I've heard the "grid can't handle all EVs" statement, but have not seen anything backing up the claim.
I believe the grid can in fact handle EVs becoming prevalent. We might need more power generation, which could be new plants, and/or residential solar.
Baring some kind of crazy legislation requiring ICE vehicles to be crushed or permanently parked, we are decades away from a scenario where pure EVs are the dominant vehicle type on the road. There are just too many serviceable ICE vehicles in play to expect them to really go away in the next quarter century or so. That allows plenty of time for anything the current power generation and distribution infrastructure lacks to be adequately addressed.
The US's annual gasoline consumption is 135 bn gallons (2021 figure). At around 20 mpg (random estimate because I have to pick something), that works out to 2.7 trillion miles. At 30 kWh/100mi (figure from google), that works out 800 TWh if every gas vehicle in the US was suddenly switched for an electric one, or about 20% of the US's annual electricty generation of 4222.5 TWh (2018 figure). Also, that's about 5x the global crypto energy usage, vs just America's cars. [Obvious disclaimers: some of those estimates are arbitrary and not perfect, but they're in the right ballpark, and we obviously wouldn't switch to electric cars overnight]
Crypto was bad because it didn't actually accomplish anything with that power usage, but it was a pretty small footnote on the grand scheme of things.
For the first time I can remember, my power company was sending out Texts here in the midwest during that last Arctic blast telling people to use less electricity because the grid was over taxed.
Our National Energy grid is very very fragile.
Converting natural gas furnaces to heat pumps and replacing resistive heating with heat pumps, would not increase the total electricity usage at all. Last I looked 40% of heating in Texas was done through resistive heating, heat pumps would be 3-4x more efficient. There is current power devoted to resistance heating to run heat pumps for every home.
Anyways in areas where it regularly goes below 0F, the transition will not be smooth (but probably still necessary). Heat pumps that operate efficiently down -20F are just coming out and will be even more expensive than normal heat pumps. Also most residential energy usage in really cold areas are from burning natural gas, so electricity generation is quite low compared to warmer parts of the country.
Indeed seems manageable.
That is an astonishing amount of electricity for something of so little value.
But anyway, to the larger point, I agree the grid impact is overblown, especially since we should be coupling consumer BEVs with home / business / warehouse / commercial solar.
There's always going to be people who will need to drive, but there's a hell of a lot of people who could be perfectly adequately served by strong public transportation.
Never going to happen for 80-90% of the US. It is neither economically feasible, culturally feasible, or practically feasible for most people in the US.
Work places are too spread out, homes are not located near workplaces, and there is no desire from anyone (my self included) to increase density.
I want less density not more, "walkable" cities only work if people actually want to live in a walkable city. Many many many dont
1) where power is generated and used for crypto isn’t the same as needed for electric cars. Locations matter when you’re dealing with the creation of and distribution of electricity
2) moving electricity to all of the locations where it will be used is another problem. That deals with transmission lines, transformers, the last mile, and all of that stuff. That we don’t hear about it doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. It is Andy the lack of awareness and planning concerns me.
An ev drains way more power then a 2kw space heater.
A 2kW space heater used just 12 hours a day uses the same power per day as 4 mile per kWh EV driven 35,000 miles per year. Many space heaters see more than 12h/day of use but 35k miles per year is extremely rare.
EV’s are like microwaves, they use a lot of power when on but the grid cares about average load across millions of them not what’s happening in any one home.
“The battery size for a Tesla Model 3 ranges from 50 kWh to 82 kWh” that would give the largest a range of 20 miles.
Ev-database.org says they use 151Wh/km which is about 240Wh/mile.
Your hypothetical 2kw space heater uses 24kWh a day and is drastically less efficient than a heat pump.
EV zealots are just blind to the issues their silver bullet creates. Just like the "walk-able cities" folks.
Others will use dirt-cheap night time electricity.
And with Vehicle to Grid smart people can sell the extra energy in their car battery during peak hours and use the credits from that to charge their car overnight.
None of this is some kind of magical tech that's hard to use. Gridio (https://www.gridio.io) already exists and works directly with multiple EV brands.
Electric motors are even more efficient, but using them in the form factor of a car is also stupid. With robotics we can now make tiny self-driving vehicles that can do chores for us. Why should I drive a 2-ton car to the store to pick up a gallon of milk, when the store can send a small robot to deliver it to me? Similarly a large empty bus can be replaced with smaller ATV sized EVs that drive me from my house to the main artery and merge to form one train. That reduces the size of the EV engine and battery pack by 10x. Some of the problems to be solved are not merely technological but organizational and cultural.
You can ride a bicycle to the store to pick it up. Just think of the cardiovascular benefits.
And you know what? Think of the energy cost of the robot's manufacture, and the energy the delivery takes.
The next time I need to plug it in is maybe on Saturday.
You need to use your electric heater 24/7 to not freeze.
