Could the Ontario Grid support an all-electric fleet?

[daniel]

... I don't have my model 3 yet, but I do question your claim when you say people could fill up under an hour at 240V 40A. ...

Depends how far people drive. I charge at 240 v. 40 a. and I figure that I get about 30 miles of range for an hour's charging. Maybe the Model 3 will be more efficient due to improvements in the last decade, but certainly 40 miles for an hour's charging would be very optimistic at 9.6 kW.

But if people only average 30 miles a day, then an hour would do it. If people drive an average of 12,000 miles a year, that averages to slightly more than 30 miles a day. And by the time half the North American fleet is electric, we'll probably have smart charging where the utility determines when your car charges, and some number of people will have solar panels and charge directly from them during the day.

 

[wayner]

The average daily distance of 44km that I used came from the average annual distance divided by 365. And at 240V/40A you should be able to do that much charging in an hour. But it seems like the bottleneck may be the last mile of the distribution grid. And in some neighbourhoods that may be very different from the average. For example, those that live in the burbs are likely driving far more than 44km/day while those in the city will drive far less.

I used to drive 50km/day but I now take the train so I only drive about 6km/day to and from the GO station. So I only bother plugging in one or two days per week.

 

[Webeevdrivers]

The BC hydro website addresses this and estimates that if every vehicle in BC were to change to electric tomorrow the additional grid load would be 19 percent. BC has an over capacity of 30 percent and when site C comes online it will be substantially more.

 

[Doug_G]

The Model 3 will use slightly less power because it is smaller and lighter, not because of efficiency improvements. My Roadster takes much less power than my Model S, though it is running old tech.

30 kW a night is high; I average 12.

 

[wayner]

30 kW a night is high; I average 12.

In the OP I used an average of 44km per day for vehicles in Ontario. I assumed that it would require a little over 9kWh for that distance in my P85D. A Model 3 would be somewhat less for the reasons that you mention.

 

[mknox]

30 kW a night is high; I average 12.

I assume you meant kWh (energy) not kW (power). In the scenario we're talking about, it is really all about the power and not the energy. You run into trouble when you have large concurrent power demands on the distribution system.

 

[Gen3]

One thing to note, although maybe not applicable to Ontario, is the amount of electricity it takes to refine oil for gasoline. Estimates vary, but a few years ago Elon said a Tesla could drive 20 miles on the electricity it took to produce 1 gallon of gas. If we stopped refining oil because all cars were electric, there would be a lot more electricity available for the evs.

 

[Ulmo]

The claims that the grid could not support a 100% electrified fleet ignore the basic fact that the fleet will not switch to electric overnight. The percentage of the fleet that is electric will grow very slowly as EV manufacturers slowly increase their production capacity, electric cars slowly gain popularity, and gas cars are slowly taken out of service and replaced by electric. As this happens, the grid will be slowly upgraded to handle the increased demand. Both the carrying capacity of the power lines, and the generating capacity of the power plants will grow as needed. Increased demand will tend to push the cost of electricity up, but people installing PV panels on their roofs will tend to push cost down, as well as shunting some of the charging from off-peak by grid to daytime directly from the roof solar panels.

Also, the majority of car charging will be done at off-peak times (which you take into account, but the nay-sayers don't), or directly from home-installed solar panels as noted above, so that the pressure on the grid will be far less than the overall increase in energy usage.

In conclusion, the nay-sayers are trying to compare present-day grid capacity with a distant-future demand and a presumed lack of any planning.

I have heard that the grid in North America is in bad shape and needs a lot of upgrading, irrespective of any pressure on it from electric cars.

I agree with everything you said with exception of some items that would make it even easier:

• Solar panels near day time parking spots with charging pedestals can charge cars directly during high solar energy times. This substantially bypassses the grid. The EVSE manufacturers seem to be intentionally dragging their feet on solar energy tracking, just to exacerbate all stresses on current infrastructure on purpose, but once they get over their "innovation" (not even that innovative) blockage, daytime solar grid infrastructure will barely need to budge in parking lots with nearby solar.
• A lot of the grids are expandable using a substantial amount of the current infrastructure, and incremental upgrades paired with smart local generation and use can go a huge way.
• I can imagine some areas re-use areal high and medium voltage (MV) lines to raise the voltage levels, move the transformers to other circuits that don't need higher voltage but do need more transformers, and put new higher voltage transformers on old existing high voltage lines. They may need to replace many of the insulating stand offs, though. That at least saves the cost of all new transformers on some old lines, and of new lines everywhere. This coupled with smart use and increased local clean generation like you and I explained should be enough to fill in a huge number of spots.
• Some amount of plain old new capacity will be needed here and there. More jobs created, and the utilities already make bucketfuls of money every day, so they can afford it under the incremental way all of this is going to be done.

The only way it will ever become a failure is if entities intentionally cause failures by intentionally not doing their job right. That would only happen with an active decision to fail; this is simple stuff to understand for anybody with enough IQ to be in utility engineering management.

 

[Doug_G]

I assume you meant kWh (energy) not kW (power). In the scenario we're talking about, it is really all about the power and not the energy. You run into trouble when you have large concurrent power demands on the distribution system.

kWh. This is what happens when you type on a phone. Typo city.