A few years ago I was working with a custom builder on a house plan (that we didn't end up pursuing), but one of the things I suggested was future proofing the garage for electric cars. Given that a Tesla can charge on 80 amps, it seemed reasonable that a two car garage in a custom home should have 160 amp service. It may not useful right away, but it would very probably be useful over the life of a home.
He thought I was crazy, and maybe I was. But articles like this make me wonder.
Note that EVs are considered "continuous loads" under the US electrical code, so the circuit actually needs to be sized for 125% of the load (ie to charge at 80 A requires 100 A service, not 80 A service).
My custom house is almost complete and we only put a single 40 amp circuit in the garage. I've lived with an EV for a few years now. 40 amps is plenty. When we get two EVs, 40 amps will still be plenty. The garage is also close enough to the breaker box that we can run another 40 amp circuit if we need to.
You don't need both of your Teslas to go from 0 range to 300+ miles in two hours everyday. If you did that much driving you'd be running a taxi service.
In our case, the charger will be between both bays. Assuming that both EVs have 300 mile range, we won't need to charge both cars everyday. (Edit) I'm also assuming someone will come out with a 40-amp dual-car charger that will split the load between two cars when both are plugged in.
Anyway, I did ask about 400 amp service because I wanted to use tankless electric water heaters. What he told me is that he'd have to wire in a second panel and second meter.
When I had upgraded service run to my 1923 house, I ran 200 amps to the detached garage and 200 amps to the house. The extra cost vs a smaller service is marginal.
I would suggest 200A service as a bare minimum, with 400A being ideal (this will be heavily dependent on your electric utility service entrance). Consider two EVs, HVAC loads, and possibly electric water heaters, clothes dryers, and a stove. Also, NEC 80% derating (100A circuit required for an 80A 100% duty cycle load).
The electrician's time is the most expensive part; oversize for decisions such as these (load center, EV run to outlet, subpanels, etc).
After putting up panels at my relatively modest house, I’m honestly surprised at the kind of juice I can produce. I’m ready to convert everything I have to electricity
200+ A circuits in a residential home really makes a point for 400 V three phase (where the same load would be ok with a standard 63 A circuit, which is still a lot). [1]
However, when more and more people try to have fast chargers in their homes for EVs, then not only the residential installation poses a problem, but utilities would need to rebuild ~two layers of distribution to accomodate for a 100-200 % increase in residential power consumption.
[1] Not just because high currents are more difficult to handle properly, but also because you need a lot less copper.
If your utility lets you do this... in many areas, increasing your service amperage is expensive if you don't use a majority of that additional capacity.
Future proofing isn't all about providing a service today for a possible need tomorrow. Plenty of fiber is sitting in walls unused because people thought in-home fiber networks were going to be a thing. Don't provide the cables. Provide the conduit for future cables. Leave the accessible passages and pull-throughs and let future generations decide exactly which cables to install.
I have similar experience - you dont know what will be useful in the future. Someone put in Cat5 cables 20 years ago into my place - nice idea. There is cat5 to the kitchen which is a waste of time now that wifi is here. Meanwhile it isn't fast enough for gig ether to my server so I put a new cable in. Likewise I have analog component video wires in the wall which is useless when I want HDMI.
Yes! This is exactly what I was thinking in regard to the above commentary. By the time you get an electric car, a table saw, a band saw, a dust collector... and that's before the mention of an electric tankless water heater. Throw in there some grow lights for your greenhouse or whatever other high-electric hobbies you might have and the numbers above start to look really reasonable.
I haven't added power to my detached garage yet, but when I do, it's getting 200 amp service. I don't have an electric car (yet) and I may not before I move out of the house, but somebody is eventually going to live in that house and have an electric car.
160 amps alone is more than standard house connect. In any case you will likely be charging overnight, and then given the time available pumping 80 amps into your precious depreciating battery is a great way to make it lose lots of value, quick.
What people need in their garage is 20 amps for the trickle charge to replenish the 30 miles lost from their commute and some grocery shopping overnight.
It's likely a 100% EV home would want the option to charge as quickly as possible, even if they trickle charge most of the time for the sake of battery life.
It's also likely that future EVs won't have this battery limitation, just put in the heavier gauge wires and breakers while you're in there if the house is going to be around for the next century.
This is maybe off topic, but it also may pave the way for us to use nuclear energy to produce electricity without greenhouse emissions. I think the problem we have yet to solve with nuclear, is safety diligence. Maybe some automation can help with modern tech? Or maybe with efficient manufacturing like 3d printing, we could tear them down and rebuild them each year?
In the case of the Three Miles Island Accident, modern sensors and more automation would have helped. With Fukushima, automation wouldn't have helped, what they were lacking was better tsunami protection, more resistant construction, bigger battery backups. At Tschernobyl they had an inherently unsafe reactor type, operated the reactor outside the safety parameters and had safety systems deactivated. Not much you can do about that.
Automation would help, but more modern reactor designs that are less prone to causing problems likely have a much bigger impact.
>Or maybe with efficient manufacturing like 3d printing, we could tear them down and rebuild them each year?
Tearing nuclear reactors down on regular basis sounds like a much worse nuclear waste problem than the power production already is. All the stuff that would be interesting to tear down and rebuild is contaminated from radiation exposure.
IMHO utilities need to realize that their business model of the future is to provide load balancing services and backup power to customers as much as it is to sell electricity. If they wait too long to start acting and keep fighting decentralized generation, they risk losing their value proposition as more people install batteries at home.
If that happens I could see them setting themselves up for a big political fight against their customers as they try to maintain their business by force/law.
The problem is what you suggest would destroy them as businesses. You have just described them doing "just" the parts of their business where they operate at a loss with massive multi-decade debt loads.
Generation is the only part of the business that produces the money to fund the infrastructure and the generation is the cheapest part of the business.
Rising living standards are bad? Growth doesn’t have to consume more material resources. (Computation and thus energy, on the other hand, it probably does.)
Not upsetting. It interesting, really. Finding ways to economically rationalize good climate behavior. You no longer need to ask people to install renewables to save the planet; it just makes plain economic sense [1] [2].
Utilities need electrical usage growth to offset consumption stagnation (and occasionally, structural and energy efficiency declines). That growth will occur moving ground transportation off of oil. If that creates an unexpected coalition, why not roll with it? It'll increase the EV uptake rate, it'll ensure transmission infrastructure still sees necessary upgrades and investment, and because vehicle charging can be structured around time of day metering, they're a perfect mix for more renewables being added to the grid.
EDIT: OP I replied to should not be downvoted. The situation really is dire [3]. At our current renewables deployment rate, it will take 400 years to swap out all fossil fuel generation; we can and must do better, but we're going to have to properly incentivize action and rapidly increase the replacement rate of fossil fuel generation.
>At our current renewables deployment rate, it will take 400 years to swap out all fossil fuel generation
This seemed off to me, so I checked the source. From TFA (in Technology Review):
>Instead of the roughly 1,100 megawatts of carbon-free energy per day likely needed to prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 ˚C, as the 2003 Science paper by Caldeira and his colleagues found, we are adding around 151 megawatts. That’s only enough to power roughly 125,000 homes.
>At that rate, substantially transforming the energy system would take, not the next three decades, but nearly the next four centuries.
Can anyone tell me how can this possibly compute? 94% of new electricity generation is renewable,[1] and it's not like power plants have a lifetime of 400 years...
edit: Of course, it was staring me in the face the whole time. They're using numbers from 2003! Essentially they're looking at the tail beginning of the logistic adoption curve[2] (the sloooooooow exponential ramp) and extrapolating it in a linear fashion. But logistic curves are "S-shaped," not linear.
The thing that drives climate change is the burning of fossil fuels needed produce electricity in the first place. Keeping the rate of electric production constant will not help us. The fact that electric energy usage is dropping is a good thing and we should keep a negative derivative, not increase it! There needs to be a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, keeping it constant (or even worse, increasing it) will not help this.
I really think everyone needs to take a step back from the HN ideology and think this through. Here climate change has a chance to essentially kill our grand children or at the very least leave them with a much more barren of a planet and a life. But somehow, the issue of a single institution's profit is somehow more important than actual people, children.
The free market is a tool, it shouldn't be more important than human lives.
You're right, the article makes a simplistic and greedy-sounding point. A better way to put it would be: electric vehicles are a good way to shift the roughly 30% of our energy consumption that is transportation from fossil fuels to renewable energy. We can do this by taking advantage of the electric grid infrastructure that's already there, which saves us some money (vs. for example building out a giant hydrogen supply network).
The profit motive keeps the grid healthy. If utilities suddenly become strapped for cash, the grid suffers. And transitioning from internal combustion to pulling power from the grid will decrease resources needed for creating energy and upend the gasoline distribution economy.
When have we not been on the verge of a “mass species extinction” event on our blue dot? Also, I believe it was a mass extinction that allowed us homo erectus to thrive.
> We're on the verge of a mass species extinction event
No, we're really not. Climate change due to carbon emission is real, but we'll reduce our carbon emission "in time" to avoid extinction level increases and/or adapt to the environment more drastically if we miss that target.
"The Problem: The US electricity transmission and distribution system – or ‘grid’ -- is in critical need of an upgrade. It is old, balkanized and too limited in its reach. The current grid is a series of independently operating regional grids – it can’t meet the needs of a nation whose economy would benefit substantially from the system optimization that comes with national interconnection. Its limitations and vulnerability to failure are also reported to cost the nation $80 billion to $188 billion per year in losses due to grid-related power outages and power quality issues.1 And most critical to clean energy development, areas rich in renewable resources like solar, wind and geothermal are currently not well-served and thus have no ‘highway’ available to move power outputs to the markets where that power is needed"
US utilities don't need saving. It seems like a bizzare statement to make. The reason behind the slow growth in electricity demand is the high price dictated by environmental politics.
Also having such a high burst in demand will be a major problem, not a benefit. Maybe we need to account for grid expansion, peak demand management and production capacity increase costs in a new bill of EV taxes. Arguing that it's good for the economy because of jobs is the same like arguing war is good for the economy because you get to rebuild infrastructure. It's not, we can use this potential for more useful things.
>The reason behind the slow growth in electricity demand is the high price dictated by environmental politics.
That seems like a pretty dubious claim. For one thing, how often do you (or any home or business owner) not turn stuff on because of how much it might cost them? For another, the largest driver in my understanding is growing energy efficiency (e.g. LED's use fractions of the old incandescent bulbs)
Energy efficiency has been a big factor, but an even bigger one is the energy-intensive heavy industry fleeing from the developed world to china and other places where power is cheap and plenty. Countries like Germany that kept their industry at home face extraorbitant prices. I think they pay close to 30+cents/kWh.
Why not? Utilities make money by power transmission. Even if every single house in the US has solar panels there still is a massive market around transferring power between houses to balance loads and time of use issues. In my direct and relevant experience talking with r&d folks and strategic planners at big utilities, they treat cheaper utilities as another market to get in to. They don't think of it as a threat to their business.
I'm not following. Let's say current transmission and generation is the baseline. In the future when there is distributed generation, transmission is definitely going to go down as generation will be tightly coupled with supplying private, commercial, or industrial entities (eg panels on the roof). So generation goes down (since more renewable), and distribution as well on average (due to coupling mechanisms).
Readit News
He thought I was crazy, and maybe I was. But articles like this make me wonder.
Note that EVs are considered "continuous loads" under the US electrical code, so the circuit actually needs to be sized for 125% of the load (ie to charge at 80 A requires 100 A service, not 80 A service).
My custom house is almost complete and we only put a single 40 amp circuit in the garage. I've lived with an EV for a few years now. 40 amps is plenty. When we get two EVs, 40 amps will still be plenty. The garage is also close enough to the breaker box that we can run another 40 amp circuit if we need to.
You don't need both of your Teslas to go from 0 range to 300+ miles in two hours everyday. If you did that much driving you'd be running a taxi service.
In our case, the charger will be between both bays. Assuming that both EVs have 300 mile range, we won't need to charge both cars everyday. (Edit) I'm also assuming someone will come out with a 40-amp dual-car charger that will split the load between two cars when both are plugged in.
Anyway, I did ask about 400 amp service because I wanted to use tankless electric water heaters. What he told me is that he'd have to wire in a second panel and second meter.
At that point I decided that 200 amps was plenty.
Aren't these prohibitively expensive compared to natural gas?
(I've considered the same but I have gas service)
The electrician's time is the most expensive part; oversize for decisions such as these (load center, EV run to outlet, subpanels, etc).
However, when more and more people try to have fast chargers in their homes for EVs, then not only the residential installation poses a problem, but utilities would need to rebuild ~two layers of distribution to accomodate for a 100-200 % increase in residential power consumption.
[1] Not just because high currents are more difficult to handle properly, but also because you need a lot less copper.
What people need in their garage is 20 amps for the trickle charge to replenish the 30 miles lost from their commute and some grocery shopping overnight.
It's also likely that future EVs won't have this battery limitation, just put in the heavier gauge wires and breakers while you're in there if the house is going to be around for the next century.
Or less gloomy: In between appointments, you drive home to charge. Do you want to come 15m late just because your pipe is too weak?
Big pipe = freedom.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/business/dealbook/flyi...
Automation would help, but more modern reactor designs that are less prone to causing problems likely have a much bigger impact.
>Or maybe with efficient manufacturing like 3d printing, we could tear them down and rebuild them each year?
Tearing nuclear reactors down on regular basis sounds like a much worse nuclear waste problem than the power production already is. All the stuff that would be interesting to tear down and rebuild is contaminated from radiation exposure.
The main issue with Fukushima and other Japanese nuclear plants is Japanese regulation enforcing 1960s nuclear safety.
We're on the verge of a mass species extinction event and with the news that efficient electronics are in fact using less energy is somehow bad news.
The profit motive doesn't work for utilities...well it does most of the time, but this is a clear example of when it doesn't.
If that happens I could see them setting themselves up for a big political fight against their customers as they try to maintain their business by force/law.
Generation is the only part of the business that produces the money to fund the infrastructure and the generation is the cheapest part of the business.
Utilities need electrical usage growth to offset consumption stagnation (and occasionally, structural and energy efficiency declines). That growth will occur moving ground transportation off of oil. If that creates an unexpected coalition, why not roll with it? It'll increase the EV uptake rate, it'll ensure transmission infrastructure still sees necessary upgrades and investment, and because vehicle charging can be structured around time of day metering, they're a perfect mix for more renewables being added to the grid.
EDIT: OP I replied to should not be downvoted. The situation really is dire [3]. At our current renewables deployment rate, it will take 400 years to swap out all fossil fuel generation; we can and must do better, but we're going to have to properly incentivize action and rapidly increase the replacement rate of fossil fuel generation.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/FCYT1xa.jpg
[2] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610457/at-this-rate-its-g...
This seemed off to me, so I checked the source. From TFA (in Technology Review):
>Instead of the roughly 1,100 megawatts of carbon-free energy per day likely needed to prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 ˚C, as the 2003 Science paper by Caldeira and his colleagues found, we are adding around 151 megawatts. That’s only enough to power roughly 125,000 homes.
>At that rate, substantially transforming the energy system would take, not the next three decades, but nearly the next four centuries.
Can anyone tell me how can this possibly compute? 94% of new electricity generation is renewable,[1] and it's not like power plants have a lifetime of 400 years...
edit: Of course, it was staring me in the face the whole time. They're using numbers from 2003! Essentially they're looking at the tail beginning of the logistic adoption curve[2] (the sloooooooow exponential ramp) and extrapolating it in a linear fashion. But logistic curves are "S-shaped," not linear.
[1] https://electrek.co/2018/01/12/94-percent-new-electricity-ca...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#Applications
I really think everyone needs to take a step back from the HN ideology and think this through. Here climate change has a chance to essentially kill our grand children or at the very least leave them with a much more barren of a planet and a life. But somehow, the issue of a single institution's profit is somehow more important than actual people, children.
The free market is a tool, it shouldn't be more important than human lives.
Try 90+% of Earth's history?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
Though all living humans are alive during the current (anthropocene) extinction event, so in that sense "we" have never known anything else.
No, we're really not. Climate change due to carbon emission is real, but we'll reduce our carbon emission "in time" to avoid extinction level increases and/or adapt to the environment more drastically if we miss that target.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
"The Problem: The US electricity transmission and distribution system – or ‘grid’ -- is in critical need of an upgrade. It is old, balkanized and too limited in its reach. The current grid is a series of independently operating regional grids – it can’t meet the needs of a nation whose economy would benefit substantially from the system optimization that comes with national interconnection. Its limitations and vulnerability to failure are also reported to cost the nation $80 billion to $188 billion per year in losses due to grid-related power outages and power quality issues.1 And most critical to clean energy development, areas rich in renewable resources like solar, wind and geothermal are currently not well-served and thus have no ‘highway’ available to move power outputs to the markets where that power is needed"
I wrote a post on ZDnet http://www.zdnet.com/article/al-gores-unified-smart-grid-vis... discussing efforts for a unified grid, but haven't seen much progress since then to support the demands of electric vehicles.
Also having such a high burst in demand will be a major problem, not a benefit. Maybe we need to account for grid expansion, peak demand management and production capacity increase costs in a new bill of EV taxes. Arguing that it's good for the economy because of jobs is the same like arguing war is good for the economy because you get to rebuild infrastructure. It's not, we can use this potential for more useful things.
That seems like a pretty dubious claim. For one thing, how often do you (or any home or business owner) not turn stuff on because of how much it might cost them? For another, the largest driver in my understanding is growing energy efficiency (e.g. LED's use fractions of the old incandescent bulbs)