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

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

#381
The original Green New Deal design have chosen BEVs not at "electric cars" but as connected batteries reasoning of usage like "you arrive at home and plug the car", "you depart from home, go to work and plug the car" etc so most of the time the battery is connected with an AC inverter to the grid, so something who can suck or push power looking at current grid frequency.

That ideas is (was?) the solution to keep a large grid powered with massive renewables who make grid loads vary much in very little time, something NO fossil/nuclear power plant can cope, so something that provoke continuous blackouts because when the Sun rise suddenly the "classic" power plant load fall and they can't reduce power quickly enough so the frequency skyrocket and they disconnect. Similarly when clouds pass or Sun goes down the inverse (a sudden peak) provoke a quick drop in frequency with equal effects, instead of power plants entire part of distribution network disconnect suddenly to reduce the load and the the frequency. Batteries are quick enough to cope. So the idea was: when the Sun goes up the sudden drop in load will be absorbed by cars who start charging full power than slowly reduce to give times to classic PP lower their production, when the Sun goes down they discharge to the grid for a little while with the similar target. Since batteries do not last longer and cost a fortune EVs are a way to shift the costs to the users.

If you have p.v. at home you have to face big capex BUT you can lower opex lowering high electricity price using your p.v. and car, or so to speak if you help the transition you get paid back. If you can't you simply suffer higher tariff getting equally more poor from another way. The wealthy became poor due to high investments, the less wealthy due to the sky high cost of living. And you know the classic WEF/2030 https://youtu.be/Hx3DhoLFO4s vision.

Casually people are a bit dumb en-masse, as Gustave Le Bon and Eduard Bernays wrote in their masterpieces, but not that dumb so while p.v. is actually a bit spread because anyway lower enough the electricity cost to pay back EVs/domestic batteries are not because simply they do not pay back despite the claim. And that's why we have blackouts and sky-high energy costs plus menace of scarcity of diesel and gasoline to makes EVs convenient "enough".

Charging at night is the logical choice FOR MOST, since normally we are active in the day and sleeping at night, but doing so means charging from the grid wanting a certain SOC in the morning. Green New Deal theorist have imagined remote workers who do not use their cars all days and workers how drive to the work and there charge the car in large parks with p.v. roofs. That's of course happen, but for a small cohort of people, while MOST EV owners so far are from dense cities where such model simply do not work because they have common garages, without p.v. or without enough p.v. both "at home" and "at work".

So far those theorist have found no solution: they can try push blackouts a bit more than natural to push people buying EVs as home batteries BUT due to EVs prices most people will not buy them anyway so the shift to renewables will not happen. They can't lower EV prices, most of the supply chain is in foreign hands and anyway there are way to expensive to manufacture to lower the price much. Not only, since they do not state clearly such cars-as-a-grid-balancers perhaps to avoid being accused of shifting costs to the people most EVs are NOT made to be used as home batteries. Something start happening BUT at very limited and slow rate. Some inverter-chargers charge on DC and so can offer "standard power" to the home, but most do not offer micro-grid islandic setups so they can't work in case of an outage, some V2L do exists with in-car inverters, but for very limited power (like 2kW while potentially the car can deliver 50+kW) etc.

That's the issue when managers are in charge: they dream something and run with the idea of fixing and detailing anything on the go, that the reality hit.

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

#382
post #132
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.

For me, it's $0.67/kWh in peak hours, and $0.12 during super off peak (12am to 4am). I will, obviously, continue to charge at night. All electric cars, that I'm aware of, and most charges, have scheduling built in.

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

#383
post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It needs to be like 99% of parking lots. It's ok until it isn't. I have had ro refuel my car during a commute many times and barely made it, if electric cars keep contributing to my tardiness I will blame them instead of my lack of adequate planning, even if it worked fine for a whole year before that. It took one experience of being stranded because of bad battery life estimate to get me to dislike them with passion…

Hardly 99%. With a 260 mile-range car I only need to plug in about once a week. People who drive more obviously need to plug in more often, but it's a pretty rare person who would absolutely need to charge every single day. EVs are not for every single use case yet (like long distance towing) and that's okay. They will handle more use cases with each passing year. We certainly don't have nearly enough slow charging p…

To be a bit reductive here, it needs to work for everybody for it to be a viable fossil fuel car alternative. You can't have 1% of people for whom it doesn't work for because for 300M people that is 3M people. Often the people for whom it doesn't work for are the poorest and most vulnerable as well. Imagine taking off the cost of battery ownership and having battery leases subsidized, now you electric cars become even more affordable. Battery swapping from an infrastructure perspective is not mutually exclusive to charging either. You can charge cars with swappable batteries at charging stations. You just need the government to force standardization of both charging and swapping connections. Capitalism will take care of where you have swapping and charging stations. Of course you can force people to buy hybrids as well but they are not well liked due to difficulty of repairing them and that still means fossil fuels.

If fast charging car batteries in less than 5min can be done in 15 years and hybrids are acceptable maybe that is the way to go but even then as a consumer a 20second swap is better than a 5 minute charge. Ignoring what consumers want is always a critical mistake.

I have no doubt fossil fuel cars will go away, the question is do you want them to go away in 10 years, 20 years or 30 years. The sooner they go away the better it is for climate change right? If so, long term "holistic" engineering has no place here. Swappable+chargable battery designs are best imo.

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

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheaper than an equivalent EV charger. Safety requires an isolating transformer in the charger, which adds costs and an efficiency loss. The wireless charger is the isolating transformer in their case, leading to surprisingly high efficiency and low costs in comparison.

have you ever looked at a level 2 charger? it's literally just a beefy extension cord.

The pitch isn't a 1 for 1 replacement, it's that the Witricity system (which is like a level 2.5) provides via convenience the extra charging that would otherwise require the speed and power of a level 3 charger. You're trading off speed of charge for time fiddling with the system.

This trade-off may not work for someone with one car they plug in when they get home and unplug in the morning, just like they don't need a level 3 charger anyway, but might for an airport taxi firm, where they can charge their fleet while boarding passengers, or a loading bay for EV delivery vans.

If that demand is enough to make it a standard item on the car side, then it'll likely displace plug in charging in a lot of places where both are possible for silly reasons like "nothing for drivers to crash into", feeling more "luxurious", "cheaper install" and so on.

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

#385
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not, if the alternative is installing enough battery to charge most people's electric cars at night. My state's grid is over half nuclear, and our electric rates are not high.

Good news! The very article we're discussing explains why you don't have to install enough batteries to charge most people's electric cars at night.

Right, and all it will take is "major investments and changes in charging habits." Note those major investments are seldom accounted for when people talk about solar cost.

Speaking of which, California is 17% solar, 8% wind, and 7% hydro[1], and their retail electricity costs 19.9 cents/kWh.[2]

South Carolina is 58% nuclear, 0.1% solar, no wind, and 2% hydro,[3] and their retail electricity costs 12.9 cents/kWh.[2]

It's almost like solar is super cheap on the margins, but it's easier to make a cheap grid with lots of nuclear than lots of solar....nah, that can't be it.

[1] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

[2] https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/

[3] https://energy.sc.gov/node/3067

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

#386
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good news! The very article we're discussing explains why you don't have to install enough batteries to charge most people's electric cars at night.

Right, and all it will take is "major investments and changes in charging habits." Note those major investments are seldom accounted for when people talk about solar cost. Speaking of which, California is 17% solar, 8% wind, and 7% hydro[1], and their retail electricity costs 19.9 cents/kWh.[2] South Carolina is 58% nuclear, 0.1% solar, no wind, and 2% hydro,[3] and their retail electricity costs 12.9 cents/kWh.[2] I…

All the nuclear plants in S.C. are old. The most recently completed one came online in 1986. Power from old depreciated plant can indeed be cheap (although sometimes not cheap enough; TMI 1 was cash flow negative the last six years it was in operation). Trying to REPLACE those plants, or build new ones to provide additional power, is another matter entirely. Look at the sad experience at V. C. Summer, also in S.C.

A similar story is playing out in France, with Flamanville 3.

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

#387
post #315
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The harm is polen on your car? It's harm, sure, but seems pretty minor at this point.

I have pretty bad allergies, the pollen messed with me quite a bit.

The real harm I think is giving too many perceived privileges to something that is currently a luxury.

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

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of newer charging stations in the US also have this built in, as well. You can hook them up to the internet, or do it manually. How mine works is pretty clever: you plug it in, and it asks you if you'd like to go to 100% now or wait until charging is cheaper. If you don't reply, it will fast charge your car to about 40%, and then wait.

that's EXACTLY the oversight in the 2013-2014 onboard firmware : even though i didn't need a full charge at 8am, the car would realize it couldn't get to (the not important) full charge by 8am, which was the previous day time of departure, and would start charging while electricity was still expensive, because it decided maximal charge at previous day departure time was more important than cheap electricity. Just an…

Sounds like a software/firmware fix. Did they never adjust that logic? queue my hatred for automotive closed ecosystem abandonware

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

#389
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good news! The very article we're discussing explains why you don't have to install enough batteries to charge most people's electric cars at night.

Right, and all it will take is "major investments and changes in charging habits." Note those major investments are seldom accounted for when people talk about solar cost. Speaking of which, California is 17% solar, 8% wind, and 7% hydro[1], and their retail electricity costs 19.9 cents/kWh.[2] South Carolina is 58% nuclear, 0.1% solar, no wind, and 2% hydro,[3] and their retail electricity costs 12.9 cents/kWh.[2] I…

Where's the part where you have to install enough batteries to charge most electric cars at night? That was your scenario.

Good choice of states, though: I grew up in SC and live in California. California uses time-of-day rates to nudge people away from charging during the early evening peak.

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

#390
post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's EXACTLY the oversight in the 2013-2014 onboard firmware : even though i didn't need a full charge at 8am, the car would realize it couldn't get to (the not important) full charge by 8am, which was the previous day time of departure, and would start charging while electricity was still expensive, because it decided maximal charge at previous day departure time was more important than cheap electricity. Just an…

Sounds like a software/firmware fix. Did they never adjust that logic? queue my hatred for automotive closed ecosystem abandonware

Nope, but perhaps in later model year software builds.
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