Students at Stanford University have studied the problem of increasing the electrical load when increasing the number of electric vehicles. Work should help find an optimal strategy for the location and time of charging electric cars. It turns out that everything is wrong today. The main conclusion is that preferential night tariffs need to be eliminated in order to charge electric vehicles at home during night hours.
The work published in the journal was based on data collected for the state of California and other western states of the United States, but for other states it will also be largely consistent with the reality of the situation. Pleasure night tariffs on electricity are common practices that have traditionally encouraged domestic consumers to reduce the pressure on electricity networks during the day and evening when industrial and office activities are the main consumers of energy. Regular people have been allowed to load household appliances at a discount later in the evening and throughout the night. Under new conditions, everything must be different.
It is well known that renewable electricity and, above all, solar peak generation power delivers during the day and before the twilight. Thus, domestic consumers miss this period using soft and no longer green electricity from the network at night. In order to maintain the night load with the constant growth of the electric car fleet, huge storage batteries will have to be built. For example, if on the roads of the western part of the United States electric vehicles represent 50 per cent of the transport fleet, this will require reserve storage capacity of more than 5.4 GW. Otherwise, five new nuclear reactors of typical power will have to be built.
The elimination of night charging and the postponement of the procedure on a day-to-day basis at the workplace will reduce the capacity of the necessary buffer storage facilities to 4.2 GW. It is clear that no one is pursuing such a strategy today because the same electricity tariffs for legal entities are much higher than those for the public; the employer is not happy to place charging stations on its territory, nor is there a preferential daily tariff policy that takes into account new realities.
By the way, it's not only about the power supply, it's about getting to the point of consumption, which modern distribution networks are largely unprepared for, at least in terms of providing electricity to consumers in the U.S. to residential areas, and with the condition of keeping the electric vehicles overnight charged at home, the peak demand for electricity will rise by 25% by 2035.
" said one of the authors of the paper.