Quote:
Originally Posted by TimMullen
Currently, using electricity overnight to charge the plug-in cars will just be using excess, unused capacity - the demand for electricity goes down significantly at night when businesses are shut down. There is plenty of extra for charging cars without building new power plants. Now, adding a few million plug-in electric car to the grid, and things may change down the road...
|
It is true that, at least in most service areas, electric demand is lower at night than during the day.
The words "...excess, unused capacity...", however, have little practical meaning when it comes to utility operations. Every load must be time-scheduled onto the regional grid, and matched to time-scheduled generation supply (often from an unregulated third party) and a transmission path.
Construction lead-time, economics, and regulation force utility, grid, and power plant owners and operators to constantly try to match planned future capacity to forecast loads. But forecasts are never perfect, so installed capacity might temporarily exceed, or fall short of, actual load. And, at any given time, the situation varies considerably across the grids that serve each region of the US.
So, in the short-term, adding car charging might more fully utilize the installed capacity in one or more regions, or it might increase shortages.
But, regardless, adding any significant electric car charging loads to future load forecasts will, in the long-term, force the addition of new power plants, or possibly refurbishments, and grid capacity, that would not have otherwise been built.
Electric cars may offer benefits, but probably not in relation to the electric grid.