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

news.stanford.edu

261–270 of 394 posts

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

#261

Did anyone do the math for when gasoline car sales will be banned? How many more power plants to we need? How much more Lithium do we need? I don‘t want to be a luddite, but the ev revolution seems to be unfeasible.

As long as the internal combustion engine is banned the EV revolution is entirely feasible. No one said everyone would be able to afford to drive an EV. Just that people would stop driving internal combustion engine vehicles.

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

#262
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely what the linked article says. From the section "Charging Incentives": “And it’s not just California and Western states. All states may need to rethink electricity pricing structures as their EV charging needs increase and their grid changes,” added Powell, who recently took a postdoctoral research position at ETH Zurich. The article also includes other interesting and more nuanced policy details tha…

> This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. > So yes, there are weird red herrings in this thread from people who want a technology first and a solution second (or never) and/or who don't understand design of incentive structures. Speaking of incentive structures, one of my former employers installed EV chargers in all of the bottom floors of…

> Speaking of incentive structures, one of my former employers installed EV chargers in all of the bottom floors of our parking garage while explicitly not allowing non-EVs to park in those spaces.

Sounds like it worked out great for them — people who could afford living in single detached houses (generally the richer ones, and therefore generally the management) now get reserved parking out of the pollen. The people who are inconvenienced (i.e. you) weren't the people involved in the decision anyway.

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

#263
post #228

I need ELI5: electric cars have very large and heavy batteries right? Why is it prohibitively difficult to replace them on demand? What if there were 2-3 batteries charging at home or hundreds at a "battery station", where you would park at a spot/drive-thru garage and have a hydraulic machine drop your old battery and lift in a new battery and the whole swap can take no longer than the time it takes to fill up a has…

This could work for leased cars or fleet vehicles.

I already don’t want to swap my propane tank for someone else’s rusted piece of crap so I have it filled. No way if want to swap my 20k battery for who knows what.

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

#264
Did anyone get the sense the article was dancing around the main point with vague language? They left it ambiguous about whether they meant effectively all charging should switch to the day or a portion should switch (to give some kind of optimal balance).

I haven't looked at the model but it seems really odd to think that there shouldn't still be some night charging, to soak up the fixed capacity that's there to cover variations in solar/wind.

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

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LOL. This is classic “virtue signaling.” Your iPhone battery is not even a rounding error on your electricity consumption.

Very short sighted to think it's about "your" individual power consumption.

There are over a billion iPhones in use today. Assuming 10% of them get charged during peak times, each one shaving a watt off of its peak is 100000 kilowatts of load reduced from the energy grid.

Considering the number is probably a lot higher, and the load reduction a lot greater, my estimate is probably pretty conservative. And then further consider that this is being rolled out to iPads, Macbooks, and Apple Watches as well. It starts to add up!

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

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available From the parts of the world I come from the majority of people are vehemently opposed to time of use pricing. Because that's when they use it most. They and their political representatives would much prefer to keep taking from those who consume in off-peak rather than fix the underlying mechanism.

Ontario Canada did a mass $2b implementation of smart meters for time of day pricing. Unfortunately most people don’t care (or the technology to take advantage of it just isn’t there), and demand shifted less than 1% over several years. But it’s hard to find this info, because it doesn’t fit the (expensive to implement) narrative of “let them pay market price and people will respond to incentives”. https://www.cbc.ca…

I wouldn't judge this framework on a few year time horizon, but the time horizon to migrate to 100% EV fleet for Ontario.

The problem with 100% EV fleet a regular grid will be overloaded and customer's will not be incentivized to care.

This framework future proofs the Ontario grid from such a "wall".

Now that the framework exists in Ontario, prices at certain times in the day can grow 10x, 100x, 1000x where appropriate and people will care and will change their behaviors.

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

#267
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the issue with this report is that it is specific to the unique mix of energy that the (west of the) USA has compared to other areas/countries. Countries with a lot of nuclear see that energy wasted at night because you can't just dial down the level very quickly, in that sense, in most of Nothern Europe this would be desirable. In countries that have extreme levels of solar, clearly this only works during th…

> I have precisely zero appliances in my house that can make any use of cheap electricity and even worse, if I want a dual-tariff to get cheaper overnight electric, I get punished for it costwise No dishwasher or washing machine? I have a hog water tank with an immersion switch on it, I would love to heat that with cheap electricity overnight. I agree on the stupidity of punishing people for taking on the cheaper nig…

Hog water!

Heat is hard and it’s hard to get around the energy requirements. Ovens don’t use that much at all at normal home duty cycles.

Improvements in insulation can certainly help.

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

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it’s smart enough it should be able to turn off and on itself otherwise it’ll just think the charger turned off.

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

#269
post #199
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all iPhones do this it will matter. Charging when energy is plentiful also means that electricity is more likely to come from renewables.

> If all iPhones do this it will matter. No it won't. An phone has around 5 watt hours. So: 5 watt hours / day * 150 million people * 365 days = 273GWh / year / 4,116 billion kilowatthours / year = 0.006651% of electrical usage. Yah, it's virtue signaling, not anything real. And keep in mind 0.006651% is total electrical usage - this time shifting might save 10%, so actual savings are even less than that.

"150 million people"

There are over a billion iPhones in use worldwide. This technology is also being brought to MacBooks (100 million+), Watches (100 million+), and iPads (150 million+).

Your fundamental numbers are staggeringly inaccurate.

And, most crucially, representing it as a whole of the electric usage instead of peak hours intentionally misses the point of reducing peak hour usage. It's called "peak hour" for a reason.

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

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Texas right now you can get two meters to your home. One meter you use a fixed rate plan and the other meter you use a "wholesale" plus fee type plan, infamous example being Griddy. When the rate is nearly free you enable the outlet that charges your car. Of course hiring an electrician and all of that would probably have a long payback period.

That's one of those things that works great if you use a huge amount of power. The fixed rate cost of charging for my commute would probably be less than the connection fee for the 2nd meter. In that scenario it wouldn't pay off it all (and of course you wouldn't bother doing it).

That may be true now but if we develop meters with dual outputs it wouldn’t be much more than the normal box setup.

But if we’re doing that might as well make it so it can pull from the car if needed and turn it into a powerwall.

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