One of the first things you notice after installing solar panels is that it makes more sense to charge your EV during the day, when the sun shines, instead of at night, even though rates are lower then.
The reason is simple, when your panels are generating at full capacity, filling your home or vehicle battery is almost always a better option than dumping that surplus into the grid.
But given the huge shift to EVS in the coming years, it will no longer make sense for electricity utilities to promote off-peak consumption. Electricity regulators in several markets have said that no matter how many EVs are sold, their generation infrastructures can perfectly meet demand even if the predictions came one decade in advance, but common sense tells us that the possibility of spreading the charging process of EVS throughout the day rather than concentrating it at night makes much more sense.
Why the change? Because we’re moving from a productive fabric fundamentally dependent on coal, gas or nuclear, always working and with surpluses at night due to lower demand, to one based on renewable energies and distributed infrastructures, which works the other way around: surpluses during the day, and no production at night.
A study by Stanford University reveals that, as the EV fleet grows, it is necessary to move from encouraging nighttime charging to trying to ensure that charging takes place during the day, in order to adapt to the needs of a redesigned productive fabric. As we have seen, part of this transition is occurring naturally: people who have solar panels on their homes (all newly built homes in a growing number of US states and elsewhere in the world) are making this transition logically and voluntarily. Those who cannot install their own solar panels will need help by creating extensive charging infrastructure in the workplace, so that employees can charge their vehicles during the day. We’re also going to need a lot more public charging points.
To maintain the stability of the grid, these chargers will have to be managed intelligently, through algorithms that balance the charging capacity of households without their own generation infrastructures, or offering those that do the option to integrate them into centrally managed systems in the form of distributed power plants. Smart EV charging is the way to balance a country’s electricity generation network, and also makes it possible to shift the approach to peak and off-peak hours to adapt them to peak production times.
As power plants evolve and we move from producing energy through hydrocarbons and nuclear to renewables due to their lower costs and greater sustainability, promoting nighttime consumption will disappear, and we will see new ways of balancing production and demand. In the final analysis, it is logic: if we change the way we produce and consume energy, the structure of the generation fabric will have to change as well.
This will mean us changing our habits and rethinking many activities. But it is not impossible; it is simply one consequence of the greatest energy transition in the history of mankind. And since humanity’s future depends on it, the sooner we understand and assimilate it, the better for everyone.
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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.
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