agree this is awesome and congrats to all.. electric vehicles are just starting however as a percentage of road miles. Expect electricity demand to continue to increase steeply?
Norway's vehicle fleet is now 25% EVs and their per capita electricity usage is the same it was a decade ago[1]. Oil infrastructure uses a ton of electricity, and California refines most of the oil it consumes because of its geography and unique fuel blend. EVs may actually reduce California's overall electricity usage.
The good news is that electric car charging will be mostly done whenever power is cheapest and demand is lowest so it should be the easiest possible extra demand for the grid to support.
If a homeowner has a home charger, and comes home from work and immediately plugs their car in, won't the charging start right during peak demand? I guess there could be software in cars that tells them to delay charging past evening peak demand, but I guess there will be a mechanism for the car owner to bypass that.
I'm a homeowner with a home charger. When I get home I plug in. It doesn't usually start charging until way late in the evening. Currently it's just on a timing schedule I set up once, but soon it'll be linked to my electric provider to automatically shift to whatever is an off-peak time for them and I'll get a discount on my bill. In the end I can still tell it to just go ahead and charge but typically it's going to sit there overnight and I can normally go a few days between charges anyways.
Pretty much every recent model EV can do this on its own. Many EVSEs (Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment, the "charger") that have any level of smarts can also do this. My EVSE is just a dumb one, it just tells the car it's capabilities and it's up to the car to choose when to charge.
Adding an EV to my house didn't change my peak usage at all.
> I guess there could be software in cars that tells them to delay charging past evening peak demand, but I guess there will be a mechanism for the car owner to bypass that.
The most widely adopted EVs in the US and elsewhere have had this feature from the start.
