5 ms·

The power grid will be roughly the same in 15 years. Now, know what the "TV pickup" is? - It's a spike in electrical grid demand when everyone turns on a kettle

The power grid will be roughly the same in 15 years. Now, know what the "TV pickup" is? - It's a spike in electrical grid demand when everyone turns on a kettle to make tea during commercial breaks. So, consider EVs adopted at scale, and, like, there's an apartment building with 100 tenants arriving home in the evening. They start charging their cars. That would require 7.2kW x 100 = 720kW of power (a common max for charging stations) for a single building just to charge cars.

Tade0 4y ago
That's a solved problem - just combine a smart meter with a charger and you can adjust the power so that it doesn't make the peak worse. For most of the night electricity usage is considerably lower than during the evening peak.
Cort3z 4y ago
So? The power companies makes money by delivering electricity. This sounds like a problem they want to solve.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Power companies have a monopoly and make money by doing the least amount of work possible to continue collecting (effectively) rent on the lines they own. The kind of capital investment necessary to upgrade the power grid for EV will require public funding.
  - zamnos 4y ago
    Public funding you say? For infrastructure? Wasn't there some sort of thing the US President did at the end of 2021? For like a trillion dollars?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    Gee, its almost like a private company is a useless middleman in cases like this and the government should just do it themselves.
    - Clubber 4y ago
      Why do you think the government would do a better job? Perhaps in other countries, but in the US, the government is largely seen as incompetent at best, corrupt and captured at worst. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/06/m-16-a-bureaucratic-horror-story/545153/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/06/m-16-a-... This was during a war where lives were at stake.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
        The government can be held accountable directly. A corporation with a monopoly can only be held accountable via the government.
        Clubber 4y ago
        >The government can be held accountable directly. By whom, itself?
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
        By the people who vote for it. Let me turn this around: who holds a monopoly corporation accountable? If your government is too corrupt to fix, what hope in hell does a corporation running a utility get you?
        Clubber 4y ago
        I don't think either is held accountable. Who was held accountable for Flynt? Who was held accountable for East Palestine? Usually, the only people held accountable are citizens when they make even the slightest mistake.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
        Ok, so my statement that a monopoly corporation is a useless middleman and the we're better off if the government does it because at least they're one fewer link in the chain is negated by neither being very good, so we do nothing. And we wonder why shit sucks in this country.
  - schiffern 4y ago
    >will require public funding. Truly astounding that you acknowledge that the power companies are (at this point) just rent-seeking monopolists, and your response is "Gosh, I guess we'll just have to subsidize them with a massive corporate welfare check! No other options are possible!" We've seen this game play out with telecom before. Spoiler: the monopolists just pocket the money and don't build the infrastructure.
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  This is a simplistic view and it’s a problem that many businesses on many sectors face.
criley2 4y ago
Very true, and it's a well understood problem. For a variety of reasons it is better to charge during the day than overnight (not the least being that solar works better during the day, helping to mooting nightly storage concerns), and so an ideal situation here is that many or even most of those charged during the day at work. There's a lot of possibilities here though. With smart meters and cars hooked up all night, the power company has a lot of freedom to not just 100% every car instantly, but throttle and prioritize as necessary.
- _heimdall 4y ago
  > For a variety of reasons it is better to charge during the day than overnight This was one of the examples given in the article - the answer on whether it's better to charge at night or during the day varies by who you ask. Solar does work better when the sun is out, but what if your area isn't using solar power? Air conditioner use peaks when the sun is out, what is your area uses much of its electrical capacity during daylight hours on HVAC? The answer always ends up at "it depends"
snowwrestler 4y ago
There were very similar concerns about mobile bandwidth not long after the iPhone came out. Mobile carriers just built like crazy and handled it. No reason power companies can’t do the same thing.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  > No reason power companies can’t do the same thing. Nuclear power plants take over a decade - best case - to build.
  - mywittyname 4y ago
    But gas turbine power plants can take under a year to come online; even less when an existing plant expands capacity. Yeah, they still emit CO2, but it's a quick and cheap stop gap while waiting on green energy to replace them. It should be noted that the USA has a refining crisis looming. Our refinement capacity is stagnant/shrinking and it's substantially more difficult to build refineries than it is to build electricity generation. This is largely a problem that's "by design" that will act as the stick, if the carrots for the EV transition don't work. We basically have an artificial cap on the number of ICE vehicles that can be supplied with gasoline unless something changes.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - snowwrestler 4y ago
    It took wireless network providers over a decade to build out their capacity too. In fact they are still building today.
pornel 4y ago
This is not much power, and all cars support scheduled/delayed overnight charging already. There are cars that support V2G and can be made to even supply power to the grid for that TV pickup peak if necessary. BEVs have batteries large enough that they're fine even if they're not plugged in for several days. Slow AC charging is little more than a kettle + electric oven, and we built the grid for that instead of lamenting it's too much for the grid and people need to continue to use wood stoves. Driving 40 miles (US daily average) uses about 10-12kWh of electricity, and there's whole night to refill that.
iso1631 4y ago
Why would I do that when it costs more to charge at that time due to higher demand. Indeed I'll drain from my house battery back to the grid at that time to make a little on the side and charge from midnight for far less cost.
naravara 4y ago
Assuming it's for overnight charging, I would guess a large apartment complex that offers an EV charging hub might like to install some sort of load balancing/switching mechanism to limit how much total draw. It doesn't take the full evening to charge a car, so it would sequence where to deliver the power. Most people don't drive that much in a day. For a typical EV user nightly charging isn't even really necessary, they're probably only needing to charge once every 3 days or so so it won't take that much to top-up if they're doing it nightly. If it's a small enough building tenants might be okay with doing a sort of sign-in system to use a smaller bank of chargers when needed. Sort of like reserving a treadmill at the gym.

Tade0 4y ago

That's a solved problem - just combine a smart meter with a charger and you can adjust the power so that it doesn't make the peak worse. For most of the night electricity usage is considerably lower than during the evening peak.

Cort3z 4y ago

So? The power companies makes money by delivering electricity. This sounds like a problem they want to solve.

AlexandrB 4y ago
Power companies have a monopoly and make money by doing the least amount of work possible to continue collecting (effectively) rent on the lines they own. The kind of capital investment necessary to upgrade the power grid for EV will require public funding.
- zamnos 4y ago
  Public funding you say? For infrastructure? Wasn't there some sort of thing the US President did at the end of 2021? For like a trillion dollars?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Gee, its almost like a private company is a useless middleman in cases like this and the government should just do it themselves.
  - Clubber 4y ago
    Why do you think the government would do a better job? Perhaps in other countries, but in the US, the government is largely seen as incompetent at best, corrupt and captured at worst. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/06/m-16-a-bureaucratic-horror-story/545153/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/06/m-16-a-... This was during a war where lives were at stake.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      The government can be held accountable directly. A corporation with a monopoly can only be held accountable via the government.
      - Clubber 4y ago
        >The government can be held accountable directly. By whom, itself?
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
        By the people who vote for it. Let me turn this around: who holds a monopoly corporation accountable? If your government is too corrupt to fix, what hope in hell does a corporation running a utility get you?
        Clubber 4y ago
        I don't think either is held accountable. Who was held accountable for Flynt? Who was held accountable for East Palestine? Usually, the only people held accountable are citizens when they make even the slightest mistake.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
        Ok, so my statement that a monopoly corporation is a useless middleman and the we're better off if the government does it because at least they're one fewer link in the chain is negated by neither being very good, so we do nothing. And we wonder why shit sucks in this country.
- schiffern 4y ago
  >will require public funding. Truly astounding that you acknowledge that the power companies are (at this point) just rent-seeking monopolists, and your response is "Gosh, I guess we'll just have to subsidize them with a massive corporate welfare check! No other options are possible!" We've seen this game play out with telecom before. Spoiler: the monopolists just pocket the money and don't build the infrastructure.
KyeRussell 4y ago
This is a simplistic view and it’s a problem that many businesses on many sectors face.

criley2 4y ago

Very true, and it's a well understood problem. For a variety of reasons it is better to charge during the day than overnight (not the least being that solar works better during the day, helping to mooting nightly storage concerns), and so an ideal situation here is that many or even most of those charged during the day at work. There's a lot of possibilities here though. With smart meters and cars hooked up all night, the power company has a lot of freedom to not just 100% every car instantly, but throttle and prioritize as necessary.

_heimdall 4y ago
> For a variety of reasons it is better to charge during the day than overnight This was one of the examples given in the article - the answer on whether it's better to charge at night or during the day varies by who you ask. Solar does work better when the sun is out, but what if your area isn't using solar power? Air conditioner use peaks when the sun is out, what is your area uses much of its electrical capacity during daylight hours on HVAC? The answer always ends up at "it depends"

snowwrestler 4y ago

There were very similar concerns about mobile bandwidth not long after the iPhone came out. Mobile carriers just built like crazy and handled it. No reason power companies can’t do the same thing.

dotancohen 4y ago
> No reason power companies can’t do the same thing. Nuclear power plants take over a decade - best case - to build.
- mywittyname 4y ago
  But gas turbine power plants can take under a year to come online; even less when an existing plant expands capacity. Yeah, they still emit CO2, but it's a quick and cheap stop gap while waiting on green energy to replace them. It should be noted that the USA has a refining crisis looming. Our refinement capacity is stagnant/shrinking and it's substantially more difficult to build refineries than it is to build electricity generation. This is largely a problem that's "by design" that will act as the stick, if the carrots for the EV transition don't work. We basically have an artificial cap on the number of ICE vehicles that can be supplied with gasoline unless something changes.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  It took wireless network providers over a decade to build out their capacity too. In fact they are still building today.

pornel 4y ago

This is not much power, and all cars support scheduled/delayed overnight charging already. There are cars that support V2G and can be made to even supply power to the grid for that TV pickup peak if necessary. BEVs have batteries large enough that they're fine even if they're not plugged in for several days. Slow AC charging is little more than a kettle + electric oven, and we built the grid for that instead of lamenting it's too much for the grid and people need to continue to use wood stoves. Driving 40 miles (US daily average) uses about 10-12kWh of electricity, and there's whole night to refill that.

iso1631 4y ago

Why would I do that when it costs more to charge at that time due to higher demand. Indeed I'll drain from my house battery back to the grid at that time to make a little on the side and charge from midnight for far less cost.

naravara 4y ago

Assuming it's for overnight charging, I would guess a large apartment complex that offers an EV charging hub might like to install some sort of load balancing/switching mechanism to limit how much total draw. It doesn't take the full evening to charge a car, so it would sequence where to deliver the power. Most people don't drive that much in a day. For a typical EV user nightly charging isn't even really necessary, they're probably only needing to charge once every 3 days or so so it won't take that much to top-up if they're doing it nightly. If it's a small enough building tenants might be okay with doing a sort of sign-in system to use a smaller bank of chargers when needed. Sort of like reserving a treadmill at the gym.