Re: Think of the Grid!
I'm going to do some maths on this, hold tight everyone, here we go! And if anyone else here is seething like I am at how so many contributors here are conflating power and energy as if they are the same thing, relax, you're in safe hands here.
UK government stats says that in 2022, roughly 250bn miles were driven by cars in the UK - just cars, not vans or lorries etc. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/road-traffic-estimates-in-great-britain-2022/road-traffic-estimates-in-great-britain-2022-headline-statistics
How many Watts does this translate to, if all those miles were driven by EVs and were all charged nice and slow overnight to keep the grid demand down? To put it another way, what would be the grid demand if we all moved to electric cars and could all charge slowly and gently, could the UK grid cope with this extreme minimum demand?
250bn miles in a year is about 685million miles per day. If we assume an EV efficiency of 4miles per kWh, that's 685,000,000/(4x1,000,000) = 171 GWh per day. If we all slowly charge over the same 10hr period, that's a grid capacity increase of about 17GW (maintained for 10 hours), just for electric cars. That's about 26% of the 62GW peak in 2002 quoted above and a bit more (but not much) than the quoted 16% drop in demand since then. So, rough calculation suggests that it's possible for the existing grid to meet EV demand.
This all changes of course if everyone insists on rapid charging like we do currently with petrol and diesel. And I haven't worked out how many daily kWh are needed per car, and therefore if the domestic 10hr overnight charge would be enough, on average.
I look at this challenge as needing a culture change, the way we have changed mobile phone charging. We mostly slow charge our phones overnight these days because they don't last all week anymore. Some power users/drivers will be driving long distances everyday and that's the use case for oil powered hybrids or range extenders, like how some people carry a power bank for their phone today.