this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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I'm not sure if you know this, but there are smart chargers that include a sensor to put on the feed going into your house. The charger can throttle up and down as you turn stuff on and off to keep the house's total power draw under the limit, so you run all your stuff and the car just gets whatever's left over. You can even have dozens of chargers in a parking garage and program the chargers to share a limited grid connection.
EVs aren't a fixed load, you can ramp them up or down or shut them off as needed, so they're pretty easy to accommodate.
I give simple examples of power load issues and some of y'all take it like a literal argument against just some examples and then the problem goes away. Good grief. Essentially your "easy to accomadate" is just everyone use less power and charge your cars longer".
The argument against your example scales, though. You can do demand management with EV chargers, either at the household level or grid scale. Unless your power supply is running so close to the edge it can't cope with existing normal usage, adding EV charging in the midnight to 6am period when power consumption is otherwise really low works just fine. And nobody cares if their car took 6 hours to charge instead of 5, because they sleep through it.
It doesn't though. If you convert all ICE cars to BEV tomorrow it doesn't matter how much you do demand management the grid will be overwhelmed... OR you demand managed so hard that effectively nobody can charge their car regardless of how long they leave it on the charger.
We've got enough excess supply coming online as people install solar that we're seeing the wholesale electricity price occasionally flip negative. We might not have enough power to satisfy 2035's demand today, but we can accommodate a lot more EVs than we've got on the road.
You know much about Tokyo? How many people there do you think live in houses with a garage compared to apartments? Your idea only works for the portion of people with a house and at least a driveway.
What does that have to do with grid demand?
You can't use slow chargers between midnight and 6 am if you can't charge the vehicle at your house.
If you live in an apartment and own a car, you're parking it somewhere. Put the chargers there.