Summary
Join Pam, Ben and James on a fun-filled ride through the ins and outs of electric vehicle (EV) charging, utility tariffs, and the ever-evolving grid technology. Our lively discussion kicks off with the basics of home EV charging and its potential to revamp your utility bill. We also delve into the role of the Public Utility Commission in managing fair rates in the growing age of time-of-use tariffs, especially in states like California and Michigan.
Episode chapters:
(00:00:00): EV banter & intro
(00:06:25): EV tech
(00:15:38): Batteries & EV charging
(00:17:00): Level one toaster charging
(00:21:08): Level two charging
(00:23:29): Level three DC fast charging
(00:31:38): Charging connectors
(00:35:29): Battery sizes and charge curves
(00:47:25): Utility tariffs and metering
(00:49:20): PG&E resi EV tariffs
(00:52:10): Types of EV charging tariffs
(01:00:53): Obligatory V2X hype
A key topic is consumer response to variable rates and its effect on curbing peak electricity usage. We explore ways to design rates that accommodate different lifestyles and spur shifts in energy consumption. Then, we turn the spotlight on "utility tariff hacking," considering how EV batteries could even power homes, thus exploring the realms of Vehicle-to-Home (V2H) and Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology.
Our chat veers into the importance of EVs in shifting electricity usage, with a highlight on level two chargers for overnight charging. We introduce the intriguing concept of an EV time-based charging incentive for charging during off-peak hours.
Rounding off, we ponder over utilities, their awareness (or lack thereof) of home EV chargers, and their varying adoption of time-of-use rates. With a promise of deeper dives into V2G, demand response programs, and grid participation in the future, we leave listeners eagerly anticipating more.
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Relevant links we found helpful
Overview
Charging
Impact on utility bill
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Music
Our incredible intro/outro music is the song Ticking, by artist TIN
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Episode transcript
Well, hello and welcome back to Intermediate, where you can easily get the knowledge you need to work in clean energy beyond the obvious. I'm Ben here with my co-hosts, Pam and James. Hey Ben, good to be back. Hey James. Hi. How are you guys doing? Yeah, doing well. Question of the group, how many of us have EVs? Yes. How many of us? Yes? Oh, I have whatever car I could get and then bring to school. But then I make up for it by walking almost everywhere and taking the bus when possible and carpooling. All right, that's even better than the EV. Yeah. All right. I do not have an EV. I guess I could cheat and say I don't have a car because we sold my car when gas prices were high. I was convinced this was the beginning of the end for gas. Our one gas car, which we have because it's paid off, is a 2013 Ford Fusion, so not an EV. OK. Is it fusion powered, though? Not even fusion powered. It's just gas powered, unfortunately. I do, in fact, have an EV. I have a 2018 E-Golf. it is it's from the era where EVs were slightly more handicapping than they are today you know on a good day it'll do about 150 miles of range and that's you know you might think that oh you can go pretty far 150 miles but when you're you know when you're running around doing a bunch of errands you eat that up pretty quickly. But on the other hand it's amazing. I love it and I'm hopefully never going to get rid of it. Yeah so question for me, the next car I want to get is an EV and I'm actually like causing issues in our family because I insist on it actually. I'm being very stubborn. But our requirements up here in Seattle like I need it's basically like you want an electric Subaru with long range, which doesn't exist. You know, I need high ground clearance. I need to be able to travel greater than 200 miles probably. I need it to be not a million dollars. So like the Rivian's kind of out. I don't know what my options are here. And so I was like, okay, if I think about Subaru has the Soltera and that's all of those things except something with long range. What if, could I get some rig that's like, put it in my car and it's a battery and solar panels and I could like when I get to the trailhead or camping or something like charge up my car based off the Sun is that feasible there's actually a guy that has prototype this at least and is trying to sell it for Tesla's where not only is there a kit where you put a pretty sizable solar panel over the top of your model 3 but there's actually, when you park, just like you said, when you park, you unfold this kit from the trunk and it goes up for like 10 yards behind your Tesla, and it just lays on the ground and trickle charges your Model 3. So it's like a mobile ground mount. I guess you wouldn't, yeah, that makes sense. See, the issue though is the Model 3 has really low ground clearance. And so that's, obviously that would be a great option, but you don't wanna destroy it and have the EV and all the components fall out as you go up the trailhead. Yeah, well, one of the things we'll get into today is actually the charging standards. And kind of aside from, okay, this thing needs to fit on the roof of a Model 3. If you put that part aside and just think about the panels you lay on the ground, the charging is actually the same between whatever, a Soltera or a Model 3, or God forbid, a Hummer, like an electrified Hummer, which, you know, which is the high end of the price bracket there. Pam, why do we care about EVs? Because they're storage on wheels, and they're cool. And we get a lot of emissions from just the average car that runs on gas, like ICE vehicles is what they're called, internal combustion engines, but ICE sounds way cooler. In America, 29% of emissions are coming from transportation. And within that 29%, 58% of those emissions are coming from light-duty vehicles. And a lot of that is from short-range trips. So if you want to abate those emissions, then switching to EVs is part of your answer. What are those things that we have now available that are renewable, that can be worked in quite a different way into the economy of the United States? which are concerned primarily with the design of nuclear power plants and this type of thing. Hi, I'm Pamela Wildstein. I'm Wyatt Makarovski. I'm Ben Hilborn. I'm James Gordy. You're listening to Indermediate. Indermediate. Indermediate. To Indermediate. Indermediate. The place for people trying to get into or already working on distributed energy resources and clean energy. This is the podcast that makes it easy to learn how the grid actually works beyond the office. Hey everyone, this is James Gordy and this is episode two of the Intermediate Podcast. Today we have the esteemed co-host guest of Ben Hilborn and Pam Wildstein. Hello. Hey Ben and Pam. Thanks for jumping on. Yeah. And so I think today we want to cover a slightly in the weeds version of electric vehicles. So we're really just going to take you through. And so I guess just to kick it off Ben, do you want to give us an intro on EVs and why they're awesome? Yeah, I mean so if you're if you're in the energy industry if you're in EVs This is this is gonna seem pretty rudimentary But this is for anybody who's you know Who's checking out the episode because they want to get really in-depth and if you don't know some of the basics It's hard to hard to build on top of that understanding. So At the most basic level, you know, a car is a car. It is an enclosed cabin that has usually four wheels and some way, some mode of propulsion to move you around. In nearly every vehicle up until, call it 10-ish years ago, maybe 20, most vehicles were internal combustion. they had a tank of combustible fuel, you know, diesel or gasoline, and an internal combustion engine, which you would feed that fuel into, you would get small explosions of your old dinosaur juice, and that would be turned into, you know, rotational power which would move the wheels. Now, instead, we have in an electric vehicle, you have a battery pack, and so Instead of a tank that holds gasoline, you have a battery which has a chemical potential that when you let that chemical potential equalize, you get electricity out of it. That goes into a little electric motor, the electric motor turns that electricity into rotational force which moves the wheels. At the end of the day, two different ways of moving the vehicle forward. The, kind of the big difference, and this is what everyone talks about when it comes to EVs, at least at this point in time, which is date of recording, you know, April 17th, 2023. We're like, I would say that we're fairly far along in the EV revolution. We've seen, you know, multiple generations of vehicles come out now. And the main topic of conversation is still, what's the range? So while an electric motor is way more efficient at turning input power into output motion than an internal combustion engine, it's a fact of the matter that a lithium-ion battery is way less energy dense than a tank of gasoline. There is so much more potential energy in a tank of gasoline than there is in a battery pack which you know will be much much larger and much heavier than that tank of gasoline and So at the end of the day, you've got all these numbers that kind of balance out you get, you know, call it 500 miles out of a You know out of an efficient car with a with a full tank of gasoline and you'll get you know 300 and change out of a you know an efficient EV with a with a full charge. So in the same ballpark we're not there yet. That's kind of the That's kind of the big talking point. You get other people also talk about how EVs are are greener. You've got and the the important thing to focus on here is tailpipe emissions. So when you look at the vehicle itself how much how Polluting is the vehicle. And so you put a certain amount of energy into the vehicle. It gets charged up where the gas tank gets filled. And what comes out of that as you drive? Nothing comes out of an EV. You get carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides, different things coming out of an internal combustion vehicle. Especially when you talk about how green these vehicles are, you really do get, you know, can get some people riled up about, oh, well, like the power for that EV is coming from dirty coal plants and whatnot. There's a whole conversation here. My favorite thing that I like to come back to is it's called entrained emissions, where if I'm going to build a brand new vehicle today and I build an internal combustion vehicle, that vehicle can only ever run on fossil fuels. It can only ever, it's probably, the day it rolls off the factory line, that's the most efficient it's ever gonna be. It is never going to get cleaner than it is that day. You build an electric vehicle. It has some amount of emissions that take to build it. And yes, it's drawing power from the grid that will that has some amount of carbon footprint today but the beauty is that as the grid gets cleaner so does the vehicle and so that's that's my my favorite way to think about that what I don't know what do you guys think how do you how do you like to talk about how clean or not clean EVs are yeah I think you just brought up all the the sticky topics I might happen at Thanksgiving table with my older relatives Ben I know I know I wanted get them out there early. No doubt we can unpack those. I think one thing they just like highlight though right, electric vehicles isn't just the four-wheel things that you are going to park in your garage like electric vehicles are you know school buses and transit buses and semi trucks right like Tesla's announcing their semi truck or even boats and airplanes like it's a thing that moves it's a vehicle and you know in many cases it makes sense to make it electric. Um, I think there's a lot of, um, things that kind of talk about the benefits, the pros and cons, I think like at a high level, people will tell you EVs are awesome. Um, I don't have one myself, mostly for those range challenges, right? Like we live in Seattle and so like when we drive our car outside the city, it's normally like pretty long and it needs to be off road. And, um, there's not a whole lot of like off road type SUVs that are electric that aren't like a Rivian, which is super expensive, right. Um, but I think, um, you know, in general, like they're a good, smooth driving experience, you know, I've driven one a couple of times and, um, when you look at the total cost of ownership, both from like an electricity purchasing stick in the car standpoint, and also the maintenance EVs are normally cheaper, um, and we'll get into this a lot more, but that implies that you're going to manage and like charge it in a smart, efficient way. And so while it might be hard out of pocket on the front end to say my EV is cheaper, and batteries are pretty expensive, so it can be out of reach for some people, they are getting cheaper and cheaper and more accessible like we talked about. And if you can manage the energy in a smart way, they are cheaper from a total cost of ownership. You can try to make that argument at the Thanksgiving table. It's hard to whip out the spreadsheet though in practice, and so we need to get better at saying that in a simple way. I can be very disappointed if I hear that you didn't whip out a spreadsheet about EVs at this Thanksgiving dinner. You know, Pam probably did, right? Oh, probably. No, absolutely not. I think when I think about EVs, though, and I think kind of going off your earlier point, I think they're a really great example and probably one of the best examples for why, when we talk about electrifying everything, it's not just make everything based on electricity. it's also if we want to truly decarbonize we also need to make sure we're coming from clean energy sources because you can have an EV and it can be you can have an EV but if all the electricity is coming from coal then you haven't really helped the environment that much or you haven't really led to system-wide decarbonization at all so it's really be being proactive about how you're managing your system and what you're actually using to fuel your EVs now And I think the one other little sticky point on EVs, and maybe this is more from, I hear this one a lot and I think it's really important for us to consider in the future, is the batteries themselves, the lithium ion batteries themselves, the mining processes that we're getting those resources from have a lot of environmental harms associated with them and also a lot of justice concerns with human issues associated with them, and that's And that's something that there's not, there's not like an easy fix for that one. It's not like, oh, you know, there's a, you know, there's, my EV is currently being, you know, fueled by coal. So I just need to create a transition to clean energy. It's like, well, if the processes behind which I'm getting the battery for are really toxic for the environment and really terrible for the people that are doing the mining. Like that's a tough one. Yeah, absolutely. there's I think my favorite part about the EV industry it's you know AI is all the rage these days everybody is talking with experimenting with you know just experiencing how quickly AI is is progressing and one of the things I'd love about EVs is the the EV industry is kind of having this the same kind of extremely rapid development cycle that a lot of people don't really see because the the end consumer product isn't like oh man I'm gonna go to the I'm gonna go to the grocery store and get the newest chemistry of Evie battery like that's that's not something that you buy as a consumer, but you'll see What is it? There's a I think BYD out of China is releasing their seagull evie with the option for a sodium ion battery you know slightly less energy dense than lithium ion but it's like you know one of the very first generations of this battery this is battery tech but they're putting it into a car that you can buy and so the more you can deploy this into real life the more you can put it into people's hands and just like iterate iterate iterate where we're gonna be in five years from now, like, EVs today are gonna look like relics. It's I love it. Yeah, I remember I think it must have been like, five years ago at this point, I was listening to an episode of the podcast called the interchange before green tech media got shut down and bought out and back when it was like really clean energy oriented. And one of the guys on the podcast was like, I'll eat my shoe the day that I see like a pickup truck EV. And then I and I was like, Yeah, we're never see it's going to take like 10-20 years and then like two years later we got a pick up truck ev and my whole class was losing their minds over it and we were all we watched the commercial in class and we all like a little party over it was so cool just like the speed that the industry's going is insane tell me you mailed him a shoe no no i hope someone did okay well just to like just to like continue leveling the playing field making sure that basics so in the same way that you can you can buy different octanes of gas for your car there there are different ways that you can that you can fuel your your EV and it's just that everybody kind of has the the same understanding here not that not that any one type of fueling like gives your car more power or anything like that no in the way that you know and an octane rating has has an influence over you know ignition timing so you go out you buy your you buy your first EV you're super proud you bring it home and in the trunk they give you a a charger like a home charger also important to note that a sometimes charger what's that sometimes it's not always sometimes that's true right yeah that's right it used to be included in the model 3 and now you have to buy it separately. I forgot about that. So sometimes, sometimes you get a charger with your EV. Also worth noting that the proper name for the thing you call a charger is actually an EVSE, the electric vehicle supply equipment. And the reason for that is the thing that actually charges the battery is in the car. It was in the car from day one, it'll always be in the car. But that is semantics. If you ever hear the term EVSE, they're referring to what most people think of as the charger. Anyways, if you're lucky enough to get a charger in your car from the from the showroom, it'll likely be just kind of a 110. This is North American focused, obviously. It'll just be a 110 volt charger that you can plug into any wall socket in your garage. You plug it into your electric vehicle and you wake up in the morning and you stare at the dash of your car and you realize I only got 50 miles of range overnight. Oh, that's not what I expected. Everybody tells me that I can plug my car in and it's fully charged every morning. Well, they're, just because some salesperson tells you that and leaves out some of the details doesn't change the mechanics of how the grid and your home electrical equipment works. So what you what you've experienced there is called level one charging. This is just charging your car at the the same speed as a toaster essentially. So you're taking it a one ton vehicle and you're supplying it with the same amount of power as it takes to make your bagel in the morning and you're expecting that to move your car around all along. Okay, so there's there's a little bit of a mismatch there. For some people, people that you know have have short commutes or maybe that don't commute at all and you know only take their car out once every couple days, a level one charger is actually totally sufficient. And this is, it's a cheap way to charge your car. It's very gentle on the batteries. You're not you're not taxing them by you know heating them up by pushing a ton of current into them It's you know, it's a simple nice easy way to do it most people that buy an EV will eventually upgrade to what's called a level 2 charger and These can be found in homes or out at the mall or at a hotel A level two charger, this is somewhere from five to 20 times as fast as a level one charger. And so starting to get into a little bit more details here, your level one charger is probably capped at around one kilowatt. A level two charger can be anywhere in the range of like five to 20 kilowatts. And this to reference back to episode one where we talked about the difference between kilowatts and kilowatt hours. A kilowatt is the rate of charge is how fast you're charging. A kilowatt hour is how much you can charge in an hour. It's the amount the aggregate amount of charge. And so you'll go hire an electrician they'll come mount a fancy shiny box on your wall the charge cable is gonna be much thicker and you plug your car in and now it's gonna be fully charged potentially in three hours or something like that. You get home from work, you plug in, by the time you wanna go out for dinner, your car's fully charged again. That kind of thing. That's the kind of experience you can expect from a level two charger. And it's the same kind of thing. You go to the mall, you plug in, you shop for a couple hours. By the time you come out, your car's fully charged. That's the level two experience. Quick question, Ben. Yeah, yeah. So I definitely like I know some people where like they live on the side of a hill here And they don't like park their car in the garage because the garage is just full of stuff That's not a car you can imagine Yeah And so they run an extension cord out to the street to plug in their Tesla Model 3 Is that a level one a level two or something else? That's janky. It doesn't qualify. Is that legal? Yeah, more people do this than you might think actually. Oh, I believe it. Yeah, there's actually a very cool company called Voltpost that's looking to kind of make street side charging a little bit easier for owners like this where you're charging during the daytime and you use power that's not being used for lighting. Anyways, little small shout out to Voltpost there. That's likely going to be just a level one. The reason being is if you have to run an extension cord from the side of your house all the way to the sidewalk and then it's like a souped up extension cord yeah is it it's entirely possible that people are actually doing like level charging level two charging street side that's totally possible ingenuity ingenuity indeed indeed just hope to adapt overcome persevere okay okay i'm gonna finish my spiel on charging wait we've made it through one. We got level two. And what's after that? Well, level three. So this is this is called DC fast charging. And the reason you call it DC fast charging is level one and level two were AC. So this is the power that's in your walls at home. You know, it's the same like same thing. You plug in your toaster, you plug in your oven, your clothes dryer, all this kind of stuff. It's all AC. DC fast charging is much different, primarily because it's direct current, not alternating current. And the reason for that is because of that charger that I talked about earlier. When the charger that is in the car, not the EVSE, but the little box that's hidden in your car somewhere, the thing that charges the batteries, it's what takes AC current that's into the car from your wall and converts it to DC current and puts it into the batteries. Batteries are inherently a direct current device. When you plug into a DC fast charger, it says, hey onboard charger, I don't need you. I'm going to throw power into the battery pack myself. I'm going to manage it. You can get out of the way and the kind of the management capabilities, the power delivery capabilities of a DC fast charger are much, much greater than the little charging block that's hidden in your car somewhere. So whereas a level two charger on your wall, let's say it can deliver, at the very top end, let's say it can deliver 20 kilowatts, most are not that fast, but let's say it can deliver 20 kilowatts. and the little charging, the charger in your car. It can accept up to 20 kilowatts. You're kind of maxing out all ends of the system there. A DC fast charger, depending on the vehicle, can put up to 500 kilowatts into a vehicle. Now, no consumer vehicles can accept 500 kilowatts. You get things like the Porsche Taycan or the, I don't think even the IONIQ 5 can accept 350, but the maximum that a commercial, commercially available vehicle for a consumer can accept is about 350 kilowatts. So an order of magnitude larger than level 2. And the experience here is intended to be as close to pulling up to a gas station as possible. This is something, it's not that fast yet. It is, we simply aren't there in terms of technology. But this is something where if you're road tripping with your car, you can pull up to a DC fast charger, plug in, you know, go into the nearby convenience store for a snack, go to the bathroom, you know, just, you know, look at the birds for a minute or two and by that time, your car's ready to go. You know, you're aiming for somewhere between like a 15 to, you know, 30 minute stop for most of your battery capacity. That's kind of the experience of DC fast charging. James, you said you've tried driving an EV a few times. Did you get to try supercharging or DC fast charging? Indirectly, I was up in British Columbia like kind of on the way to Banff driving from Vancouver one time and when we were driving up like we got to Squamish and they had like a Tesla supercharger station there and so we got to use one of those and we basically just like walked got a coffee you know Starbucks and it was kind of like pretty crowded so it took us like 20-30 minutes we got back and like we definitely were most of the way there Um, but then we got up to actually like Whistler, um, and we were just using like a level two charger, right? Um, cause we just like driven up the mountains and all over. So we had like drained down a lot. Um, and we probably went like into the Whistler village for a couple hours, came back and I would assume this was level two, not level one, but like. It didn't make that big of a dent, honestly, you know, like we were probably there for a couple hours and we may be added like 30, maybe 40% onto it from the public charger. Yeah, yeah, that's a very apt description of level three versus level two charging. And it's really important to note that all of this, all of these things are entirely vehicle dependent. It's the same kind of thing. If I have my 1995 Toyota Camry, right? It doesn't matter if I put a hundred octane into it, It's not going to go any faster, there are limitations of the car. It's the same kind of thing with charging of any type. The charger in your car is going to limit how fast you can AC charge and the battery itself and onboard battery management system is going to limit how fast you can DC charge. So in my eGolf, I can only DC fast charge at 40 kilowatts. It doesn't matter if I plug into a 350 kilowatt capable station, I'm only charging at 40 kilowatts. The great thing is it's an extremely efficient vehicle, not like a Hummer EV or something. And so it still doesn't take me that long to charge up. But there are limitations of the car. I can't take advantage of the full capabilities of the of the DC fast charger and so people kind of need to think about the fact that like it's not just like the charger or even the car itself it's kind of like both and like what they can support in like a charging experience is that like the right way to think about it yeah it's i think one of the one of the interesting things about the transition to EVs is that the average driver has to know more about their car than they used to. It's interesting. There's a little bit of like a dumbbell curve here. You know, back 30, 40 years ago, the average driver had to know like roughly like how to adjust a carburetor, right? It's just, it's one of those things that like if you're driving up a mountain pass, you need to know how to adjust a carburetor so that you can adjust your air fuel mixture. it's just one of the necessary tools in operating that vehicle. And then we got to the modern era of internal combustion where everything is automated, computerized. It is as simple as, I don't even take the key out of my pocket anymore. I get in the car, I turn it on, I go, and that's it. That's the extent of the experience. Because we kind of shifted to this new technology, in a way is we're kind of back towards the like, you've got to be a little bit more involved. You have to understand your vehicle a little bit more to have the best possible experience. Yeah, but I mean, that's kind of asking a lot of people, right? I think there's a lot of change management or difference here. Like people just want something that's simple. Like even me, who's like relatively, you know, excuse the pun, plugged in to the EV scene. Like it's kind of a lot to know. So can't you just like go plug in more or less and as long as you have the same connector, like it'll charge and it'll go kind of as fast as it will but like you just kind of have to know or like be surprised by how long it's gonna take like is that fair you can mostly just like plug it in but it might just take a long time like is that gonna cause problems you know you kind of touched on something interesting there is the different connectors right there's we've everybody kind of knows about the oh which which usb cable do i need do i need the you know type a type b type you know micro mini That whole thing has happened with EVs as well. So To your to answer your question so long as you're not in a rush Yeah You can mostly just go plug in anywhere and just see what happens and the vehicle and the charger will sort it out It's just you at the end of the day as the human are gonna be you're kind of left holding the bag You're just kind of waiting for the process to finish now that the hard constraint here is making sure that you've got the right connector There are a bunch of different connectors per market, so us as North Americans, we don't have to worry about seeing like a European style EV plug. It's called like a Menekes plug, and you just, you're never going to see it. You're not going to see it on a charger. You're not going to see it on a car. It has never come to North America. We have J1772s for our kind of level one, level two charging. Same kind of thing for fast charging. You've got this kind of this standard. It's called CCS, CCS-1 or CCS-2, CCS-1 is the North American standard, CCS-2 is the kind of European slash rest of world standard. And then you've got the complexity of the Tesla plug where Tesla don't have any of those, Tesla has its own plug shape and architecture and you need to use adapters if you want to use a Tesla on a non-Tesla charger or a non-Tesla vehicle on a Tesla charger. There's another layer of complexity.
So, to answer your question, it kind of sucks for user experience right now. There is a big learning curve. Do people just carry around a bunch of adapters? Do you kind of realize that you can't charge one time and then you order something on Amazon like an adapter kit? How do people normally deal with this? Manufacturers try to make your life a little bit easier in that, you know, with every Tesla, you'll get an adapter so that you can charge at any J1772 charger. And as for other vehicles, yeah, if you want to charge at a Tesla level two charger, you have to go buy an adapter on Amazon, and they're not the cheapest things. Tesla's just recently started opening up their Supercharger, that's their fast charger network. they've started opening it up to non-Tesla vehicles and what they've done is they've included an adapter as a part of the charging station. So if you pull up and kind of unlock the station with the app, there's something on the supercharger called a Magic Dock. And if you say, oh yeah, I'm charging a non-Tesla vehicle here, when you pull the charge handle out, it actually, instead of pulling out just the Tesla charger, it comes out with a CCS-1 adapter on it. So then you can fast charge it on Tesla. So people are working on it. It's not there. Stuff is a little bit hacky, but it's getting better. That's fair. Did you want to cover the bit, Ben, about how the chargers and the battery don't automatically just charge at the same rate? Or is that best left to a visual that we follow up on, you think? I think I touched on it a little bit. I think that should be fine. OK. All right, I did want to give people a sense of scale, best we can. And best we can means if you have a relative are following us as far as kilowatts and kilowatt hours go. Can we just talk through some vehicle batteries and just say what the vehicle is, how big the battery is, and roughly how long it would take to charge with the different chargers, a few examples helpful for people. Yeah, I'm gonna plug my own. I have a real example that I had written up for my part. Oh yeah, let's hear it. Yeah, so, well I guess pretty said this, but a kilowatt is a rate. It's how fast you're getting the electricity, and the kilowatt hour is the amount of electricity that you're getting. So one kilowatt for one hour is one kilowatt hour. So if my UV has Capacity of 80 kilowatt hours and my charger charges at a rate of 10 kilowatts Then I would need eight hours to charge the battery from empty to full Yep What level would that be Pam? That'd be a level two Good work This was a test This was my final today. This was it I will add one thing. Yay, I passed. I will add one thing. The difference on a residential home's electricity usage between level one and level two is staggering. Just from the residential sector's electricity usage standpoint, it's huge. If you think of an hourly time series of a home's kilowatt difference you're not really going to notice that because the home really is generally from like 0.5 to 1 kilowatts anyway that's maybe like that's really maybe that's like it's not that much of a difference but adding 5 to 20 kilowatts is huge like you'll see homes at like 5 or 6 pm they'll plug the car in with level 2 chargers that that's like 10 times the amount electricity use, it just increases by, you know, ten times tenfold. It's wild to see on a graph. Because I have two competing thoughts. The first one being that math that you did, Pam, is great and works well at low charge rates, but it really breaks down when you start increasing that charge rate because a battery doesn't perform linearly it's not like a bucket it's like it's not how how fast can I pour the water into the bucket that's how fast the bucket will get full it's much closer to an elastic band where in many ways actually where if you take an elastic band and you haul on it super fast there's a good chance it'll just snap but if you if you pull it gently from you know totally loosey-goosey all the way till it's you know fully extended that's that's much gentler on the on the elastic band and as you as the elastic band stretches more and more till it till it gets that point where it would change from elastic to you know elastic deformation, you'll feel more and more resistance. And that's exactly what happens with a battery. So when you're DC fast charging, this happens at all charge levels, but the effect of it is much more prominent when you're DC fast charging, the closer you are to full, the slower the battery is going to charge, because there is more resistance to the electrons flowing into the battery. And this is just kind of like the last little cherry on top of the charging experience I wanted to give. And that's that math doesn't specifically work at higher speeds. If I have a 100 kilowatt hour battery and I go and I plug into a 100 kilowatt capable charger, that doesn't mean that I'm done in an hour because my battery is likely going to start charging at 100 kilowatts. And as it gets closer to full, that charge rate's going to taper off for things primarily because of heat. As the battery fills up and there's more internal resistance, the electrons moving around, it starts to heat up. And there's much more minutiae to do with why DC fast charging has to slow down I don't know well enough but it's just important to talk about for the experience where different cars have different battery management systems they can deal with this DC fast charging in different ways and it's it seems like a very strange thing to look at when you're buying a car but if I Right, like it's came out in like 2016 or something like that. It's kind of old tech But when you plug it in to fast charge The the charge curve of that vehicle is a flat line. It charges at 40 kilowatts basically from 0 to 100% It's crazy. But then you look at a brand new vehicle like the Toyota BZ 4x or like Subaru Solterra same car Um, it starts near its, uh, its maximum charge rate and immediately starts declining from there when you think, Oh yeah, my car can, my car can fast charge at a hundred kilowatts. And you just kind of do that mental math and factor that into how long you're going to be at a, at a rest stop charging, that's not what's going to happen because you're going to be down below 50% of your max charge rate before you know it. I think to paint this picture, though, Ben, we're looking at graphs and it's really easy for us to tell. Like if you can imagine like an X and a Y with like the X axis left to right being like the percentage battery or often state of charge, and then the Y axis up and down being like the rate in kilowatts, right, at which it's charging, you can kind of imagine this like really steep ramp up as you like plug in and start the charge session. And if it's a really good charge curve, that rate will stay really high all the way across until as close as possible to like the battery at being at 100% state of charge. The dicey ones though, like Ben's kind of describing, are like they'll ramp up and then very quickly the like charge rate will drop really, really quickly. and so instead of it just being like 10 kilowatts, 80 kilowatt hour battery, it'll be more like eight hours. It'll be like a lot longer than that because like your charge rate is declining on the graph, right, and so it'll kind of like shoot up and then like go down pretty quickly and maybe that helps a little bit. Yeah. Alternatively, one of the guys in my lab explained it to me as people going on a bus and their comfort level of being on the bus and how many people you can get on the bus at once. And when the bus is empty, you can very quickly get many people on the bus. But then as time goes on and the bus becomes more full, you have to sit near more people. Now some people are standing. Now you're at the big stop and all the people come in and now everyone's smushed together and you're like slowly getting as many people in this bus smushed together as possible. And it becomes really uncomfortable. I love the bus analogy. It's a really good analogy. It's a really good one. It's a great one. I didn't understand this at all until my friend used the bus analogy and then I completely understood and then I also understood from that analogy why you don't want to keep your battery fully charged because you're putting too much stress on it like you don't want your bus at your max capacity because it's just not you know it's not comfortable for everyone you put strain on it all right if it's cool I'm just gonna name a couple popular vehicles and like their battery size and then we can move on to Pam section is that cool let's do it all right so people pretty familiar right Tesla you know everybody wants one maybe maybe you don't so like a Tesla model 3 somewhere between like a 50 to 90 kilowatt hour battery you know model Y it's kind of like the SUV 75 to 100 Chevy Bolt 60 kilowatt hours Nissan Leaf maybe the older ones are kind of 40 they get all the way up to 100 now, Volkswagen ID.4 or Ford Mustang Mach-E, these are kind of like they call them SUVs, but they're not really type vehicles. They have about 75 to 100 kilowatt hours. You have the Hummer EV 210 kilowatt hours, or like a Ford F-150 Lightning. That's 98 to 131 kilowatt hours. And so like, oh, I'm going to add in the RAM rev. So like, Dodge has come out with its competitor to the Ford Lightning, which is the RAM rev. It has a 229 kilowatt hour battery pack, which is an insane. That's like a school bus. Like an electric school bus, yeah, pretty similar. Yeah. But in coming back to pounds point about like we are still in this era We don't have a great handle on how to do this perfectly ethically and you know, perfectly You know good for the planet from cradle to grave man that the people that are buying vehicles like the Hummer EV or the Ram Rev and just Using it to you know, do their 20 mile commute to work every day it really is the same kind of excess as buying a Hummer and using that to do your commute to work. Like buying a car or something. Yeah, but I don't know though, man. Like I'm from New Orleans, spent a lot of time living in like Texas, Mississippi, or places like that. Like it's less about practicality and it's more just like cultural, you know? Like people have trucks, they use them for work. They don't use them for work, right? Like they might never get a speck of dust on it, But you need to provide cars and electric options that people really resonate with and are almost cultural. In middle America, a truck is much more than just a car. It's a cultural symbol, a status symbol. And so I think it's good that we have these options. How we make them practical, I think that's a totally fair argument. But in the Northwest, everyone makes fun of you. You get a Subaru when you move to Portland or Seattle or something, right? We need to have a really good electric SUV for people like that. Otherwise, even us, it's hard to really justify that trade-off or that sacrifice. People don't wanna do it. We need to meet people where they are. Yeah, I can agree with that. I'll get behind that. Okay, Pam, I think we did wanna talk a little bit about electric vehicle energy use and how that impacts people's utility bills. In theory, in magic, EVs are cheaper because the electricity is cheaper than gas. But could you take us through that world and help us start to engage with it? Speak to the people that maybe aren't in it day to day like us and are really just curious. All right, now we're peeling back. We have a good feel for the hardware and the options here.
How does this interact with utilities and the grid? And speak to people really trying to engage. Yeah, so in theory, like you said, in theory, they're cheaper, in theory, they are better for their, you know, have lower emissions, but that's, you know, all theory and practice it gets messed up and gets crazy very quickly. So the big difference between and I'm going to stick to the residential level here. So all this is going to be mainly residential and in theory, not very sorry. The big difference between an EV and an ICE vehicle is that with the ICE vehicle, You're paying at the pump and then the EV assuming you're doing a level one or a level two charger at home now You're paying at the end of the month for your utility or utility bill and the cost of charging that EV is going to depend on your rate structure and how much you're paying per kilowatt hour and Then depending on that rate structure the time that you're charging So in general there are two options for charging your EV You can either meter the EV with your house and then everything is on is the same on the same one bill And that's where, when I spoke about earlier, when I said we can really see the difference between a level one and a level two charger in your hourly electricity usage for the home, that's where you really start to see that. Your second option is to meter the EV separately, and then you get two bills. So you have one bill for your house and then one for your EV. So, for example, PG&E, as of February 2023, has two residential EV rate plans. Their home charging EV2A combines the vehicle and the home, and then their EVB rate requires you to install a second meter and keeps the two on separate bills. So then the question becomes, well, why would you want to keep them separate? That just sounds really annoying to have to pay two bills a month and keep them in line. And it's because the EV specific rates, like that EVB rate I was speaking about, tend to be more dynamic and there's more you can do with them and there's more savings that you could get with them. So there are two, I guess, technically three styles of EV charging tariffs. The first is the normal plot. Before we go there, can I just try and make sure I understood it for anyone that's maybe not quite as familiar with utility bills and how kind of like energy usage flows through? So, what I understand it as is that, you know, right, like you kind of use however much energy use electricity, and then that gets tagged on your meter, and then like every month you get a bill from the utility. Now you have this like net new load right electrifying everything, maybe the first thing is your EV that energy. If you don't do anything else is going to get fed in through to like the usage is going to get fed into your meter, and then translated to your bill through the tariff that you're on, correct? The utility is called tariffs? Exactly. And then how do people even know this stuff? Like you're talking about an EVB and residential, you know, a whole bunch of words, right? How do people engage with this stuff? How can you even figure it out? Unfortunately, you have to be kind of proactive about going on the utility's website and looking for the options. Some utilities make it really easy. sometimes they'll even come to you and they'll tell you these are the options available to you or this is where it can be found on our website or here's some mail about it and then other and and maybe their website's like really easy to use and navigate like i've seen some really great websites and then others not so much um so if you're going to get an ev like we were talking about before people need to know more about their vehicle they need to interact with their utility in new and different ways that they haven't had to in the past part of that process And this is something, when my parents were getting an EV, I had to walk them through, because I, as an energy person, was kind of familiar with it, is going on the website, going through the pain of calling the utility, and doing some research. And hopefully, over time, as EVs become more normalized, then more of these processes will already be set up, and there'll be more resources available for people. Yeah. Makes sense. Sorry. You were talking about the two different types or three different types maybe of tariffs. Yeah. Technically three. Yeah. So when you go on the website and when you look at the different tariff options available for you or maybe you get something in the mail from your utility or maybe you have a friend who got an EV before you and they already know what's going on, there are generally two or three different styles of EV charging tariffs. The first and these can go for either if it's coupled with the home in your normal electricity usage or if it's separate So the first is just the normal flat tariff, which is you? Probably what you're already paying for your home, which is just you pay the same amount for charging at every hour of the day And this is generally the default for most utilities Increasingly, this isn't true. If you look at San Diego gas and electric DTE here in Michigan consumers in Michigan et cetera, like this is starting to change. But generally, for most of the country, this is the default. The second option is a dynamic time of use or TOU tariff. And the reason why, sorry, these dynamic time of use tariffs are where the price of electricity varies throughout the day. EVs are a particularly special case as users of electricity in the sense that one, they pose a large addition to a residential electricity load, like I spoke about earlier, people's electricity usage multiplying by 10, just because they plugged in their EV. And two, at their core, EVs are just simply battery storage on wheels. They're just batteries moving about space. And to also be clear, two things that make grid operators particularly stressed are one, relatively rapid, large, unplanned additions to residential load that are physically moving across space and to untapped unreported storage assets. So in this sense, EVs are kind of a double-edged sword because they run the risk of causing huge unplanned increases in load, but they also offer significant value in the form of storage if we find a way to harness that. So grid operators will seek to avoid the former and realize the latter through these dynamic time of use rates. The time of use EV rates are specifically designed to incentivize EV owners to charge at what the utility deems to be optimal hours and they achieve this by leveraging price, so changing the price of electricity throughout the day. In a time of use tariff design there are generally two or three periods on peak, off peak, and sometimes super off peak. Other times they'll name them different things but it's generally two or three different periods. The on peak hours are when charging would be most expensive and the off peak or the super peak would be the cheapest. I remember hearing some story of I think a utility in Texas where for their EV rates the super off-peak hours of cost of electricity was zero. I never got to, yeah I never got to, I remember just seeing it in passing and I should have looked more into it because that's just it, it was something to do with wind. Anyway, so for example- So what does the average consumer do? Because obviously the on-peak times are to be the most convenient times for the average person to charge. And so how does the average consumer deal with that? What do they do? Just pay the exorbitant price or? I guess it depends on what you're able to pay for starters, which is a whole justice issue on its own. But the goal is to push people to charge at night or to charge when solar is producing. And that is because? Because there's just less electricity usage. And I think wind tends to be better at night. More performance at night, yeah. Yeah. So push people overnight when there's less demand for electricity, because people are like sleeping, et cetera, et cetera. Is that the idea? Well, either times of less demand or times of high production. Because if you're trying to, instead of ramping supply up to meet demand, instead you're matching supply with, I'm sorry, instead of ramping supply up and down to meet demand, now we're looking to demand and ramping demand up and down to match supply. So it's times of- I see. So in the middle of the day, maybe, when solar is really producing. Yeah. So for example, in PG&E's EV2A rate, which is the one where the home and the EV are metered together, the off-peak hours, which are $0.24 a kilowatt hour, are 12 AM to 3 PM. The partial peak, I don't know why they call it that. The partial peak hours are 3 PM to 4 PM and 9 PM to 12 a.m., which are 44 cents a kilowatt hour. And then the on peak, which is four to nine p.m., which is when everyone gets home and wants to charge their vehicles and they're all cooking food and they're watching TV and all their lights are on, is 55 cents a kilowatt hour. And so, as time goes on and as I think utilities are taking these time of use rates more seriously and public utility commissions in general are starting to see their value and they're pushing them more, we're gonna get more granular, I guess is the right word for it, and more, I guess granular is the right word, kind of more granular and structured rates where, you know, there's part of your partial peak time is one hour, just three to four p.m. And so you can compare that time of use rate that I just explained to their base E1 residential flat tariff, which is always $0.35 a kilowatt hour. So if you're smart about how you charge or if you have the ability within your schedule to be really picky about when you charge, then you can save a lot of money. I think an issue is that not all of you have these multifaceted rates that are two, maybe three different rate tiers for different times of the day. And they might not even be like sequential. They're, you know, they're split up. They're spread out throughout the day. But a utility could change them, you know, as different generation capabilities come online in that power jurisdiction, it might be in the utility's best interest to change around those rates when they're applicable, how much they are, those kind of things. I can see it being kind of difficult for the average homeowner to really stay on top of, honey, you gotta remember to not charge the EV right now. But that kind of- Yeah, I mean, that's true. And that's one of the things I'm- That's an opportunity. Yeah, I mean, I think that's true, but that's either up to the different actors to try and like help people along that journey to drive a better outcome, right? like either like the utilities providing a price incentive, which is like a market way for them to like incentivize you, but sure that's complicated. So like, do you get a text message that says like, hey, you know, don't charge now, or it's already plugged in and you don't charge until later, or, you know, like I think there's opportunities and people are working on this to kind of help people on that journey and make this more simple, kind of more set in, forget it, I think. And I think too, This is something that the Public Utility Commission, or at least in the US, the Public Utility Commission, I don't know what the equivalent is in other countries, but that's something that especially as these time of use rates begin to become the default, which we're seeing in California and in Michigan, I know off the top of my head, that's something that they need to be proactive about, about managing fair rates and communicating with customers and consumers and seeing what works best for them while still having the best outcomes. and a lot of the really early research at the time of use.
And I think too, this is something that the Public Utility Commission, or at least in the US, the Public Utility Commission, I don't know what the equivalent is in other countries, but like, that's something that especially as these time of use rates begin to become the default, which we're seeing in California and in Michigan, I know off the top of my head, that's something that they need to be proactive about, about managing fair rates and communicating with customers and consumers and seeing what works best for them while still having the best outcomes. a lot of the really early research at the time of use and I just know some of this because this is the type of work that I do and like the type of research that I'm studying was just well are these rates gonna work are people gonna respond and then they found out okay yes people will respond we're seeing reductions in peak electricity usage and now the question is well if we start breaking it up into three different periods are people are we just gonna lose people or what you know what design of this is gonna get the best results and what design do people like the most? And what is not infringing upon their daily life the most? What's the easiest for people to work with? And can we create different rates that are better for certain lifestyles? A rate for someone with young children is gonna look very different than a rate that works best for me, a grad student living alone in an apartment, that can sometimes work from home, it just depends. and one thing I think is interesting and you touched on this right so these time of use tariffs from the utilities are becoming more common and people are shifting their usage or responding to them you know at least somewhat right like I can appreciate that it's complicated for the average person but like we can help them get there I also think what's cool EVs also have a battery right so like in theory like let's say and again not everyone's this lucky and this doesn't nothing's one size fits all but like you could in theory have rooftop solar, charge up your EV battery during the middle of the day, and then use your EV to power your house during the peak window, right? And so like, you're not even using like in theory, any electricity or not that much during the peak and you're saving yourself a lot of money and you're also like using directly those solar electrons like that concept and that like stitching together of the solar system with the battery in your EV to kind of like optimize or I almost call it like utility tariff hacking I think is really cool and very interesting. Do you want to do you want to just expand a little bit on like V2H and V2G? Yeah, this is certainly a whole episode but like I think that like we talk about again in the industry like people there's like we take this for granted there's these terms of like behind the meter and in front of the meter right I think we talked about that utility meter like It's very literal in that sense. And so behind the meter is like, you're not moving those electrons in front of the meter and like selling them or dispatching them into the grid. That's in front of, behind is that you're not. And so in theory, your rooftop solar system sits behind the meter and so does your electric vehicle and so does kind of all of the energy use demand in your house. and so you could charge your electric vehicle battery or maybe even a standalone battery or maybe both behind the meter and then use your batteries to eat or like power the load of your house you know maybe it's your heat pump powered by a smart thermostat at home maybe it's just your tv or dishwasher any of these kind of things and if you go back to those time of use tariffs right like that makes sense because you're getting the solar from the panels and then like it's cheaper to kind of like charge during those off peak hours right like in the PG&E there was 55 cents a kilowatt hour for on peak and then off peak was like 24 cents or something like that yeah so like if you're using less or no energy during that peak and you're shifting that load with your battery or your EV to those kind of like during the day hours like one that's cleaner and like also like you're almost like becoming more self-sufficient and so you're able to like really really reduce your you know your your energy charges and so like all of this could kind of like happen without needing to dispatch your energy in front of the meter into the grid in like a vehicle to grid type scenario and so there's like a lot of work I think and I think like people are excited about all of this potential and I agree it's very exciting like let's talk about all of it let's do a whole V2G episode let's I think is very cool and maybe gets overlooked a bit is like doing a lot of interesting things behind the meter to optimize and reduce your energy cost. I think also I kind of got away for a second by talking about time of use program design and I ended up being more about like everyday life but the real reason to try to target EVs with these time of use rates, specifically. And why we want people potentially on these time of use rates if they have EVs is because EVs are relatively easy to shift electricity usage for, because you can charge them overnight, especially if you have a level two charger. And the amount of load that they add to the system is so much, just to wrap that all up. Um, there's one other type of EV charging rate that you might come across, and it's, I don't, not very many people use it, but I recently learned it existed. Um, it's, it's called EV time based charging. It's an EV time based charging incentive, which if you know what peak time rebates is, it's kind of like that, but like not really. I don't really, I don't see this type of tariff, um, taking off, but you know, maybe I'll eat my shoe like the guy from the through a dynamic time of use rate. Instead, the utility can incentivize charging at optimal hours through a rebate. So JCP&L in New Jersey, for example, offers a two cents per kilowatt hour credit for the hours an EV owner charges during what they deem to be off peak. So it all happens, all the math happens like behind the scenes after the fact. Interesting. I don't really like that program design. I don't know how I feel about it. I feel like that's a little more opaque for the user you're not really seeing the immediate impact of like okay I'm using what is cheaper. It's Yeah rebates are hard yeah, it's also I it's also just different in the impact because on the Time of use the dynamic time of use in the moment type of rate, then it's almost like I Not that I want it's you know, it's almost like An extra charge here. It's like here's a savings. So maybe their idea behind it is that you know, they're giving people a carrot So maybe they're more likely to do it But I just don't know how I feel about that design And to be clear most Utilities are using the time of use construct or the pricing right like this this rebate thing is a bit less common Let's assume they are using something at all because plenty of utilities don't have time of use or they don't have anything at all and they're just having all these you know, But you don't have to tell your utility when you install an EV charger in your home. So they might not even know that you have one. But if they do offer an option, it's most likely always time of use. I was shocked when I saw this JCP&L example. Someone showed it to me. I had never seen that in my life. Someone's going to come back with five more examples in the Slack and be like, here Pam, here's like 10 examples of this EV program that you said you've never heard of before. but it's super popular. But I had never heard of it. Well, I do have to run pretty quick here. And I think we've kind of, I think we did a good job. I think we covered a lot of different aspects of this. Like you said, James, we should spend an entire episode talking about VitaG because electric vehicles are this super interesting potential piece of the grid where you can move like a source and sink of electricity. You can physically move it around very easily and dispatch it in different ways throughout the day. It's, yeah, there's a lot of complexity we can go into there. We are getting closer and closer to you guys wanting to do a DEA aggregation participation in a wholesale market episode. We're getting so close. The next step after that would be order 2222. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, just to tease it a bit, right? Like we talked about behind the meter, using your battery and your ED to kind of hack your tariff and reduce your cost. I mean, I think we'll dive into this deeper, but certainly you can use your battery to participate in a utility demand response program, or like Pam sort of hinted at there, become part of an aggregation into the wholesale market. And I think that's kind of more where this concept of V to G comes into play, right? like not just impacting your own behind the meter footprint, but participating in the larger grid. And there's a lot of complexity. It's moving very quickly, but it's certainly very interesting and we plan to cover in the future. That's a huge area of interest of mine. I can't wait. Can't wait.
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