this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
2 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
59587 readers
3117 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Urban probably isn’t too bad, if it’s a proper city they already have power for the infrastructure of subways, lighting, and large buildings.
Where it’s going to be tough is putting these in the ‘burbs or the large areas of mostly vacant interstate. There’s just no infrastructure for them to build off of, and EV charging infrastructure is already one of the issues holding people back from more widely adopting them.
Yeah, just the random added load equivalent to 80-100 houses per car, any time between 5am and 9pm would be enough to send local suburban grids into a spin, especially in summer evenings when there's peak loading already underway. A lot of infrastructure would need to be beefed up to make it reliable.
We have an EV that charges on 110v current. It’s not fast, but plugged in the previous evening it will be ready to go by morning. Not a huge draw on the grid off household current. Obviously, just like you point out, more EV will increase demand…but charging off 110v overnight isn’t going to be as demanding as a “gas station” for EV that all want fast charge for people that maybe don’t have charging access otherwise.
I imagine there would have to be some sort of organized system to pick charging time slots via the local electricity provider in order to keep the grid stable. EV owners could certainly get an electrical timer or via the EV manufacturer app to set a charging time.
Yeah if you've got home charging it's not a real issue. We use 240v here in Aus so you can pull quite a bit out of domestic outlets before having to get serious and generally overnight charging to top up the day's commute would be fine.
So it wouldn't be a fast charger on every street, and you could always enforce limits by time of use pricing to put a dampener on peak loads.
I just wonder if utility planners might get caught with their pants down on this one. Like, could you say 5 years ago chargers might run to 800kW?
I’d say grid planners everywhere are under serious strain. The demands for air conditioning in public and private spaces are getting higher, the number of household electronics is climbing along with data centers constantly consuming ever more amounts of electricity…now we add EV charging to the mix.
Yeah, I’d say they haven’t been able to keep up.
Many rural areas honestly would not be too bad since power plants are usually out there. Those generally tend to have pretty decent power infrastructure. It might be different in other states though. Here in Washington dams and wind farms tend to be pretty far out of town.
lol, I am picturing buried thorium salt reactors at charging stations in the boonies.