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0 pointsbob10291y ago0 comments

I don't think we can look at it on an average basis when each vehicle is pulling a megawatt, regardless of how long they are doing it for.

Industrial users with electric arc furnaces and other massive loads need special, ongoing arrangements with the utility to operate safely on the grid. It would only take 200~300 of these high speed chargers to equate to the demand of the largest EAFs on earth.

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araes1y ago

Mostly agree with you on that case. My initial thought on the matter also.

This theoretical car draws 1 MW for 5 minutes, pulling 83 kWh. Your normal residential address in America only uses 20 kWh all day long. The hard limit in a lot of areas is 25-30 kW continuous. Sure, they're building special charging stations, yet this is like 40 residential addresses running at max line limit consumption suddenly.

Looking at this a different way, lighting the entire SoFi Stadium (3.5 Disneylands for another scale), takes 10 MW. [1][2] Ten (10) of these cars pulling on the grid is like lighting an entire NFL scale stadium on game day.

[1] https://brilliantsourceenergy.com/the-power-of-the-super-bow...

[2] https://time.com/3926325/nfl-super-bowl-energy-usage/

Looking at something like Electricity Maps [3], the entire state of Texas is producing 47,700 MW (11.6 GW Gas, 24.3 GW Wind, 6.7 GW Coal, 5 GW Nuclear, and they're only exchanging 25 MW across their borders with other utilities. 25 of these cars is Texas's border electricity exchange.

Enormous, multi-state electricity organizations. Have 1000 of these show up to gas stations in some place like Texas, and you're suddenly pulling a substation chunk of the entire Texas electric grid all at once.

[3] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-TEX-ERCO/72h/hourly

0xB31B1B1y ago

most of these cars will be charging using L2 overnight charging. If you need to limit the fast charging, you can surge price it so maybe it costs $100 to charge fully instead of 25, etc. There are many possible solutions as long as they can solve for the surges as it spins up and down.

bryanlarsen1y ago

That's enough to support hundreds of thousands of cars.

bob1029OP1y ago

And how many cars do we need to be able to support in order to cover all of MISO, ERCOT, etc?

bryanlarsen1y ago

1 EAF is a very minor amount of infrastructure compared the gasoline infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of cars and the energy usage of hundreds of thousands of cars.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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araes1y ago

Mostly agree with you on that case. My initial thought on the matter also.

[1] https://brilliantsourceenergy.com/the-power-of-the-super-bow...

[2] https://time.com/3926325/nfl-super-bowl-energy-usage/

[3] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-TEX-ERCO/72h/hourly

0xB31B1B1y ago

bryanlarsen1y ago

That's enough to support hundreds of thousands of cars.

bob1029OP1y ago

And how many cars do we need to be able to support in order to cover all of MISO, ERCOT, etc?

bryanlarsen1y ago

1 EAF is a very minor amount of infrastructure compared the gasoline infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of cars and the energy usage of hundreds of thousands of cars.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse