Why the EV boom could put a major strain on our power grid

More than half of all new cars sold are expected to be in the United States by 2030 electric car. That could put a huge strain on our country’s electricity grid, an aging system designed for a world powered by fossil fuels.

Domestic electricity demand in 2022 is expected to increase by up to 18% by 2030 and 38% by 2035, according to an analysis by Energy Policy Rapid Assessment and Analysis Toolkit, Or REPEAT, an energy policy project from Princeton University. This is a significant change compared to the 5% increase we have seen in the last decade.

“We’ve got a lot of energy demand in this country when we didn’t have any about 25 years ago,” said Rob Gramlich, founder and president of Grid Strategies, a transportation policy group.

As many parts of the economy move away from fossil fuels toward electrification – think home appliances like stoves, and space heating for homes and offices – the transportation sector is driving the increase. Light vehicles, a segment that does not include large trucks and aviation, are expected to use up to 3,360% more electricity by 2035 than they do today, according to Princeton data.

But electrification is only an effective decarbonization solution if combined with a large pool of renewable energy. “So we have both supply-side and demand-side drivers for large network needs,” Gramlich said.

That means we need big changes to the grid: more high-voltage transmission lines to carry electricity from rural wind and solar power plants to centers of demand; smaller distribution lines and transformers for last-mile electricity delivery; and devices such as inverters that allow customers with home batteries, electric vehicles, and solar panels to feed excess power back into the grid.

It won’t be cheap. In a study commissioned by the California Public Utilities Commission, network analytics firm Kevala predicted just that California alone will have to spend $50 billion by 2035 on distribution network upgrades To achieve its ambitious goals for electric vehicles.

Charging electric cars requires a lot of electricity. While direct comparison with hardware depends on many variables, a new Tesla Model 3 owner who drives the national average by about 14,000 miles a year will use the same amount of electricity to charge his car at home as he uses for an electric water heater over the course of a year, and about 10 times the electricity a new energy-efficient refrigerator would require. Larger electric cars like the Ford F-150 Lightning use more electricity than a large house’s central air conditioning unit.

The facility currently has about 470,000 grid-connected electric vehicles in its service area in Northern and Central California and is targeting 3 million by 2030, said Lydia Krivta, director of clean energy transportation for PG&E.

Given that PG&E territory covers about 1 in 7 electric vehicles in the United States, how it approaches the EV transition could serve as a model for the nation. It is not an easy task. The facility is tied into a four-year funding cycle to upgrade the network’s infrastructure, and its last funding request was in 2021. Now that funding will definitely fall short of what’s needed, Krefta said.

“A lot of the analysis that went into that order came from, like 2019 or 2020 forecasts, particularly some of the older electric vehicle forecasts that didn’t project some of the growth that we think we’re likely to see now,” Krefta said. This situation has caused PG&E to apply for several state and federal grants that can help it meet its electrification goals.

“I think now people have an overly simplistic view of what electrification means,” said Kevala CEO Aram Shumaphone. “If done right, it’s massive; if it’s poorly managed, there’s going to be a lot of upset people, and that’s a real risk. That’s a risk for regulators. That’s a risk for politicians, and that’s a risk for utilities.”

If network infrastructure doesn’t keep up with the electric car boom, Shumaphone said, drivers can expect charging difficulties such as long lines or the ability to charge only at certain times and places. A highly stressed grid will also be more vulnerable to extreme weather events and prone to power outages, which California experienced in 2020.

The most direct way to meet the growing demand for electricity is to bring more energy sources online, preferably green ones. But although it is easy to set up coal and natural gas plants near population centers, the best resources for solar and wind energy are usually in rural areas.

This means that what the United States really needs is more high-voltage transmission lines, which can transmit solar and wind energy resources across county and state lines.

But Gramlich said that while we’re constantly spending money to replace and upgrade old lines, we’re hardly building any new ones. “I think we probably need about $20 (million) or $30 million a year on new capacity, new linear mileage and new delivery capacity. We’re spending close to zero on that right now.”

There are significant regulatory hurdles when it comes to building new transmission lines, which often traverse through multiple counties, states, and utility service districts, all of which need to approve the line and agree on how it will be financed.

“If you just think about a line that crosses twenty or thirty different utility areas, they have a way of recouping their costs on their local system, but they kind of throw up their hands when something benefits thirty utility areas, and who are they supposed to pay, how much and how are we going to decide?” Gramlich said.

Permit is a big hurdle, too. All new energy projects must undergo a series of impact studies to assess what new transmission equipment is needed, how much it will cost and who will pay. but The list of projects stuck in this process is huge. The total amount of electricity generation on hold, nearly all of which is renewable, exceeds the total generation capacity on the grid today.

The Inflation Reduction Act has the potential to reduce emissions by about 1 billion tons by 2030, According to the REPEAT Project at Princeton. But by that same analysis, if transportation infrastructure construction does not more than double its historical growth rate of 1% per year, more than 80% of those cuts could be lost.

Efforts are underway to accelerate the construction of energy infrastructure. Most notably, Sen. Joe Manchin of Deutsche Welle, Va., introduced a bill allowing the reform in May after similar measures failed last year. President Joe Biden has thrown his support behind the bill, which would speed up authorization for all kinds of energy projects, including fossil fuel infrastructure. Handling the politics will be tricky, though, as many Democrats view the bill as overly friendly to fossil fuel interests.

But even if the pace of permitting picks up and we start spending big on transmission soon, it will take years to build the required infrastructure.

“There will be an interstitial period when the need is very high, but transmission cannot be built during the time period when the need occurs, and the distributed energy resources will play a very active role in managing this process, and other resources will not be available,” explained Shumaphone.

This means that resources such as solar systems and residential batteries can help stabilize the grid as customers generate their own power and sell excess electricity back to the grid. Automakers are also increasingly equipping their electric vehicles with two-way charging capabilities, allowing customers to use giant EV battery packs to power their homes or return electricity to the grid, just like a normal home battery system. Tesla It does not currently offer this functionality, but has indicated that it will in the coming years, while other models such as stronghold F-150 Lightning and Nissan Leaf are already in action.