We’re still early in the adoption curve of electric vehicles. Once adoption starts its geometric growth, I believe we’ll see several things happen. First, basic supply and demand will continue to affect electricity pricing. At my home, with our two commutes, totaling 80 miles per day, the electricity we use for charging our plug-in hybrids amounts to at least 25 kWh per day. That’s just for commuting. Weekends and additional driving for errands, recreation, etc. keep that weekday average to around the same figure, on weekends. We drive our two vehicles about 15K miles per year. This averages to about 770 kWh per month, just for our two plug-in vehicles. When our daughter comes home from college, in the summer, that average goes higher, as she also drives a plug-in vehicle. For this little exercise, we’ll just consider the driving done by my wife and me.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the average U.S. household uses 914 kWh per month. Based on that, our vehicles’ usage of 770 kWh per month is about 85% of the average U.S. household usage. That’s almost like having two homes to power! In Texas, residential electricity usage is 26% higher, than the national average, or 1,150 kWh per month. Have you ever spent a summer in Texas? 😉
Don’t let that scare you away from a plug-in vehicle! According to Texas’ Public Utility Commission’s electricity shopping site, electricity pricing today, ranges from 6.2¢ to 14.6¢ per kWh, for usage of 1,000 kWh per month, in my area of Texas. The average is roughly 10¢ per kWh. Based on that, fueling our two cars costs us about $77 per month. Even at the relatively low price of gasoline today, two average gasoline powered cars (not trucks) would cost us $223 to fuel each month. Driving plug-in vehicles reduces our fuel cost 65%. If we both drove crew cab pickups, we’d spend $330 per month on gasoline (and have friends asking us to help them move).
By the time EVs are the most common form of vehicle, we can expect to see residential demand for electricity increase by a pretty large percentage. This is above and beyond the increase in demand that is normal, due to population growth and other “normal” growth factors. If workplace charging doesn’t become much more common, we can expect much of the increased demand to be biased toward evening/nighttime usage, when most people would typically be home. In Texas, if you arrive home around 6PM, your air conditioner is still running hard to keep your house (relatively) comfortable. Electricity is in high demand, at that time. Due to this, I expect a couple things to happen: 1) electric utilities will increasingly use a time-of-use pricing structure, to curb demand during peak usage hours and 2) based on that change in pricing, EV drivers will start using EV or charger settings to begin charging late at night, when electricity demand is low. In all honesty, we should all be doing this now, since lower temperatures are a better environment in which to charge batteries. Doing this will reduce the available hours to charge, before drivers get up the next morning to head to work, necessitating faster Level 2 (or 240 volt) charging. Fortunately, Texas has an abundance of wind energy that peaks at night. Once again, great news for electricity providers.
As the U.S. shifts toward renewable energy, as Texas is rapidly doing now, we’ll need to have a strategy on the supply (generation) side as well as time-shifting on the consumer side. Wind energy is great, but solar power is unavailable at night, so solar farms will need to store energy, in order to not waste any surplus not used while the sun is shining overhead. There are utility-level storage sites being built in Texas now and I expect that trend to continue and increase over time. As the fossil fuel industry reminds us, there are days the wind doesn’t blow, so these storage facilities will need to store excess wind energy, when it is available, to be able to disperse it during time of low generation. Currently (pun intended) energy storage is predominantly handled by batteries, but other technologies are on the horizon (graphene capacitors, flywheels, bi-directional flow of electricity stored in EVs, etc).
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Still, the demand increase and infrastructure roll-out will cause electricity rates to increase and consumers will be looking for alternatives. Rooftop solar panels are still a novelty, in my neighborhood, but adoption of rooftop solar generation will increase as prices for the panels drop and electricity prices rise. Increased demand of solar panels will slow the rate that solar panel prices go down, but I’m still hopeful that manufacturing efficiencies of scale and increases in efficiency of the panels themselves will continue to drive the cost of solar panels down. Something that is common at utility-level electricity generation, that is practically non-existent at the residential level, is getting my attention these days: residential wind turbines. These are not the large windmills we are used to seeing out in the panhandle, but small, quiet turbines that are starting to become available (and affordable). There are new form factors for generating electricity from wind, including vertical axis turbines and the Archimedes, or screw-type wind turbine. One limiting factor is the height, at which these designs can produce electricity efficiently. As studies continue, and the height requirement is reduced, we may see these become as common as solar panels on residential roofs. This would allow homeowners to have hybrid home power generation, harnessing both solar and wind energy to power their homes.
Another residential option, for decreasing demand on the grid, is energy storage. This has been something I personally have been waiting for, but due to high up-front costs, for the first battery backup unit, I have held off. The first battery installed requires significant changes be made between the grid connection and the distribution panel in the house. Once these changes are made, additional battery storage capacity is (relatively) inexpensive. If demand for electricity drives prices high enough, we may even see homeowners, who do not have solar or wind generation, install batteries and charge them, when electric rates are low, to power their homes when rates are high (IF the cost to install them gets low enough to make this feasible). I have seen some do-it-yourselfers utilize used electric vehicle batteries, as energy storage for their homes. Once EV batteries have degraded in storage capacity, due to aging, and are no longer useful in cars, they can repurposed as residential solar and/or wind energy storage, instead of recycling them for their valuable contents.
Governing entities should start actively modifying building codes to prepare for the dominance of electric vehicles. Obvious changes would be 1) to have the components in place to allow energy storage to be added without major, costly changes to the home’s wiring, 2) wiring of new homes designed for easy addition of solar or wind energy generation products, 3) requiring two 220 volt outlets in each garage, for EV charging and 4) possibly preparing for an end to the need to have the home connected to the electric grid at all. One thing I discovered, after our solar panels were installed, is that my solar panels cannot power my home if the grid is down. In a blackout, the panels are designed to shut down so that their energy can’t flow into the grid and endanger workers working on the power lines. In the aftermath of hurricane Alicia, my home in Houston went without electricity for four days. Have you ever tried to boil a pot of water, on a charcoal grill, to make pasta?
On the fossil fuel side, decreased demand for gasoline will drive gas prices lower, which will tempt drivers to continue to drive gasoline-powered vehicles, but as more and more people experience the low cost of fueling and maintaining electric vehicles, as well as the instant acceleration of EVs, more and more people will opt for electric driving. Those who don’t experience it firsthand, will undoubtedly hear about it from their friends who have.
The future is taking shape right now. We need to start actively planning for it.
