Electricity grids can easily handle electric vehicles – they just need to be properly managed

One of the most common concerns raised by EV haters is that there is no way the power grid can handle the fact that all cars become EVs. However, they didn’t get the math right. The networks in most developed countries will be fine as long as demand is properly managed. Here is how.

The biggest mistake made by the social media keyboard warriors is the very strange assumption that all cars could be charged at the same time. There are currently 32,697,408 cars in the UK, according to the UK Department of Transport. The UK’s national power grid had a capacity of 75.8 GW in 2020. If all cars in the UK were electric vehicles and charged at 7 kW (the typical home charging rate) at the same time, they would need 229 GW – three times the UK grid capacity. If they were all charging at 50 kW (a common public DC charge rate) they would need 1.6 TW – 21.5 times the UK grid capacity. That sounds impracticable, and that’s usually the mindset behind those who claim the web won’t handle EVs.

Charging electric vehicles will not threaten the power grids of developed countries.

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What they don’t know is that the likelihood that every single car will charge at once is negligible. Their arguments seem to assume that no one ever drives their car and keeps it charging. Looking at average values, the absurdity of this position becomes particularly clear. The distance traveled by every UK car each year has been slowly decreasing, averaging 7,400 miles in 2019, according to the UK Department of Transport. An electric vehicle averages between 2.5 and 4.5 miles per kWh, so let’s go in the middle and say 3.5 miles. In other words, each car uses an average of 2,114 kWh per year. Multiply that by the number of cars and you get 69.1 TWh. But the UK national electricity grid produced 323 TWh of electricity in 2019, which is only 21.4% of the energy produced for the year. Before arguing that this is still a problem, the UK grid produced 402 TWh in 2005, which is more than the 2019 figure, plus charging all of the UK’s EVs combined. The capacity is there.

Let’s do the same thing for the US. There were 286.9 million cars registered in America in 2020. According to the US Energy Information Administration, the US grid had 1,117.5 TW of electricity capacity and 27.7 TW of solar power in 2020, making a total of 1,145.2 TW. If all cars were electric cars charged with 7 kW, they would need 2,008.3 TW – almost double the network capacity. If they were charged with 50 kW, they would need 14,345 TW – 12.5 times the capacity.

In most developed countries, electric cars will not cause stormy weather for the power grids at all.

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However, in 2020 the US grid generated 4,007 TWh of electricity. Americans drive farther than Brits on average – 13,500 miles per year, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration. This means that if an American car were an electric vehicle, it would use 3,857 kWh per year, assuming the average efficiency values ​​above. If all US cars were electric cars, they would consume a total of 1,106.6 TWh, which is 27.6% of what the American electricity grid produced in 2020. US electricity usage hasn’t decreased as it has in the UK since 2005, but it’s clearly not impossible for all American cars to be EVs. The US network could handle that too.

After all, switching to electronics won’t happen overnight. Electric vehicle sales are growing rapidly, for example more plug-ins were sold in the UK in 2021 than in the entire previous decade (2010-19) combined. Battery electric vehicles account for 10% of the market in the UK and by September 2021 they already accounted for 77.5% of new cars sold in Norway. But these are new cars, so the vast majority of cars on the go is powered by fossil fuels. A step-by-step introduction is also essential, because an overnight conversion would require a massive ramp-up in the installation of charging points, especially devices for people who do not have the luxury of charging at home. This requires a significant investment, but could be serviced by many chargers on street lights that are said to cost as little as £ 1,000 ($ 1,300) to install, usually with no extra wiring.

The author’s electric car is happily charging from a lamp post while this article was being written.

James Morris

This would be a perfectly viable way of providing top-up for most people. For example, as I write this article, my own electric vehicle is hanging from a lamp post down the street from my house. It gets 5.5 kW for 24 pence (32 cents) per kWh via SimpleSocket, a service from Ubitricity (now owned by Shell) and installed by my local London councilor Barnet. I plugged in at 11 a.m. and by 7:30 p.m. my car (which started out at about 28%) will have a range of about 275 miles – enough for a few more weeks. It will have cost me about £ 12 – a lot less than a fossil fuel tank. It was a super simple process of scanning a QR code and entering a credit card, very similar to many parking systems these days. If most lampposts had one of these charging plugs, then having no off-street parking would be no problem for owning an electric vehicle.

Since most electric cars these days have a range of at least 200 miles and the average daily mileage in the UK is 20 miles (the annual number of 7,400 miles divided by 365 days) or 37 miles in the US, EVs don’t need charging more than once per day Week or even every week or two. On average, the networks will therefore be fine in most developed countries. It is important to balance the load, because if too many electric cars are charged at the same time, problems can arise. The aim is to create incentives for charging outside of peak times, for example at night, or to make charging more expensive during peak times. It may also be necessary to reduce the charging current prices locally and to set priorities if necessary – for example for rescue workers. But the problem lies in the logistics, not the impossibility.

There will be networks around the world that are at least not so well suited to an EV revolution. But to argue that the proliferation of electric vehicles will be an insurmountable disaster for electricity supplies in developed countries is downright wrong. As long as the supply is properly managed to use free capacity when it is as available as possible, the grids will do just fine.