re: German auto club finds that EV charging wastes 13% of electricity used on average

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Ok, well, we're talking about during the day.

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Why? The overwhelming majority of charging happens at night.

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The number of people charging at the 50kW rate will be extremely high.

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Can you define "extremely high"? I strongly doubt that more than 20% of charging will ever be at that rate.

But just for argument's sake, let's say that all 32 million of those vehicles charge at that rate for all their charging, and during the day to boot (and let's call daytime only 8 hours instead of 12, and also only count weekdays). Charging will only be sustained at that rate for maybe an hour at a time, but let's go with 2 hours. In the UK, that will only happen about once per week per vehicle. On average each vehicle will be charging for 2 out of the 40 weekday daytime hours, or 5% of the time. That works out to an average charge rate of 80GW, right at the UK's capacity.

That is an absolute worst case, never-gonna-happen event. Far less than half of all charging will happen at that rate. And less than half of all charging will happen during those 8 working hours 5 days a week. And they won't charge at that rate for 2 hours at a time.

You have to intentionally do absolutely everything wrong to arrive at the conclusion you want.

I’d like to have an electric vehicle as a second vehicle to run errands and such,not for road trips.Would eleminate oil changes.

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Why? The overwhelming majority of charging happens at night.

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Yeah, currently. This is about looking ahead to a majority or all EV fleet.

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Can you define "extremely high"? I strongly doubt that more than 20% of charging will ever be at that rate.

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Even at 20% charging at 50kw, that's 4x the grid capacity (using the UK numbers)

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That's because filling up a tank of gas takes a couple minutes whereas it takes 45 mins to several hours for an EV.

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So what you're glossing over is that whether it takes 45 minutes or 12 hours, the same amount of electricity will be consumed. It's either a big load for a short time, or a small load for a longer time.

It works out that for first world nations a 100% EV fleet would cause about a 25% increase in total electricity consumption. You can make up any scenario you like where nearly all of that increase is piled into the same small frame of time, but it's just not going to happen. It's a bogus argument, and you should move on to something else. Like how everyone takes a 500 mile trip every month and they're all stupid enough to buy an EV for such purposes right now.

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So what you're glossing over is that whether it takes 45 minutes or 12 hours, the same amount of electricity will be consumed. It's either a big load for a short time, or a small load for a longer time.

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The issue is handling the load at peak daytime usage.

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So...you can choose losing 13% charging in an EV, or 40-60% in heat and friction loss with an ICE.

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Assuming a natural gas turbine for electricity generation, you still have to compress the gas before you burn and expand in the turbine. Also voltage losses in transmission need to be accounted. You lose roughly 50% of the electrical energy during generation and transmission.

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Can you walk us through the logic for how this would result in a higher % of daytime charging?

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If someone is charging their vehicle during the day, it's almost certain that they'll be using the 50kw option. That's the heaviest load at the highest general power usage points of the day.

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Again, if all of those cars charge at the same fricking time. How and why would that happen? There are 168 hours in the week, how the hell is everyone going to choose the same exact hour to rapid charge? This is complete nonsense and it's mindblowing that you're still trying to hammer on this.

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So you're telling me that it's absolutely ludicrous that, at any one point during the day, of a fleet of say 100 million cars, even 10 million of those would be charging?

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The issue is handling the load at peak daytime usage.

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Again, you have to work really hard and overlook a lot of things in order to contrive a scenario where this will be a common problem.

Why will not only daytime charging, but daytime rapid charging, become a common thing? Especially given how easy this is to manage via time of use billing and variable charging fees.

Whatever the increased load is expected to be, why do you think power companies can't manage it? Especially given we've increased capacity in the past at a rate faster than will be required to convert to EVs.

Since you're so concerned about the daytime peak, which AC contributes to enormously, why do you think solar panel use won't continue to scale up and offset this consumption at exactly the right time (when the sun is shining and it's hot)?

And why oh why do all your calculations involve everyone charging at a high rate at the same time? Is everyone going to start driving half a million miles per year?

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Why will not only daytime charging, but daytime rapid charging, become a common thing? Especially given how easy this is to manage via time of use billing and variable charging fees.

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It seems like common sense that people would be using rapid charging almost exclusively during the day. Most driving is done during the day and if my battery is low I want the quickest possible option. I don't see how that's some sort of egregiously insane concept.

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Whatever the increased load is expected to be, why do you think power companies can't manage it? Especially given we've increased capacity in the past at a rate faster than will be required to convert to EVs.

Since you're so concerned about the daytime peak, which AC contributes to enormously, why do you think solar panel use won't continue to scale up and offset this consumption at exactly the right time (when the sun is shining and it's hot)?

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The whole point is that you're saying that the current grid can handle everything and now you're talking about adapting to increase power output.

And, like I said, I'm calculating everyone charging at a high rate at the same time because that's the most likely choice during the day and during peak power usage.

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Far from certain. Charging at the workplace will be very common. It's even likely that workplace chargers will double as standby power that employees can opt into.

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Ok, so instead of 10% charging at the higher rate at any one time, we may have 5%, but we'll also have maybe 30% charging at the lower rate? Just the 5% number alone exceeds the total available power in the UK example.