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I've had a Chevy Bolt EUV for 3 weeks. We are moving to a new house that has a 240V outlet in the garage. This house does not, so I'm using the stock Chevy p

I've had a Chevy Bolt EUV for 3 weeks. We are moving to a new house that has a 240V outlet in the garage. This house does not, so I'm using the stock Chevy portable charging cable with the 110V adapter, not the 240V one. Setting a known location (like home) means that you can charge at 12A because you can tell the car there's nothing else on the circuit. Otherwise, it will charge at 8A to avoid overloading the circuit. The Bolt charges about 3.5 miles per hour on 110V, which is 35 miles of range or more overnight, which is fine for this situation. Somebody in the neighborhood has a PHEV Subaru. They park on the wrong side of the street (can be ticketed for this in Portland) so they can run their charging cable out a window and plug it into the car. It is almost certainly another 110V. The local utility offers $25 off if you let them control your smart thermostat during the winter and summer (not spring or fall) seasons. You have to participate in at least half of the events to qualify. The typical recommendation for EV batteries is to charge them to 80% unless you need more. There are times where energy prices have gone negative because utilities have too much electricity from solar or wind power. It doesn't seem impossible to do some combination of "let us fill you to 100% if we have too much energy" or "please go plug in your EV" along with time-of-day rates. 240V can draw up to 32A for the Bolts, other cars up to 50A (on a dedicated 60A circuit) and is easily multiples of 110V, which might not be worth really worrying about it. There are solar panels on this house and there'll be ones on the next one, too.

bbarn 3y ago
The company I work for manages those demand response programs. Many of them now also support smart L2 chargers that can also be controlled similar to the thermostat you mention. We also still, at the end of the day have a greed problem. My local utility, for example (smaller, very monopolized one in the socal mountains) has halted being able to get credits from feeding solar back into the grid. They've all but made getting home solar irrelevant unless you have an expensive battery system like a Tesla powerwall or similar. I live in an area at altitude where it's sunny for much more than average and we are prime candidates to have solar on every home - but a greedy local utility has halted nearly all progress that the last decade has seen.

bbarn 3y ago

The company I work for manages those demand response programs. Many of them now also support smart L2 chargers that can also be controlled similar to the thermostat you mention. We also still, at the end of the day have a greed problem. My local utility, for example (smaller, very monopolized one in the socal mountains) has halted being able to get credits from feeding solar back into the grid. They've all but made getting home solar irrelevant unless you have an expensive battery system like a Tesla powerwall or similar. I live in an area at altitude where it's sunny for much more than average and we are prime candidates to have solar on every home - but a greedy local utility has halted nearly all progress that the last decade has seen.