It really depends on how much actual grid demand it is and how much they notice. It’s uncertain if EV charging demand will really make a big difference, and that depends on when it is.
Big EV depots - UPS, FedEx, etc, will be on demand charges and generally won’t matter - they may charge overnight, they may do some daytime charging, and will probably have their own battery banks to load level. But delivery trucks don’t use that much power - 50kWh/day or something for most, and if you’ve got 12h to recharge, that’s only 4kW per truck.
But EVs just don’t pull that much for personal transport, and I remain unconvinced it will really matter in the realm of increased demand. Of course, if demand drops, then it’s a problem. But time of use changes to mid-day low cost will push a lot of people around as needed.
Unless they charge at work. Also, you can come up with a better term than “Boobus Americanus.” Even Joe Sixpack is better…
Time of use solves a lot, though. If it’s little enough cost delta, then it’s not that important. If the cost delta is enough, people will shift charging times. And long range BEVs don’t need to charge every day.
There are plenty of issues with EVs in terms of environmental impact (see BGL thread), but grid impact doesn’t seem like it should be one of them.
The grid is much MUCH more affected by air conditioning and electric heat (both of which are more difficult to time shift) - so something like a shift away from natural gas in an area that historically used lots of it to electric would have more of a critical impact.
Again - even that would be a slowish moving problem and we’re good at dealing with those (unless California lol).
Yeah, utilizing thermal mass is a way to time-shift, and I think it’d be interesting to go back towards that (very old houses in Europe are very very thermal massy)
We’ve centered everything around AIR temperature but if you have a massive building it’s harder to shift the material temperature, but it’s also harder to shift the material temperature.
Basically build-your-own geothermal. I could see cooling some interior stone mass in walls down to nearly freezing overnight so that they remain cool all day.
This is actually quite common in low-energy homes - you just put a metric crapton of thermal mass in. A lot have glass or lucite pillars of water as elements - you simply use the water for thermal mass. When you add things to a house, “buying by weight” helps a lot too. Heavy bookshelves, couches, etc, all add some very real thermal mass.
And of course you can go with real rock construction for things as well.
I’d love more thermal mass in our house, ideally paired with some way to efficiently cool them at night.
I predict it’ll be 5 years before you manage to get around to start doing your thermal mass heating/cooling stuff, given all the rest of your projects and stuff you want to do.
Well… looks like California isn’t too happy about their carbon salvation EVs…
I’m reminded of the phrase, “Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance” here…
Anne Gonzales, a senior public information officer at California ISO, told Newsweek as last week’s heat wave was just beginning that Californians tend to take the Flex Alerts seriously and pitch in to conserve energy when doing so is needed.
They did mention charging earlier in the day when power is more available…
Heh, yeah, the 5 P’s. Very important. Although apparently our major grid operators don’t necessarily consider that. See the last few years wildfires and untrimmed powerlines and such. Or at least… The top doesn’t necessarily seem to care as much. Maybe that’ll change for a while, we’ll see.
But at least it wasn’t as bad as ERCOT was, and most of us are used to the flex alerts and somewhat trying to conserve. Now they grid just needs to get off its butt and figureoout more storage and generation and such, so that there is less needs for the flex alerts.
Our energy use this week is… not ideal. We’re still exporting, but are definitely drawing in the evening. We’re making two round trips a day in the car for kid[0]'s summer camp, and that involves plugging in around 4:30 - only 3.3kW, but that’s still enough to draw heavily with the car, some AC, cooking dinner, etc. Trying to let temps float up during then, but…
At some point, I’ll trench power over there off a fatter breaker, put a Juicebox or something in, and then can control charging times/rates with more precision than “I don’t plug it in, and then forget to plug it in.”
A little external microcontroller based charge selection box would be nice too, and I’ll probably build one of those. Have a couple waterproof buttons and an LCD that let you select optimized charging options.
Something like “I need it in the morning” (which will charge slowly overnight at 1.5kW or so starting at 10PM or midnight) for evening, the default is “Charge as fast as you can,” etc. Just have the option to restrict charging as needed. Or even, “I don’t plan to need the car tomorrow,” and it will simply charge during solar peak (starting around 11AM or noon).
Just having a quick “Plug it in, push button to select what’s important” would gain a lot in terms of less evening grid abuse in the heat.
I’ve been planning to do something very similar to this for my li-ion tool batteries where I can plug a bunch of them in whenever and have relays kick on once they can charge from the sun instead of drawing down my off-grid batteries…
lol
