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>People will mostly all charge their vehicles at night, so it won’t be from solar power. It always amazes me that people assume that. Take a 3 car household.

>People will mostly all charge their vehicles at night, so it won’t be from solar power. It always amazes me that people assume that. Take a 3 car household. Lets assume every one is a Tesla. Just for ease of calculation. To charge a Tesla in 8 hours, one needs a 240v level 2 charger. This is the same type of connection one would need for a washer/drier/oven/stove. Per car. Now. You've about doubled the number of high pull outlets in the average home. Most people [sans shift workers] work during the day, and there are only so many hours in the day for people to charge. 3 Teslas could in theory be charged back to back off one outlet, but now you have a nightly ritual. I assure you, people will go for the parallel charge. Now expand this load to neighborhood scale. Now propagate that to the trandmission infrastructure. This is not as easy a thing to accommodate once you start sitting down and actually tracking the numbers.

liketochill 4y ago
So you think there will be two cars charging at night per house instead of 1? As long as people aren’t also using their oven and running the drier I don’t see that it changes much for required transmission and generation capacity, but there would be more energy used at night than we currently see.
- salawat 4y ago
  The more you can use, generally the more you will. And people really discount the drain of say, an extended family who all have to charge vehicles for work the next day. It's not a pretty picture.
  - liketochill 4y ago
    Meh, I’m not seeing a capacity problem. Either their panel can handle the load or it can’t and then they have to upgrade panel to higher amperage, and if the whole street upgrades their panels then the utility might have a problem. I think the main problem is going to be that we are going to need a tonne more energy to replace fossil fuels and the daily demand curve with the diurnal pattern is going to flatten right out as people charge all night.

liketochill 4y ago

So you think there will be two cars charging at night per house instead of 1? As long as people aren’t also using their oven and running the drier I don’t see that it changes much for required transmission and generation capacity, but there would be more energy used at night than we currently see.

salawat 4y ago
The more you can use, generally the more you will. And people really discount the drain of say, an extended family who all have to charge vehicles for work the next day. It's not a pretty picture.
- liketochill 4y ago
  Meh, I’m not seeing a capacity problem. Either their panel can handle the load or it can’t and then they have to upgrade panel to higher amperage, and if the whole street upgrades their panels then the utility might have a problem. I think the main problem is going to be that we are going to need a tonne more energy to replace fossil fuels and the daily demand curve with the diurnal pattern is going to flatten right out as people charge all night.