Thursday's Energy Absurdity: New Stanford Study Calls EVs' Entire Business Model Into Question
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BrightersideNews.com reports about a new study on the coming power grid impacts from expansion of electric vehicles conducted at Stanford University and published in the science journal Nature recently. Specifically, the study looks at the stress that the western United States’ electric grids will experience by 2035 from growing EV ownership.
The Problem:
The study finds that more than half of EV owners currently follow the sales literature from Tesla, GM, Ford and other EV makers by installing home chargers in their garage and recharging their vehicles overnight. This selling point has in fact been a central part of Tesla’s business model since the company’s founding, and has been adopted by pretty much every manufacturer that sells EVs in the United States. Thus, one might labor under the belief that this is the model society needs to plan for and implement, right?
Sure. But you would be wrong.
According to the Stanford researchers, this mass charging of EVs in the evening and overnight hours is perhaps the most inefficient model, and will become increasingly inefficient over time if we continue to load up our electric grids with intermittent generation like wind and solar.
Oh. Who could have seen that coming?
The problem is obvious: This standard EV business model envisions owners charging their EVs at the time of the day when the sun is setting and the winds are dying down. That in turn will mean that, as EV usage rapidly expands, power grid operators will have to find ways to permit the building of huge addition dispatchable thermal capacity and nuclear, or invest trillions is expensive back up battery installations, to handle the rising evening load from EV charging.
Oh. Who could have seen that coming?
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