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I'd heard somewhere that the idea that the national grid would need upgraded is vastly overstated but doing some back of the envelope maths does seem like it co
by VBprogrammer 6y ago
I'd heard somewhere that the idea that the national grid would need upgraded is vastly overstated but doing some back of the envelope maths does seem like it could potentially be a problem.
My workings were 32 million licenced cars, 40kwh each (obviously bigger batteries are already available but you'd hope not every car would need charged from scratch). Works out as over 1000gwh, you'd have say 10 hours to charge them so you could bring that down to 100gw. Average electrical consumption in the UK is about 30gw. I appreciate it's a gross over estimate as most cars won't do nearly that many miles every day.
Average mileage in the UK is typically around 10k miles. A 40kw battery nets somewhere around 200 miles, so needs to be fully charged perhaps once per week on average. That cuts the above significantly but it's still of the order of the UK's current average consumption.
- nicoburns 6y agoI think average consumption is wrong figure to be looking at here. You can charge EVs overnight when consumption is typically lower.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoI accept that but for the moment there is no centrally organised way to do this, car charges have timers and the like built in for sure, but that is asking a lot to expect everyone to set it. The majority of people will come home and plug in. This should be easy to fix but it is another thing which needs to be rolled out and working in the next 10 years.
- fulafel 6y agoFlat rate electricity prices over the day aren't sustainable anyway with the transition to renewables, price signaling is coming.
- _ph_ 6y agoIn Germany, if you have a heat pump you can get special discounted rates if you let the utilities company switch off the pump for some time during peak demand. The same scheme could immediately be used for electric car charging. Actually I expect the utilities to be a big pusher for charging infrastructure, which is then controlled to even stabilize the grid.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoI think you missed this: > This should be easy to fix but it is another thing which needs to be rolled out and working in the next 10 years.
- nicoburns 6y agoThis isn't exactly a new idea though. This has been done in the past in the UK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater). And rollout of smart meters is already in progress.