The Expert Podcast

So how is this going to work? Electric vehicles are being touted as a replacement for gasoline vehicles across the country. Some states are even outlawing gasoline vehicles in the coming years. Obviously electric vehicles by definition need electricity - they need to plug in to charge up. The question is: where is that electricity going to come from?
According to the Wall Street Journal article that came out today, there's already an electricity shortage in the United States. It's not that there's going to be an electricity shortage - there already is one. Power grid operators caution that electricity supplies aren't keeping up with demand and that many states are already struggling to keep up with demand, saying that there will be rolling blackouts this year. Rolling blackouts this year. This electricity shortage is when there are less than one percent of vehicles in operation that are electric vehicles. One percent electric vehicles and there's already rolling blackouts being predicted.
Well, the question is: how much more electricity will be needed for electric vehicles? Maybe electric vehicles don't need that much electricity compared to the existing use. So let's do some math and see how much electricity an electric vehicle does use compared to the normal domestic use. According to the US government, the energy division, how much electricity does an American home use? The average is 893 kilowatt hours per month. 893 kilowatt hours per month. Now remember that number - 893 kilowatt hours per month.
We'll also do some math on charging station - how many amps, how many watts. Here's your kilowatts down here. And on average, the typical electric vehicle driver - if you drive your car 1,000 miles per month according to Investopedia - you'll need 250 kilowatt hours to charge your property properly. So a thousand miles a month, that's twelve thousand miles a year. Most people drive more than twelve thousand miles per year. Think of the car you have - how many miles are on it? Divide by how many years you've had it. More than likely you probably average more like 18 to 20,000 miles per year. But for the sake of argument, let's just use 12,000 miles a year, 1,000 miles per month.
So 250 kilowatt hours over 893 - that's almost a 30 percent increase in the amount of electricity residential power consumption will increase. If you take 250 kilowatt hours added on to eight ninety three, that's about a thirty percent increase. Well, before that even happening, we have electricity shortages. It doesn't take rocket science to figure out that this is going to be a problem.
If the Wall Street Journal is already saying there's going to be rolling blackouts during heat waves or other peak periods, then the risk of electricity shortages rising because traditional power plants are being retired - what does that mean? That means if electric vehicles are supposed to be more than one percent of the current use, the power supply doesn't exist.
There may be more factors to this than meet the eye. There may be more absorption of this demand than is obvious just from this. I'm a simple guy - I just go by what the math says. Maybe domestic power use is a small percentage compared to commercial power use. Maybe there is flexibility in the charging if it happens at night. All I'm saying is electric vehicles are one percent of the market. The intention is to have them be 70 or 80 percent of the market within a decade. State of Washington has passed a law that does not allow for gasoline or diesel vehicles to be sold or even registered in the state of Washington after 2030 - seven years away roughly.
If that's going to be the case, where's the electricity going to come from? Again, this isn't about whether or not electric vehicles should or shouldn't happen - that's not the opinion we're just doing. A rational, logical observation of if electric vehicles are going to happen, where does the power come from? Where does the electricity come from? Put your comments below, let us know what you think about this potential conflict between demand and availability.
Look, we already see what happens when supply and demand doesn't match. In the last 18 to 24 months there's been supply and demand problems with real estate, gasoline, motor vehicles, appliances - and what happened? The price went up or you couldn't get it. If the same supply and demand pressure hits the energy market, most suitably electricity, what's that going to do? Is that going to raise the price of your electric bill? If your electric bill normally was $200 or $300 a month, is it going to be $400 or $500 a month?
Or is it going to make rolling blackouts? Is it going to make restrictions on usage of electricity? How would an electric company limit your use? Well, here's an article that claims that this person found a remote switch installed on his air conditioner by the power company without their permission to shut off their air conditioner. Rocky Mountain Power has installed switches on AC units that allow it to remotely toggle off the air conditioning to save energy during heat waves. So will this be the wave of the future?
If there are hundreds of thousands or millions of new electric vehicles in the marketplace sapping electric capacity from the grid, how will the power companies deal with it? They're not building any new plants - power plants. And if there are already energy shortages in many parts of the country, as electric vehicles come online and need to be charged from a home charging system, the power company that provides electricity to the residents is going to find itself with a severe shortage. So maybe they'll use these air conditioner kill switches to shut off your AC.
AC is one of the biggest draws of a system. It's also the biggest spike energy usage because when it gets hot, everybody turns on the air conditioner all at once. Where other things like stoves, hot water heaters, they cycle on at different times. Stove is an intermittent use, hot water heater intermittent use, a dryer intermittent use. Those are the highest amperage draws from an electrical grid, and because they're intermittent - you run your dryer for a half an hour, your stove might be on for 20 minutes bake some cookies, your hot water heater kicks on and off to keep the water warm. Air conditioner - once it gets hot it kicks on and it stays on for hours. So it's going to draw a lot from that electrical grid. The power companies might have an incentive to shut that off to keep their grid supply evenly distributed. Is that what you want?
Again, we're not drawing a conclusion whether or not electric vehicles should or should not happen. We're just pointing out the future, thinking ahead of what might be some of the problems and how to prevent them. Whether you're a homeowner, you are an electrical company, government agency - these are all factors that have to be taken into account because many times this planning doesn't happen in advance and it only is realized once the problem happens. Could be 2028 - oh, we have all these electric vehicles, they're all plugging in and it's using up all the power, people can't run their AC, there's not enough power to go around, there's blackouts, there's brownouts.
So being aware of this need - again, maybe there's smarter people than me that are figuring this out at the government level. What do you think? Do you think there are strategies for this happening at the electric company, at the government level? Are people thinking of this? Put your comments down below, let us know what you think about electric vehicles in general and also about the power grid being able to support these high drain battery recharge - 250 kilowatt hours. It's like a third - twenty, thirty percent of what your house normally uses, a typical U.S. house.