Re:California approves $768M for electric vehicles
by epistasis on Friday June 01, 2018 @04:40PM
(#17210001)
Even better than home chargers are workplace chargers, especially in California.
We're getting enough solar on the grid that every spring we choose not to generate massive amounts of otherwise free electricity during the day.
Rather than having stationary grid storage, dumping that the cars of people who are at work will provide a huge amount of grid flexibility.
I'm not a huge fan of parking requirements in code, but it's a simple addition to require chargers for X% of the spots. The second part of the challenge is getting payment structures in place.
Ideally utilities would be pushing forward with their own scheme so that charging would go directly to your usual utility bill. That way there's no middleman taking an extra 30% - 100% cut on the cost of the electricity, it reuses a convenient billing channel, and it also lets the utility start to do demand response to manage their oversupply of renewables.
But utilities are both too short-sighted and boneheaded to realize that this could be a major win for them. They ought to be paying more attention because increased efficiency is decreasing demand for prior electricity loads.
We're getting enough solar on the grid that every spring we choose not to generate massive amounts of otherwise free electricity during the day.
Rather than having stationary grid storage, dumping that the cars of people who are at work will provide a huge amount of grid flexibility.
I'm not a huge fan of parking requirements in code, but it's a simple addition to require chargers for X% of the spots. The second part of the challenge is getting payment structures in place.
Ideally utilities would be pushing forward with their own scheme so that charging would go directly to your usual utility bill. That way there's no middleman taking an extra 30% - 100% cut on the cost of the electricity, it reuses a convenient billing channel, and it also lets the utility start to do demand response to manage their oversupply of renewables.
But utilities are both too short-sighted and boneheaded to realize that this could be a major win for them. They ought to be paying more attention because increased efficiency is decreasing demand for prior electricity loads.