running their AC at the same time during peak hours isn't a constant problem in the summer (yes, it occasionally is, but they key word there is occasionally), why do you think level 2 charging in the middle of the night is going to be an issue?
The real problem is people who don't have access to at-home charging. They are at risk of having to charge in suboptimal conditions, and at suboptimal times. And yes, that is going to be a problem in 10 years unless we do something about it, because it is a problem right now.
moknine1189 t1_ixw43no wrote
How many people run multiple dryers at home? How many people have multiple cars at home? How you will you guarantee cars will only be charged between 9pm and 6am?
The reasons I think infrastructure is a problem (also in the U.S. infrastructure issues extend well beyond the grid, a lot of our infrastructure is old out date and poorly maintained)
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-renewables-electric-grid/
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/05/31/us/power-outages-electric-grid-climate-change/index.html
https://blog.ucsusa.org/samantha-houston/can-the-electric-grid-handle-ev-charging/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/13/electric-vehicles-grid-upgrade/
Note that my concern is not that we won’t be ready or be able to get ready but rather getting the infrastructure ready for such is a bigger challenge than simply how much energy EV charging stations will require.
I’m hopeful that renewables will take off in the future to help help us meet the demand but the real trick is having the infrastructure in place to be able to take advantage.
Just an FYI electric dryers been around since the 60s the infrastructure we have today has them accounted for and as technology has progress they’ve become somewhat more efficient (nothing too crazy though since they work off heat and law of conservation of energy is real) which has bought us some extra capacity within the grid. But nowhere near enough to support all EVs.
Btw you keep dancing around the issue that you can’t guarantee when people will and will not be charging their EVs you keep mentioning the ideal situation of charging at night but what happens when that isn’t case. To the best of your knowledge what is the worst case scenario for charging EVs?
SkySchemer t1_ixwaz8p wrote
>How many people run multiple dryers at home? How many people have multiple cars at home?
I have run my AC and my dryer at the same time.
>How you will you guarantee cars will only be charged between 9pm and 6am?
You program them not to run between 5pm and 9pm, or whenever your peak hours are.
Trust me on this: when you get an EV, you become very aware of how much electricity costs. If you want to pay a lot less for charging than you do for the equivalent mileage from gas, then you move to a plan where you pay based on the time of day. In this case, capitalism and the market work in your favor. Few things build habits quite like cost of use.
You keep talking about the grid as if adding overnight charging is some huge stress. It's not. Even the third article you linked to say this. (The fourth was behind a pay wall so I couldn't read it).
The average home uses about 30kW of electricity per day. That usage is concentrated between 6 or 7am and 9 or 10pm. A level 2 charger is about 7 to 8 kWh, and my charger's stats tell me my longest sessions are about 5 hours, for a total of 34kW, but more typical is a 3.5 hour charge because we prefer to keep the battery above 40% (trading a little long-term lifetime to ensure we have plenty of range during an emergency). But I am not charging every day: I am charging maybe 2x a week at most. So twice a week I am pulling up to 8 kW an hour for a few hours, when the only other things of note running in the house are the fridge, water heater, and HVAC.
When the second car arrives, my best option is really to stagger. Most folks probably only have one level 2 charger, so they have to stagger anyway. There may be some cases where both cars are charging at the same time, but since you don't need to charge every day, that's just not going to happen frequently.
All this stuff you write is mostly FUD. It's human nature to joke around and say that people are stupid, but they really aren't. People learn the things they need to learn.
Stop assuming that everyone is going to charge their cars all at once. Stop assuming that everyone will collectively lose their minds and charge during the day when electricity is the most expensive. Why would you assume these things? The first article you linked to makes this same assumption and it's just plain silly.
>To the best of your knowledge what is the worst case scenario for charging EVs?
Rapid charging during the daytime. It is expensive and requires a large amount of power. Busy charging stations are in constant use, so that power demand is significant. But the only people who should be rapid charging are those who are on a long road trip, where time matters.
moknine1189 t1_ixwnn6t wrote
As previously stated AC and Dryers are technologies that have been around and have been improved over time to run more efficiently. The grid as it exists today has taken into account running them both simultaneously. Running multiple central ACs and Dryers is not very typical, Running of each is.
Programming vehicles to charge between any times doesn't guarantee that it will always be so, again what you are describing is an ideal situation. Even with programming you cannot guarantee that the day wont ever come that people wont charge their vehicles during peak hours. This is not due to stupidity, maliciousness, arrogance, or anything of the sort. It may come in the form of an emergency where people may have to evacuate, or other unprecedented scenarios. Think about it like this if there is ever a situation where you think you might lose power are you really going to wait to charge your vehicle? or will you charge it while you still can? These are the type of questions that help build reliable systems. Again you don't just plan for the best case scenarios you must account for as many as possible.
When it comes to engineering systems as a whole you MUST account for the worst case scenarios. In this case it would be everyone charging their vehicles during peak hours (here lets assume every household only charges 1 vehicle at a time). The current infrastructure (substations) that supplies power to homes cannot withstand that (if you go back up to my original comment you shall see I mentioned I'm referring to the substations that feed the neighborhoods). Remember when you are talking about breakers, transformers, transmission lines, and fuses they all have a maximum limit they can operate at. Exceeding that limit will cause a failure in the system. Again when they were put in place they weren't accounting for EVs and their additional power draw. As stated before as the system ages performance degrades its simply a matter of fact. The reason you MUST account worst case scenario is to avoid critical failures such as an entire neighborhood losing power. Either the system must be capable enough to account for the WORST or safeguards and procedures must be put in place to avoid faults/failures. Adding the safeguards would be considered an upgrade to the infrastructure.
As far as trusting you goes I'm having a hard time doing so (I'm not sure if you truly meant kW or kWh two different things one is power the other is energy you consume energy and power is the rate in which you consume that energy it seems they may have gotten mixed up) as far as being aware of how much electricity costs I'm all too familiar as an Electrical Engineer (supplied generators to airports, hospitals, fire stations, nursing home, and schools) The iron clad law of power generation is your generation must always be greater than the load, if not you must be able to load shed (Also you must take into account inductive loads for the the inrush current of starting motors and if they have soft starters or not).
Also I never said or assumed all these vehicles where going to be put in peoples homes all at once (hell I even acknowledge that because of increasing efficiencies in technologies we bought ourselves extra leeway). The reality is as we move on to more EVs we must upgrade our infrastructures to keep up with the rising demand.
As far as what I write you considering it FUD is mostly a you problem. The information I've at least taken the time to share with you is factual to the best of my knowledge (I don't know everything nor do I want to pretend to). If any of it gives you FUD that's because life is that way there are many things we don't know such as how the future will play out, there is a lot of uncertainty in reality, and doubt is something we all deal with everyday. Ignoring the facts doesn't make any of that go away.
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Just as an FYI I never joked about calling anyone stupid.
SkySchemer t1_ixx0lbh wrote
>The grid as it exists today has taken into account running them both simultaneously.
The grid doesn't directly care how efficient something is. It only cares about how much power is being drawn. A central AC is roughly 3 to 5kW. A dryer is roughly 2 to 5kW. That's 5 to 10 kW, and a level 2 EV is right in the middle of that range. So, by your statement, "the grid" can handle EV's charging at night, since it can already handle AC+dryer during the day.
>Programming vehicles to charge between any times doesn't guarantee that it will always be so, again what you are describing is an ideal situation. Even with programming you cannot guarantee that the day wont ever come that people wont charge their vehicles during peak hours. This is not due to stupidity, maliciousness, arrogance, or anything of the sort. It may come in the form of an emergency where people may have to evacuate, or other unprecedented scenarios. Think about it like this if there is ever a situation where you think you might lose power are you really going to wait to charge your vehicle?
Of course it's no guarantee, but money is a powerful motivator. Yes, we have accidentally charged our car during mid-peak hours, which costs me not quite double what off-peak costs. Of course mistakes like that will happen, but so what? Every EV owner is not going to make this same mistake at the same time. You keep insisting that the grid needs to plan for this extremist nonsense. And I say, no, it doesn't. That would be throwing tons of infrastructure money away, overdesigning for a theoretical edge case with a likeliness of occurrence so low that it may as well be zero. That is not how you do capacity design.
As for emergencies...so what? If I lose power, guess what? The battery in my car still holds its charge. And unlike an ICE vehicle, it doesn't consume a significant amount power while idling in traffic (an ICE engine burns roughly 1/4 to 1/2 gallon per hour while idling). Remember that big snowstorm in the NE? EV's, it turns out, did just fine. More than fine.
If a storm is coming, maybe I'll charge to 80% even if I'm not down very much. So what? That's going to be a really short charging session. Or, if I am especially worried, maybe I'll take the extra hour and go to 90% so give me more usable miles. Most ICE car owners will also gas up to a full tank, too. It's the same strategy, only I don't have to wait in line to do it.
If it's a sudden disaster, like an earthquake? The car is the last thing I am worried about.
You're way too lost in whataboutism.
>far as trusting you goes I'm having a hard time doing so (I'm not sure if you truly meant kW or kWh two different things one is power the other is energy you consume energy and power is the rate in which you consume that energy it seems they may have gotten mixed up)
The "7 to 8 kWh" figure I used for Level 2 charger, stating kWh instead of kW, was a simple typo. I know those are unusual on the internet, but there you go.
>If any of it gives you FUD that's because life is that way there are many things we don't know such as how the future will play out, there is a lot of uncertainty in reality, and doubt is something we all deal with everyday. Ignoring the facts doesn't make any of that go away.
It's FUD because it's based on hypotheticals and extreme cases. Read that third article you linked to, again. The grid is able to handle current adoption rates. There is plenty of time to plan for years from now, when adoption rates will be forced to accelerate further. Money has been allocated for exactly that purpose.
moknine1189 t1_ixxg7xn wrote
The grid may not directly care about efficiency of individual components but to the system as a whole makes a huge difference. A 5kW dryer that's only 80% efficient will actually consume 6.25kW of power (imagine if that was the case for 1000 house holds that would be equivalent to 6.25MW of power, thats something that cant be ignored) the fact that things are more efficient helps a fuckton.
Also I never argued that the grid cannot handle EVs charging at night I'm not even sure how you came to that conclusion, once again the grid cannot withstand the worst case scenario of most consumers charging EVs during peak hours. Once Again if you read my original comment I was referring to the infrastructure upgrades to the substations that feed power to neighborhoods/homes to meet the increased demand. Also as far as need to be able to supply all that power I never said it was actually necessary to do that but the system but rather the grid needs to be either powerful enough to meet the peak demand or have safeguards in place to prevent critical faults/failures that would cause interruption of service to customers.
As far as the "Typo" goes its not just that you put kWh where it should of been kW. You incorrectly stated that your car charged 30kW in 5 hours that sentence does not make sense. I even explained the difference between kWh and kW (you can charge at a rate of 30kW for a period of 5hrs, giving you a total charge of 5 x 30 x 3600 doing this will give you the energy stored in your batteries in kWh (kWh is how batteries are measured or AmpHrs if know the voltage and divide by it).
As far as my hypothetical FUD goes: its not really a hypothesis if its happened. Electric grids have failed before, we have had natural disasters which have caused people to panic, and there's been too many examples of failures of infrastructures that have caused plenty of harm and property damage (I'm only here fighting to prevent it yet its FUD...). Once again if the information that I present to you gives you FUD that's a you problem, where I come from its simply reality.
I also like to point out you have tried multiple times to deflect from arguments by using words like FUD, whataboutism, and twisted my words to the point of calling people stupid. If you truly believe that these scenarios are as improbable as you believe them to be please articulate as to why you believe that to be the case. Saying we have this one fits all solution of just charge vehicles at night is complete BS. you yourself admitted there maybe a situation where youd charge during peak hours I wonder how many people will have the same thought during the same emergency? My point always was that you must have a plan to account for the worst case because thats when shit hits the fan not during "ideal scenarios".
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