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0 pointscptskippy5y ago0 comments

That will be less of a problem than you think. Power demand is already inconsistent throughout the day. Depending on the time of year it will peak around noon or in the evening but overnight the demand is low.

When people start charging overnight at home the overnight loads will increase. This will intern allow power companies to increase capacity.

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viraptor5y ago

I suspect new payment plans will get more popular soon. I'm not familiar with the US providers, but in Australia there are already at least two companies allowing you to buy energy at a current, hourly adjusted price. I expect that in a couple of decades "energy cost arbitrage via car charging" will be a normal thing.

cptskippyOP5y ago

You're probably right. In the US there's generally two systems, flat-rate or time-of-use.

A lot of people on time-of-use plans are installing battery backups and/or solar to avoid the peak charges. I have a Tesla solar/powerwall setup that's configured for cost savings and it decided that today 100% of solar was going to be back fed to the grid and we've been running 100% off the batteries. Usually the system just switches to batteries during peak.

core-questions5y ago

> Usually the system just switches to batteries during peak.

You'd think you'd want to be using them more often - is it just that there's no grid demand for the power?

My hope is that the addition of a huge number of batteries to the grid, in the form of all these EVs, actually adds to its capacity, since most people won't be running them down to 0 and the software to optimize when to charge vs. when to power the grid seems to be evolving.

Pity it's not a nice open source standard or anything

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marvin5y ago

I’m pretty confident that this will work itself out, but you see the problem very clearly in Norway already. Non-Tesla charging stations are much more expensive per kWh due to this, reducing the cost-of-ownership advantage of EVs vs. fossil cars. It doesn’t put the cost in no-go territory, but it’s enough that users feel cheated and complain.

So if the established manufacturers or third-party charging providers want to be competitive, they will eventually have to think about this.

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