The power grid will be roughly the same in 15 years. Now, know what the "TV pickup" is? - It's a spike in electrical grid demand when everyone turns on a kettle to make tea during commercial breaks.
So, consider EVs adopted at scale, and, like, there's an apartment building with 100 tenants arriving home in the evening. They start charging their cars. That would require 7.2kW x 100 = 720kW of power (a common max for charging stations) for a single building just to charge cars.
Power companies have a monopoly and make money by doing the least amount of work possible to continue collecting (effectively) rent on the lines they own. The kind of capital investment necessary to upgrade the power grid for EV will require public funding.
Why do you think the government would do a better job? Perhaps in other countries, but in the US, the government is largely seen as incompetent at best, corrupt and captured at worst.
Let me turn this around: who holds a monopoly corporation accountable? If your government is too corrupt to fix, what hope in hell does a corporation running a utility get you?
I don't think either is held accountable. Who was held accountable for Flynt? Who was held accountable for East Palestine? Usually, the only people held accountable are citizens when they make even the slightest mistake.
Ok, so my statement that a monopoly corporation is a useless middleman and the we're better off if the government does it because at least they're one fewer link in the chain is negated by neither being very good, so we do nothing.
The government and large corporations are parts of the same machine. The corporations fund the campaigns of the elected government officials and in turn, they pass legislation favorable to the corporations. The legislation is often written by the lawyers of those very corporations. Further, the bureaucrats who head the government agencies responsible for regulating the corporations are often hired by those very corporations after their tenure.
The only way out is to vote out the incumbent every election until we get the government we want. If and when we actually start doing this, it will probably take at least a generation because so many people are largely ok with it, or too busy surviving to pay attention.
Sorry to paint such an unpleasant picture, but it's what it is. I'm optimistic because people are starting to wake up to it quite a bit.
None of which invalidates my original statement that the situation in which a monopoly corporation controls a utility is strictly worse than the government controlling it directly because at least there is one less layer of indirection.
....it doesn't require examples, it is simple logic.
I assert that:
1) A monopoly can only be held accountable by the government.
2) The government can only be held accountable by the people.
Therefore, if the people wish to hold the operators of a utility accountable then having a monopoly control that utility is only introducing an extra, unnecessary, layer.
As far as I can tell, you make no claim that contradicts 1 or 2. You are, at best, saying that in practice having a monopoly run things is no worse than having the government do it directly. Feel free to correct my assessment.
So your argument would be stronger if you cited examples. I assume since you aren't you're arguing from a strictly theoretical / academic sense. If we're going to go that route:
1) A monopoly can only be held accountable by the government.
This is not true. A monopoly can also be held accountable by the shareholders. A monopoly can also be held accountable by the market. Ask any cable company, for example. A monopoly can also be held accountable by new entrants to the market, ask any ISP that refuses to run lines to rural areas.
2) The government can only be held accountable by the people.
From a strictly academic sense, this is true, but requires an election to achieve, and I've already gone over how those are captured by the very corporations governments are supposed to hold accountable. 88% of the population supports medical marijuana legalization, but it's still illegal at the federal level. Where's the government accountability there?
> This is not true. A monopoly can also be held accountable by the shareholders. A monopoly can also be held accountable by the market. Ask any cable company, for example.
The monopolies in question are utility monopolies, none of these apply except the shareholder control, the holding accountable of which is equivalent to holding the company itself accountable.
> A monopoly can also be held accountable by new entrants to the market, ask any ISP that refuses to run lines to rural areas.
Considering the state of rural internet access in the US, that doesn't seem to be supporting your argument at all. And when ISPs have local monopolies their service is measurably much more expensive and worse than when there is competition, and also measurably worse that municipally run connectivity, which they fight tooth and nail.
> From a strictly academic sense, this is true, but requires an election to achieve, and I've already gone over how those are captured by the very corporations governments are supposed to hold accountable.
As I said, even given this the situation with the government alone running things is only as bad as it is with the monopoly middleman while remaining potentially easier to change.
Truly astounding that you acknowledge that the power companies are (at this point) just rent-seeking monopolists, and your response is "Gosh, I guess we'll just have to subsidize them with a massive corporate welfare check! No other options are possible!"
We've seen this game play out with telecom before. Spoiler: the monopolists just pocket the money and don't build the infrastructure.
Very true, and it's a well understood problem. For a variety of reasons it is better to charge during the day than overnight (not the least being that solar works better during the day, helping to mooting nightly storage concerns), and so an ideal situation here is that many or even most of those charged during the day at work.
There's a lot of possibilities here though. With smart meters and cars hooked up all night, the power company has a lot of freedom to not just 100% every car instantly, but throttle and prioritize as necessary.
> For a variety of reasons it is better to charge during the day than overnight
This was one of the examples given in the article - the answer on whether it's better to charge at night or during the day varies by who you ask.
Solar does work better when the sun is out, but what if your area isn't using solar power? Air conditioner use peaks when the sun is out, what is your area uses much of its electrical capacity during daylight hours on HVAC?
There were very similar concerns about mobile bandwidth not long after the iPhone came out. Mobile carriers just built like crazy and handled it. No reason power companies can’t do the same thing.
But gas turbine power plants can take under a year to come online; even less when an existing plant expands capacity. Yeah, they still emit CO2, but it's a quick and cheap stop gap while waiting on green energy to replace them.
It should be noted that the USA has a refining crisis looming. Our refinement capacity is stagnant/shrinking and it's substantially more difficult to build refineries than it is to build electricity generation. This is largely a problem that's "by design" that will act as the stick, if the carrots for the EV transition don't work. We basically have an artificial cap on the number of ICE vehicles that can be supplied with gasoline unless something changes.
This is not much power, and all cars support scheduled/delayed overnight charging already. There are cars that support V2G and can be made to even supply power to the grid for that TV pickup peak if necessary. BEVs have batteries large enough that they're fine even if they're not plugged in for several days.
Slow AC charging is little more than a kettle + electric oven, and we built the grid for that instead of lamenting it's too much for the grid and people need to continue to use wood stoves. Driving 40 miles (US daily average) uses about 10-12kWh of electricity, and there's whole night to refill that.
Why would I do that when it costs more to charge at that time due to higher demand. Indeed I'll drain from my house battery back to the grid at that time to make a little on the side and charge from midnight for far less cost.
Assuming it's for overnight charging, I would guess a large apartment complex that offers an EV charging hub might like to install some sort of load balancing/switching mechanism to limit how much total draw. It doesn't take the full evening to charge a car, so it would sequence where to deliver the power.
Most people don't drive that much in a day. For a typical EV user nightly charging isn't even really necessary, they're probably only needing to charge once every 3 days or so so it won't take that much to top-up if they're doing it nightly. If it's a small enough building tenants might be okay with doing a sort of sign-in system to use a smaller bank of chargers when needed. Sort of like reserving a treadmill at the gym.
So, consider EVs adopted at scale, and, like, there's an apartment building with 100 tenants arriving home in the evening. They start charging their cars. That would require 7.2kW x 100 = 720kW of power (a common max for charging stations) for a single building just to charge cars.
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