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Comment by loourr | Hacker News Reader

Don't worry utilities, electric demand is going to double once we switch to electric cars.

We can be a bit more precise than that. In the US, each 1% shift in Vehicle Miles Travelled will increase electricity demand by 0.25%. This is a BFD, but even a 100% conversion to EVs would only increase demand by 25%, not 100% ("double"). I haven't done calculations for other countries.

https://twitter.com/sampenrose/status/909532338647842818

There's a DoE paper from about 5-7 years ago that shows ~80% of light vehicles could move over to electrification, and if charged at night during off-peak, no additional generation capacity would be required.

1) The key word there is "capacity." The energy still needs to be generated.

2) Coordinating EV charging with grid dynamics is a hot topic, but getting 100M vehicles to charge largely at night is not on anyone's roadmap for the next decade.

It’s on Tesla’s roadmap. They already manage EV aggregate charging in parts of Scandinavia.

What has to be coordinated? People drive to work, park, drive home, plug in, and the car minimizes charging fees. I assume there are already APIs in place to get spot prices.

Revenue would still go up in that scenario though, no? And costs somewhat.

Correct.

This is one of the reasons I'm confused that the coal industry isn't pushing EVs as hard as possible. A huge surge in electricity demand from EVs is one of the few legitimate reasons I can think of to halt the trend of shutting down coal plants, at least in the short term (though coal's still screwed in the long-term as it should rightly be).

A lot of the coal plants that have shut down were not competitive on a cost basis (i.e. they were losing money because they were selling electricity for less than it cost them to make it). Churning out more expensive power would not make them competitive again. The coal industry really should have bought all the solar/wind companies 10 years ago to stay in business! Many nuclear plant have the same problem of high fixed costs.

Wouldn’t more EVs cause prices to rise?

More EVs certainly provides more electricity demand. Increasing demand could increase prices, but also would increase the incentive for building out more solar and wind (which have low fixed costs and now provide electricity at rates lower than coal or nuclear plants). I certainly could be wrong, but I think we would see a surge in solar/wind installations and not a big enough price increase to make coal plants competitive.

That's not that easy for few reasons

1. gas requires some energy to extract, refine, transport, sell . With electrical cars, demand for gas will go down, so anything that depends on gas being sold will also go down, which, in turn, will result in even less demand for the electricity.

2. It makes more and more sense to get solar panels on your roof, especially with electric car in the garage. More panels means electricity surplus.

3. electric cars have less parts and last longer, which means less manufacturing, less mining, less transportation and that will result in less demand for electricity.

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