Re:Global shockwaves from electric cars will be here sooner ...
by mercutio2 on Monday September 11, 2017 @04:34PM
(#15222040)
I was right with you until:
> an additional draw of 1kW per driver
> 100M additional electric cars ... 1,000GW
Looks like you're off by an order of magnitude; that should be:
1kw (continuous) * 100M drivers = 100GW (continuous)
for the typical commuting patterns. That's a lot of power of course, I agree it would increase cumulative consumer demand for electricity by about 25%.
But the key is that this is nearly perfectly dispatchable demand. It won't cause anything like the same disruption to the grid as non-dispatchable, or even weakly dispatchable demand like air conditioning (which can flex how much is consumed briefly, but will annoy users if it varies across too long a time span).
> an additional draw of 1kW per driver
> 100M additional electric cars ... 1,000GW
Looks like you're off by an order of magnitude; that should be:
1kw (continuous) * 100M drivers = 100GW (continuous)
for the typical commuting patterns. That's a lot of power of course, I agree it would increase cumulative consumer demand for electricity by about 25%.
But the key is that this is nearly perfectly dispatchable demand. It won't cause anything like the same disruption to the grid as non-dispatchable, or even weakly dispatchable demand like air conditioning (which can flex how much is consumed briefly, but will annoy users if it varies across too long a time span).