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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

#51

Post by saidajigumi »

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…

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 than just "change pricing structure", such as:

Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. 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. But this work doesn't appear suffer from those problems.

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

#52

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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…

Tesla calls this "Virtual Power Plant" and there's a talk by a couple of the software devs online somewhere.

Found it: https://youtu.be/ggdYts4muu0

Some other people have mentioned that you just need to vary the price, but the price is set by bids from providers. Code that can learn demand patterns and integrate weather forecasts will let Tesla bid lower and so earn more money in the market while also lowering energy costs for everyone.

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

#53

Post by kadoban »

drdec wrote: post #44
function_seven wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be the best part. Cover all that parking with solar panels, use those panels to partially or completely offset the charging demands of the cars parked under them. An average parking space has enough room for (napkin math...) 6kW of solar output. That's more than enough to offset a level 2 charger while the driver of that car is in the office. And it leaves the car cooler at the end of the say. Costs a bit…

>Cover all that parking with solar panels This would help in many cases, but parking garages are a thing, even in my relatively small city. We would need a solution for them as well.

Putting solar on the roof (adding a roof if necessary) should help a lot. You'd run into issues where it won't scale with garage height of course, but most garages aren't that tall anyway (at least in my area).

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

#54

Post by lm28469 »

alexb_ wrote: post #49
lm28469 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wrong according to what metric? Have you read the study ? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01105-7 > you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself. Never worked, never will, borderline sounds like a cult following, "The all mighty market will automagically fix it with no human intervention"

A very small amount of people really care about "grid impact" enough to change their behavior. They do care about "I can make my electricity cheaper" or "My electricity bill went up".

They don't care until their whole neighbourhood goes dark at 6PM everyday

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

#55

Post by GoOnThenDoTell »

Grimburger wrote: post #39
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…

> 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.

time-of-use is also cognitive load that can cause anxiety

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

#56

Post by rufus_foreman »

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…

>> you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself

We're talking about electric vehicles here. There has already been massive interference in the market forces through both push and pull mechanisms - push would be things like outlawing internal combustion engines going forward, pull would be huge subsidies for electric vehicles.

It's pretty late in the game to say, "Hey! let's just use natural market forces! Problem solved!"

Natural market forces would be a tax on carbon equal to the cost of removing it from the atmosphere when it is burned and then let people buy whatever kind of car they want and can afford. There is no popular support whatsoever on either left or right for those kind of natural market forces.

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

#57

Post by kadoban »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #25
nightski wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So electric car owners need to just cover all the battery wear out of their own pockets? Wouldn't that make electric cars even more expensive since battery replacement will be needed more often?

The Tesla Model 3 SR ships with a battery expected to last ~750,000 km. If you had that vehicle, how much would you need to get paid to compensate for reducing that range by 1km? I'd accept 0.1 cents, how about you?

That seems low, that'd be $750 to reduce it to 0? But yeah there should be a way to choose a fair price or just let the market decide.

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

#58

Post by trgn »

sudden_dystopia wrote: post #47

EV’s are only a solution as far as renewable energy can keep up with electricity demands. And that doesn’t appear to be the case right now. Coupled with the mining of minerals, violent venting of batteries, and non-recyclable/non disposable nature of the batteries it’s not obvious that EV’s are more environmentally friendly.

They are more quiet and don't pollute the local environment. They are a small but meaningful improvement to the quality of city life.

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

#60

Post by DropPanda »

Gasp0de wrote: post #46
DropPanda wrote: post #34

This is very interesting and perfectly logical. I wrote a fairly recent report looking at a very similar question, and reached the opposite conclusion: night time charging is far better for the grid. That study however focuses on Sweden, where solar power only marginally impacts day-time supply. Link to the study: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn%3Anbn%3Ase%3Ari%3Adiva-5752... If the western US has a surplus in morni…

Inductive charging seems like a horrible solution as it must surely be extremely inefficient? Also, if dynamic charging refers to charging while in motion, why would that be a good solution? It seems way more complicated and inefficient than charging while stationary, and personally owned cars are stationary more than 90% of the time.

Surprisingly, transmission efficiency (grid to motor) does not appear to be lower with inductive methods than conductive. Numbers above 90% should be expected. A bit lower for the dynamic (in-motion) solutions, but not so much that it’s a deal breaker. There seem to be much larger savings/costs elsewhere in the system that make transmission efficiency of less importance.

Cars that are stationary most of the time are a pretty good reason to put charging infrastructure on the only land they actually share - the roads.

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