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>So how much did it cost the grid to add my car? $0. As you say, you are now "running the laundry and cooking" for hours at night to charge your car. How do y

• vel0city 3y ago
  It didn't take a single piece of new equipment to handle it. All of that equipment was built out to support my high demand loads, so it already existed and was ready to go. The power plants serving my house already had that capacity, the transformers could handle the load, all the lines were rated to handle far more power going to my house than the time I charge. Even if everyone on my street added an EV, it wouldn't take a single piece of new equipment to handle the load because all the equipment is already designed to handle more than that during other hours of the day. So long as people on average charge late at night or other off-peak times, it hasn't increased the peak loads on the grid at all, which is what they have to build to anyways. Sure, I'm buying energy at those hours of the night, but that's a low time of energy usage overall. So much of a low usage, spot prices at those hours in my area routinely go negative, i.e. there's so much spare energy they're giving it away. My REP makes money accepting electricity at negative rates for me to charge my car many nights of the year before even factoring in what I then pay them for it. Of course, this then figures into their overall rate contract they have for me, there's certainly hours in the day where my energy usage costs them more than what their contracted rate is for me.