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The average power consumed by an electric car doing average miles is a few hundred watts. It's well within the capacity of the grid to supply. The issue you're

The average power consumed by an electric car doing average miles is a few hundred watts. It's well within the capacity of the grid to supply. The issue you're highlighting is that fast charging makes the power usage very bursty with high peaks. So why not smooth it out? Put another battery in the charger which slowly replenishes. Then the grid doesn't see the bursty load you're talking about.

neoberg 4y ago
But then we need to wait for the charging station to charge. How many of those batteries would a charging station need to ensure continuous service?
- pph 4y ago
  Likely we'll see such a system with electric motorcycles (and similar categories) first, which is like a "small scale" version due to the smaller battery capacity & size. E.g. Honda is working on it: http://www.honda-mpp.com/in/ http://www.honda-mpp.com/in/
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  It doesnt need to completely disconnect from the grid, just smooth the load as much as is economicallly useful. A load that is already statistically smoothed by multiple cars charging at once, arriving and leaving at different, but statistically predictable, times. And people are already attaching batteries to the grid to earn money by smootging supply and demand, it just makes sense to locate those near to demand so they can share cables. Then to the grid the car charger station looks like a consistent energy user that can flex a little to help the grid (possibly even feeding back during peaks), rather than a random one.
MagnumOpus 4y ago
Another battery is another 10-15% loss of efficiency, which makes charging 10-15% more expensive. Far better in most situations to distribute the spike it to the grid.
lm28469 4y ago
> So why not smooth it out? Put another battery in the charger which slowly replenishes. There are 1.4B vehicles one earth, the plan apparently is to replace them all with battery powered vehicles I don't think people understand the scale of this and how many batteries we can produce and recycle given the limited resources we have.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  > 1.4B vehicles one earth Most of which spend approximately 90% of their time stationary and unoccupied.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    I've never seen an empty gas station during the day in my city. You can't have batteries to charge batteries, then you'd need batteries to charge the batteries charging the batteries. All of that because we simultaneously decided that nuclear was bad and all we need is windmills, which are like the worst thing to power a fully electric world with high demand peaks, and to move from gas to electric cars Adding batteries won't solve any problem. Gas allowed us to live unsustainably and made it easy to do so. Wanting to replicate that with electricity/batteries is plain stupid. If everyone needs three tonnes of steel and their own body weight in rare earth material to cover 30km per day on average we're totally fucked from the get go
  - thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
    Locally, the same 90%. It's no use sharing a car with someone who needs to commute somewhere else at the same time, you need to share it with non-conflicting use.

neoberg 4y ago

But then we need to wait for the charging station to charge. How many of those batteries would a charging station need to ensure continuous service?

pph 4y ago
Likely we'll see such a system with electric motorcycles (and similar categories) first, which is like a "small scale" version due to the smaller battery capacity & size. E.g. Honda is working on it: http://www.honda-mpp.com/in/ http://www.honda-mpp.com/in/
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
It doesnt need to completely disconnect from the grid, just smooth the load as much as is economicallly useful. A load that is already statistically smoothed by multiple cars charging at once, arriving and leaving at different, but statistically predictable, times. And people are already attaching batteries to the grid to earn money by smootging supply and demand, it just makes sense to locate those near to demand so they can share cables. Then to the grid the car charger station looks like a consistent energy user that can flex a little to help the grid (possibly even feeding back during peaks), rather than a random one.

MagnumOpus 4y ago

Another battery is another 10-15% loss of efficiency, which makes charging 10-15% more expensive. Far better in most situations to distribute the spike it to the grid.

lm28469 4y ago

> So why not smooth it out? Put another battery in the charger which slowly replenishes. There are 1.4B vehicles one earth, the plan apparently is to replace them all with battery powered vehicles I don't think people understand the scale of this and how many batteries we can produce and recycle given the limited resources we have.

kwhitefoot 4y ago
> 1.4B vehicles one earth Most of which spend approximately 90% of their time stationary and unoccupied.
- lm28469 4y ago
  I've never seen an empty gas station during the day in my city. You can't have batteries to charge batteries, then you'd need batteries to charge the batteries charging the batteries. All of that because we simultaneously decided that nuclear was bad and all we need is windmills, which are like the worst thing to power a fully electric world with high demand peaks, and to move from gas to electric cars Adding batteries won't solve any problem. Gas allowed us to live unsustainably and made it easy to do so. Wanting to replicate that with electricity/batteries is plain stupid. If everyone needs three tonnes of steel and their own body weight in rare earth material to cover 30km per day on average we're totally fucked from the get go
- thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
  Locally, the same 90%. It's no use sharing a car with someone who needs to commute somewhere else at the same time, you need to share it with non-conflicting use.