[HN Gopher] Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go:...
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Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go: study
Author : hhs
Score : 71 points
Date : 2022-09-23 14:59 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.stanford.edu)
| m0RRSIYB0Zq8MgL wrote:
| > Current time-of-use rates encourage consumers to switch
| electricity use to nighttime whenever possible, like running the
| dishwasher and charging EVs. This rate structure reflects the
| time before significant solar and wind power supplies when demand
| threatened to exceed supply during the day, especially late
| afternoons in the summer.
|
| So, if you have a grid that doesn't heavily rely on solar then
| charging at night makes sense.
|
| > Today, California has excess electricity during late mornings
| and early afternoons, thanks mainly to its solar capacity. If
| most EVs were to charge during these times, then the cheap power
| would be used instead of wasted.
|
| How are people going to charge their cars during commutes?
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| I appreciate that you acknowledge Californians show up late and
| leave early
| elzbardico wrote:
| Only in Sacramento
| tantalor wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > drivers should move to daytime charging at work
| floatrock wrote:
| > > Today, California has excess electricity during late
| mornings and early afternoons, thanks mainly to its solar
| capacity. If most EVs were to charge during these times, then
| the cheap power would be used instead of wasted.
|
| > How are people going to charge their cars during commutes?
|
| Come on, you're saying most commutes are "late morning and
| early afternoon"? I too would like a job where my commute in is
| at 11 and my commute home is at 2.
|
| Rather than spreading EV FUD, can we instead discuss what the
| article is actually talking about, like installing charging
| infrastructure in daytime parking lots so we can take better
| advantage of the cheap, plentiful, and often curtailed solar
| energy?
| m0RRSIYB0Zq8MgL wrote:
| My post wasn't not about criticizing EVs. My post was about
| criticizing the energy grid. I think "slow" charging over
| night is the best way to use EVs and an energy grid that
| cannot accommodate that (because of a predominance of PV)
| should be criticized.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Is a level 2 charger not slow enough? Running that for 2-4
| hours should be enough for normal commutes I imagine.
| m0RRSIYB0Zq8MgL wrote:
| I was referring to level 2 chargers.
| jonahhorowitz wrote:
| We should install solar panels over those lots at the same
| time. It covers some of the capacity need, cools the lot and
| the cars, and is an efficient use of space.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Late morning and early afternoon. So, basically, people would
| charge their cars where they park them during the day while
| they work, not at home while they sleep.
|
| Seems very doable to me.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Most people wouldn't be commuting then, but this could be an
| argument for employers to supply infrastructure to facilitate
| charging during the day while at work.
| ctrlmeta wrote:
| > We're doing it wrong, according to a new Stanford study.
|
| This requires further clarification. What is it that we want to
| optimize? How do we know we want to optimize that?
| badrabbit wrote:
| I need ELI5:
|
| 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?
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| 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?
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| 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
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Did anyone do the math for when gasoline car sales will be
| banned?
|
| How many more power plants to we need? How much more Lithium do
| we need?
|
| I don't want to be a luddite, but the ev revolution seems to be
| unfeasible.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Sounds like the problem is simply that the US doesn't seem to
| have real time pricing of electricity.
|
| In Norway we pay what the market determines is the current price.
| Most people don't have flat rate charges. I can see the spot
| price in real time in an app.
|
| Why isn't that good enough?
| faxmeyourcode wrote:
| >Residents with variable-rate power plans are being hit the
| hardest. Such plans charge different prices for electricity
| depending on how much demand there is. The more demand, the
| higher the price.
|
| This is a thing for some power companies in Texas, but during
| peak times or in a crisis like TX experienced in winter of
| 2021, the prices skyrocketed because demand was out of control
| trying to keep warm. People ended up with a $5k electric bill
| trying to keep a modest single family home "warm" (in the
| article they mentioned they kept lights off and thermostat set
| at 60F/15C, not very warm).
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-winter-storms-2021...
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| This is all true, but I think the Texas issue is an outlier.
| Many things went wrong and all of them were preventable
| issues caused by mind-boggling terrible governance. Somehow
| these people are still in power.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| "The US" doesn't have a single system, not even within each
| state. Anecdotally, I have Time-of-Use billing with my PG&E
| electricity, but AFAICT, I was only allowed get that because I
| have BEVs.
|
| I think the "problem" is that someone needed to publish. This
| is a complete non-issue and utilities will shift the load as
| needed by adjusting the billing. Also, the notion that everyone
| going "in to work" is some antiquated pre-covid thinking.
| more_corn wrote:
| What? Peak electrical consumption is during the day. The big
| challenge for electric companies is the swing between the night
| trough in demand and the day peak. Night charging is excellent
| because it flattens that curve. Bringing demand into a straighter
| line and allowing electric companies to generate at a steady rate
| without having to cycle production up and down.
|
| I glanced though the article and found no mention of that.
|
| You can't write a piece like this and begin anywhere else.
|
| This article gets an F- for effective communication and
| persuasion.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I have TOU based electric plan in CA, and the summer times are
| about to shift to peak starting at 4pm (from 10am). This huge
| shift is because of excess capacity from installed solar. 4pm
| is early enough that there's lots of use, but late enough that
| solar is tapering off.
| e63f67dd-065b wrote:
| The article (and paper) is saying that in solar-dominated
| generation regions, peak electrical _production_ is during the
| day when the sun is out, and the trend seems like it 's not
| stopping. I haven't actually read the full paper, but to quote
| the abstract:
|
| > 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. We find that peak net
| electricity demand increases by up to 25% with forecast
| adoption and by 50% in a stress test with full electrification.
|
| The paper is at
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01105-7, I only
| briefly skimmed through it but it seems plausible.
|
| The assumption that a flat electrical load is desirable is less
| and less true as renewables go on the grid; of course, if we
| just took the (imo sensible) step to go all-nuclear, hydro, and
| geothermal for baseline load, then diurnal electrical
| consumption would not be desirable, but with the solar that
| might not be the case.
| JMiao wrote:
| op, how did you get that vanilla formatted view of
| new.stanford.edu?
| elzbardico wrote:
| Of course, it is far more efficient system-wide to charge
| electric cars around noon, where photovoltaic energy produces a
| surplus of energy with zero marginal economic value.
|
| It is an elegant way of solving at least part of the storage
| problem and the mismatch between peak power and demand times.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| "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.
| olivermarks wrote:
| Fire risks are also much greater at night if you are charging a
| BEV in your house while asleep. Far safer to charge in an open
| area preferably away from other vehicles and stuctures.
|
| https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20210113.as...
| vel0city wrote:
| I've had several recalls for spontaneous combustion of my ICE
| cars suggesting I don't park in the garage. At least one car
| had _multiple_ fire risk recalls for starting fire while
| parked.
|
| I guess ICE cars should never be parked in a garage.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Frankly, if a user cannot trust their EV to charge without
| going up in flames it is _not_ ready for prime time and should
| be recalled. Period.
| ctrlmeta wrote:
| Yes! It surprises me that the reliability issues in charging
| an EV are not discussed more. This bears more discussion and
| subject to regulations. It is not ok for companies to push
| EVs to general consumers without creating a good safety
| record.
| adrianN wrote:
| How many EVs spontaneously combust while charging?
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Less than ICE anyway. Who wants to talk about gas cars
| burning? It's so frequent journalists won't report them.
| But Teslas? Oh, my.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I think we already have enough regulations to hold
| companies liable for creating a dangerous product, we
| simply need to use them to hold corporations accountable.
|
| None of this 'oh, our owners manual says you should only
| charge in these special conditions or we can't be held
| responsible'. Nope. You make a product and it hurts people
| or destroys property? You better make your peace with
| punitive damages that'll make you wish you properly tested
| before shipping to customers.
| dymk wrote:
| The press release you linked to is about cars catching fire
| after they crash.
|
| Can you give a source for how many cars catch fire
| spontaneously when they're stationary and charging?
| calrain wrote:
| My understanding was that it helps countries with nuclear powered
| base electrical load to use that power at night, when there isn't
| a lot of demand.
|
| With further development, a key side benefit is that the grid can
| then tap into about 5% of your cars battery storage during the
| day when demand is higher (if you allow it).
| elzbardico wrote:
| The same issue applies to almost every country's baseload
| generation infrastructure, with a small exception of hydro
| (that has some small degree of dispatchability), it is not
| exclusive to nuclear power generation. Traditional thermo-
| electric plants also can't ramp up and down their power levels
| instantaneously.
| DropPanda wrote:
| This is very interesting and perfectly logical. I wrote a fairly
| recent report looking at a very similar question, and reached the
| opposite conclusion: night time charging is far better for the
| grid. That study however focuses on Sweden, where solar power
| only marginally impacts day-time supply.
|
| Link to the study:
| http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn%3Anbn%3Ase%3Ari%3Adiva-5752...
|
| If the western US has a surplus in mornings and afternoons, you
| guys really should invest in dynamic charging using electrified
| roads (commonly referred to as wireless inductive charging in
| California, but there are conductive solutions as well).
| philsnow wrote:
| > you guys really should invest in dynamic charging using
| electrified roads
|
| The state of our roads is already atrocious. Electrifying them
| would make them worse (installing any significant amount of
| road would take away from repairing the existing issues), and
| also dangerous.
| Gasp0de wrote:
| Inductive charging seems like a horrible solution as it must
| surely be extremely inefficient? Also, if dynamic charging
| refers to charging while in motion, why would that be a good
| solution? It seems way more complicated and inefficient than
| charging while stationary, and personally owned cars are
| stationary more than 90% of the time.
| DropPanda wrote:
| Surprisingly, transmission efficiency (grid to motor) does
| not appear to be lower with inductive methods than
| conductive. Numbers above 90% should be expected. A bit lower
| for the dynamic (in-motion) solutions, but not so much that
| it's a deal breaker. There seem to be much larger
| savings/costs elsewhere in the system that make transmission
| efficiency of less importance.
|
| Cars that are stationary most of the time are a pretty good
| reason to put charging infrastructure on the only land they
| actually share - the roads.
| Gasp0de wrote:
| This source
| (https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-412-charging-
| withou....) says efficiency is only 75-80% when charging
| inductively. Do you have any better sources for those 90%?
| DropPanda wrote:
| It's hard to get data from non-biased sources, given that
| there are no commercial installations yet.
|
| Some numbers are thrown around here (static inductive):
| https://insideevs.com/news/425972/momentum-dynamics-
| wireless...
|
| And here (dynamic inductive): https://www.greencarcongres
| s.com/2022/06/20220614-electreon....
|
| From what I have heard, the transmission efficiency of
| the dynamic inductive solution is quite sensitive to
| alignment and they still have some R&D left to do there.
| throwawayallday wrote:
| Witricity claims to have inductive charging efficiency
| that matches traditional plug-in level 2 charging:
|
| https://witricity.com/newsroom/blogs/what-is-efficiency-
| how-...
| Kirby64 wrote:
| Remember, when you charge your cell phone, you charge at
| ~15W (or less), so 80% efficiency is something like 3W of
| power loss. You can dissipate that pretty easily.
|
| For a car charging, you're charging closer to 7-11kW.
| Dissipating 2.2kW (20% of 11kW) as heat is basically
| impossible. The inductive charging they're using for cars
| (which, are basically mostly prototypes at this point)
| are different and use much more closely coupled coils...
| so they can get better efficiency. Whether it works in
| practice, I don't know, but that's what companies are
| claiming who come out with these solutions.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I worry that my phone's battery gets hotter while
| charging so it's getting double damage when it comes to
| lifespan. Maybe we should add a fan to inductive phone
| chargers...
|
| (Doesn't help that 99% of people run a case on their
| phones, and I doubt the manufacturer's inductive charging
| efficiency tests account for that)
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Turns out the sun is out during the day.
| sambeau wrote:
| And in cold climates there is a greater need for heating at
| night.
| adrianN wrote:
| So plugging in the car whenever it's parked and letting the grid
| decide when to charge it is the way to go?
| thehappypm wrote:
| I would love to have a charger that just has a knob on it.
| Charge fast on one side, charge cheap on the other.
| adrianN wrote:
| I would be okay with a "give me at least x range by tomorrow"
| button, so that the car can also feed back to the grid if I
| happen to have more in the tank than I need.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Works for thermostats shedding AC loads on hot days for
| consumers who have opted in.
| rr888 wrote:
| We really need a way for power hungry smart devices to charge by
| spot pricing. By default your car charges when rate is low eg
| windy nights and sunny lunch times and not a heatwave. Having
| Night and Day rates is too simplistic.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| This is simple.
|
| Musk just needs to throw 1% of his AI talent at optimizing
| charging times via realtime grid negotiating and nobody will need
| to even think about this. Cars will turn into one of our most
| valuable assets as they help _stabalize the grid_ by being both
| sinks when energy is plentiful and sources when it 's not.
|
| There are certain problems we all need to think about, but this
| is not one of them. It will effectively solve itself because all
| the incentives are aligned.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Musk does not control power utilities, nor what they charge,
| nor what power they have access to at a given time, nor the
| load of the rest of the grid outside of Telsa vehicles.
|
| > Cars will turn into one of our most valuable assets as they
| help stabalize the grid by being both sinks when energy is
| plentiful and sources when it's not.
|
| In fantasy land, sure. In reality there are a lot more players
| with a lot more variables and most of them don't give a shit
| about some grand unified solution through cars. Just because
| _in theory_ there is one great universal solution to one
| problem (demand for power) doesn 't mean everyone is going to
| work together to achieve it. We have more than enough
| agricultural land around the world to feed the entire planet
| every day, yet millions of people go hungry every day. Just
| because a solution is possible doesn't mean it happens.
|
| By the way: if we had fewer cars, we wouldn't have this huge
| demand for additional power. The simpler solution is to replace
| cars with public transit and micromobility. Then we would
| pollute less to make the cars, require fewer chips and rare
| earth metals, require less power generation and distribution,
| require fewer people to sink huge amounts of money into car
| ownership, free up cities for more pedestrian and bike traffic,
| provide easier access to jobs and education for poor rural
| areas, and have 30,000 fewer fatalies in the US every year.
|
| But instead let's just buy more cars and build more nuke plants
| to power them and expand the grid because _I want my own zoom-
| zoom machine!_
| alexb_ wrote:
| If there's excess demand at night, you increase the price at
| night. If there's excess supply in the morning/afternoon, you
| lower the price. It's not complicated, and the problem fixes
| itself. You don't need AI to simulate what groups of people
| making rational, independent decisions do themselves. That's
| how you get cars that won't charge because "AI says so",
| similar to how all of these dogshit smart thermostats can be
| completely shut off from heating if "AI says so".
| gpm wrote:
| The car needs to charge for 4 hours overnight (say, before
| 7am). It's currently 9pm and the price is currently 7c/kwh,
| should it charge or not?
|
| That question is obviously underspecified, you can only
| answer it by knowing whether or not the price will be below
| 7c/kwh for 4 of the remaining hours in the night. You answer
| the question with a predictive model of the price, and you
| build that predictive model with "AI" because that's how we
| build all our best predicitve models.
|
| AI doesn't get to say "you can't charge", you get to say "and
| I'll delegate the question of which 4 hours to charge during
| to the AI".
|
| > similar to how all of these dogshit smart thermostats can
| be completely shut off from heating if "AI says so".
|
| I assume you're referring to the instance where texas power
| companies remotely increased the temperature on peoples
| thermostats? That's not AI, or even remotely related to AI,
| that's humans controlling other peoples stuff without
| permission. That risk exists whether or not you use machine
| learning models to predict electricity prices.
|
| https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/texas/remote-
| thermos...
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| You don't get what I'm saying. I'm saying market dynamics
| (ie, setting the price lower when the grid needs less power)
| _plus_ the inevitable AI that will game it to everyones
| advantage will solve this problem automatically.
|
| There is no reason to worry about this. This is trivial AI.
| nightski wrote:
| So electric car owners need to just cover all the battery wear
| out of their own pockets? Wouldn't that make electric cars even
| more expensive since battery replacement will be needed more
| often?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The Tesla Model 3 SR ships with a battery expected to last
| ~750,000 km. If you had that vehicle, how much would you need
| to get paid to compensate for reducing that range by 1km? I'd
| accept 0.1 cents, how about you?
| kadoban wrote:
| That seems low, that'd be $750 to reduce it to 0? But yeah
| there should be a way to choose a fair price or just let
| the market decide.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Batteries are lasting far longer than anticipated.
|
| Anecdotally, I have fast DC charged my 2018 Model S (100kw
| pack) for the majority of the 100k miles I've put on the car,
| and only have 7% battery degradation. Others are seeing
| similar longevity well into hundreds of thousands of miles.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32758881
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/08/01/electric.
| ..
|
| https://cleantechnica.com/2022/03/29/tesla-founder-ex-cto-
| sa...
| nightski wrote:
| That doesn't really matter. If you own a resource, and I
| utilize it, are you going to let me do so without
| compensating you in some fashion? If so I'll take you up on
| that offer.
|
| I have no problems with encouraging people to charge at
| certain times. Using personal batteries for energy storage
| and draw without any compensation however seems to cross a
| line.
|
| Your argument seems to me like justifying petty theft
| because in the end it doesn't really affect the store
| owner.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I think your position comes from a lack of understanding
| of energy markets and pricing mechanisms. Powerwall
| owners are paid roughly $2/kwh when called upon to
| support the grid in California. Compensation is
| absolutely available for discharging and charging at
| specific times.
|
| If you'll charge me a fraction of the cost to charge off
| peak or when there are excess renewables on the grid, and
| you'll pay a premium to pull that power back if the car
| is parked and I can set a minimum state of charge to
| maintain, yeah, I'll take that deal any day. I'll come
| out ahead in almost all cases based on EV battery
| longevity.
| [deleted]
| nightski wrote:
| If I am being compensated a premium $/kwh for each kwh
| drawn then we have no problem. Otherwise I'll just not
| offer my battery by disconnecting it when not charging.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Of course! No one is forcing you to, these programs are
| voluntary.
| peter422 wrote:
| Presumably the cost savings from charging when rates are the
| cheapest and potential incentives for feeding into the grid
| when necessarily will make up for that.
| goethes_kind wrote:
| Yeah, except now each parking spot at work needs its own power
| outlet.
| function_seven wrote:
| That would be the best part. Cover all that parking with
| solar panels, use those panels to partially or completely
| offset the charging demands of the cars parked under them. An
| average parking space has enough room for (napkin math...)
| 6kW of solar output. That's more than enough to offset a
| level 2 charger while the driver of that car is in the
| office.
|
| And it leaves the car cooler at the end of the say.
|
| Costs a bit upfront, sure. But I think we'll continue to see
| these costs come down, and the incentive to build out parking
| lot solar arrays will increase as the grid has to adapt to
| the demands we're placing on it.
| drdec wrote:
| >Cover all that parking with solar panels
|
| This would help in many cases, but parking garages are a
| thing, even in my relatively small city. We would need a
| solution for them as well.
| kadoban wrote:
| Putting solar on the roof (adding a roof if necessary)
| should help a lot. You'd run into issues where it won't
| scale with garage height of course, but most garages
| aren't that tall anyway (at least in my area).
| chipsa wrote:
| Future is SAE J2954 (aka Witricity): you have a wireless
| charging pad under each parking spot. No screwing with power
| plugs, just park and go. This isn't ideal for fast charging,
| but for the slower charging you'd get from being somewhere
| for 6-8 hours, it's perfectly fine. You still need to run
| power to every parking spot, but now it's embedded in the
| ground, and you don't have to worry about someone just coming
| around with cable cutters and stealing it.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| Losing 30-70% of the power and adding a bunch of cost
| doesn't seem like the way forward. Cables exist for a
| reason. They are the best way to move charge.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| These can actually be cheaper than the alternative to
| install, and get greater use (assuming the standard gets
| widely implemented). Definately going to be a thing.
| Loading/waiting areas for taxis and delivery vehicles
| seem like an early adopter market.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| A wireless charger is cheaper than a power outlet?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Tesla calls this "Virtual Power Plant" and there's a talk by a
| couple of the software devs online somewhere.
|
| Found it: https://youtu.be/ggdYts4muu0
|
| Some other people have mentioned that you just need to vary the
| price, but the price is set by bids from providers. Code that
| can learn demand patterns and integrate weather forecasts will
| let Tesla bid lower and so earn more money in the market while
| also lowering energy costs for everyone.
| gpm wrote:
| Tesla already has a beta of this with their "powerpacks"
| (batteries for houses instead of cars):
| https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/powerwall/own/californi...
| sambeau wrote:
| This is not simple. The batteries in cars can be used to help
| load-balance but they cannot offer grid-scale storage.
|
| The following is back-of-napkin figures but there are close
| enough to make the point.
|
| Take a country the size of the UK. It currently uses 1600 TWh a
| year. Once fully-electric it should need around 1100 TWh a
| year, so 3 TWh a day.
|
| The UK, despite being a windy place, still has weeks without
| wind once or twice a year. We had a week without wind power in
| the middle of August this year and had to generate 60% of our
| power using gas. A windless week with a frost snap is something
| you often see in January and February. A cold week, with
| everyone using electric heating (when solar power does
| basically nothing) is why the UK might need TWh of stored
| energy to be secure without fossil fuels.
|
| 7 days at 3 TWh is 20 TWh.
|
| A big home Tesla Powerwall can store 14kWh and if run at full
| power it will be empty in 4 hrs. You'd need over a billion to
| store 20TWh.
|
| In the UK an average home currently uses around 10kW of
| electricity a day, but also has a car, a cooker and central
| heating, all using fossil fuels. Add those in and were looking
| at 40-50kWh: 20kWh for the heating, 10kWh for the cooking and
| another 10kWh for the cars.
|
| There are savings to be made of course, the electric versions
| of all of those items are way more efficient. There's
| insulation; there's heat pumps; there's electric cars.
|
| The average UK car sits idle for 23 hours of the day. An
| average-ish car is around 100kW. Even if that hour is slow and
| often stationary, it's not unreasonable to expect it to be
| another 10kWh. And the average UK home has more than one car.
|
| A mid-range electric car has a 50kWh battery, so has a bit more
| beef than a Tesla Powerwall battery. If they are being used for
| 1 hour a day they are probably going to need a top-up of
| around, say, 10kW. So let's say they have 40 kWh to spare.
|
| 20 TWh / 40 kWh = 500 million cars.
|
| There are only 33 million cars in the UK.
|
| You can, of course, quibble with these figures. There's
| subtleties everywhere here, but the orders of magnitude are
| plain. We need to be able to store renewable energy--
| desperately, and in enormous amounts. Car batteries will help--
| no doubt--but more in load-balancing and smoothing rather than
| long-term storage. We need something like grid-scale hydrogen
| storage to solve this.
|
| See here for 1100 TWh figure. This document has loads of other
| really interesting details too:
|
| https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/264421/download
| guywithahat wrote:
| This is a very California problem caused by very California
| policies
| kadoban wrote:
| It's not a problem, it's an opportunity to optimize energy use
| to match how it's now generated.
| guywithahat wrote:
| Shouldn't it be an opportunity to match energy generation to
| how it's consumed? No industry survives long by offering a
| worse product to consumers than what they had before
| kadoban wrote:
| If consumption has a good reason to be as it is maybe. The
| whole reason we have lower night rates and such was due to
| how it was generated in the past though. Why would we
| continue that if it no longer makes sense?
|
| It's something that should be looked at on the whole and
| tradeoffs considered.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Unfortunately for them it isn't a product they can control
| with the legislation they are choosing.
|
| There will be significant problems with CA power
| infrastructure in the near future.
| kadoban wrote:
| > No industry survives long by offering a worse product to
| consumers than what they had before
|
| That's ... optimistic, but not really true.
|
| It also doesn't seem to match what's happening here either.
| How is power generation when demand is highest a worse
| product?
| myko wrote:
| I assumed the comment meant EVs were worse than ICE
| vehicles (not an opinion I hold)
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| If utilities change their time-of-use time slots (when
| electricity is cheaper to consumers) and EV owners will quickly
| change their charging habits (and companies will be incentivized
| to provide them with on-premise charging stations available at
| those hours and with cheaper rates).
| cortesoft wrote:
| 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.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| 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.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| 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.
| ParksNet wrote:
| 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.
| kieranmaine wrote:
| 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...).
| landemva wrote:
| > 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.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| These are great options
| NickM wrote:
| 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.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| If we're seriously going there , then legislate mandatory
| carpool or motorcycles for single occupants.
|
| 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
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| If only there were a way to encourage upwards of 50% of
| trips to be done via methods that take a tiny fraction of
| the energy with no or negligible battery without invasive
| freedom limiting legislation just by spending roughly as
| much as EV manufacturers have received in subsidy on
| infrastructure.
|
| Oh well. Guess we'll have to give another billion to elon.
| NickM wrote:
| My point isn't that we should actually shrink EV batteries
| and use the excess for stationary storage, my point is that
| car batteries as a demand-leveling mechanism is not likely
| to be an optimal solution.
|
| That said, it's not something that's really happening right
| now anyway, so the "power your home with your car at night"
| idea seems unlikely to take off unless there _is_ a
| (possibly misguided) legislative push for it.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| Batteries are a bit too expensive to make sense as
| stationary storage outside of some specialty cases right
| now. But EVs have been economical for a while. So while
| we wait for battery prices to drop, two way EV charging
| absolutely make sense as a transition technology. Most of
| those EV batteries are sitting unused for large chunks of
| the day, and the entire capacity of the battery is often
| only needed by the driver a few times per year. Adding
| two way charging is not a prohibitive cost, and that
| installation can be reused if/when an onsite battery is
| added in the future. The rest of the program can be
| managed with software.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| They are making politically expedient decisions that move
| the state towards its clean energy commitments. Yes, there
| may be some hiccups down the road, but that is the price to
| pay for putting off the transition for so long. And as one
| of the faster movers in this space CA will almost
| undoubtedly move the market in a way that will make it
| cheaper and easier for everyone else. Look at the
| "California Solar Initiative" (CSI) for example. It
| incentivized solar installations across the state, well
| before small scale installations were economically viable.
| And across the lifetime of the program, solar prices came
| down and adoption grew.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Have you seen BART? The freeways in every major metro of
| CA?
|
| You are defending politics and not engaging the reality
| of failed infrastructure in the state.
|
| Now they are going to lead the country in developing a
| new paradigm in power infrastructure? The same that has
| PG&E blowing up neighborhoods because the company got so
| much tax incentive to continue building they failed to
| record where they placed capital assets and can't
| complete maintenance.
|
| California isn't putting anything off, they just can't
| get anything done.
|
| Giving tax incentives to get more people to buy e-cars
| won't fix that problem
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| 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.
| NickM wrote:
| The problem is, you need a full charge in the morning if
| you're leaving on a road trip, so then your car will not be
| powering your house the night before. This would likely
| lead to big spikes in demand the night before the start of
| holiday a weekend, for example.
| kevinpet wrote:
| I don't have an electric car, but I can't imagine this is
| a challenging problem at all. All you need is a target
| charge level. If you're going on a trip tomorrow, set it
| to 100%. If your normal commute is 20 minutes, no reason
| to charge past 75% or even 50%.
| kieranmaine wrote:
| 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).
| lelag wrote:
| 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...
| m463 wrote:
| 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.
|
| There is choice in that equation.
| floatrock wrote:
| 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
| greedo wrote:
| The logical conclusion is to try to get away from needing to
| drive to work at all.
| neon_electro wrote:
| Right? Then it becomes trivial to charge at home, during
| the day (if that really _does_ make an impact).
| r00fus wrote:
| Or simply not have a car (or reduce cars in the
| household). That'd make an even bigger difference in
| energy usage an GHG emissions.
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| EV's are only a solution as far as renewable energy can keep up
| with electricity demands. And that doesn't appear to be the case
| right now. Coupled with the mining of minerals, violent venting
| of batteries, and non-recyclable/non disposable nature of the
| batteries it's not obvious that EV's are more environmentally
| friendly.
| trgn wrote:
| They are more quiet and don't pollute the local environment.
| They are a small but meaningful improvement to the quality of
| city life.
| kitkat_new wrote:
| yes, no car is better than a car - still, people won't get rid
| of all cars
| _ph_ wrote:
| It is very easy to keep up expanding renewable energy with the
| ramp up of electric cars. In Germany (which is pretty far
| north), about 10 solar panels are enough to cover one cars
| electric needs.
|
| And it is not true, that batteries are non-recyclable.
| Currently, they can be recycled to about 95% and of course this
| is cheaper than to mine the minerals for a new battery and also
| saves a lot of energy. It is just that it will quite a few more
| years before we need much recycling capacity, as the bulk of
| the batteries will live at least 10 to 15 years.
| dymk wrote:
| EVs become carbon neutral after around 6 months of existing,
| taking into account emissions to manufacture them. Solar panels
| are between 6 months and 3 years. And batteries are highly
| recyclable, and only getting better.
|
| The US doubled its solar capacity in 2021, and adoption is only
| speeding up.
| ttGpN5Nde3pK wrote:
| Crazy concept: instead of banning cars, forcing electric cars,
| mandating specific efficiency, etc... we _could_ work towards a
| world less dependent on personally owned vehicles. And yet, huge
| companies will continue to just get a pass for forcing people to
| commute to jobs to sit on a computer all day.
| kitkat_new wrote:
| how about all of it?
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| False dichotomy
| Animats wrote:
| _" 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.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...
| wongarsu wrote:
| Skimming the article it seems the crux of the matter is that with
| home charging people charge either a) when they come home b) with
| a timer, at 9pm, or c) with a timer, at 12am (with b and c driven
| by fixed changes in electricity prices). Electricity demand for
| everything else is highest at about 7pm, so both a and b charge
| at times where there isn't a lot of unused grid capacity. And to
| make things worse, at all three times you don't get a lot of
| solar power.
|
| I wonder why the recommendation is to go to daytime charging,
| instead of timers staggered around 4am (when grid utilization is
| lowest). Sure, no solar, but potentially lots of unused wind, and
| lots of spare capacity on the power lines that already exist.
| syntaxing wrote:
| What's the alternative? Not like you can charge your EV at home
| when you're working when...you're at work
| bregma wrote:
| Work from home.
| kadoban wrote:
| Charge at work.
| ctrlmeta wrote:
| But how many work areas have a charging station available
| easily?
| kadoban wrote:
| Not as many as should. The state can probably incentivize
| creating some more, and job seekers can prioritize it as
| well. Not to mention workers just asking their employers to
| do it.
| floatrock wrote:
| Literally the point of the study
|
| > "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
| _ph_ wrote:
| The term "charging station" is hinting at a too big
| infrastructure. All you need is a power outlet per car. If
| the car parks for 8 to 9 hours, you don't need a huge
| amount of power to recharge it.
| toast0 wrote:
| You need more than just a power outlet per car, with
| regular 120vac, you pretty much need a breaker and
| circuit per car, because you shouldn't put two of those
| on a single circuit, since they'll usually pull up to the
| 15A rating of the plug, and code restricts you from using
| more than 20A breaker on a circuit with 15A plugs, so
| you'll pop the breaker if you've got two 15A loads and
| they don't communicate to share. It probably makes more
| sense to get a two or maybe four car charging station per
| breaker and circuit, and set it for the appropriate amps
| on the circuit, it can share that appropriately amongst
| the cars plugged in.
| greedo wrote:
| Our main campus has parking for roughly 450 cars. We just
| added EV charging; two entire parking slots. There's no way
| our company would outfit every spot with charging in any
| reasonable future. We already have roughly 35 EVs on the lot.
| pornel wrote:
| When a car is parked for 8 hours, even the slowest 3kW
| charger will charge 70-90 miles of range.
|
| Low-power AC "chargers" are dumb devices, basically just
| wire. They don't require active cooling, and all of the
| expensive hardware is in the car. They could be installed
| on every single parking spot.
| greedo wrote:
| Our lot isn't closed, and it's adjacent to a mall. So the
| only way we'd electrify each spot is with pay outlets
| (which is what the current 2 are). Otherwise we'd have
| people leeching off of the company.
| pornel wrote:
| You're overthinking this. The solution can be as trivial
| as putting a padlock on the power outlet. More
| practically, there are dispensers that read RFID cards,
| so employee badges can be used to grant access. It can be
| a raspberry-pi level tech, not a full-blown payment
| terminal.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| This will happen when/if TOU rates change, which will happen
| when/if solar gets built way out... There is a lot of inertia in
| the grid. No need to rush things and mess with incentives without
| good reason.
|
| Being receptive to and prepared for employers who want to offer
| EV charging is a good idea, but it is definitely early days. No
| need to panic and implement a bad solution.
| sempron64 wrote:
| The article predicts that even with the proposed changes, 4.2 GW
| of storage or other generation capacity will be necessary, as
| opposed to 5.2 GW without the changes. I'd advocate getting on
| the power supply or storage solution immediately rather than
| trying to change consumer habits by e.g. funding or legislating
| power station installations in workplaces (a nice convenience,
| but not one that will solve this problem).
|
| Tesla has already built a very large power storage station in
| Australia https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-
| battery-beg...
|
| Obviously the notion of building >5GW of generation capacity on
| fossil fuels or nuclear in under 10 years seems wild. So it's
| probably going to have to be solar + storage.
| mise_en_place wrote:
| I would love to charge in public while doing errands but every
| supercharger station is always occupied. I am forced to charge at
| home for this reason.
| alexb_ wrote:
| >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.
| mattwilsonn888 wrote:
| Came here to post a less eloquent version of this sentiment.
| tomohawk wrote:
| > The solution is simple
|
| Oh, so just solve the problem that people since Edison have
| been trying to solve.
|
| So simple!
| Grimburger wrote:
| > The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's
| more available
|
| 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.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| 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".
|
| 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.
| Marsymars wrote:
| The pricing model isn't appropriate to make people care.
|
| What they could do instead of time-of-use pricing is a
| sliding multiplier that multiplies your total bill based on
| the _ratio_ of on-peak to off-peak use. Make the multiplier
| worse based on what the total usage is.
| pas wrote:
| they can afford not to care. this doesn't mean it's not a
| good solution.
|
| it's no surprise the general population in one of the
| richest regions on Earth doesn't immediately change their
| consumption habits when a small fraction of their monthly
| bill gets variable
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The point is that off-peak isn't necessarily the best option
| anymore.
|
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| 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...
| wcoenen wrote:
| 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.
| GoOnThenDoTell wrote:
| time-of-use is also cognitive load that can cause anxiety
| landemva wrote:
| For the small amount I consume, tiny potential savings are
| not worth the mental hassles. I switched a residence to
| flat rate to avoid these mental games.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's probably worse for poor people, that already deal
| with the extra cognitive load on every other pricing...
|
| But it's also probably best for poor people, that will
| optimize their usage and get better deals out of it.
| landemva wrote:
| Poor people don't use/waste electricity in large volumes
| because they are poor and don't have money to waste.
|
| Rich people can waste enormous amounts of electricity and
| not be financially affected. It benefits rich people to
| schedule running the two clothes washers and two clothes
| driers at off-peak rates. Poor people don't have energy
| fat like this to cut.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| This is about moving usage around the clock, not cutting
| unnecessary usage.
|
| Yes, poor people have less usage to move around in
| absolute values, but they have more relatively to their
| income.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| My house uses around 3-4MW/mo. I hyper optimized when I
| had true spot pricing before Griddy energy was disbanded
| by the state. My bill was _extremely_ low compared to
| what I pay now.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Your average constant electrical load is 4.2-5.5 kW? That
| seems excessive, are you running crypto miners or a small
| manufacturing operation/welding shop out of your home or
| something?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I thought mine was high at about 1.6 MWh per month!
| distances wrote:
| It does sound high too if that's any consolation! My
| electricity usage is 1.3 MWh per _year_ , though heating
| is then a separate energy bill.
| bonzini wrote:
| What? My house used 4 MWh a _year_ in 2020, with two
| people working from home and two kids. Of these about
| half (IIRC) is self-produced solar. Stove and heating are
| gas and I do not have a tumble dryer, but does that
| justify a 10x difference??
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| It's 90-100F from 9AM to 9PM (and sometimes longer than
| that) with 100% humidity 3600sqft mutli story house. 2
| adults, 2 kids at home. 2 electric vehicles.
| vel0city wrote:
| My home uses over 2MWh/mo over the summer, I think our
| peak bill this year was ~3200kWh.
|
| Average highs these last few months has been around 100F
| or so and _very_ sunny, with at least one month >100F
| for the high every day. Its finally "cooling off" around
| here, with our highs being in the upper 90s most days.
| Cooling >2000sqft of space, even with some decent
| insulation and keeping the AC to 78F in the day, uses _a
| lot_ of energy. It uses ~30A @ 240V, so ~7.2kW. If it had
| to run 12 hours in a day, that 's 86.4kWh in just a
| single day. Doing that for a month straight, that's
| 2,592kWh.
|
| I was going to write up the math on how much my pool pump
| uses, but honestly it kind of turned into peanuts
| compared to the amount our AC usage is. The pump is
| 3/4HP. Running ~600W on the schedule of 8 hours a day +
| 12 hour once a week shock it really only worked out to
| 172.8kWh/mo of usage. Still though, that's 52% of your
| entire usage for just my pool.
|
| Last year we probably used ~3,000kWh charging the EV.
| That's on average 250kWh/mo.
| khuey wrote:
| Average US residential consumption is under 1MWh/mo so
| you are definitely not a typical customer.
| Retric wrote:
| What are are you using that much power for? I can't think
| of much that uses that much per that you can shift to
| time of day pricing, perhaps pottery kilns?
|
| Even 2MWh per month is enough to drive 2 EV's around
| 50,000 miles per year each. If you're very flexible with
| time of day rooftop solar could probably save you quite a
| bit.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Just having my 4x3090 constantly running deep learning
| experiments consumes 1MWh/month. And that's GPUs only.
| Retric wrote:
| Except _constantly running_ can't benefit from time of
| day pricing. Essentially it needs to be some 15kWh load
| that only needs to run for 6 hours per day.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If the price changes are large enough, you can just buy
| an extra board and have them at the best half of the
| time.
| Retric wrote:
| I think you would be better off buying a 2 Tesla power
| wall to load shift the demand vs 4x as much computer
| equipment that's quickly outdated.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Bitcoin miners?
| notatoad wrote:
| it is, but that's the part that technology can actually
| help us with. all the internet-connected smart home stuff
| that companies have been trying to sell us is a bit silly
| when electricity is sold at a flat rate, but if my car
| charger, my clothes dryer, or my or my dishwasher could sit
| idle until electricity prices drop into the cheap zone and
| then turn themselves on, that internet connection becomes
| useful.
|
| an attitude of "i don't want to deal with the stress of
| thinking about the electricity i use" is absolutely the
| sort of luxury that you should pay extra for, the people
| willing to schedule their power usage to reduce peak demand
| should be paying less than the people who aren't willing to
| do that.
| AceyMan wrote:
| this just makes me think of the situation that resulted
| in Global TCP Synchronization flapping problem; when
| everyone is operating on the same premise without some
| random delay or other way to 'shard' the load it seems
| like a Slashdot effect is bound to happen.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You are comparing a complex, out of band, auction-based
| organization system with a simple, no added overhead,
| parameter-guessing system. Those don't fail on the same
| ways.
| mirchiseth wrote:
| Saw the Slashdot effect reference after such a long time.
| Not sure what % of HNers were there in the heydays of /.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| More than you think? =;-{)} Wo remembers the "Anonymous
| FTP Sites List"?
| zbrozek wrote:
| Yeah it is. I hate having to have a process in my brain
| thinking about optimizing everything. So I bought solar
| panels and batteries. Now I no longer care. The grid can
| keep getting more expensive and less reliable without
| causing me grief.
| alexb_ wrote:
| >So I bought solar panels and batteries
|
| ...Mission accomplished?
| zbrozek wrote:
| Sortof? The chumps left behind have fewer people to help
| amortize fixed costs.
| sulam wrote:
| "Profit"
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Wrong according to what metric?
|
| 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"
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I'm not a hardcore free marketeer, but price signals work via
| 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.
| alexb_ wrote:
| 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".
| lm28469 wrote:
| They don't care until their whole neighbourhood goes dark
| at 6PM everyday
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| They still won't care _to change_. They will complain,
| yes, but change? No.
| jsight wrote:
| People already charge at night because that is currently
| when power is cheaper. They'd switch if they can and it
| becomes cheaper.
|
| We already see this to some extent, as people with free
| workplace charging often choose that over home charging
| when possible.
| dybber wrote:
| 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.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| 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).
| Terretta wrote:
| Weirdly, the latest iPhone + iOS pops a dialog box saying it
| will do this.
|
| // Weird given tiny amount of energy for your iPhone. But
| perhaps reasonable in aggregate.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Nice. I've also wanted my phone to tread water and not add
| charge while I'm driving.
|
| Dumb dumb to use a gasoline engine's generator to charge
| it, but I don't want it to go dead either.
| midasuni wrote:
| The iPhone 13 pro max has a battery about 17Wh.
|
| A typical car uses 330 Wh per mile.
|
| Charging your phone from flat will cost you about 90
| yards in range. At the most expensive electricity on the
| planet of about 70c per kWh it will cost you about 1c.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| That's probably what electricity costs in gasoline from a
| car's alternator. I'd like to keep that 1c tyvm.
| neuralRiot wrote:
| Your car probably wastes more power heating all the wires
| on it than charging your phone.
| zaptrem wrote:
| Can you give an example of this? I haven't seen it
| mentioned before.
| dybber wrote:
| I guess it's this
| https://9to5mac.com/2022/09/12/ios-16-clean-energy-
| charging-...
| spoonjim wrote:
| LOL. This is classic "virtue signaling." Your iPhone
| battery is not even a rounding error on your electricity
| consumption.
| dybber wrote:
| If all iPhones do this it will matter. Charging when
| energy is plentiful also means that electricity is more
| likely to come from renewables.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Steve Jobs famously once compared speeding up a boot
| process by 10 seconds to saving a dozen lives:
|
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.
| txt
| ars wrote:
| > If all iPhones do this it will matter.
|
| No it won't. An phone has around 5 watt hours. So: 5 watt
| hours / day * 150 million people * 365 days = 273GWh /
| year / 4,116 billion kilowatthours / year = 0.006651% of
| electrical usage.
|
| Yah, it's virtue signaling, not anything real. And keep
| in mind 0.006651% is _total_ electrical usage - this time
| shifting might save 10%, so actual savings are even less
| than that.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| If the resources used to develop the function result in a
| net improvement, it's not "virtue signaling." Further,
| did it occur to you that Apple doing this opens doors to
| research and development of the concept with an eye
| toward extending it? How many people enabled it, how
| effective was it, how many people turn it off and how
| soon, etc?
|
| Dismissing every minor improvement (or waste) is how we
| collectively end up with a wasteful society.
|
| It never ceases to amaze me how conservatives run around
| shouting about "leftists triggered by everything" and
| then proceed to get incensed against a small software
| change that improves the chances of variable demand being
| generated when green energy is plentiful.
|
| The same people who will shout and yell about how green
| energy doesn't work because "the sun doesn't shine at
| night and the wind doesn't always blow, GOTCHA!" or
| attack people doing things they don't believe in because
| of something that shows they're not ideologically
| perfect. The other day, I saw people shouting about how
| some climate change protesters used a _gas guzzling
| pickup truck_ to carry some barrels to a protest site.
| The audacity! What hypocrites!
|
| Seriously, how does it feel going through life devoting
| your time and energy to attacking others for improvements
| that aren't _enough_ of an improvement for you?
| spoonjim wrote:
| No. Do you celebrate programmers fixing 1 in a million
| cosmetic bugs when the software crashes on boot and
| deletes the user's disk?
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| More like product placement.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Helps further centralize/converge appliance control into
| the iPhone.
|
| Good move.
| JohnFen wrote:
| "virtue signaling" is doing something useless in order to
| make yourself look good to a particular group.
|
| Could it be that this isn't "virtue signaling", but
| rather people overestimating the impact of the action? In
| other words, an honest (if mistaken) attempt at doing a
| good thing rather than just wanting to be perceived as
| doing a good thing?
| spoonjim wrote:
| I think many virtue signalers are earnest and think that
| Tweeting #BLM or other useless actions are actually
| useful.
| JohnFen wrote:
| If someone is doing something because they think it makes
| a real difference, then it's not virtue signaling by
| definition.
| saidajigumi wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| to11mtm wrote:
| > _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.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| If only there were a clean energy source that we could
| harness.. Hey what about nuclear!?
| pfdietz wrote:
| More expensive than alternatives, sorry.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> 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.
| NickM wrote:
| 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.
| jsight wrote:
| 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".
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Considering that less than half of all cars in California are
| parked in a garage overnight, charging at home has a ceiling on
| it anyways.
| exabrial wrote:
| I know this is against the grain, but I do think clean hydrogen
| is the future fuel.
|
| I know hydrogen is less efficient than Battery-Electric, but it's
| not about efficiency, it's about convenience.
|
| One can transfer millions of joules at the petro pump in a few
| minutes without having to actually "handle" said joules.... but
| to transfer hundreds of joules with a battery-electric vehicle,
| one currently must actually "conduct" or directly "handle" all of
| the power that will eventually be used to propel the vehicle.
| Gasoline in a sense, "compresses" the energy for transfer...
|
| That being said, Battery-Electric is a "here and now" technology.
| Perfection is the enemy of progress, so I'll gladly take a 1000HP
| Battery Electric GMC Hummer thank you.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| 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.
| parkingrift wrote:
| >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
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| California's electricity has been mandated to switch to TOU
| since 2015: https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-
| topics/electrical-ene...
| parkingrift wrote:
| I couldn't find data more recent than 2017, but as of 2017
| fewer than 4% of utility customers were using time of use
| billing.
| frumper wrote:
| I live in California and have never had TOU at my
| residence. I do have TOU options that just haven't been
| very good choices for my family.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| 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.
| maxerickson wrote:
| That's one of those things that works great if you use a
| huge amount of power.
|
| The fixed rate cost of charging for my commute would
| probably be less than the connection fee for the 2nd meter.
| In that scenario it wouldn't pay off it all (and of course
| you wouldn't bother doing it).
| lbriner wrote:
| 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.
| maccard wrote:
| > 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.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Smart metering would make it easily enforceable but couldn't
| tie into the smart thermostat system to at least delay
| charging to off peak hours?
| drak0n1c wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| yeah I wonder how the car would respond to that at the outlet
| level.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| 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.
| dominotw wrote:
| I personally think Govt should ban home charging if they are
| going to ban non-EV vehicles.
|
| How is that rich people with homes charge at home while everyone
| else has to queue up and waste their time at charging stations.
|
| Doesn't seem fair at all. Its a extra time tax on the poor.
| alexb_ wrote:
| This is nonsensical. You are taking away extremely useful
| technologies from people who can afford a parking space next to
| a power outlet, all because it's not fair to people who don't
| have that.
| dominotw wrote:
| >This is nonsensical.
|
| Whats nonsensical is thinking people will vote to increase
| taxes on themselves to improve public infrastructure if it
| doesn't benefit them.
|
| we shouldn't create public policy expecting ppl to vote for
| it purely out of goodness of their hearts.
| cortesoft wrote:
| So your solution to some people having an easier time charging
| is to make it worse for everyone?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| There are people who suggest banning private schools so that
| the wealthy and powerful will be incentivized to improve
| public schooling. GP seems to apply the same logic to EV
| charging.
| dominotw wrote:
| Exactly!!!. Thats one of the example I had in mind.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Which is a bad idea, considering public school admissions
| are generally district based, so only only rich districts,
| the ones with already generally better schools, would
| (maybe) improve. This fixes nothing.
| dominotw wrote:
| Correct. This logic is used to ban charter schools in many
| areas of the country.
|
| No point rehashing the same logic again.
| frumper wrote:
| I'm not sure how you'd effectively enforce that. Charging
| happens at standard power levels.
| bfors wrote:
| Wouldn't that increase charging queue times for the poor?
| dominotw wrote:
| No because there would be a bigger push to develop public
| infrastructure. Charters vs public schools, same logic.
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