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Grid capacity is what blocks EV market share and will continue to be the blocker for the foreseeable future. A 2 person apartment where I live will consume ~40
by tpxl 4y ago
Grid capacity is what blocks EV market share and will continue to be the blocker for the foreseeable future.
A 2 person apartment where I live will consume ~400kWh of power in a typical month. Charging a 100kWh battery twice a month per person would double the power usage. We don't have the power generation, nor power delivery for that, nor will we have it for some time.
- anovikov 4y agoNot really, a car serves for ~15 years, so even 100% EV market share will mean only 6% or so annual replacement rate. Plenty of time for grid to adapt.
- tpxl 4y agoAccording to a random source (American Public Power Association), the US got about 30GW of new power from 2014 to 2021, and is projected to build another 41GW in 2022. The generation as of March 2022 was 1250GW, so about 2-3% increase per year. You'd have to add another 8.5% (12 year car replacement age, and it doubles consumption, so you need to double the total production in 12 years) on top of that and you'd have to start now, not in a couple years, when the problem becomes apparent. Edit: Average car age is < 12 in the US, not 15.
- hnaccount_rng 4y agoAverage age != average service life though, so what you are essentially saying is: Service life is something above 20 years[1] The main thing about the electricity grid isn't so much that we need new capacity (that we actually have the production capacity to deal with), but that it changes the load distribution of the grid. And we have no (effective) way to communicate the load condition. If we could dynamically increase and decrease the consumption, then we could deal with building less excess capacity. At least here in Germany, if you look outside you'll see nearly every new house having a complete array of solar panels and all of the currently added installations come with the option to redirect the power into local storage. This isn't widely deployed yet as battery capacity is still too expensive, but within the next couple of years this will be fixed and all of these buildings will "disappear" from the electric grid. They will (largely [2]) feed themselves and all remaining demand will be time-insensitive due to the available local storage. These houses (and the associated EVs) will not put additional strain on the grid. And, if we manage to sort out the regulatory things and implement a reasonable user-interface, they may even take strain from the grid. This is a rather long story for saying this: Don't equate "capacity added" with "production increase" with "actual amount of electric energy generated and consumed". The first to numbers differ by a load factor and the last one will (increasingly) diverge, due to net-metering and friends. [1] assuming that all cars large the same time and none get "lost" by being in accidents or exported you'd get to 24 years if the half-life is 12, in practice I would assume a certain heavy-tailness and a peak somewhere around 20 [2] most houses will be _heavily_ oversupplied on a year-long basis, but will be consumers to the grid for shorter periods.
- dzhiurgis 4y ago10% of your EV cost, added to your roof solves this at least by 50% of the year. Some places let you invest in solar farm that you then use power at all your abodes and at municipal chargers. FWIW we should have waaay more incentives towards adding rooftop solar + batteries than towards EVs.