One of many favourite tropes of the anti-EV crowd is that changing all automobiles to EVs will “crash the grid.” These of us who repeatedly converse with execs at electrical utilities and charging infrastructure suppliers aren’t too nervous about this. Nonetheless, as they are saying, the plural of anecdote just isn’t information, so maybe a mathematical clarification would higher allay your fears {of electrical} apocalypse.

As Chris Harto lately wrote in Shopper Experiences, understanding the difficulty requires some stats and doing a little bit little bit of math. 

The Federal Freeway Administration (FHWA) estimates that Individuals drove 2.9 trillion miles in light-duty automobiles in 2019, and predicts that this quantity will improve by 17% by 2049. If these estimates are right, Individuals will drive round 3.4 trillion miles in 2049.

The effectivity of EVs (how a lot vitality they use to drive a given distance) varies extensively, however CR checked out 20 widespread EV fashions, and located that their common effectivity is 3.1 miles per kilowatt-hour. 

The DOE estimates that US utilities generated 4.2 trillion kilowatt-hours of electrical energy in 2022.

Primarily based on these figures, we discover that, if each passenger automobile within the US have been immediately transformed to a battery-electric automobile, we would want to generate an extra 950 billion kWh of electrical energy per 12 months—a 22% improve in whole electrical energy era.

In fact, even essentially the most ardent EV followers don’t anticipate all the nations 276 million automobiles to immediately flip into EVs. A current CR evaluation discovered that, even when EVs made up 100% of latest automobile gross sales by 2035, it might take till 2050 for nearly all automobiles on the street to be electrical. Assembly this elevated demand for electrical energy would require era to extend by about 1% per 12 months, properly under the 3.2% common annual progress charge for electrical energy era over the previous 70 years. 

All this isn’t to attenuate the challenges that lie forward— as these electrical consultants we talked about at the beginning of this text continuously remind us, the US electrical grid will should be massively upgraded and modernized to accommodate EVs and renewable vitality. However the bugaboo of grid capability as a deal-killer for automobile electrification is simply that—a grain of fact spun right into a deceptive meme by of us with an obstructionist agenda.

It’s additionally value mentioning that CR’s evaluation of the difficulty apparently didn’t take note of the potential of V2G, an rising know-how that guarantees to make EVs into an asset for the grid; nor the truth that gas-powered automobiles additionally require massive quantities of electrical energy (by one calculation, about half as a lot electrical energy per mile as a pure EV).

Shopper Experiences just isn’t the one group that has utilized details and figures to this difficulty. The US Drive Partnership concluded in 2019 that “based mostly on historic progress charges, ample vitality era and era capability is predicted to be out there to assist a rising EV fleet because it evolves over time, even with excessive EV market progress.”

The Union of Involved Scientists, Scientific American, and IEEE Spectrum reached comparable conclusions: tough, however can do. Even the Wall Road Journal, no drinker of electrical Kool-Assist, reported: “The consensus is that utilities can generate sufficient electrical energy. The issue goes to be getting it to folks’s houses and companies.”

In Could 2023, the Rocky Mountain Institute launched an in depth evaluation of the implications of professional quality truck electrification for the grid. Individuals want to appreciate that electrical vans “is not going to ‘break the grid’ or ‘destabilize the grid,’” the authors write. “Vans are only a new supply of load progress that deliver a couple of wrinkles that problem a few of our present means of working. Nonetheless, utilities can and can determine it out.”

Supply: Shopper Experiences