First Electric Cars Have Power Industry Worried

Hugh Pickens writes "Jonathan Fahey writes for AP that as the first mass-market electric cars go on sale next month, the power industry faces a huge growth opportunity, with SoCal Edison expecting to be charging 100,000 cars by 2015 and California setting a goal of 1 million electric vehicles by 2020. But utility executives are worried that the difficulty of keeping the lights on for the first crop of buyers — and their neighbors — could slow the growth of this industry because it's inevitable that electric utilities will suffer some difficulties early on. 'We are all going to be a lot smarter two years from now,' says Mark Perry, director of product planning for Nissan North America. When plugged into a home charging station the first Leafs and Volts will draw 3,300 Watts and take about 8 hours to deliver a full charge, but both carmakers may soon boost that to 6,600 Watts. The Tesla Roadster, an electric sports car with a huge battery, can draw 16,800 Watts. That means that adding an electric vehicle or two to a neighborhood can be like adding another house, and it can stress the equipment that services those houses. The problem is that transformers that distribute power from the electrical grid to homes are often designed to handle less than about 12,000 watts so the extra stress on a transformer from one or two electric vehicles could cause it to overheat and fail, knocking out power to the block."

Comments

These numbers don't make sense.

[Leebert]

The problem is that transformers that distribute power from the electrical grid to homes are often designed to handle less than about 12,000 watts

often designed to handle 12,000 watts? Hogwash. That's 50 amp service (in North America, where homes are almost always supplied at 240VAC). Most new homes in North America receives at minimum 200 amp service. Even my rural 1956 rancher has 70 amp service.

And this is a single home. Most transformers supply several houses. If there are any transformers rated at 12KW, they are very few and far between, and probably service locations that aren't likely to have electric cars anyhow.

Re:Good!

[ptomblin]

You mean Enron?

Re:Worried?

[udippel]

Spot on here!

The trouble is the distribution. I don't know about the voltages used in the states, but often the electricity is transformed down to 33/11kV, because these voltages are rather simply run underground. So in the average distribution network, you hit a number of (down-)transformers and a number of (underground) cabling until the 3x400V reach the client. It would cost billions to rip it out and put back another one that supports charging of electric cars.

The trouble is also in the distribution with respect to daytime. Some might think, that they already use a high energy load, maybe even 3, 6 or 12 kW; and 'what is the difference?'. The difference is that until now, high loads are somewhat randomly distributed over time, and usually run for short time-spans. So a 12 kW load runs from 8-9 here, and another one maybe 2-4 there.
But think about it: In future when the working population comes home in the evenings, they will want to recharge their cars for the trip to work next morning. Unfortunately, evenings are already the times of highest load in residential areas: lighting, heating, air-co, ovens, you name it.

And it would be very wrong to blame the situation on some '50 year old hardware' or so. It could not be more wrong. The distribution networks were simply not designed with recharging of electric cars at homes in mind; and even less with additional loads correlating with already peak hours.

Re:Good!

[wytcld]

Funny how you leave out the biggest piece of this: Enron. The deregulation allowed Enron to manipulate power supplies and prices. So your "scenario in a nut-shell" is using a nut that selectively includes in its narrative only the government as a player, despite that private industry was as much or more at the center of the story as government practices, that the private industry was in large extent crooked, and that deregulation on the government's side was essential to the run-away crookedness on the private industries' side which resulted in, for example, brownouts when totally operational power plants were turned off in order to raise the spot-market prices from the electrical generators which were still on line - putting billions into Enron's pockets, as well as into the pockets of several of it peers.