This is a pretend problem. When have EVs ever caused rolling brown outs?
Grid can’t handle the current of all the cars charging at once? Charge them slower. Get a battery bank for your home to smooth out the demand curve. Throw banks of supercaps at fast charging stations. Fix the fucking grid as you go. Use battery banks on the grid to even out demand at any level. Hell, you can use the cars themselves as battery banks and bring back rooftop solar tax breaks
It’s a fake problem, our grid and production do genuinely need work, but in practice EV adoption hasn’t been a limiting factor at all
Get a battery bank for your home to smooth out the demand curve.
I’d advise anyone considering buying a battery bank to look at this one simple metric:
Take the price of the battery bank, divide it by the total number of kWh that the battery bank will source to your electric devices over the battery bank’s lifetime. That should give you a figure of $ per kWh that you can compare with what you currently pay for electricity.
Anytime I have run that exercise, the battery bank is costing me near or more per kWh than I pay for electricity from the grid, even if I am charging the battery for free (which is never the case, even with solar there’s a cost of installation and maintenance.)
If you want the battery bank for grid independence, it’ll do that, but know there’s a cost.
If you live in some crazy demand variable tariff area where you pay $0.20 more per kWh during peak than you do in off hours, the battery may make financial sense for you there, particularly if you can sell power back to the grid at peak tariff rates during peak hours.
Most people: batteries are a waste of effort that don’t save you money, plus they have the added thrill of being a non-zero risk source of a signifianct fire.
It also serves the purpose of a generator, and with solar you might be able to cut your grid draw to basically zero
The fire risk is generally overstated, plus different battery tech, like sodium, are much less flammable. Weight and size are much less of an issue, so as adoption increases they’re going to get much cheaper and longer lasting as production ramps up
Not to mention it does meaningfully reduce load on the grid with increased adoption. Not everything needs to be financially min-maxed… If you’ve got the money, it’s a good thing to invest in
If you want the battery bank for grid independence, it’ll do that
We have a little battery (1200Wh) that will run the refrigerator overnight, so if a storm is on the way we set that in-line incase the power goes out, don’t worry about the freezer - we can get the gasoline generator cranked up in the morning if needed. They call it a generator, it’s as heavy as a generator, but only outputs the power that you get from about 8 ounces of gasoline before it’s needing a recharge.
Whatever reasoning you attribute it to, as a customer (typically of a monopoly utility), your reality is: electricity prices don’t change with the clock or the calendar, so storage in batteries isn’t as profitable as it is for people with variable rates.
This is a pretend problem. When have EVs ever caused rolling brown outs?
Grid can’t handle the current of all the cars charging at once? Charge them slower. Get a battery bank for your home to smooth out the demand curve. Throw banks of supercaps at fast charging stations. Fix the fucking grid as you go. Use battery banks on the grid to even out demand at any level. Hell, you can use the cars themselves as battery banks and bring back rooftop solar tax breaks
It’s a fake problem, our grid and production do genuinely need work, but in practice EV adoption hasn’t been a limiting factor at all
I’d advise anyone considering buying a battery bank to look at this one simple metric:
Take the price of the battery bank, divide it by the total number of kWh that the battery bank will source to your electric devices over the battery bank’s lifetime. That should give you a figure of $ per kWh that you can compare with what you currently pay for electricity.
Anytime I have run that exercise, the battery bank is costing me near or more per kWh than I pay for electricity from the grid, even if I am charging the battery for free (which is never the case, even with solar there’s a cost of installation and maintenance.)
If you want the battery bank for grid independence, it’ll do that, but know there’s a cost.
If you live in some crazy demand variable tariff area where you pay $0.20 more per kWh during peak than you do in off hours, the battery may make financial sense for you there, particularly if you can sell power back to the grid at peak tariff rates during peak hours.
Most people: batteries are a waste of effort that don’t save you money, plus they have the added thrill of being a non-zero risk source of a signifianct fire.
It also serves the purpose of a generator, and with solar you might be able to cut your grid draw to basically zero
The fire risk is generally overstated, plus different battery tech, like sodium, are much less flammable. Weight and size are much less of an issue, so as adoption increases they’re going to get much cheaper and longer lasting as production ramps up
Not to mention it does meaningfully reduce load on the grid with increased adoption. Not everything needs to be financially min-maxed… If you’ve got the money, it’s a good thing to invest in
We have a little battery (1200Wh) that will run the refrigerator overnight, so if a storm is on the way we set that in-line incase the power goes out, don’t worry about the freezer - we can get the gasoline generator cranked up in the morning if needed. They call it a generator, it’s as heavy as a generator, but only outputs the power that you get from about 8 ounces of gasoline before it’s needing a recharge.
Charge during non-peak hours. Demand on the grid fluctuates over the day, use it when it’s not in use.
A lot of the US has flat electricity tariff rates 24-7.
That has nothing to do with demand, it has to do with US obsession with privatization.
Even at 25 cents a Kw/hr, that’s $15 a fillup.
Whatever reasoning you attribute it to, as a customer (typically of a monopoly utility), your reality is: electricity prices don’t change with the clock or the calendar, so storage in batteries isn’t as profitable as it is for people with variable rates.