https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/climate/gm-electric-cars-power-grid.html
Electric Cars Are Coming, and Fast. Is the Nation’s Grid Up to It?
GM’s decision this week to phase out gasoline vehicles is the latest in a major shift that will mean drastic new demands on electric utilities. Here are four things that will need to happen.
Generate More Juice
If every American switched over to an electric passenger vehicle, analysts have estimated, the United States could end up using roughly 25 percent more electricity than it does today. To handle that, utilities will likely need to build a lot of new power plants and upgrade their transmission networks.
“There’s no question that utilities can do this, but it’s not going to be trivial,” said Chris Nelder, who leads the vehicle-grid integration team at the Rocky Mountain Institute. “It takes time and money.” In a
recent study, his team found that many utilities and vehicle fleet managers planning to go electric have yet to fully grapple with all the challenges involved.
For instance, Mr. Nelder said, if a transit agency wants to buy 100 new electric buses and charge them overnight, it will suddenly need large amounts of power feeding into the bus depot, potentially requiring new substations and other equipment that could mean million-dollar investments.
“That’s not something utilities can just do next week,” he said. “It takes a lot of careful advanced planning.”
There’s good news, too. In 2018, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute looked at what a shift to electric vehicles
would mean for the power grid in every state. While Americans would likely pay more for electricity as utilities made necessary upgrades, that would be offset by fuel savings from not having to buy gasoline anymore.
“While it’s challenging to predict the future prices for gasoline, electricity and vehicles,” the researchers wrote, “we believe it is likely that the widespread use of EVs would reduce the overall costs of transportation in California and elsewhere. These savings are even greater if the environmental benefits, especially lower carbon emissions, are taken into account.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesm...-just-need-proper-management/?sh=ba01b9178629
Electricity Grids Can Handle Electric Vehicles Easily - Forbes
https://getjerry.com/questions/can-the-us-infrastructure-grid-handle-electric-cars
Can the U.S. infrastructure grid handle electric cars?
One of the subjects I’ve been hearing come up a lot lately in regard to EVs is that our infrastructure grid can’t handle charging millions of electric cars. Is this true? Is it even worth buying an EV if the recharging process is going to be unreliable?
This is probably one of the biggest myths out there when it comes to
electric vehicles. Yes,
America’s grid can easily handle electric cars—and even though EVs will most likely become the dominant form of personal transportation, charging them all isn’t going to be an issue. By the time that electric cars are owned by 80% of the U.S., this will only translate into a 10-15% increase in electricity consumption.
One of the main reasons for this minimal increase in national electricity consumption is that EVs are more fuel-efficient than internal combustion engines, somewhere between 5-6 times as efficient. Though their batteries aren’t powerful enough to take them beyond the 700-800 mile range, between 10-20 years, that will likely be possible. Another facet regarding the ways that electric cars will affect the grid is smart charging capabilities.
Smart charging is a technology that links a vehicle owner’s charging device with their EV’s battery. “Smart “ charging devices identify times during the day that electricity consumption is highest, and pull power from the grid to hold in its reserves so that owners don’t experience any charging delays when the power grid is most active.
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