The gen side won’t be an issue, although capacity factors will increase. And mass EV adoption is an existential threat to peaking units, not a benefit. They’ll ultimately run less and become economically unviable with the advent of AI/IoT based storage and virtual power plants. There’s a reason the turbine business has tanked. Energy storage, IoT, and renewables are going to be the death of peakers relatively soon.
You’re calling EV charger installs distribution infrastructure? It that sense every dwelling requires substantial distribution infrastructure. It’s true local electricians and contractors will be busy. Like if a majority of car owners got new dryers installed in their parking spot But the distribution infrastructure won’t need as big of buildout as you’re alluding unless there’s a fundamental change in how EVs are charged.
The grid has problems without EVs en mass, but EVs being mainstream doesn’t add to that anywhere close to linear.
“The further a person lives from a city, the less likely they’ll give up owning a car”.
First you’re assuming car ownership is synonymous with having a car. Car ownership will likely go down regardless of area. Second, the further someone lives from a city the less that demographic is in terms of population. Someone 100 miles from a city may be slow to get an EV, but that demographic is so small it’s irrelevant. The contention was car ownership would go down, not that it would be zero.
If EVs are the primary non-commercial transport, it will flatten the daily load curve, not significantly shift it up. At a certain level, the price of oil is prohibitive to a shift occurring. And because it’s not a shift, distribution and transmission are not as stressed. But many people and businesses will be buying some extra hardware for their parking spots, and the ibew will have an extra revenue stream
I'm not sure you are completely understanding me. A lot of the extra electricity demand will be soaked up by the reduction in gasoline refining. I can't find it now, I think it's a Ted talk by a Physics professor from Oxford or Caimbridge who makes the case that renewables are not going to cover all our needs. We will need something in addition. His conclusion was we would need nuclear power. He points out that all renewable sources generate fairly low amounts or power per acre (or whatever measure of space you want to use).
If people continue to resist nuclear power we will continue to burn natural gas to fill in the gap. Ultimately new renewable sources coming online will likely make up for the extra energy needs for EVs (which will be less than the critics think because of the offset from shutting down oil refineries). But in the short term, running peaking units more will have to be done to make up the gaps. The peaking units will need to run at different times than now to cover when EVs are charging.
As far as charging station installations, there will likely not need to be any major changes to the distribution network to support single family home installations, but larger installations like installing charging in every parking spot in an apartment complex will probably require changes upstream from the complex with larger transformers and possibly added capacity at the nearby substation.
Fast charging networks will require even more upstream infrastructure improvements. Something like a supercharger can change the energy needs of a location quite dramatically. The total electricity used is not going to increase all that much as the electricity footprint of the oil industry declines, but where it's used is going to change a lot. That will require changes to distribution networks.
I do expect we'll see some decrease in car ownership, but nowhere near the decrease predicted by the experts. A lot of experts have made long term predictions based on the behaviors of one generation: the Millennials. On average Millennials had less interest in driving and got drivers licenses much later than Boomers and GenX. Experts thought this was a long term trend, but it appears to be a quirk of youth in one generation.
Polls of GenZ teens find they are just as interested in learning to drive and getting their own car as Boomers and GenX were, though they are much more interested in electric cars than any previous generation. As they get older Millennials are learning to drive and buying cars as they move out of city cores and into suburbs to have families.
The bulk of American middle class people live in suburbs and before the pandemic commuted to work in a city. According to this article from just before lock down (Jan 2020). The average commute was a little more than 27 minutes.
This Is the Average Commute Time in Every U.S. State
In the aftermath of the pandemic we may see a little less commuting, but while getting around Portland was a breeze at 3 PM a year ago, it's now back to pre-pandemic traffic levels and both Oregon and Washington are still taking the pandemic seriously.
I have always hated commuting and the last 20 years have managed to arrange things so I can work from home. But before that it seemed like things were always conspiring to make me stuck in traffic somewhere. When I bought my first house in 1989, I deliberately looked in a radius of 20 minutes drive on surface streets to work. I could get to work via mostly residential streets which were rarely backed up.
Then the company moved me to a different location further away and I was stuck on Seattle's bizarre and poorly designed freeway system. After a couple of years of that I left and started doing contracting. All the gigs ended up being 20-30 miles from home and houses closer to where the work was were only available at nosebleed prices so I joined the throngs commuting on the freeways every day.
One of my gigs was with the King County bus system. I learned a lot about mass transit systems. King County suffers from planners with an antiquated vision of where people commute. They seem to think people live in the suburbs and commute to downtown Seattle every day and the entire system is built on that premise. But over half of commute trips are between Seattle suburbs. Microsoft and later other companies built large work places in the eastern suburbs and now there are people from all over the metro area going to those suburbs every day. There are no viable alternatives but to drive those routes yourself, or at best carpool.
If self driving cars without drivers become a reality (something I'm skeptical about), you will probably see more people opt for ride sharing instead of their own car, but people being people, I expect a lot of people are going to stick to their own cars. If individuals have self driving on their own car, they will appreciate that, but they are not going to be reluctant to go with ride sharing.
Psychologically people tend to be more forgiving of their own mess and intolerant of messes from others, especially if they don't know where it came from. Someone might be tolerant of a fast food wrapper in their own car they put there, but if they saw the same thing in a car they weren't familiar with, they would be creeped out. The pandemic has put that paranoia into overdrive. We're going to see a generation or two of heightened germ phobia because of the pandemic.
There probably will be fewer cars on the roads in the future, but it won't be the decrease the experts think. Most of the people who will embrace ride sharing in the future have already given up their cars.
