Mike, because whatever you wrote about it's about the battery not the grid and using EVs as back up are all Elon's bullet points on his PowerPoint presentations. 

Having batteries is useless without the power to charge them up first. And infrastructure is much more than just high power quick chargers, it's also about the last mile delivery of electricity. That little transformer up on the pole that supply to the whole block? Yeah, that little thing too. Your wall charger? The high power breaker? That's infrastructure too. You are confusing infrastructure upgrade as only for Superchargers, it isn't. 

A dryer, at most runs for 2 hrs. That's only a 30A load max, and it doesn't even stay at 30A for the whole drying cycle. A EV chargers draws 40A if not more, and that's continuous for 8-10hrs. 

An average home draws about 2-3kW pre-EV, at times spikes to about 6-8kW. That's the number electric companies sized their local transformers for neighbourhoods. Your Tesla charges at 9.6kW, newer chargers can draw up to 19.2kW. See the mismatch? It doesn't take that many EVs 'charging at home' to exceed the local transformer. 

Some EV owners charges every night to top up, some others do it every few days when it's empty, so not all owners will be charging at once at the same time, that theoretical peak load is just that, theoretical. But can it happen? It's a non-zero possibility. Which also means older neighbourhoods will need transformer upgrades, which cost money, and power companies aren't known for investing. Newer developments will have accounted fro EVs and size up the transformers so the problem is less likely to happen. But majority of people aren't living in new neighbourhoods. 

This is just for 'low power' home charging. We haven't even gotten to 'mid-power' convenience fast chargers, like those 50kW mall chargers. Much less 200+kW 'fast chargers'. 

The utopia of EVs as load balancers for the electric grid is a nice pipe dream, but not going to happen. The cost up front is already the first road block. See no farther than home solar as a supplement to the grid, only a very minority of people are taking advantage of that. 

While electric girds are mostly connected geographically, the power that flow though them aren't connected. Here where I live, we have abundance of power, cheap clean hydro power. Enough to support the highest concentration of EVs in the world. Our power company are also on point with transformers so it would seems like we have unlimited capacity. But down the coast at California, they still have rolling blackouts, even the Governor has come out and asked people to not charge their EVs. how is an uncharged EV gonna load balance the grid? There just isn't enough power to even charge up the EV to start off with. Heck, even Oregon don't have power issue, and they are next to California. 

Same thing is happening in Europe also, there just isn't enough power to start off with, no amount of 'load balancing' will work. 

 

 

 


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