If Gas Cars Are Banned, Can The Grid Handle Electric Cars?

hello everyone and welcome in this video we're going to be answering the question can the grid handle electric cars we're going to kind of take this question to its extreme let's see if gas cars were to be banned not whether or not that's a good decision but if that were to happen could the power grid actually handle all of these cars being electric an immediate switch to electric cars and so i really think there's two parts of this question you need to look at big picture looking at power production and then smaller picture looking at residential consumption where you're actually charging all of these cars so let's start off with a little very simple math so in the united states there's about 230 million licensed drivers and those drivers drive on average about thirteen thousand five hundred miles per year so you can multiply those two together and get the total miles driven by people in the us each year just in their you know regular old everyday cars now the way we discuss efficiency for electric cars is kind of silly in the u.s but we give it mile per gallon equivalent mpge and so the worst electric cars are getting about 70 mile per gallon equivalent the best electric cars are getting about mile per gallon equivalent and so if you look at that spread if you look at the median it's over 100 mile per gallon equivalent so in this video we're going to use 100 as our you know just average point that we're looking at probably a bit conservative and certainly a number that could increase in the future but let's just say the average electric car gets a hundred mile per gallon electric now what does that mean well one gallon of gasoline is equivalent to 33.7 kilowatt hours so if we go back to our initial proposition we have our 230 million drivers they're driving 13 500 miles per year we divide that by their fuel economy which is 100 mpge and then we multiply that by the amount of energy used and that gives us the total amount of energy that would be used in the us if everyone was driving uh electric cars for all of their mileage now that number ends up being about 1 trillion kilowatt hours so total amount of energy that would be needed if everyone was using electric cars about a trillion kilowatt hours now that doesn't take into consideration transmission losses through power lines and it doesn't take into consideration uh charging losses when you're charging that battery at home so we're going to add another 25 on top of that so a total amount of energy required of 1.25 trillion kilowatt hours now how much energy do we actually produce in the united states well according to the eia about 4.1 trillion kilowatt hours so we would need in addition to that 4.1 trillion kilowatt hours another 1.25 trillion kilowatt hours so an increase of total energy production in the united states of about 30 percent uh would be required which is significant i don't think it's as mind-blowing of a number as some people might have thought um you know switching over just a 30 increase in energy required now let's give some perspective for that number so from 1960 to the year 2000 in 1960 the energy production in the us was under a trillion kilowatt hours per year in the year 2000 it was nearly 4 trillion kilowatt hours per year so in 40 years we increased the amount of energy we produced in the united states five times and so this is asking for a thirty percent increase uh you know not multiplying that number by five just thirty percent uh and it's over what duration so if you start looking at what are countries saying uh that are going all electric they're saying you know maybe 2050 some maybe 2040. um gm announced you know they want to go all electric by 2035. the whole point being if you look at what the us was capable of from the years 1960 to the year 2000 they were increasing energy production by about four percent per year so in order to get this 30 percent improvement if we were to use a similar scale looking at 1960-2000 it would only take us six and a half years in order to meet that demand to make the amount of energy additional energy required if everyone every single person were to start driving an av we'd have six and a half years uh based on previous rates but you know i don't think we're going to adopt anywhere near you know we're not going to be anywhere near 100 evs in the united states uh in six and a half years it's going to take much longer than that especially considering we're only adopting at like a two percent rate currently that meaning two out of every hundred cars sold in the us are electric so the adoption rates very slow the you know switch over to full electric is going to take a very long amount of time it's not going to be this instantaneous thing and so for a 30 increase in energy production that to me doesn't seem like a challenge does it mean companies have to make more power yes absolutely but are companies willing to make more money yes they are if you are a customer and you want more energy that is a product they are selling they will sell you what you want so you want more energy they'll sell it to you i don't think that is an issue now i will say that 30 percent increase does not take into consideration population growth or other reasons why you might need more energy at home so a production you know a power production company it might not be 30 that they need to increase by it could be more considering you know what the population growth is going to be if it's explosive population growth or if you have other demands for electricity that are not accounted for currently okay so now let's look at it from more of a local perspective so of course you have that power plant that's generating the electricity and then it sends that to a transformer which steps up the voltage and sends it across transmission lines so you can send that electricity very far distances efficiently so then you get to a local transformer you step down that voltage and you distribute it across local power lines and then before it comes to your house at that final poll you have one more transformer to step down the electricity before it gets to your house so now we're at your house and so the question is how much energy are we going to be adding to our household consumption by adding this electric car and so if you look at the average house in the united states according to the eia electricity consumption is about 900 kilowatt hours per month now if we go back to our example of driving 13 500 miles per year well then we can get an average monthly consumption of electricity purely from that electric car and so that gives us about 15.6 kilowatt hours per day or about 475 kilowatt hours per month so that means an increase in total consumption on a monthly standpoint of about 50 and that is a sizable increase so you know this is going to you know cause a strain on a local grid and so think about it like this if you think about it from an average standpoint all that's saying is you know you're using 1400 kilowatt hours per month that's the equivalent of using one outlet one 120 volt outlet constantly so can the electricity grid on average handle one outlet from every household constantly absolutely yes it can handle that you know it's just like running a vacuum cleaner constantly but that's the only thing you're doing all month long so of course the grid can handle that the challenge is that's not what happens so if everyone's driving an ev and they all get home at 5 30 and they all have fast chargers at home and they all plug in uh you know their car at 5 30 and everyone's got an 8 kilowatt charger and suddenly all of these houses in a neighborhood are all charging at that really high rate well then you're putting a huge demand on that local electrical infrastructure and so from a power standpoint it's not that big of a deal you know it's only two hours on average that you need to charge each day in order to accommodate the average driving distance per day for the average person if you think about it like from an ac standpoint it's like running an air conditioner for four and a half hours per day like that's definitely something that happens right there are plenty of houses that are going to run an air conditioning system for four and a half hours per day that's the amount of energy you're asking for um the challenge is you're asking for it all at once now speaking of air conditioning of course there was a time where air conditioning wasn't common in most households and then there was a time where air conditioning was common in most households and we didn't simply say you know what the grid can't handle it uh let's all just sweat in our homes like we rose to a certain challenge that challenge being hey we need more energy if everyone wants to use ac in their homes uh so you know it has been done and there are solutions infrastructure solutions to these challenges and it's not like we just have to give up and say ah we can't do it it's like we've done it before uh with you know bringing air conditioning into our homes so what is the solution well there's multiple parts to this so first of all yes you could just simply update the infrastructure to allow for that higher demand peak surge and power consumption now sure that's possible but it'd be a very expensive thing to do and it means that your electricity rates are all going to go up really high because the power company has to make all those expensive updates so there are smarter ways of solving this problem and the real key is just changing when everyone is charging so for example a lot of peak demand occurs when everyone's running their ac systems right but during the night when temperatures cool down not everyone's running their ac systems at full blast like they were during the day and so energy consumption at night goes down so utility companies can say hey if you charge your car at night we'll offer you a cheaper rate a lot of people will take advantage of that cheaper rate and thus more people will charge on off peak hours and as a result the peak demand doesn't change all that much and therefore your infrastructure demand doesn't change all that much another example let's say you live in a location that has a lot of solar power and so of course solar power is only effective during the day unless you have some way of storing that energy so a solar company could say hey we're going to give you a better rate if you can charge during the day when we have crazy power production and at night when they don't have that production then you know you're charged a different rate because something else is kicking on in order to compensate for that now does that mean everyone has to do it everyone has to charge during the day no you just need a certain percentage to take advantage of it so you can reduce your peak demand so it's all about just making sure that that peak demand remains as low as possible and you can do that by spreading out when people charge you could also have smart grids where you have certain areas of the grid where you allow for charging and then you move to another section of the grid and you allow for charging and it can work as long as you spread it out so that everyone can get that full charge now maybe you know people don't want to be in that system so you make it opt in and offer a lower rate so you say hello hey you can control you know my peak power limits and as a result you'll get you know a cheaper monthly electricity bill so you can have ways of getting a portion of the population it doesn't have to be everyone a portion of the population to opt in and by having that portion you know incentivized opt-in you reduce your peak and by reducing your peak you don't have to change the local infrastructure nearly as much because it can handle it it can handle those constant loads it's where you get those spikes uh like what you see in california where they have factories that aren't producing power factories that are down and then really high outdoor temperatures everyone's using their ac in that scenario you know there's gonna be brownouts and blackouts because they can't produce all of that power and send all of that power out immediately the peak demand is so high and so yes you know you do have to update that infrastructure or these flaws will be shown um but it is something that is predictable it's something that you can see okay here's the eevee adoption rate here's how many cars are coming in it's a problem that doesn't seem like hey this is the the reason why we can't switch over to evs that's not going to be the grid the grid can handle it it's a predictable problem with a predictable solution and there are clever ways of minimizing how much infrastructure you have to update now a really interesting example of this is norway and so norway has a very high ev adoption rate in fact in 2020 over 50 percent of new cars bought were electric so an insanely high adoption rate so you might wonder well what's going on with the grid and before you think okay in norway you know completely different circumstance yes sure it's a lower population five million uh population of norway versus you know 300 million in the united states but the problem is just scaled differently right like they still have to produce a certain amount of power for those five million residents and if they all start going ev they have to produce more for those residents and distribute it more for those residents so it's just a different scale of a problem it's the exact same problem though and so with norway if you look at their energy consumption numbers from 1990 they've only increased by 30 percent that's pretty wild to see so that's not that dramatic of an increase in electricity consumption yet you know they're they have this massive push towards evs and really the bulk of that increase in consumption comes from an increase in population because if you look at it on a per capita basis per person you can see that the energy consumption really hasn't changed throughout the years so they found other ways to be efficient um while adding on these other you know additional power draws so you know if you make your home ac unit more efficient but you're charging with an electric car then you know you may have offset that charging by the more efficient uh cooling system or heating system so norway is an example where you can look at today and say look they've adopted at an insanely fast rate like this is not the rate that the us is ever going to come close to adopting at uh and yet norway is doing it much faster and they are able to you know meet these challenges from an energy production and distribution standpoint it's also worth noting you know that electric cars can improve in efficiency in the future so you know we're not at their best i'm using an average of 100 mpg where we have examples today of 140 mpgs so electric cars can improve in their energy efficiency and of course you have that charging efficiency which you know is in the mid 80 so there are ways that we can improve you know that power consumption and those peak demands now there is one thing though i do want to make very clear about this video i'm not saying that i think you know it makes sense to tell everyone today as in right now hey you have to switch to an ev there's obvious challenges electric cars are expensive the cost to purchase them new is very high so you can't simply expect everyone to be able to do that and then secondly the charging infrastructure isn't there for everyone so if someone lives in an apartment and that apartment doesn't offer any way for them to charge their car it seems silly where one of the biggest advantages of an electric car is the fact that you can charge up at home and then you tell someone who can't do that hey you have to drive this thing so there are very real challenges with electric cars uh the purpose of this video i really want to dive into that you know power grid question and i think that's a bit of a silly excuse to use uh to not adopt evs uh saying that the grid can't handle it because it is predictable and there are predictable solutions in order to make that happen are there challenges with evs yes absolutely so if you'd like to watch other videos that i have surrounding electric cars i'll include some relevant ones in the video description thank you all so much for watching and if you have any questions or comments of course feel free to leave those below

Channel: Engineering Explained

Views: 834,979

Keywords: electric cars, power grid, ev environment, environment, green cars, the grid, ev grid, gas engines, gas cars, combustion engine, combustion vehicles, clean energy, sustainable, tesla, electric car charging, ev charging, are electric cars green, engineering explained

Id: 7dfyG6FXsUU

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021