Can our GRID keep up with DEMAND?

[FarAway]

Winter is coming.... CNBC video on our Nation's electrical grid and the effects of widespread adaptation of EV's. BIG PROBLEM, we don’t currently have the electric infrastructure - The Grid - both in terms of power generation and power distribution, to support the EVs expected to hit the road in the near term. Not. Even. Close.

Upgrading the national power grid will take trillion$ of dollar$ and near dictatorial direction to get it done in time to matter. Maybe ELON has some ideas?

Because we are not ready......

 

[anionic1]

Nope. I can speak for California. I have sat in commercial development meetings where the utilities are saying add all the EV charging you want. We frequently have days now where all the demand is covered by renewable energy. Meaning where once the power provider has to pick up 100% of the demand that day they didn’t have to pick up any while the Sun was out. Also in 2023 the law changed and now basically all new construction has to have solar and 4 stories and up is supposed to have batteries. And we are talking huge numbers. I priced a handful of new apartments and they tend to be in the 60 to 120kW size for solar and usually close in battery size although I have seen engineers find other energy compliance that mitigates the batteries. So now every new house and building and all the existing structures are dumping tons of solar onto our grid. So maybe on the news they cry trillion dollar grid upgrade but in meeting with the billionaires looking to build and wanting EV power, they are saying no problem. Just started a job with 8000 amps at 480V for EV power to a large mixed use project in LA.

The part that will be a struggle is rural areas with people trying to travel

 

[cvalue13]

can our GIRD keep up with DEGARLIC?

 

[Kahpernicus]

If only people has forewarned this decades ago.

Weird no one did.

 

[Fugue]

EVs can be configured to charge during off-peak hours. California incentivizes this with discounted pricing.

 

[CyberGus]

While the CNBC story is correct that our National Grid is yet another example of our neglected infrastructure, I have faith in our ability to find solutions, like using Megapacks to enhance the local grid.

I think Joe Biden should reclassify Superchargers as "vending machines" so they can be installed at the 1,000+ rural Interstate Highway rest stops across America. Then the government can add a Megapack and cover the whole area in solar panels. Boom!


Rest Area Maps of the United States (Google)

 

[Gurule92]

Can our grid handle all the dryers in our houses?

Basically the same load except less ppl will have EVs lol

 

[tidmutt]

Can our grid handle all the dryers in our houses?

Basically the same load except less ppl will have EVs lol

Engineering Explained, the youtube channel calculated it to be roughly equivalent to the switch to air conditioning in the US.

 

[tidmutt]

While the CNBC story is correct that our National Grid is yet another example of our neglected infrastructure, I have faith in our ability to find solutions, like using Megapacks to enhance the local grid.

I think Joe Biden should reclassify Superchargers as "vending machines" so they can be installed at the 1,000+ rural Interstate Highway rest stops across America. Then the government can add a Megapack and cover the whole area in solar panels. Boom!


Rest Area Maps of the United States (Google)

Well, you put money in and it vends electricity out.... seems reasonable to me. ?

 

[Greshnab]

Winter is coming.... CNBC video on our Nation's electrical grid and the effects of widespread adaptation of EV's. BIG PROBLEM, we don’t currently have the electric infrastructure - The Grid - both in terms of power generation and power distribution, to support the EVs expected to hit the road in the near term. Not. Even. Close.

Upgrading the national power grid will take trillion$ of dollar$ and near dictatorial direction to get it done in time to matter. Maybe ELON has some ideas?

Because we are not ready......

have there been any engineering studies to show total energy use to drill, refine, store, distribute, dispense, and sell gasoline compared to the usage for the same number of miles of BEV use?

everyone keeps just trying to say BEV's add to the grid without taking out the electricity required to produce that gas and to get it into a car. I suspect it will come out that BEV's use LESS energy overall.

 

[LoneWolfO6]

No!

 

[fhteagle]

have there been any engineering studies to show total energy use to drill, refine, store, distribute, dispense, and sell gasoline compared to the usage for the same number of miles of BEV use?

I tried really hard to come up with a number for this before being a guest on a podcast. Hard numbers were really hard to find. I believe it was an ORNL study that placed well to tank energy expenditure at around 6-12kWh per marketed gallon of liquid fossil fuel. I'll see if I can dig it up again.

There's other ways to look at this, for example how much new renewable energy do we need to generate to run all new vehicle sales in the US as BEVs. I did the math and the answer was on the order of 80 billion kWh per year, not that far above our current installation rate. Install those at or close enough to DCFCs (i.e. put the charger at the base of a wind turbine that's already doing AC-DC conversion in the power equipment anyway) and the grid transmission needs for BEVs are reduced sizably, like in the 10 to 20% range.

Okay, people like to charge at home. Take the average miles per year driven, assume they all are done in an inefficient F150 Lightning, charged overnight most nights of the year. You come up with about ~16A over 8 hours for the nights it does charge. If the grid can't handle another 16A per meter in the lowest demand period of the day, we have bigger problems than EVs.

Bottom line is the grid needs serious overhaul and to resume the expansion rate we had from the 50s to the 90s. We quit investing in it for like 20 years for no really good reason. We might as well do that overhaul assuming EVs, behind the meter solar, etc, because those technologies are now so far beyond the competitors economically it's not even funny.

 

[BayouCityBob]

These are silly, click-bait stories to pitch the agenda of equipment sales companies and consultants. If we banned the sale of ICE vehicle in the US tomorrow (won't happen), the total electricity demand increase per year associated with EVs would be about 0.8% per year of additional electricity over the next 20 years as the fleet was replaced. We can handle this. The neighborhood grid is a challenge but will be solved out of extra revenue.

Places like California will have a problem but it will be due not to any technical or economic challenges but to the continued incompetence of the CEC, the four orifices through which electricity must pass, and the regulatory morass that makes energy project builds prolonged, expensive, and unpredictable. (Speaking as someone who has been directly involved in more than 2,000 MW of CA energy projects, both renewable and thermal.)

 

[ÆCIII]

I don't see a problem, because total EV transition is still going to take years of production so there won't be any sudden demand with everyone having EVs overnight.

The growth of the electricity grid over the past 70 or more years has been increasing substantially already, although a plateau since 2005 has been result of accelerated reduction of petroleum usage and heavier dependence on other forms of energy. But the trend is still going up and renewables are just beginning to increase to their more used potential.

Most US homes have been using roughly an average of 877kwh electricity per month (although the amount can vary a lot), and if one charges an EV at home four times a month that 's about 200kwh to 250kwh added to that.

https://www.electricrate.com/data-center/average-energy-bills/

So we're looking at roughly a 25% increase in electricity consumption for the average household - but only if they are one of the small percentage of households with new EV owners each year.

What people also are not considering, is that most of this extra home EV charging demand will be placed on the grid at night during non-peak hours when the grid is closer to idle, so the peak demand of any area or substation will hardly ever be maxed out even at current grid capacities from home EV charging.

Of course supercharger demand is different and occurs likely more in the daytime, but Tesla is also taking steps to develop battery storage to buffer and augment sites with heavy peak demands, or at peaker power plants. But a large portion of EV charging demand will be from home charging at night during off peak times.

As @BayouCityBob notes above, these are really just a click-bait nothing burger stories put out by those invested in ICE, legacy auto, or petroleum interests most likely. I've always ignored them and will continue to ignore them.

- ÆCIII

 

[Greshnab]

I don't see a problem, because total EV transition is still going to take years of production so there won't be any sudden demand with everyone having EVs overnight.
but only if they are one of the small percentage of households with new EV owners each year.

This issue I can see is the ramp rate of BEV plants In tesla's case> is a LOT faster than the ramp rate of electrical power generation.
So if the delta between getting 100 miles worth of gas in your car.. and getting 100 miles worth of electricity into your BEV is very high.. we are going to acumulate a LOT of energy debt and no way to break even.