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Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go: study

news.stanford.edu

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Re: Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go: study

#151

Post by kieranmaine »

NickM wrote: post #78
upsidesinclude wrote: post #66

This article does a poor job of explaining why there is going to be a problem and relaying the point of the study. To model the grid and power infrastructure into the future, assumptions must be made about where the power is derived. The article fails to provide the basic factors contributing to the problem, even though the study itself does a fine job. So California wants to legislate electric cars. That means highe…

If you're regularly committing a certain percentage of your car's battery capacity to powering your house, wouldn't it make more sense to just have a stationary battery at home? Otherwise you can't rely on that extra range in your car if you need it to power your home anyway, and you're just spending extra energy carrying around extra battery weight in your car every day.

This requires extra cost for the consumers and will drive up battery demand. It will be cheaper for the consumer to use their car to help balance the grid, as long as they have the required range for when it's needed (with current smart charging solutions already providing this).

Re: Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go: study

#152

Post by Terretta »

dybber wrote: post #132
alexb_ wrote: post #17

>We're doing it wrong, according to a new Stanford study Wrong according to what metric? Cost? Raw efficiency? A lot of people are more than willing to give up efficiency so that they don't have to actually worry about finding a station during the day. To say that something is just outright "wrong" based on their personal preference of priorities comes off as unhelpful to me. The solution is simple. Make electricity…

That’s how we do it in Denmark. We have hourly prices on electricity, so for me it’s cheaper to start the dishwasher outside peak hours. In some areas they are experimenting with car chargers hooked up to this electricity price info, so it charges when it’s cheap.

Weirdly, the latest iPhone + iOS pops a dialog box saying it will do this.

// Weird given tiny amount of energy for your iPhone. But perhaps reasonable in aggregate.

Re: Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go: study

#153

Post by [deleted] »

drak0n1c wrote: post #143
denimnerd42 wrote: post #18

I would be curious about a study done for the Texas market. From what I understand, you'd definitely want to charge at night due to the vast amounts of wind power available and the otherwise low demand. Even better would be to plug the car in at all times when parked either at work or home and it just charges when the rate is cheapest. You don't need to charge every day to refill that 20 or 30 miles.

Many electricity co-ops and providers in Texas offer a choice of plans, one of which is higher rates during daytime but free electricity during nights and weekends. But that allowance doesn't kick in until later in the night, so a programmable clock on the charger would be a killer feature for electric car sellers.

[deleted]

Re: Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go: study

#154

Post by denimnerd42 »

drak0n1c wrote: post #143
denimnerd42 wrote: post #18

I would be curious about a study done for the Texas market. From what I understand, you'd definitely want to charge at night due to the vast amounts of wind power available and the otherwise low demand. Even better would be to plug the car in at all times when parked either at work or home and it just charges when the rate is cheapest. You don't need to charge every day to refill that 20 or 30 miles.

Many electricity co-ops and providers in Texas offer a choice of plans, one of which is higher rates during daytime but free electricity during nights and weekends. But that allowance doesn't kick in until later in the night, so a programmable clock on the charger would be a killer feature for electric car sellers.

yeah I wonder how the car would respond to that at the outlet level.

Re: Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go: study

#155

Post by AlexandrB »

Retric wrote: post #131
lostmsu wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just having my 4x3090 constantly running deep learning experiments consumes 1MWh/month. And that's GPUs only.

Except constantly running can’t benefit from time of day pricing. Essentially it needs to be some 15kWh load that only needs to run for 6 hours per day.

Bitcoin miners?

Re: Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go: study

#156

Post by gpm »

alexb_ wrote: post #31
3pt14159 wrote: post #4

This is simple. Musk just needs to throw 1% of his AI talent at optimizing charging times via realtime grid negotiating and nobody will need to even think about this. Cars will turn into one of our most valuable assets as they help stabalize the grid by being both sinks when energy is plentiful and sources when it's not. There are certain problems we all need to think about, but this is not one of them. It will effec…

If there's excess demand at night, you increase the price at night. If there's excess supply in the morning/afternoon, you lower the price. It's not complicated, and the problem fixes itself. You don't need AI to simulate what groups of people making rational, independent decisions do themselves. That's how you get cars that won't charge because "AI says so", similar to how all of these dogshit smart thermostats can…

The car needs to charge for 4 hours overnight (say, before 7am). It's currently 9pm and the price is currently 7c/kwh, should it charge or not?

That question is obviously underspecified, you can only answer it by knowing whether or not the price will be below 7c/kwh for 4 of the remaining hours in the night. You answer the question with a predictive model of the price, and you build that predictive model with "AI" because that's how we build all our best predicitve models.

AI doesn't get to say "you can't charge", you get to say "and I'll delegate the question of which 4 hours to charge during to the AI".

> similar to how all of these dogshit smart thermostats can be completely shut off from heating if "AI says so".

I assume you're referring to the instance where texas power companies remotely increased the temperature on peoples thermostats? That's not AI, or even remotely related to AI, that's humans controlling other peoples stuff without permission. That risk exists whether or not you use machine learning models to predict electricity prices.

https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/texas/remote-thermos...

Re: Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go: study

#157

Post by distances »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #126
shiftpgdn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My house uses around 3-4MW/mo. I hyper optimized when I had true spot pricing before Griddy energy was disbanded by the state. My bill was extremely low compared to what I pay now.

I thought mine was high at about 1.6 MWh per month!

It does sound high too if that's any consolation! My electricity usage is 1.3 MWh per year, though heating is then a separate energy bill.

Re: Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go: study

#158

Post by dominotw »

cortesoft wrote: post #36
dominotw wrote: post #19

I personally think Govt should ban home charging if they are going to ban non-EV vehicles. How is that rich people with homes charge at home while everyone else has to queue up and waste their time at charging stations. Doesn't seem fair at all. Its a extra time tax on the poor.

So your solution to some people having an easier time charging is to make it worse for everyone?

Correct. This logic is used to ban charter schools in many areas of the country.

No point rehashing the same logic again.

Re: Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go: study

#159

Post by zaptrem »

Terretta wrote: post #152
dybber wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s how we do it in Denmark. We have hourly prices on electricity, so for me it’s cheaper to start the dishwasher outside peak hours. In some areas they are experimenting with car chargers hooked up to this electricity price info, so it charges when it’s cheap.

Weirdly, the latest iPhone + iOS pops a dialog box saying it will do this. // Weird given tiny amount of energy for your iPhone. But perhaps reasonable in aggregate.

Can you give an example of this? I haven't seen it mentioned before.

Re: Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go: study

#160

Post by dominotw »

bfors wrote: post #77
dominotw wrote: post #19

I personally think Govt should ban home charging if they are going to ban non-EV vehicles. How is that rich people with homes charge at home while everyone else has to queue up and waste their time at charging stations. Doesn't seem fair at all. Its a extra time tax on the poor.

Wouldn't that increase charging queue times for the poor?

No because there would be a bigger push to develop public infrastructure. Charters vs public schools, same logic.
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