>We're doing it wrong, according to a new Stanford study
Wrong according to what metric? Cost? Raw efficiency? A lot of people are more than willing to give up efficiency so that they don't have to actually worry about finding a station during the day. To say that something is just outright "wrong" based on their personal preference of priorities comes off as unhelpful to me.
The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available, and people will use it. You don't need any complex "AI" like people in this thread are saying, you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself. Too much energy being used at night - price increases. It's not complicated, and it's what we're doing already. People don't need a Stanford study to convince them to get their energy for cheaper.
This is precisely what the linked article says. From the section "Charging Incentives":
“And it’s not just California and Western states. All states may need to rethink electricity pricing structures as their EV charging needs increase and their grid changes,” added Powell, who recently took a postdoctoral research position at ETH Zurich.
The article also includes other interesting and more nuanced policy details than just "change pricing structure", such as:
Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. [...]
So yes, there are weird red herrings in this thread from people who want a technology first and a solution second (or never) and/or who don't understand design of incentive structures. But this work doesn't appear suffer from those problems.
> Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. [...]
Well, I don't know what to say aside from we would need a lot of work to have it 'both ways'.
By that I mean, if we expect everyone to charge their cars during the day, especially 'peak hours' in a given industrial area, there's a chance that the line and/or station capacity would have to be increased. A large part of the allure of 'night charging' is that it avoids requiring major grid upgrades, and also possibly opens up better uses around certain energy sources quirks. Nuclear, water power, geothermal, all three to some extent have 'consistent load' properties where either it takes time to adjust power output, or power output can be consistent both day and night with minimal incremental cost, vs the need to install additional capacity for extra day load.
> This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs.
> So yes, there are weird red herrings in this thread from people who want a technology first and a solution second (or never) and/or who don't understand design of incentive structures.
Speaking of incentive structures, one of my former employers installed EV chargers in all of the bottom floors of our parking garage while explicitly not allowing non-EVs to park in those spaces. I was left parking my hybrid on the roof in a desert climate where my car would continually get covered with pollen.
Naturally, I did what they were trying to incentivize: I looked at EVs. I quickly discovered that the cheaper models have limited usecases; for instance, the road trips I go on would now be out of the picture. The more expensive ones are much more functional but come at a high price that I've never personally spent on a car.
There's also the fact that I didn't have anywhere to charge it except public spaces where I'd have to awkwardly wait for hours because I lived in an apartment. In order to get a 240v plug in my garage I would need to pay for it myself.
These policies, as they invade the workforce, need to be looked at from a lens that doesn't end up doing harm in the end.
Seems that commercial power costs less than residential. Sometimes the difference is negligible but other times it's significant. I know residential lines cost much more to maintain because of the distances but that doesn't apply to residential apartments buildings in cities and I believe there's a seperate charge for that.
That’s how we do it in Denmark. We have hourly prices on electricity, so for me it’s cheaper to start the dishwasher outside peak hours. In some areas they are experimenting with car chargers hooked up to this electricity price info, so it charges when it’s cheap.
my 2014 BMW i3 could be set to start charging when electricity was cheap (defined by me onscreen). it was a little buggy, as far as systems go, but it was the original model year (for north america, i think 2013 in europe).
For me, it's $0.67/kWh in peak hours, and $0.12 during super off peak (12am to 4am). I will, obviously, continue to charge at night. All electric cars, that I'm aware of, and most charges, have scheduling built in.
I had a related epiphany regarding car traffic today. When thinking about how autonomous cars could increase efficiency of taking off from stop lights by doing it syncronously, I realised that to put it bluntly, nobody would actually give a shit. We drive cars for personal autonomy and a level of freedom and protection from the car centric cities we build. Making that efficient is nice, but no one is willing to sacrifice the core point of driving for the various minor efficiencies.
It was an epiphany I had in relation to my staunch pro-bike/public transport internal discourse. It occurred to me that we need to focus on the main motivations for driving and public transport in order to make them both better. Road networks should focus on freedom and personal autonomy, and public transport should focus on throughput efficiency. Making PT better at throughput by expanding the networks would give people more freedom on the road network too by reducing traffic.
Glad you were able to make the connection. Too many folks passionate on reforming transport focus primarily on the moral/technical problem/solution Vs the actual "job to be done" for people of owning a personal car.
Where I live, I don't own a car largely because the "jobs" for which having access to a car is critical is handled by a reliable, efficient and safe cab/taxi on demand system (you need to get somewhere quickly, carry a lot of stuff, take your family/friends to A&E at night etc). So then I can rely on the very good Public Transit system for the bulk of my regular commute needs confident that I can get a cab when I need to.
If the reliable cab/taxi on demand didn't exist (which was indeed the situation before Uber and it's ilk), I would buy a car irrespective of how good the public transport system was (it was good even then) and irrespective of taxation dis-incentives. Once you own a car, for many use cases it becomes a lot more convenient and has low incremental cost to just drive.
As you may note, these "jobs to be done" vary by geography, lifestage and income - so while general principles can be drawn up, they need to be locally customized.
Ontario Canada did a mass $2b implementation of smart meters for time of day pricing.
Unfortunately most people don’t care (or the technology to take advantage of it just isn’t there), and demand shifted less than 1% over several years.
But it’s hard to find this info, because it doesn’t fit the (expensive to implement) narrative of “let them pay market price and people will respond to incentives”.
> The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario's 2015-16 Energy Conservation Progress Report found "a 0.7 per cent reduction in peak demand among residential customers" attributed to time-of-use pricing over a four-year period.
I mean, people keep their foot on the gas when the light ahead is red and sometimes even speed up to get ahead of you only to slam on their brakes.
Power companies can offer more than one pricing formula.
People who want to minimize their power bill can choose to pick the time of use pricing and shift some of their consumption off peak. Others can choose to pay more for the convenience of not having to worry about all that stuff. How much more, that can be determined by market forces.
It's probably not "taking from those who consume in off-peak." The utility knows when people who use flat-rate power use it, so they can bake that into the flat rate. But if it makes consumers feel better about the price...
> Make electricity cheaper when it's more available, and people will use it.
It’s _not_ like that in the states? In Denmark people are sharing spreadsheet that can tell you when to run the washing machine to save on electricity since the energy crisis following Russias invasion of Ukraine has pushed prices enough that these optimizations become valuable to regular consumers.
All the usual communist elements (Jimmy Carter, California) have been slowly making progress on introducing it since the 1970s, but mysteriously a lot of lies sprung up about how it would harm the poor. And the USA is really caring about the poor not using as much fossil fuels as they possibly can so it got kind of squashed.
A very small amount of people really care about "grid impact" enough to change their behavior. They do care about "I can make my electricity cheaper" or "My electricity bill went up".
>> you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself
We're talking about electric vehicles here. There has already been massive interference in the market forces through both push and pull mechanisms - push would be things like outlawing internal combustion engines going forward, pull would be huge subsidies for electric vehicles.
It's pretty late in the game to say, "Hey! let's just use natural market forces! Problem solved!"
Natural market forces would be a tax on carbon equal to the cost of removing it from the atmosphere when it is burned and then let people buy whatever kind of car they want and can afford. There is no popular support whatsoever on either left or right for those kind of natural market forces.
I think you're conflating two separate markets; there can be as many subsidies or taxes added to buying an EV as you want, but the "what time do I charge my car" problem is an electricity market problem, not a car market problem.
For all the hype, that is less true than it appears. A lot of EV owners pay annual fees and also sales taxes on power. On top of that, the most popular EVs in the US aren't subsidized in every state.
My comment is US-centric, but in the US the adoption isn't really regulatory driven. The regulations are following reality while the politicians try to position themselves as "leaders".
> The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available, and people will use it. You don't need any complex "AI" like people in this thread are saying, you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself. Too much energy being used at night - price increases. It's not complicated, and it's what we're doing already. People don't need a Stanford study to convince them to get their energy for cheaper.
This is exactly what they were doing in Texas right up until the moment the Blizzard hit last year.
Suddenly electricity became unavailable (because you know, giant blizzard), and consequently it was something like $6000 a kw/hr[1] for some users
Your market force solution for electricity pricing almost bankrupted me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Set thresholds on your meter that notifies you when price rises to high and turns it off automatically? Maybe some household batteries or a small generator?
This article does a poor job of explaining why there is going to be a problem and relaying the point of the study.
To model the grid and power infrastructure into the future, assumptions must be made about where the power is derived.
The article fails to provide the basic factors contributing to the problem, even though the study itself does a fine job.
So California wants to legislate electric cars. That means higher demand in a shorter period of time. Meanwhile Calofornia wants to legislate 'clean' or 'green' energy production. If that's a design limitation then the outcome is a shift away from what is the normal situation we face with energy use today.
Energy use at night with a highly solar derived power system requires significant storage and efficiency loss. Charging all of California's electric cars in 2035 will be a demand that far surpasses anything seen today. These things that we see causing rolling black outs and brown outs, like AC use spikes in summer will be a blip compared to the consistent vehicle charging demand.
Interesting, though, the electric vehicle adoption basically negates the storage problem if a parallel infrastructure of charge back from homes at night is implemented. Charge your car at work in the sun and use it to power your home at night.
If you're regularly committing a certain percentage of your car's battery capacity to powering your house, wouldn't it make more sense to just have a stationary battery at home? Otherwise you can't rely on that extra range in your car if you need it to power your home anyway, and you're just spending extra energy carrying around extra battery weight in your car every day.
I wonder if there's any correlation between times someone travels 400 miles and times when they are not home... we probably need a study or something to figure it out.
This requires extra cost for the consumers and will drive up battery demand. It will be cheaper for the consumer to use their car to help balance the grid, as long as they have the required range for when it's needed (with current smart charging solutions already providing this).
Each car is typically driven 35 miles daily in the USA. Against a capacity of ~250 miles, this represents many days of non-charging, and thus a lot of flexibility in when charging occurs.
EVs can potentially strengthen the grid: if they are charged smartly, to balance demand.
We need manufacturers, regulators, grid operators to align on how to figure this out.
At the least, grid conditions/pricing should be sent to the car for smart charging.
Mandating 240volt connections in all garages and a large portion of apartment parking lots would also enable the solar excesses of the day to be quickly utilized.
This is spot on. Kaluza (https://www.kaluza.com/demand-response/) are working on this problem, by giving EV drivers reduced prices for EV charging as long as the Kaluza platform controls when you car is charged, with the Kaluza platform using price signals to decide when to stop/start charging.
The larger impact will come from V2G (Vehicle-to-grid) charging. This will require manufacturers to add this capability to vehicle but the savings for customers are significantly greater than just smart charging (see see https://www.kaluza.com/case-studies/case-study-kaluza-enable...).
> Charge your car at work in the sun and use it to power your home at night.
And fill your coffee thermos at work and drink free coffee at home all weekend. And toilet paper and pencils from work can also be taken home and maybe resold at a flea market.
-Charge your car at work in the sun and use it to power your home at night.
This doesn't make any sense. If you don't need the capacity, why do you wanna carry a ton of battery everywhere with you wasting energy? Buy a smaller battery for the car. Keep another battery installed at home. The battery at home is also more flexible to draw power at the optimal time for the grid.
Not to mention that this constant charging and recharging would decrease the lifetime of the battery, causing more environmentally unfriendly waste and inefficiency.
I live in a cold climate and it would take only take more than 50% of charge to keep the house warm overnight with an air source heat pump. Since I rarely use more then 10% of range per day driving this would easily work for me. With an LFP battery car the cycle usage wouldn’t even be a big deal.
"more than 5.4 gigawatts of energy storage would be needed if charging habits follow their current course."
Gigawatts are a unit of power, not energy. Storage is measured in gigawatt-hours.
Stanford's PR department should know this. The question is, how much storage is needed to make it through the night?
The biggest pumped storage station in the US [1] generates 2.7GW of power and stores 24GWH. So, two of those, somewhere in the Sierras, should cover a night of charging.
The reservoirs we're using as an example are in the hundreds of acres of surface area. That's not "huge parts of the Sierras". If you look at Bath County Pumped Storage Station on Google maps, the bigger reservoir is a skinny lake about a mile long.
Perhaps it makes sense to use much larger reservoirs, but even then I have trouble equating the creation of a few artificial lakes with severe environmental destruction. Really, it all depends on where they put it and whether they do reasonable due diligence to not impact existing habitat too severely. The environmental destruction that results from burning petroleum for ground transportation is far worse.
It sounds like the real issue is that the time-of-use rates are wrong. Just adjust them to match the actual energy production/demand, and the behavior change will follow.
My solar, battery, and car setup automatically adjusts to the rate for power. It sends all my energy to the grid when costs are high and I get the most back, and uses the battery at that time... and then charges the battery when rates are low.
Set the rates to be accurate and the system will work itself out. I am not going to use more expensive electricity just because the rates are set wrong.
It seemed obvious to me that time of use rates will have to change when you switch from thermal generation to solar because when you have over/under-provisioning is different.
Thermal plants have excess capacity late at night, early morning. And under during the late afternoon early evening. Solar will have excess during the late mid morning. And nothing in the early evening.
I don't think you need smarties at Standford to figure that out.
"Electric vehicles will contribute to emissions reductions in the United States, but their charging may challenge electricity grid operations. We present a data-driven, realistic model of charging demand that captures the diverse charging behaviours of future adopters in the US Western Interconnection. We study charging control and infrastructure build-out as critical factors shaping charging load and evaluate grid impact under rapid electric vehicle adoption with a detailed economic dispatch model of 2035 generation."
The opening lines of the actual study paper. Wanted to put that out into the mix before this turns into another Soleus Pushup debacle.
That said, I think University of Houston actually did a better job with their press release than Stanford did, both in clarity of explanation and in the quality of presentation. I'd like to hear some thoughts for/against though.
I would be curious about a study done for the Texas market.
From what I understand, you'd definitely want to charge at night due to the vast amounts of wind power available and the otherwise low demand.
Even better would be to plug the car in at all times when parked either at work or home and it just charges when the rate is cheapest. You don't need to charge every day to refill that 20 or 30 miles.
I guess the issue with this report is that it is specific to the unique mix of energy that the (west of the) USA has compared to other areas/countries. Countries with a lot of nuclear see that energy wasted at night because you can't just dial down the level very quickly, in that sense, in most of Nothern Europe this would be desirable.
In countries that have extreme levels of solar, clearly this only works during the day and perhaps leaves the night being covered by fossil fuel plants instead where they are happy to use less/dial it down.
The massive missing piece, at least in the UK, is a genuine Smart Grid that can drive usage to meet supply. I have precisely zero appliances in my house that can make any use of cheap electricity and even worse, if I want a dual-tariff to get cheaper overnight electric, I get punished for it costwise.
> I have precisely zero appliances in my house that can make any use of cheap electricity and even worse, if I want a dual-tariff to get cheaper overnight electric, I get punished for it costwise
No dishwasher or washing machine? I have a hog water tank with an immersion switch on it, I would love to heat that with cheap electricity overnight. I agree on the stupidity of punishing people for taking on the cheaper night tariffs - we should be goint for as much carrot as we can over stick!
The other aspect of this is price and consumption. I work from home with a workstation PC and an electric over that we use maybe every other day. Meanwhile my annual electricity bill is 1/4 of what my annual heating (gas) is, and of that, hot water is only 1/4 of that. Well over half of my annual bill and energy consumption is just heating my house during winter.
The real goal is to get storage heat sources heated by renewable sources for those of us in the UK.
Many electricity co-ops and providers in Texas offer a choice of plans, one of which is higher rates during daytime but free electricity during nights and weekends. But that allowance doesn't kick in until later in the night, so a programmable clock on the charger would be a killer feature for electric car sellers.
I believe most electric cars already support charging on a timer. I have a ChargePoint charger that does the same thing on the charger side. The app even has a choice of all the electricity providers and plans to choose it so I don't have to look it up manually.
Hamburg the city is currently funding a fairly interesting research project. The problem here is that solar + wind at times overproduces, and we have no grid scale energy storage to keep that power. So, a short-term idea is to equip most larger garages with EV chargers and to include a central control unit for these chargers. This way, the grid can bring the EVs to 40% - 60% charge slowly during off-hours, or dump as much power into the EVs as possible if the alternative was to shut down solar plants or wind turbines.
And additionally, centralizing the power usage simplifies transmission issues for now. It's much easier to have a few big cables to a few big buildings, than having every single home pulling a lot of power all of a sudden.
>Even better would be to plug the car in at all times when parked either at work or home and it just charges when the rate is cheapest.
99% of people have a fixed rate 24/7/365. I live in NYC and I'm not even sure if it's possible for me to pay time of use rates. The time of day that electricity is cheapest is... all the time.
I sincerely doubt there is any public or political will to change this engrained billing method. People will not willingly change their habits, and any politician proposing reducing quality of life will just get thrown out
In Texas right now you can get two meters to your home. One meter you use a fixed rate plan and the other meter you use a "wholesale" plus fee type plan, infamous example being Griddy. When the rate is nearly free you enable the outlet that charges your car.
Of course hiring an electrician and all of that would probably have a long payback period.
electric cars have very large and heavy batteries right? Why is it prohibitively difficult to replace them on demand? What if there were 2-3 batteries charging at home or hundreds at a "battery station", where you would park at a spot/drive-thru garage and have a hydraulic machine drop your old battery and lift in a new battery and the whole swap can take no longer than the time it takes to fill up a has car and you have less queues. Why is this not possible?
If it takes an hour to charge a battery and a battery station has 200 charging at any given time, and it takes 2 minutes to swap a battery then 6 charging bays can replace batteries for 180 cars leaving 20 extra batteries for defects and other issues. Couldn't such a charging station be implemented on a similar lot and budget of constructing a medium size gas station (at least a dozen pumps and around 1 acre lot).
A charging station that is twice as efficient with a 30min charge time can do 2 cars at most in one hour. You need 90 charging station to reach that efficiency even without considering the queues.
I just don't get it. Governments around the world and spending trillions on this stuff so why is there no clear answer on this?
We're talking about an industry that has failed to standardize on a single, interchangeable charging plug here.
What do you think the chances of a single, interchangeable battery for such a "battery station" to remove, recharge, replace are? Or are you proposing such stations for each individual manufacturer, model, model year, etc?
> CCS is the established industry standard DC fast-charging connector, and every automaker selling cars for the US market is already using it, or, in the case of Nissan, has pledged to use it going forward. Except, oh right, except for... them [Tesla].
The charger situation is quite analogous to Lightning vs. USB-C for smartphones. USB-C is the industry standard, and there's one manufacturer still using a proprietary connector. And in both cases, the hold-out manufacturer provides an adapter cable so you can use the standard connector.
(To your point about standardized batteries having approximately 0% chance of happening any time soon, I 100% agree.)
They haven’t standardized because they haven’t been given an incentive to standardize. I would argue that perhaps the incentives mentioned in the article could be given to companies instead to encourage them to standardize in plugs and batteries, but many people prefer to see financial incentives given to people instead of corporations
Let's just ignore the total of end-user standardization like a charging plug.
They can't even put the gas filler on the same side universally on all vehicles. They can't even make the way you access it universal. Ever seen a car from the 70s where it was hidden behind the license plate?
Battery swap stations are an old idea, but it's really hard to actually pull it off. It requires that all the cars you service have the same battery pack, or that there are at most only a few kinds of battery pack to deal with. The packs have to be stored and charged, so you have the same electrical service requirements plus you need a place to store the batteries, and employees or robots to move them around. You need car owners to accept an ownership model where batteries are leased rather than owned.
Modern EV batteries are almost always liquid cooled, so your removable battery will need some kind of fluid connection that can be disconnected and reconnected without dripping ethylene glycol or whatever on everything, and without getting air bubbles in the line.
Some cars are moving towards structural batteries, which means the car is less sturdy without the battery installed. That might not be a problem if it's just sitting there.
The alternative is to just do DC fast charging, which seems to be good enough for most uses.
Personally I think the long-term solution here is to electrify sections of the major highways at regular intervals, so that cars can charge without stopping. Sweden has some pilot projects involving rails embedded in slots in the road surface. Overhead lines are another option (and they're cheaper), but if they're high enough for trucks to fit, then cars would have to have very tall pantographs to reach.
> but it's really hard to actually pull it off. It requires that all the cars you service have the same battery pack, or that there are at most only a few kinds of battery pack to deal with.
Precisely the kind of thing government regulation is for. Don't specify what is inside the battery pack, specify the form factor, connection points and attachment mechanisms. Leave the battery companies to figure out the rest.
With the current way of owning an EV, you own the battery. And because batteries degrade overtime, the health of the battery is a big component of the value of your car. Using a service like that means you'll get a random battery every time you swap.
I guess that can change if you lease the battery separately.
EVs will switch to LFP batteries that will have a life span of 300k miles with current technology and in 10 years will be at a million miles. Batteries will last longer than the cars.
I think the problem is that you are thinking of things purely in terms of how gas stations and gas powered cars work. You need to step back and re-think.
For almost all EV owners, a level 2 (240V 20amp) charger at home is all that's needed[0]. It charges slowly, but given the car sits for 12+ hours every night, it's more than enough. You get home, you plug in, you go eat dinner and go to bed. When it's time to go in the morning, you have a full charge. "Refilling" isn't a discrete event that takes place in a given place. You just plug in whenever you aren't driving.
DC fast charging, which charges the car in an hour or less, that's a rare event. It's what you use when you're on a long trip somewhere that takes more than one charge of the battery. But most owners might do that a few times per year.
So the problem you're trying to solve with this "swappable battery" solution is tiny. Imagine how much more the car will cost to support this complexity, and for what benefit? Saving a few hours per year? I won't pay the additional thousands of dollars for the "swappable battery" car, and I won't pay the cost of maintaining the swappable battery stations. It's just not worth it vs spending that time getting lunch.
[0] My wife and I did the math on our own driving patterns and realized we could probably get away with a level ONE charger- literally a standard 120V extension cord - for the EV we're on a waiting list for.
And you are only thinking in terms of rich home owners. I get paid verg well and I still can't afford a house. How am I going to charge at an apartment? Do you think they will spend millions converting every parking lot into a charger and maintaining it? Or would I have to stand in line at a charging station? This is one the main reasons I vehemently oppose any idea that promotes electric cars the way they are. We still don't get public transport and only you folks who are rich or inherited a house can afford basic transportation if fossil fuel cars go away anytime in the next 10-15 years.
I uber just fine to work the few times I go in, when I need a car it is to drive long distances and it sucks waiting every few hundred miles in a queue then an hour to charge. It sucks getting stuck in the middle of nowhere because the mountain road took too much energy than what the battery meter anticipated. It sucks being late to important appointments if I forgot to charge or there is some technical issue with the charging. All of this and more can be avoided by just swapping the batteries and they are already doing this in china.
> Imagine how much more the car will cost to support this complexity, and for what benefit? Saving a few hours per year? I won't pay the additional thousands of dollars for the "swappable battery" ...
Ugh, NIO is already doing this in China and I'm pretty sure it's cheaper. Also, the government is literally spending hundreds of billions to subsidize electric car infrastructure so if it wasn't for the sentiment you and others have that convinced politicians we could be getting swappable batteries.
Until then, as much as I am for climate change prevention I will fight against electric cars the way they are. Maybe when charging a car fully takes less than 5 minutes and charging stations are at least have as abundant as gas stations (regardless of how far a full charge takes you) I can support this. China and all the countries that follow them will beat us again on this as well because while we are busy debating why not they are actually getting things done.
Assuming a common work schedule, that would put you into plugging in at the most expensive peak tier pricing ($0.72c/kW here in PG&E land).
When we had the EV I had a timer on the charger to only turn on at midnight when the off-peak rates kick in. If one had to leave early in the morning, the car was never fully charged.
It worked ok most of the time as my partner could charge it up to 100% for free at work, but without that perk it was iffy.
This is a bit of a nitpick, but L2s don’t charge slowly. Ours gets us about 30 miles per hour, so we get fully charged after a normal day’s worth of driving in about 30 minutes.
This could work for leased cars or fleet vehicles.
I already don’t want to swap my propane tank for someone else’s rusted piece of crap so I have it filled. No way if want to swap my 20k battery for who knows what.
> I just don't get it. Governments around the world and spending trillions on this stuff so why is there no clear answer on this?
Why would there need to be a "clear answer" on something that quite obviously wouldn't work?
Everyone here has done a great job of explaining to you the complexity of your "simple" solution, but you don't seem to want to accept any of the explanations. You seem to think that your back-of-the-napkin calculation can just be magically turned into a major part of our transportation infrastructure.
Cars aren't television remotes. The batteries in the cars aren't your standard AA battery. The situation is far more complicated than you're making it out to be.
Give me a break, what I have seen is someone showed me this is already being done in China. So anything you say is an excuse that is dangerously preventing climate change prevention efforts. I literally saw a video of NIO doing this and arguments like yours "cars aren't television remotes" "it's too hard" are bullshit. The interstate freeway project was hard yet it was done with trillions of dollars spent because it had to. Since china is doing it the only thing hard is that it costs more but our tax dollars are set aside to subsidize this shit but home owning rich people can make electric cars work for them with chargers so everyone better find extra time and houses fast else you're shit out of luck.
Governments can force car companies to use stanrdized connections, every car has plenty of government regulated things like this.
I said ELI5 so you can explain to me why my back of napkin calculation does not work when seemingly endless subsidies and cost that is passed down to consumers are in the works. NIO is already doing this without a $300B subsidy...oh and get this: selling batteries is more profitable for companies! One car is one battery but when battery stations also buy batteries that is more profit. Tesla literally sells batteries to power grids because of profit.
"Who will spend tens of billions to do this" is the question and we have an answer now, but you don't seem to gey that it will be largely wasted because people will not buy electric cars if they have to wait in line every day to get a charge or filling up the charge can cause them to be late to places. An inconvenient solution is a dead solution, in a free market consumer satisfaction comes first.
It's not just about the rate. Charging at night happens because the car is conveniently parked at home doing nothing and EV owners want a car ready to go in the morning. Charging at EV station during the day is time consuming and is often expensive. I'm sure that the lucky few that can charge at work already do so...
It's almost as if the logical conclusion is to invest in convenient workplace charging infrastructure so charging is simple when the car is conveniently parked at work doing nothing and the owner wants a car ready to go home in the evening...
> “We encourage policymakers to consider utility rates that encourage day charging and incentivize investment in charging infrastructure to shift drivers from home to work for charging,” said the study’s co-senior author, Ram Rajagopal
Most EVs charging at home are plugged in from say 6pm to 7am. It would be most convenient to charge immediately but the electric rates (in california at least) are highest at 6pm and lowest at 7am.
Readit News
Wrong according to what metric? Cost? Raw efficiency? A lot of people are more than willing to give up efficiency so that they don't have to actually worry about finding a station during the day. To say that something is just outright "wrong" based on their personal preference of priorities comes off as unhelpful to me.
The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available, and people will use it. You don't need any complex "AI" like people in this thread are saying, you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself. Too much energy being used at night - price increases. It's not complicated, and it's what we're doing already. People don't need a Stanford study to convince them to get their energy for cheaper.
“And it’s not just California and Western states. All states may need to rethink electricity pricing structures as their EV charging needs increase and their grid changes,” added Powell, who recently took a postdoctoral research position at ETH Zurich.
The article also includes other interesting and more nuanced policy details than just "change pricing structure", such as:
Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. [...]
So yes, there are weird red herrings in this thread from people who want a technology first and a solution second (or never) and/or who don't understand design of incentive structures. But this work doesn't appear suffer from those problems.
Well, I don't know what to say aside from we would need a lot of work to have it 'both ways'.
By that I mean, if we expect everyone to charge their cars during the day, especially 'peak hours' in a given industrial area, there's a chance that the line and/or station capacity would have to be increased. A large part of the allure of 'night charging' is that it avoids requiring major grid upgrades, and also possibly opens up better uses around certain energy sources quirks. Nuclear, water power, geothermal, all three to some extent have 'consistent load' properties where either it takes time to adjust power output, or power output can be consistent both day and night with minimal incremental cost, vs the need to install additional capacity for extra day load.
> So yes, there are weird red herrings in this thread from people who want a technology first and a solution second (or never) and/or who don't understand design of incentive structures.
Speaking of incentive structures, one of my former employers installed EV chargers in all of the bottom floors of our parking garage while explicitly not allowing non-EVs to park in those spaces. I was left parking my hybrid on the roof in a desert climate where my car would continually get covered with pollen.
Naturally, I did what they were trying to incentivize: I looked at EVs. I quickly discovered that the cheaper models have limited usecases; for instance, the road trips I go on would now be out of the picture. The more expensive ones are much more functional but come at a high price that I've never personally spent on a car.
There's also the fact that I didn't have anywhere to charge it except public spaces where I'd have to awkwardly wait for hours because I lived in an apartment. In order to get a 240v plug in my garage I would need to pay for it myself.
These policies, as they invade the workforce, need to be looked at from a lens that doesn't end up doing harm in the end.
Why?
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
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// Weird given tiny amount of energy for your iPhone. But perhaps reasonable in aggregate.
It was an epiphany I had in relation to my staunch pro-bike/public transport internal discourse. It occurred to me that we need to focus on the main motivations for driving and public transport in order to make them both better. Road networks should focus on freedom and personal autonomy, and public transport should focus on throughput efficiency. Making PT better at throughput by expanding the networks would give people more freedom on the road network too by reducing traffic.
Where I live, I don't own a car largely because the "jobs" for which having access to a car is critical is handled by a reliable, efficient and safe cab/taxi on demand system (you need to get somewhere quickly, carry a lot of stuff, take your family/friends to A&E at night etc). So then I can rely on the very good Public Transit system for the bulk of my regular commute needs confident that I can get a cab when I need to.
If the reliable cab/taxi on demand didn't exist (which was indeed the situation before Uber and it's ilk), I would buy a car irrespective of how good the public transport system was (it was good even then) and irrespective of taxation dis-incentives. Once you own a car, for many use cases it becomes a lot more convenient and has low incremental cost to just drive.
As you may note, these "jobs to be done" vary by geography, lifestage and income - so while general principles can be drawn up, they need to be locally customized.
From the parts of the world I come from the majority of people are vehemently opposed to time of use pricing. Because that's when they use it most.
They and their political representatives would much prefer to keep taking from those who consume in off-peak rather than fix the underlying mechanism.
Unfortunately most people don’t care (or the technology to take advantage of it just isn’t there), and demand shifted less than 1% over several years.
But it’s hard to find this info, because it doesn’t fit the (expensive to implement) narrative of “let them pay market price and people will respond to incentives”.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/smart-meters-hydro-bi...
> The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario's 2015-16 Energy Conservation Progress Report found "a 0.7 per cent reduction in peak demand among residential customers" attributed to time-of-use pricing over a four-year period.
I mean, people keep their foot on the gas when the light ahead is red and sometimes even speed up to get ahead of you only to slam on their brakes.
People who want to minimize their power bill can choose to pick the time of use pricing and shift some of their consumption off peak. Others can choose to pay more for the convenience of not having to worry about all that stuff. How much more, that can be determined by market forces.
In areas that are going all-in on solar, there is power during the day, but at night it would have to be generated or come from storage batteries.
Off-peak traditionally means when demand is low. Now you have to change your thinking to be when supply is high.
It’s _not_ like that in the states? In Denmark people are sharing spreadsheet that can tell you when to run the washing machine to save on electricity since the energy crisis following Russias invasion of Ukraine has pushed prices enough that these optimizations become valuable to regular consumers.
https://fsr.eui.eu/time-of-use-and-dynamic-pricing-rates-in-...
All the usual communist elements (Jimmy Carter, California) have been slowly making progress on introducing it since the 1970s, but mysteriously a lot of lies sprung up about how it would harm the poor. And the USA is really caring about the poor not using as much fossil fuels as they possibly can so it got kind of squashed.
Oh, so just solve the problem that people since Edison have been trying to solve.
So simple!
Have you read the study ? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01105-7
> you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself.
Never worked, never will, borderline sounds like a cult following, "The all mighty market will automagically fix it with no human intervention"
At the lowest level it's people plugging things in at specific times to save pennies.
But people can build systems to do this automatically, like the ripple signal that's been used for half a century to turn on water storage heaters.
People can build entire business around building widgets that will help other businesses save money.
The (soylent) green energy market is people.
We're talking about electric vehicles here. There has already been massive interference in the market forces through both push and pull mechanisms - push would be things like outlawing internal combustion engines going forward, pull would be huge subsidies for electric vehicles.
It's pretty late in the game to say, "Hey! let's just use natural market forces! Problem solved!"
Natural market forces would be a tax on carbon equal to the cost of removing it from the atmosphere when it is burned and then let people buy whatever kind of car they want and can afford. There is no popular support whatsoever on either left or right for those kind of natural market forces.
My comment is US-centric, but in the US the adoption isn't really regulatory driven. The regulations are following reality while the politicians try to position themselves as "leaders".
This is exactly what they were doing in Texas right up until the moment the Blizzard hit last year.
Suddenly electricity became unavailable (because you know, giant blizzard), and consequently it was something like $6000 a kw/hr[1] for some users
Your market force solution for electricity pricing almost bankrupted me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[1] https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/natural-disa...
To model the grid and power infrastructure into the future, assumptions must be made about where the power is derived.
The article fails to provide the basic factors contributing to the problem, even though the study itself does a fine job.
So California wants to legislate electric cars. That means higher demand in a shorter period of time. Meanwhile Calofornia wants to legislate 'clean' or 'green' energy production. If that's a design limitation then the outcome is a shift away from what is the normal situation we face with energy use today.
Energy use at night with a highly solar derived power system requires significant storage and efficiency loss. Charging all of California's electric cars in 2035 will be a demand that far surpasses anything seen today. These things that we see causing rolling black outs and brown outs, like AC use spikes in summer will be a blip compared to the consistent vehicle charging demand.
Interesting, though, the electric vehicle adoption basically negates the storage problem if a parallel infrastructure of charge back from homes at night is implemented. Charge your car at work in the sun and use it to power your home at night.
The thing is, California isn't making great policy decisions or even efficient power decisions. They are making virtue decisions.
Moving 1.5 tons of battery or 1.25 tons of battery isn't where the hairsplitting should take place
EVs can potentially strengthen the grid: if they are charged smartly, to balance demand.
We need manufacturers, regulators, grid operators to align on how to figure this out.
At the least, grid conditions/pricing should be sent to the car for smart charging.
Mandating 240volt connections in all garages and a large portion of apartment parking lots would also enable the solar excesses of the day to be quickly utilized.
The larger impact will come from V2G (Vehicle-to-grid) charging. This will require manufacturers to add this capability to vehicle but the savings for customers are significantly greater than just smart charging (see see https://www.kaluza.com/case-studies/case-study-kaluza-enable...).
And fill your coffee thermos at work and drink free coffee at home all weekend. And toilet paper and pencils from work can also be taken home and maybe resold at a flea market.
This doesn't make any sense. If you don't need the capacity, why do you wanna carry a ton of battery everywhere with you wasting energy? Buy a smaller battery for the car. Keep another battery installed at home. The battery at home is also more flexible to draw power at the optimal time for the grid.
Not to mention that this constant charging and recharging would decrease the lifetime of the battery, causing more environmentally unfriendly waste and inefficiency.
Completely infeasible in cold climates if your house is heated by electrically-powered air source heat pumps, as it probably should be.
It’s not impossible.
Gigawatts are a unit of power, not energy. Storage is measured in gigawatt-hours. Stanford's PR department should know this. The question is, how much storage is needed to make it through the night?
The biggest pumped storage station in the US [1] generates 2.7GW of power and stores 24GWH. So, two of those, somewhere in the Sierras, should cover a night of charging.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...
Perhaps it makes sense to use much larger reservoirs, but even then I have trouble equating the creation of a few artificial lakes with severe environmental destruction. Really, it all depends on where they put it and whether they do reasonable due diligence to not impact existing habitat too severely. The environmental destruction that results from burning petroleum for ground transportation is far worse.
My solar, battery, and car setup automatically adjusts to the rate for power. It sends all my energy to the grid when costs are high and I get the most back, and uses the battery at that time... and then charges the battery when rates are low.
Set the rates to be accurate and the system will work itself out. I am not going to use more expensive electricity just because the rates are set wrong.
Thermal plants have excess capacity late at night, early morning. And under during the late afternoon early evening. Solar will have excess during the late mid morning. And nothing in the early evening.
I don't think you need smarties at Standford to figure that out.
The opening lines of the actual study paper. Wanted to put that out into the mix before this turns into another Soleus Pushup debacle.
That said, I think University of Houston actually did a better job with their press release than Stanford did, both in clarity of explanation and in the quality of presentation. I'd like to hear some thoughts for/against though.
From what I understand, you'd definitely want to charge at night due to the vast amounts of wind power available and the otherwise low demand.
Even better would be to plug the car in at all times when parked either at work or home and it just charges when the rate is cheapest. You don't need to charge every day to refill that 20 or 30 miles.
In countries that have extreme levels of solar, clearly this only works during the day and perhaps leaves the night being covered by fossil fuel plants instead where they are happy to use less/dial it down.
The massive missing piece, at least in the UK, is a genuine Smart Grid that can drive usage to meet supply. I have precisely zero appliances in my house that can make any use of cheap electricity and even worse, if I want a dual-tariff to get cheaper overnight electric, I get punished for it costwise.
No dishwasher or washing machine? I have a hog water tank with an immersion switch on it, I would love to heat that with cheap electricity overnight. I agree on the stupidity of punishing people for taking on the cheaper night tariffs - we should be goint for as much carrot as we can over stick!
The other aspect of this is price and consumption. I work from home with a workstation PC and an electric over that we use maybe every other day. Meanwhile my annual electricity bill is 1/4 of what my annual heating (gas) is, and of that, hot water is only 1/4 of that. Well over half of my annual bill and energy consumption is just heating my house during winter.
The real goal is to get storage heat sources heated by renewable sources for those of us in the UK.
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And additionally, centralizing the power usage simplifies transmission issues for now. It's much easier to have a few big cables to a few big buildings, than having every single home pulling a lot of power all of a sudden.
99% of people have a fixed rate 24/7/365. I live in NYC and I'm not even sure if it's possible for me to pay time of use rates. The time of day that electricity is cheapest is... all the time.
I sincerely doubt there is any public or political will to change this engrained billing method. People will not willingly change their habits, and any politician proposing reducing quality of life will just get thrown out
Of course hiring an electrician and all of that would probably have a long payback period.
electric cars have very large and heavy batteries right? Why is it prohibitively difficult to replace them on demand? What if there were 2-3 batteries charging at home or hundreds at a "battery station", where you would park at a spot/drive-thru garage and have a hydraulic machine drop your old battery and lift in a new battery and the whole swap can take no longer than the time it takes to fill up a has car and you have less queues. Why is this not possible?
If it takes an hour to charge a battery and a battery station has 200 charging at any given time, and it takes 2 minutes to swap a battery then 6 charging bays can replace batteries for 180 cars leaving 20 extra batteries for defects and other issues. Couldn't such a charging station be implemented on a similar lot and budget of constructing a medium size gas station (at least a dozen pumps and around 1 acre lot).
A charging station that is twice as efficient with a 30min charge time can do 2 cars at most in one hour. You need 90 charging station to reach that efficiency even without considering the queues.
I just don't get it. Governments around the world and spending trillions on this stuff so why is there no clear answer on this?
What do you think the chances of a single, interchangeable battery for such a "battery station" to remove, recharge, replace are? Or are you proposing such stations for each individual manufacturer, model, model year, etc?
https://youtu.be/sZOuz_laH9I?t=990
> CCS is the established industry standard DC fast-charging connector, and every automaker selling cars for the US market is already using it, or, in the case of Nissan, has pledged to use it going forward. Except, oh right, except for... them [Tesla].
The charger situation is quite analogous to Lightning vs. USB-C for smartphones. USB-C is the industry standard, and there's one manufacturer still using a proprietary connector. And in both cases, the hold-out manufacturer provides an adapter cable so you can use the standard connector.
(To your point about standardized batteries having approximately 0% chance of happening any time soon, I 100% agree.)
They can't even put the gas filler on the same side universally on all vehicles. They can't even make the way you access it universal. Ever seen a car from the 70s where it was hidden behind the license plate?
Modern EV batteries are almost always liquid cooled, so your removable battery will need some kind of fluid connection that can be disconnected and reconnected without dripping ethylene glycol or whatever on everything, and without getting air bubbles in the line.
Some cars are moving towards structural batteries, which means the car is less sturdy without the battery installed. That might not be a problem if it's just sitting there.
The alternative is to just do DC fast charging, which seems to be good enough for most uses.
Personally I think the long-term solution here is to electrify sections of the major highways at regular intervals, so that cars can charge without stopping. Sweden has some pilot projects involving rails embedded in slots in the road surface. Overhead lines are another option (and they're cheaper), but if they're high enough for trucks to fit, then cars would have to have very tall pantographs to reach.
Instead of electrifying roads for cars, why not electrify them for rail cars and trains?
Precisely the kind of thing government regulation is for. Don't specify what is inside the battery pack, specify the form factor, connection points and attachment mechanisms. Leave the battery companies to figure out the rest.
I guess that can change if you lease the battery separately.
If you don't own it, as long it's certified good and won't blow your car up it doesn't really matter if it's well-worn, etc?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTXptUuKGrc
20 seconds battery swap:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q2ew50YVHY
NIO have 1000 stations and 10 million swaps already.
More info:
https://www.arenaev.com/nio_achieves_10_million_battery_swap...
For almost all EV owners, a level 2 (240V 20amp) charger at home is all that's needed[0]. It charges slowly, but given the car sits for 12+ hours every night, it's more than enough. You get home, you plug in, you go eat dinner and go to bed. When it's time to go in the morning, you have a full charge. "Refilling" isn't a discrete event that takes place in a given place. You just plug in whenever you aren't driving.
DC fast charging, which charges the car in an hour or less, that's a rare event. It's what you use when you're on a long trip somewhere that takes more than one charge of the battery. But most owners might do that a few times per year.
So the problem you're trying to solve with this "swappable battery" solution is tiny. Imagine how much more the car will cost to support this complexity, and for what benefit? Saving a few hours per year? I won't pay the additional thousands of dollars for the "swappable battery" car, and I won't pay the cost of maintaining the swappable battery stations. It's just not worth it vs spending that time getting lunch.
[0] My wife and I did the math on our own driving patterns and realized we could probably get away with a level ONE charger- literally a standard 120V extension cord - for the EV we're on a waiting list for.
I uber just fine to work the few times I go in, when I need a car it is to drive long distances and it sucks waiting every few hundred miles in a queue then an hour to charge. It sucks getting stuck in the middle of nowhere because the mountain road took too much energy than what the battery meter anticipated. It sucks being late to important appointments if I forgot to charge or there is some technical issue with the charging. All of this and more can be avoided by just swapping the batteries and they are already doing this in china.
> Imagine how much more the car will cost to support this complexity, and for what benefit? Saving a few hours per year? I won't pay the additional thousands of dollars for the "swappable battery" ...
Ugh, NIO is already doing this in China and I'm pretty sure it's cheaper. Also, the government is literally spending hundreds of billions to subsidize electric car infrastructure so if it wasn't for the sentiment you and others have that convinced politicians we could be getting swappable batteries.
Until then, as much as I am for climate change prevention I will fight against electric cars the way they are. Maybe when charging a car fully takes less than 5 minutes and charging stations are at least have as abundant as gas stations (regardless of how far a full charge takes you) I can support this. China and all the countries that follow them will beat us again on this as well because while we are busy debating why not they are actually getting things done.
Assuming a common work schedule, that would put you into plugging in at the most expensive peak tier pricing ($0.72c/kW here in PG&E land).
When we had the EV I had a timer on the charger to only turn on at midnight when the off-peak rates kick in. If one had to leave early in the morning, the car was never fully charged.
It worked ok most of the time as my partner could charge it up to 100% for free at work, but without that perk it was iffy.
I already don’t want to swap my propane tank for someone else’s rusted piece of crap so I have it filled. No way if want to swap my 20k battery for who knows what.
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Why would there need to be a "clear answer" on something that quite obviously wouldn't work?
Everyone here has done a great job of explaining to you the complexity of your "simple" solution, but you don't seem to want to accept any of the explanations. You seem to think that your back-of-the-napkin calculation can just be magically turned into a major part of our transportation infrastructure.
Cars aren't television remotes. The batteries in the cars aren't your standard AA battery. The situation is far more complicated than you're making it out to be.
Governments can force car companies to use stanrdized connections, every car has plenty of government regulated things like this.
I said ELI5 so you can explain to me why my back of napkin calculation does not work when seemingly endless subsidies and cost that is passed down to consumers are in the works. NIO is already doing this without a $300B subsidy...oh and get this: selling batteries is more profitable for companies! One car is one battery but when battery stations also buy batteries that is more profit. Tesla literally sells batteries to power grids because of profit.
"Who will spend tens of billions to do this" is the question and we have an answer now, but you don't seem to gey that it will be largely wasted because people will not buy electric cars if they have to wait in line every day to get a charge or filling up the charge can cause them to be late to places. An inconvenient solution is a dead solution, in a free market consumer satisfaction comes first.
> “We encourage policymakers to consider utility rates that encourage day charging and incentivize investment in charging infrastructure to shift drivers from home to work for charging,” said the study’s co-senior author, Ram Rajagopal
There is choice in that equation.