Electric Vehicles, Part 2

I asked on Instagram about what questions you have on electric vehicles. Here are my answers

“How do you do a road trip?”

I’m going to answer this in four parts:

Time to charge: EVs take longer to charge than combustion engine cars take to fill up, even fast-chargers take about 30 minutes minimum. Ranges on EVs are really improving, so if you’re not going super far it’s probably a non-issue, but if you are travelling cross-country it just means doing a little bit of planning, like taking a lunch break while the car charges or stopping for the night. The potential complication with this involves queuing, especially if EV adoption outpaces charging stations getting built. Right now charging stations are outpacing EV adoption, but it would suck to be in the middle of a pass-through state, ready to take your lunch break, and the two chargers available are already in-use.

Types of chargers: There are different types of chargers: type-1 (slow) this is basically a typical outlet, type-2 (still slow) this is the type that your laundry machine uses. Home chargers are type 1 or type 2 (Hardman 2018 [1]). There are also fast-chargers that use DC current; but, there are different types of plugs for fast-chargers, basically Tesla and everybody else. There are converters between the fast-charger plugs, but I would love to see the federal government officially require one universal fast-charger plug. Regardless, charger options are expanding rapidly enough that range-anxiety is a non-issue (in my opinion).

Table Source: Hardman 2018 [1], Types of chargers for electric vehicles.

Range-anxiety: Tesla has a great network of public fast chargers across the country (Tesla [2]). Below in pink is what the map looks like for non-tesla public chargers (Bloomberg 2020 [3]). You can still go almost anywhere without issue.

Image Source: Tesla [2], Map of Tesla DC Fast Chargers

Image Source: Bloomberg 2020 [3] non-Tesla public fast chargers available along main highways.

The bigger issue: local access. Range anxiety is fairly unfounded with the pace of highway charging station expansion. If you live in an apartment and park your car on the street, public charging access can be a problem. In fact Traut et al. 2013 found that only 22% of US vehicles have a parking spot close enough to an outlet to charge [4]. From the IEA 2020 [5] we know that the US has a lot of private chargers, but we’re lacking in terms of residential public chargers for sure (we’re also lacking in highway fast chargers compared to China).

Image Source: IEA 2020 [5] Global EV outlook

“I’d love to learn more about vehicle-to-grid (V2G)?”

Vehicle to Grid! So electric vehicles take electricity and store it in a battery so that they can drive, but there’s no real reason that the energy stored in the battery can’t be turned back into electricity! We all do this on a micro-scale when we charge our phones in the car. If EVs are used like batteries rather than like cars than they can be thought of as transmission lines through time and space. You can imagine a scenario where people would charge in a place or time when electricity is cheap and then wait or drive elsewhere and off-load where and when it’s expensive to make money! This could also help flatten the demand curve that we talked about above. So, is it worth it? Is it realistic??

Peterson 2010 found that for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, even if drivers had perfect information, meaning they knew exactly where and when electricity is cheap or expensive, they’d only make $142-249 dollars through the whole year [6]. $200 bucks over a year does not seem worth the effort. If I had perfect information about when prices of things are low and high, I can think of better ways to make my fortune than vehicle-to-grid. However! This is all assuming normal circumstances. Even if vehicle-to-grid is never ‘worth it’ economically, it could have value. For example, if your power goes out and you NEED to have the lights on in your home. In the winter storm that devastated Texas in February 2021, having people drive full EV batteries into some of the communities and offload electricity to areas that needed it could have been really valuable. Though this assumes they would be able to off-load some electricity and still have enough to drive back to where the power is not down.

Ask me an electric vehicle question!

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References:

[1] Hardman, S., Jenn, A., Tal, G., Axsen, J., Beard, G., Daina, N., Figenbaum, E., Jakobsson, N., Jochem, P., Kinnear, N., Pötz, P., Pontes, J., Refa, N., Sprei, F., Turrentine, T., Witkamp, B., 2018. A review of consumer preferences of and interactions with electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Transp. Res. Part D Transp. Environ. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2018.04.002

[2] Tesla Super Chargers, https://www.tesla.com/superchargers

[3] Bloomberg, “Electric Car Chargers Will Determine America’s Green Future” 2020. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-06-01/electric-car-chargers-will-determine-america-s-green-future

[4] Traut, E.J., Cherng, T.W.C., Hendrickson, C., Michalek, J.J., 2013. US residential charging potential for electric vehicles. Transp. Res. Part D Transp. Environ. 25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2013.10.001

[5] International Energy Agency, 2020. “Global EV Outlook 2020.” https://doi.org/10.1787/d394399e-en

[6]  Peterson, S.B., Whitacre, J.F., Apt, J., 2010. “The economics of using plug-in hybrid electric vehicle battery packs for grid storage.” J. Power Sources. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpowsour.2009.09.070