re: California Asks Residents to Avoid Charging Electric Vehicles

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Do the calculation for the grid load of gas pumps and get back to me.

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You mean the gas pumps which are normally working at those times regardless? The gas pumps whose energy use is already being taken into account in the current grid-use?

Enough with the common-sense questions, let's dig into the numbers.

There are an estimated 10,449 "fuel" stations in California (there are just over 8,000 "gasoline" stations but I'm feeling generous so I will go with the larger number just to cover everything not EV). The average station has 8 pumps, giving us potentially 83,592 individual pumps in California.

A gasoline pump uses ~3,960 watts per hour. We'll extend that to the other fuels (natural gas, etc) as well and just say it covers all "fuel pumps" for the sake of argument.

That means fuel pumps in California are using 331,024,320 watts per hour. Not all pumps are being used at all times (especially at night) and the average visit time to any station ranges from 10 minutes (just getting gas) to 20 minutes (gas, snacks, bathroom break, lotto tickets, etc). We can reasonably cut this near the middle and say 8 minutes for the ease of math. As all pumps aren't constantly in use it's also reasonable to estimate ~50% usage throughout the day (averaging all pumps together).

So 12 hours per day means just under 4B watts per day (again, we'll round up for easy math). Multiply that times 365 days and you get 1.45T watts per year.

In 2020 California had ~425k electric vehicles registered in the state. The average overnight recharge for an electric vehicle takes 7,200 watts. So that's 425,000 vehicles using 7,200 watts each per night for a total of 3.06B watts per night or 1.117T watts per year.

That's ~1.117T watts per year for just the current number of EV's in California versus the ~1.45T watts used by gas stations over the same year. In other words, EV-charging for just the current number of EV's has added an extra drain on California's grid which is nearly equivalent to what fuel pumps use.

Notice that underlined/italicized verbiage: "just the current number of EV's". There are over 35.5 MILLION vehicles in California. Even just replacing 1/3 of those (ie: 11.8 million) with EVs would create a far worse drain on the California electric grid than they have ever seen.

What you failed in seeing in this is the scope of energy use. While each pump uses more power than it takes to recharge an EV, each pump can service hundreds (up to just over 1k under ideal circumstances) vehicles per day and those vehicles will not need refueling every day whereas each EV is a direct draw each night. As this energy demand increases per each new EV it will only increase the drain on the grid.

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Maybe instead of paying 5.5B on past rents, they should invest in a better power grid

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To meet their environmental BS ...California pawned off most of their production to Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. Thus they claim to be the most "green power" capable in the nation.

California is in serious trouble .... No snow, no melt, rivers running low. Their neighbors are having problems keeping up. This is just the start to a long sweltering summer for the mind numb idiots with their heads stuck up Newsom's arse.

Be prepared ....LA should be up in flames by August.

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In 2020 California had ~425k electric vehicles registered in the state. The average full recharge for an electric vehicle takes 7,200 watts. So that's 425,000 vehicles using 7,200 watts each per night for a total of 3.06B watts per night or 1.117T watts per year.

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I maybe misreading but are you assuming a "full recharge" meaning all 425k EVs are going from 0 charge to 100% every night to arrive at this number?

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My real point is that everything uses power. The infrastructure that supports ICE has a grid load. When I'm looking at these big project and we're going through technical diligence, they take everything into account and when you see it in aggregate, there's a whole lot going on. So vilifying EVs is misguided. And before someone jumps my arse, I still think forced roll outs are dumb as frick. However, there is a metric frick load of money going into the energy sector right now. I've already worked on $50B in projects this year. It might top $100B by the end of the year. Everyone knows we need to expand, not because of EVs, because its been neglected.

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I get it.

My point was that while an EV is doing a continuous charge and thus drawing from the grid during those times, a gasoline powered vehicle never does. The pumping aspect was an unexpected twist but an interesting one to dig a little into.

When you put forth the challenge I really thought the numbers would be much farther apart considering the number of EVs in California represents only .01197 of the total number of registered vehicles in the state. Scaling the watts needed to charge even 10% of their vehicular population means ~9.36T mostly extra watts per year (by that time it might have some slight impact on pump use, but that's going to be far too deep into the weeds for me to want to dig into :p ).

California annually uses around ~259T watts. That would mean just 10% of vehicles going EV equates to ~23% increase in total energy consumption for the state's grid. I thought it would be a decent bit of extra load when I read your post but I had no idea it would be that much. For a system with semi-regular rolling brownouts, even without the mandate (which we both agree is ridiculous) the increasing popularity of EVs out there is going to cause a very big problem for their grid sooner rather than later.

Thinking about that too. If they can't handle a heat wave, which is not a constant, how on earth will they handle all the electric cars if they become mandatory.