this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
77 points (93.3% liked)

[Dormant] Electric Vehicles

3188 readers
1 users here now

We have moved to:

[email protected]

A community for the sharing of links, news, and discussion related to Electric Vehicles.

Rules

  1. No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, casteism, speciesism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
  2. Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
  3. No self-promotion.
  4. No irrelevant content. All posts must be relevant and related to plug-in electric vehicles — BEVs or PHEVs.
  5. No trolling.
  6. Policy, not politics. Submissions and comments about effective policymaking are allowed and encouraged in the community, however conversations and submissions about parties, politicians, and those devolving into general tribalism will be removed.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
77
Sceptics say EVs will overwhelm the grid. In fact, they could be part of the solution (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
14 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/18002070

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

It’s a lot of poor assumptions. Yes the power grid can’t currently support the entire vehicle fleet being EV and charging at once. Duh.

However we’re assuming the grid will never change when in reality most of the changes are local and small, and made constantly as needed. It may be slower than ideal, but power companies are making these decisions every day. Does my home need upgraded service for electrification and home charging? Does my local transformer need to be upgraded now that my usage is higher? Does my neighborhood have enough juice to support multiple houses with higher usage? Multiply those everyday decisions by millions, but they happen all the time anyway

We’re assuming EVs will just happen, but the reality is even in optimistic scenarios the technology change will take a couple decades to scale out, especially in the US where it somehow became political. That’s a lot of time for power companies to get their shit together. It’s also lots of time for supply and demand to do their thing. Yes, they’re behind the curve and will continue to be so, but let’s not get overly dramatic about it.

Most importantly, not everyone charges at once, nor do they fully charge every time. For me personally, with work from home, I’ve been charging maybe 2hrs/wk. Do you really think all my neighbors are choosing the same 2 hours every week? I wish someone would figure out a smart solution to coordinate these for even lower impact, and I’m sure that will eventually come