PALO ALTO, Ca. – Most EV owners currently charge their vehicles at night when they aren’t in use, taking advantage of cheaper, off-peak electricity rates when demand is low and fossil fuel (mostly natural gas) or nuclear power plants are providing much of the electricity.
But by 2035, with hotter nighttime temperatures requiring more air conditioning, a low-carbon grid powered predominantly by wind and solar, and tens of millions of EVs on the road, charging those vehicles at night — when the sun isn’t shining — could overburden the power grid.
The team of Stanford engineers behind the new report, published in the journal Nature Energy, found that mass EV adoption — where 30 percent -40 percent of vehicles or more are electric — coupled with owners charging those EVs in the evening or at night, could shift peak electricity demand on the Western Interconnection, the power grid covering the western U.S. and western Canada, from late afternoon to around 8-9 p.m. and raise it by up to 25 percent.
Meeting this higher demand could necessitate quickly firing up fossil fuel-based “peaker” plants or relying on 10 to 24 gigawatts of grid storage, mostly from batteries charged during the day from excess solar generation. The former option is incredibly polluting, while the latter requires a massive build-out, about 40 to 100 times the grid storage that was available in 2019. Both methods are extremely expensive.
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