Quote Originally Posted by Mirek View Post
Ehm...

1) Hundreds of thousands of cars park in the streets and in parking lots in the cities. Your electricity at home is useful as a coat for a dead man in that case.
2) The existing and often very old power grid is not designed for the rise of power consumption if we speak about millions of new cars where thousands are concentrated in the same streets. The existing power grids in many European countries are pretty unstable already now (Germany for example).
3) Don't know how it is in other countries but if You have normal electrical plug 230V you can't go over 16A which means that You need something like 24 hours to charge Tesla. If you have 400V/16A 3-phase plug (I guess that nobody has that in city blocks of flats) you are still fucked with some cars which don't support 3-phase charger (BMW i3 for example), i.e. you are still limited to 16A and pretty much fucked with any at least moderately fast charging. If you have 400V/32A plug you are lucky but who has that at home?
4) I am not an electrician but our power grid here in CZ is working that way that the more or less constant power from the nuclear power plants, which is redundant in the night, is used to pump water into the massive hydro station which then during the day helps to overcome the peaks and further stabilize the grid. What if suddenly several million people start to plug their cars at night? Will it still work? I have doubts about that.
5) There is no charging network present on the highways. By simple math you need many times more charging capacity on the motorways than of the fuel stations due to the time needed for charging. Nothing like that exists.
These are challenges but not unsolvable.
1. This depends on location. In Estonia no new multi-appartment buildings get building permits without building also certain number of parking places. As there is usually street lighting nearby, bringing power outlets to parking places is minor additional investment.
2. Again, depends on location and situation. On one hand, increase of usage of more energy efficient light bulbs and appliances, renovation of houses to be more efficient etc helps to keep increase of power demand under control. Also, power lines are upgraded and renovated over time, they dont stay same.
3. Thats true but this can be partly solved by using short-term storage based on capacitor/battery combination, which slowly charges itself when not in used and rapidly discharges when in use.
4. In near future big part of this kind of balancing will be done by demand-response VPP's - virtual power plants. These pilots are successfully running in several countries and more resourses are plugged into these every day. To certain extent even plugged-in EVs can participate in such systems.
5. Trust the market. When there is demand, supply will follow shortly. At least in Estonia in addition to already existing state-owned network several private owned charging projects are already in operation or in construction. Also in several countries "charger-uber"-like solutions are live - everybody can own charger and connect them into bigger network, so small investors can enter into this market.