It's all gonna end in disaster. Unless, of course, we double our infrastructure capacity, which probably won't happen because it costs a lot of money.
There are a lot of people out there promising that digital platforms and scheduling of EV charging and other loads is going to help us reduce peak grid load and thus save investment.
This is true. In theory.
But I see this as a path to terrible (minus the hyperbole: "significant") reliability issues, because now we'll be relying on some kind of co-ordinated, internet or other communications-based system to manage loads - and if it goes wrong, the entire grid crashes.
Why do I think this? EVs present a significant additional load to the grid. Typical home EV chargers are 32A or 7.36kW. That's the same rating as a typical oven/cooktop circuit. So think about the load of cooking with your oven on max, and all stovetop elements turned on - but now, instead of only for a few minutes while you make dinner, we're talking all night. Maybe not ALL night if you have a small EV like a 2011 Nissan Leaf with its 24kWh battery pack - but going to the opposite end of the scale, the 2023 Ford F150 Lightning starts at 98kWh (and it still gets terrible towing range apparently, look it up). So if you run that down to zero, that won't even charge in 12 hours at 7.36kW - more like 13.5 hours. And while more realistically you might only run it down to 50%, future EVs are going to need even bigger batteries to satisfy range requirements, so the scale of the problem will change over time and probably get worse than people anticipate. It's such a significant amount of energy that the "scheduling" idea is of limited help: putting a significant amount of power into an EV via a home charger is going to take hours and hours, so there might only be 2-3 charging "slots" per night. Without major infrastructure improvements, or widespread home solar and storage, the actual rate of EV charging might need to be limited and people may start ending up without a full charge in the morning.
Not to mention people who have more than one vehicle per household (i.e. most people): two 32A EV chargers, plus other loads, will stretch the capacity of your actual mains service coming in from the street. Three EVs? Forget it - 96A on household mains isn't going to go.
There's also the potential for the scheduling system to be hacked, and grid loads altered unexpectedly - that could cause major grid disruption pretty easily.
Oh and, natural disasters. What if there's a major event, major power outages - suddenly transport is compromised in a way we'd never have anticipated before. Think of the cars lining the sides of the motorway, having all run out of charge on their morning commute, because a grid issue prevented charging the night before.
And I'm not sure how people are going to feel about having their EV charging 'managed', or rather, 'controlled' - by a third party. Some people are just gonna freak out and try to bypass the system. Would manual bypassing be possible? No-one's answered that. If no, that's going to be a problem for some people. If yes, think of the way we already see panic-buying of stupid stuff like toilet paper in supermarkets - now imagine everyone "panic-charging" and how quickly that could end in a complete disaster for the whole country.
I want to put this on record, that here in 2022, before everything hits the fan with climate change and EVs and the grid - I'm saying that it's all gonna end in disaster. And I'm saying that as an engineer. I believe that if we try to defer real infrastructure upgrades - that's significant additional generation plus transmission and distribution upgrades - by using "smart" systems, we will regret it. Or maybe we'll get by - but the cost will be reliability, and in a world where people depend more and more on electricity for pretty much their entire lives, that won't go down well.
Disclaimer: I'm involved in a project that aims to help with network capacity upgrades (what I'm arguing for here) in a new way.
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