6 ms·

What Tesla owners are doing while you sleep

94 points by ahmadss 12y ago

rdmcfee 12y ago
Electric vehicle owners use more electricity, in addition to the electricity they use for charging. Perhaps electric vehicle owners are in a higher income bracket and have larger houses.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  If you read about a paragraph further, you will see that the author covers exactly that.
scoofy 12y ago
Interesting data, any speculation as to what might occur when the electric car leaves the garage of the executive and enters that of the service industry employee? The automobile was all fine and dandy when only in the hands of the wealthy, but drastically changed the landscape of the country when adopted by the masses. Will there be any serious structural problems if this happens with the electric vehicle?
- jdmichal 12y ago
  Aluminum would become more expensive, at least. Aluminum smelters are one current target for buying all the cheap base-load power at night, as they need massive amounts of electricity. If power companies can sell that power at a higher price to EV consumers instead, then the smelters will have to compete against them.
  - scoofy 12y ago
    Wouldn't it be fair to say that if everyone needs their cars charged at all times, that we'd start distributing electricity throughout the day?
    - jdmichal 12y ago
      Probably. If nightly base-load power becomes as demanded as daily base-load, then the price would equalize and neither day nor night would be cheaper. However, some level of incentive would still need to be kept, otherwise the spike of car charging would just be shifted to 1800-2000, when everyone gets home and plugs in. And really, the aluminum smelters was just one example. As the nightly price equalized with the daily price, all electricity would begin getting more expensive, and everything else with it. Much as, in current times, increases in oil price can increase the price of everything.
      - scoofy 12y ago
        Here's a hypothetical: Do you think it would be feasible to create a plug that has a unique id such that an electric car could be charged remotely, but billed to the owner of the car rather than the person providing access to the power grid?
        maxbrown 12y ago
        Isn't that in effect what happens at charging stations? Not a unique plug id, but public access "billed to the owner of the car".
        windowsworkstoo 12y ago
        yeh you could do it but what a hassle. Would require new meters at the premises, as well as each individual circuits for each charging station that you wanted to bill (otherwise there would be no way to separate out the usage). IOW yes, but no.
        lutusp 12y ago
        Yes, absolutely, that wouldn't be difficult at all. A car's charging plug could have a chip such as is present in newer credit cards, and the transaction would be automatic.
        photojosh 12y ago
        Yup. This is done on mining vehicles already for (liquid) fuel security... a big issue in 3rd world countries. It's pretty easy tech.
  - prawn 12y ago
    Indeed there are individual aluminium smelters in Australia that use 25% of their state's total power.
- Scoundreller 12y ago
  There could be a glut (and reduced prices) of crude oil. The expensive oil sands projects could take a dive. Planes/ships could become a lot cheaper to operate.
- vxNsr 12y ago
  You could always invest in a nuclear power company. Regardless of Obama's fear of anything his personal friends don't own, we're gonna need to upgrade our electric infrastructure somehow and solar and wind just don't scale like gen IV nuclear does. In case anyone misses the point: for the past 6 years the ADministration has been dragging it's feet in building new Nuclear power plants that are a lot "greener" than current ones and are obviously way "greener" than coal.
  - cowsandmilk 12y ago
    what are you talking about? Fukushima killed the political climate for nuclear. Obama had proposed $54 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear plants[1]. No one in Congress was going to vote for that with a nuclear meltdown in the news. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-14/obama-s-nuclear-power-expansion-plans-set-back-by-japanese-quake-aftermath.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-14/obama-s-nuclear-pow...
joosters 12y ago
An interesting article. Some of the comparisons are a little odd, though. The author makes the point that households with an EV are wealthier. Why then, compare their electricity use with a typical household if we have established that an EV owner is not a typical household to begin with? It would be more interesting then to compare EV owners against non-EV owners in a similar income bracket (or household size, or assumed wealth, or somesuch grouping). I wonder how the picture would change? Likewise, when the article introduces solar comparisons, it runs into the same problems. I'd guess that the households with solar panels are again likely to be wealthier, and so much less likely to be a 'typical household'.
- bglazer 12y ago
  I hope this doesn't come off as snarky. Perhaps the author is making a point about the owners of electric cars not being particularly "green" because of their huge houses.
  - joosters 12y ago
    I'd expect the wealth-corrected data to make the EV owners look even better, since they'd be comparing them against households that use even more electricity than their baseline typical customer. To be fair to the author, I think that they actually can't do the more detailed comparisons because they just don't know enough about the households in the study. At the end of the page, it explains that they don't even know whether or not the households actually have EVs, they are just guessing based upon their electricity plan. So despite the earlier talk of stats like "53% more likely to have a swimming pool", I suspect that this is gleaned from elsewhere and their dataset contains very little about the customers, and probably not enough to be able to break them down by income or other factors.
    - makmanalp 12y ago
      Interesting, I'd expect the opposite - It's easier to be more cost / eco efficient when you have the money to. You can, for example afford a modern and robust car (with a great catalytic converter) and regular maintenance. You can afford proper insulation and home automation systems that shut down unused resources, etc. You can afford to pay for composting and recycling services.
gdulli 12y ago
There shouldn't have been people who thought they were getting something for nothing.
- seanflyon 12y ago
  I didn't see any mention in the article of people thinking they were getting something for nothing. Should I assume you are referring to electric car owners?
icebraining 12y ago
Are off-peak incentives only being introduced now in the US market? Here we've had it for decades; you can have a plan under which electricity is cheaper at night and on Sundays, and slightly more expensive otherwise. Since washing machines are one of the biggest consumption devices in our house, and we spend most of the day out anyway, it saves us some money. We just need to program the machines to wash at night.
- jkestner 12y ago
  No. The US has had off-peak pricing for a while. Many appliances have delayed-start buttons so you can set them to run when electricity is cheaper and forget it.
- mason240 12y ago
  They have been around for decades in the US as well. Industry uses far more electricity than residential, so the focus of managing peak use has been factories to shift energy use to off-peak hours, something that the average person would never know about. On the residential side though, our utitly (Xcel Energy in MN), has a rate reduction program where they installed a power cycling device on our central AC unit that shuts it off for 10 minutes every hour.
- Scoundreller 12y ago
  I have a bit of a fear about off-peak incentives and tiered prices. You're still not paying the real-time prices of electricity, for which the purpose is to balance supply and demand. The pricing systems seem to be designed to be easily understood rather than completely practical. As a result, the price may jump every day at 5PM, and then go back down at 10PM. But I fear we'll eventually see a time where HVAC/dryers/fridges/etc turn on full blast at 4:30PM and stop entirely at 5PM, then turn on again right at 10PM, leading to grid instability due to the sudden change in usage at exactly one point in time.
  - pedrocr 12y ago
    >But I fear we'll eventually see a time where HVAC/dryers/fridges/etc turn on full blast at 4:30PM and stop entirely at 5PM, then turn on again right at 10PM, leading to grid instability due to the sudden change in usage at exactly one point in time. If you know it's going to happen and you have a decent grid you can manage. The UK supposedly has a 3GW spike in power draw every time the BBC's soap opera goes to comercial. That's a sizable chunk of total power in an island grid that doesn't have the rest of Europe backing it up. http://www.geek.com/news/tea-time-in-britain-causes-predictable-massive-surge-in-electricity-demand-1535023/ http://www.geek.com/news/tea-time-in-britain-causes-predicta...
peeters 12y ago
There's an important correlation vs causation distinction in there: > People are more likely to be home in the morning and evening; EV owners may be especially likely to use more power at those times because they have bigger homes as well as bigger amenities In other words, it's important to note that this is by no means an "all (other) things being equal" comparison to start with.
nostromo 12y ago
A daydream of mine is to finally get solar panels on my house and buy a Tesla. My car would run on sunshine! However, during an unproductive daydream session, I realized that my solar panels would produce electricity during the exact hours that my car would be parked at work. In fact, during peak solar hours, my house uses very little energy at all. Reverse meter billing would perhaps net out the cost of energy used at night with the energy produced during the day -- but I'm fairly certain by the time I get around to doing all this our utility will have implemented demand-based pricing on electricity, making it fairly cheap to charge your car at night.
- joosters 12y ago
  Just buy a roofrack and bolt the solar panels on to the top of the car :)
  - 1971genocide 12y ago
    weight of car would significantly increase, also aerodynamics plays a big role in cars in making them efficient. solar panels would reduce that too.
    - grecy 12y ago
      Get the flexible panels that stick on - they weigh extremely little and are only a few mm think so aerodynamics are not a huge concern. It's what I'll be putting on the roof of my Round The World 4x4.
- 1971genocide 12y ago
  I think as battery tech improves you will not need to worry. Its getting cheaper to own lithium-ion batteries.
- MiguelHudnandez 12y ago
  I think home solar is great regardless of your transportation method. Those panels are putting power back into the grid specifically when demand is high due to air conditioning. To actually run your car on sunshine, you'd need a battery system at home. But battery charging losses are greater than the local electrical grid. So it's most practical to use the electricity from the panels at the time of generation and nearby. Here in Sacramento, SMUD, the local utility, has a "solar shares" program, where you buy into a solar farm nearby. It costs a little more year round, but it evens out your bills all year. You get credits for "your" solar panel generation, and you get to increase demand for solar, there are no installation costs, and no maintenance. I think utilities are reluctant to give you time-based billing when you have solar in place. They don't want to pay you peak- or ultra-peak-rates for your solar power.
dataphyte 12y ago
Would have been more interested to know how the avg EEV household electricity consumption compares to offset gasoline usage (as energy). My understand is that the efficiency of power plants is so much higher than automobile combustion engines that even if all power plants were gas-powered, EEVs would be an efficiency improvement thermodynamically. I mean, of course EEV household consume more electricity, and of course they are parked at night...and that happens to be cheap electricity hours.
- caublestone 12y ago
  http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=667&t=2 http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=667&t=2 Based on the figure of 9 Kwh to charge the Tesla, this is less than 1 gallon of gas. Pretty efficient.
ForHackernews 12y ago
Do you have to wake up in the middle of the night to plug the car in, or can the car/charger system be programmed to run at certain hours?
- bri3d 12y ago
  Most EV / plug-in cars (Tesla, CMAX, Prius Plug-In) can be programmed using the car screen or phone app to charge at certain times - peak power pricing is common enough that it's an in demand feature.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    I believe Tesla is also working with utilities, where they can provide charge cost via an API, and the vehicle can initiate charging (or stop charging) based on the current price of power.
joshdance 12y ago
The article seemed to miss the point. EV owners use much more electricity at night. The rest is a series of comparisons and factoids that don't really add up to much info for me.
- Widdershin 12y ago
  It's not even EV owners, the study was performed on consumers that had opted in to a low rate night time car charging electricity plan. Headline: Consumers use plan they signed up for to expected effect
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    I thought it was: "Rich people who can buy expensive cars are also likely to have swimming pools and use more electricity, unless they have solar panels on their big houses." In 20 years, the same section of the press will be running with: "Rich people are less greedy than poor people because they have more room on their expansive homes for solar panels. Now here's some photos of their kitchen."
yonran 12y ago
This article has some fun graphs, but the writing is a bit sloppy. “They are using gobs of electricity.” What? The observation (that EV car households use about 6kWh or under $1 of electricity above a normal household per night) is if anything remarkable for how low it is. Does the average owner of a new electric car drive only 16 miles per day? More likely, a large part of the daytime use is also spent charging the car. But the average daytime use is only 3kWh above normal. 9kWh only gets you 24 miles per day or about 9000 miles per year, still below the national average driven per year. If I bought an EV vehicle, I would drive it as much as possible, since it only costs 1/3 what a normal car does to operate. The hypothesis that “EV owners may be especially likely to use more power at those times because they have bigger homes as well as bigger amenities” is plausible, but from the given data the opposite could be true instead; they may spend all their extra electricity charging their vehicle and spending less electricity on their other appliances. Also, why mention Tesla multiple times (and in the title), when far more Nissan Leafs and Chevy Volts have been sold and are part of the data?
gmisra 12y ago
I suspect there are some HN readers with experience with how electrical grids work. Can somebody speak to this increased night load and presumably decrease in variance between daytime load and nighttime load. How would those changes impact grid operations? I'd guess that having a more consistent load is overall beneficial, but it's just a guess.
- gilgoomesh 12y ago
  The grid doesn't really care about load changes provided they are predictable (and peak demand in specific areas doesn't exceed maximum capacity). There's normally a 2 hour lead time to bring larger plants on line so provided you can predict changes in demand with that much lead, there's no real problem.
semanticist 12y ago
'Households with electric vehicles' are defined as households using an electricity plan than benefits you to use lots of power at night, rather than any indication they actually have an EV. So the headline here is: people who pick power plans which are cheaper only if you use lots of energy at night will use lots of energy at night. Once you strip out all the fluff around it, this isn't telling us anything at all whatsoever about EV usage.

94 points by ahmadss 12y ago

Electric vehicle owners use more electricity, in addition to the electricity they use for charging. Perhaps electric vehicle owners are in a higher income bracket and have larger houses.

sliverstorm 12y ago
If you read about a paragraph further, you will see that the author covers exactly that.

scoofy 12y ago

Interesting data, any speculation as to what might occur when the electric car leaves the garage of the executive and enters that of the service industry employee? The automobile was all fine and dandy when only in the hands of the wealthy, but drastically changed the landscape of the country when adopted by the masses. Will there be any serious structural problems if this happens with the electric vehicle?

jdmichal 12y ago
Aluminum would become more expensive, at least. Aluminum smelters are one current target for buying all the cheap base-load power at night, as they need massive amounts of electricity. If power companies can sell that power at a higher price to EV consumers instead, then the smelters will have to compete against them.
- scoofy 12y ago
  Wouldn't it be fair to say that if everyone needs their cars charged at all times, that we'd start distributing electricity throughout the day?
  - jdmichal 12y ago
    Probably. If nightly base-load power becomes as demanded as daily base-load, then the price would equalize and neither day nor night would be cheaper. However, some level of incentive would still need to be kept, otherwise the spike of car charging would just be shifted to 1800-2000, when everyone gets home and plugs in. And really, the aluminum smelters was just one example. As the nightly price equalized with the daily price, all electricity would begin getting more expensive, and everything else with it. Much as, in current times, increases in oil price can increase the price of everything.
    - scoofy 12y ago
      Here's a hypothetical: Do you think it would be feasible to create a plug that has a unique id such that an electric car could be charged remotely, but billed to the owner of the car rather than the person providing access to the power grid?
      - maxbrown 12y ago
        Isn't that in effect what happens at charging stations? Not a unique plug id, but public access "billed to the owner of the car".
      - windowsworkstoo 12y ago
        yeh you could do it but what a hassle. Would require new meters at the premises, as well as each individual circuits for each charging station that you wanted to bill (otherwise there would be no way to separate out the usage). IOW yes, but no.
      - lutusp 12y ago
        Yes, absolutely, that wouldn't be difficult at all. A car's charging plug could have a chip such as is present in newer credit cards, and the transaction would be automatic.
      - photojosh 12y ago
        Yup. This is done on mining vehicles already for (liquid) fuel security... a big issue in 3rd world countries. It's pretty easy tech.
- prawn 12y ago
  Indeed there are individual aluminium smelters in Australia that use 25% of their state's total power.
Scoundreller 12y ago
There could be a glut (and reduced prices) of crude oil. The expensive oil sands projects could take a dive. Planes/ships could become a lot cheaper to operate.
vxNsr 12y ago
You could always invest in a nuclear power company. Regardless of Obama's fear of anything his personal friends don't own, we're gonna need to upgrade our electric infrastructure somehow and solar and wind just don't scale like gen IV nuclear does. In case anyone misses the point: for the past 6 years the ADministration has been dragging it's feet in building new Nuclear power plants that are a lot "greener" than current ones and are obviously way "greener" than coal.
- cowsandmilk 12y ago
  what are you talking about? Fukushima killed the political climate for nuclear. Obama had proposed $54 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear plants[1]. No one in Congress was going to vote for that with a nuclear meltdown in the news. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-14/obama-s-nuclear-power-expansion-plans-set-back-by-japanese-quake-aftermath.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-14/obama-s-nuclear-pow...

joosters 12y ago

An interesting article. Some of the comparisons are a little odd, though. The author makes the point that households with an EV are wealthier. Why then, compare their electricity use with a typical household if we have established that an EV owner is not a typical household to begin with? It would be more interesting then to compare EV owners against non-EV owners in a similar income bracket (or household size, or assumed wealth, or somesuch grouping). I wonder how the picture would change? Likewise, when the article introduces solar comparisons, it runs into the same problems. I'd guess that the households with solar panels are again likely to be wealthier, and so much less likely to be a 'typical household'.

bglazer 12y ago
I hope this doesn't come off as snarky. Perhaps the author is making a point about the owners of electric cars not being particularly "green" because of their huge houses.
- joosters 12y ago
  I'd expect the wealth-corrected data to make the EV owners look even better, since they'd be comparing them against households that use even more electricity than their baseline typical customer. To be fair to the author, I think that they actually can't do the more detailed comparisons because they just don't know enough about the households in the study. At the end of the page, it explains that they don't even know whether or not the households actually have EVs, they are just guessing based upon their electricity plan. So despite the earlier talk of stats like "53% more likely to have a swimming pool", I suspect that this is gleaned from elsewhere and their dataset contains very little about the customers, and probably not enough to be able to break them down by income or other factors.
  - makmanalp 12y ago
    Interesting, I'd expect the opposite - It's easier to be more cost / eco efficient when you have the money to. You can, for example afford a modern and robust car (with a great catalytic converter) and regular maintenance. You can afford proper insulation and home automation systems that shut down unused resources, etc. You can afford to pay for composting and recycling services.

gdulli 12y ago

There shouldn't have been people who thought they were getting something for nothing.

seanflyon 12y ago
I didn't see any mention in the article of people thinking they were getting something for nothing. Should I assume you are referring to electric car owners?

icebraining 12y ago

Are off-peak incentives only being introduced now in the US market? Here we've had it for decades; you can have a plan under which electricity is cheaper at night and on Sundays, and slightly more expensive otherwise. Since washing machines are one of the biggest consumption devices in our house, and we spend most of the day out anyway, it saves us some money. We just need to program the machines to wash at night.

jkestner 12y ago
No. The US has had off-peak pricing for a while. Many appliances have delayed-start buttons so you can set them to run when electricity is cheaper and forget it.
mason240 12y ago
They have been around for decades in the US as well. Industry uses far more electricity than residential, so the focus of managing peak use has been factories to shift energy use to off-peak hours, something that the average person would never know about. On the residential side though, our utitly (Xcel Energy in MN), has a rate reduction program where they installed a power cycling device on our central AC unit that shuts it off for 10 minutes every hour.
Scoundreller 12y ago
I have a bit of a fear about off-peak incentives and tiered prices. You're still not paying the real-time prices of electricity, for which the purpose is to balance supply and demand. The pricing systems seem to be designed to be easily understood rather than completely practical. As a result, the price may jump every day at 5PM, and then go back down at 10PM. But I fear we'll eventually see a time where HVAC/dryers/fridges/etc turn on full blast at 4:30PM and stop entirely at 5PM, then turn on again right at 10PM, leading to grid instability due to the sudden change in usage at exactly one point in time.
- pedrocr 12y ago
  >But I fear we'll eventually see a time where HVAC/dryers/fridges/etc turn on full blast at 4:30PM and stop entirely at 5PM, then turn on again right at 10PM, leading to grid instability due to the sudden change in usage at exactly one point in time. If you know it's going to happen and you have a decent grid you can manage. The UK supposedly has a 3GW spike in power draw every time the BBC's soap opera goes to comercial. That's a sizable chunk of total power in an island grid that doesn't have the rest of Europe backing it up. http://www.geek.com/news/tea-time-in-britain-causes-predictable-massive-surge-in-electricity-demand-1535023/ http://www.geek.com/news/tea-time-in-britain-causes-predicta...

peeters 12y ago

There's an important correlation vs causation distinction in there: > People are more likely to be home in the morning and evening; EV owners may be especially likely to use more power at those times because they have bigger homes as well as bigger amenities In other words, it's important to note that this is by no means an "all (other) things being equal" comparison to start with.

nostromo 12y ago

A daydream of mine is to finally get solar panels on my house and buy a Tesla. My car would run on sunshine! However, during an unproductive daydream session, I realized that my solar panels would produce electricity during the exact hours that my car would be parked at work. In fact, during peak solar hours, my house uses very little energy at all. Reverse meter billing would perhaps net out the cost of energy used at night with the energy produced during the day -- but I'm fairly certain by the time I get around to doing all this our utility will have implemented demand-based pricing on electricity, making it fairly cheap to charge your car at night.

joosters 12y ago
Just buy a roofrack and bolt the solar panels on to the top of the car :)
- 1971genocide 12y ago
  weight of car would significantly increase, also aerodynamics plays a big role in cars in making them efficient. solar panels would reduce that too.
  - grecy 12y ago
    Get the flexible panels that stick on - they weigh extremely little and are only a few mm think so aerodynamics are not a huge concern. It's what I'll be putting on the roof of my Round The World 4x4.
1971genocide 12y ago
I think as battery tech improves you will not need to worry. Its getting cheaper to own lithium-ion batteries.
MiguelHudnandez 12y ago
I think home solar is great regardless of your transportation method. Those panels are putting power back into the grid specifically when demand is high due to air conditioning. To actually run your car on sunshine, you'd need a battery system at home. But battery charging losses are greater than the local electrical grid. So it's most practical to use the electricity from the panels at the time of generation and nearby. Here in Sacramento, SMUD, the local utility, has a "solar shares" program, where you buy into a solar farm nearby. It costs a little more year round, but it evens out your bills all year. You get credits for "your" solar panel generation, and you get to increase demand for solar, there are no installation costs, and no maintenance. I think utilities are reluctant to give you time-based billing when you have solar in place. They don't want to pay you peak- or ultra-peak-rates for your solar power.

dataphyte 12y ago

Would have been more interested to know how the avg EEV household electricity consumption compares to offset gasoline usage (as energy). My understand is that the efficiency of power plants is so much higher than automobile combustion engines that even if all power plants were gas-powered, EEVs would be an efficiency improvement thermodynamically. I mean, of course EEV household consume more electricity, and of course they are parked at night...and that happens to be cheap electricity hours.

caublestone 12y ago
http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=667&t=2 http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=667&t=2 Based on the figure of 9 Kwh to charge the Tesla, this is less than 1 gallon of gas. Pretty efficient.

ForHackernews 12y ago

Do you have to wake up in the middle of the night to plug the car in, or can the car/charger system be programmed to run at certain hours?

bri3d 12y ago
Most EV / plug-in cars (Tesla, CMAX, Prius Plug-In) can be programmed using the car screen or phone app to charge at certain times - peak power pricing is common enough that it's an in demand feature.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  I believe Tesla is also working with utilities, where they can provide charge cost via an API, and the vehicle can initiate charging (or stop charging) based on the current price of power.

joshdance 12y ago

The article seemed to miss the point. EV owners use much more electricity at night. The rest is a series of comparisons and factoids that don't really add up to much info for me.

Widdershin 12y ago
It's not even EV owners, the study was performed on consumers that had opted in to a low rate night time car charging electricity plan. Headline: Consumers use plan they signed up for to expected effect
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  I thought it was: "Rich people who can buy expensive cars are also likely to have swimming pools and use more electricity, unless they have solar panels on their big houses." In 20 years, the same section of the press will be running with: "Rich people are less greedy than poor people because they have more room on their expansive homes for solar panels. Now here's some photos of their kitchen."

yonran 12y ago

This article has some fun graphs, but the writing is a bit sloppy. “They are using gobs of electricity.” What? The observation (that EV car households use about 6kWh or under $1 of electricity above a normal household per night) is if anything remarkable for how low it is. Does the average owner of a new electric car drive only 16 miles per day? More likely, a large part of the daytime use is also spent charging the car. But the average daytime use is only 3kWh above normal. 9kWh only gets you 24 miles per day or about 9000 miles per year, still below the national average driven per year. If I bought an EV vehicle, I would drive it as much as possible, since it only costs 1/3 what a normal car does to operate. The hypothesis that “EV owners may be especially likely to use more power at those times because they have bigger homes as well as bigger amenities” is plausible, but from the given data the opposite could be true instead; they may spend all their extra electricity charging their vehicle and spending less electricity on their other appliances. Also, why mention Tesla multiple times (and in the title), when far more Nissan Leafs and Chevy Volts have been sold and are part of the data?

gmisra 12y ago

I suspect there are some HN readers with experience with how electrical grids work. Can somebody speak to this increased night load and presumably decrease in variance between daytime load and nighttime load. How would those changes impact grid operations? I'd guess that having a more consistent load is overall beneficial, but it's just a guess.

gilgoomesh 12y ago
The grid doesn't really care about load changes provided they are predictable (and peak demand in specific areas doesn't exceed maximum capacity). There's normally a 2 hour lead time to bring larger plants on line so provided you can predict changes in demand with that much lead, there's no real problem.

semanticist 12y ago

'Households with electric vehicles' are defined as households using an electricity plan than benefits you to use lots of power at night, rather than any indication they actually have an EV. So the headline here is: people who pick power plans which are cheaper only if you use lots of energy at night will use lots of energy at night. Once you strip out all the fluff around it, this isn't telling us anything at all whatsoever about EV usage.