And they do, at least here locally. To me, it’s sheer stupidity not to have backup power for vital energy resources.
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Sounds like battery fires are difficult to extinguish. Are there stats as to how frequently these battery fires occur in EVs?
https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/After-massive-bus-fire-CT-pulls-electric-fleet-17329085.php
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Seems like more of them should offer and encourage time-of-use rates, since the time of day when use is the highest (and the grid is most at risk while the most expensive generation sources are turned on) is well known to them. Give people an obvious incentive to shift use away from peak rate hours and they will do so.
Electric vehicles all have some sort of way to schedule charging to avoid peak rate hours, so that a commuter arriving home in the evening can plug in the car then, while the car waits until off-peak rate hours to start charging.
Might be a state specific situation: does the state utilities regulator need to approve that type of rate fluctuation? I wouldn’t sign up for it…I prefer a fixed rate. Seems like they’re penalizing people who WFH or are stay at home moms, for example, because they use more electricity during the day in their homes than those who use the A/C at the office.
Around here, peak rate hours are 4pm to 9pm, so most of the WFH or SAHP people will be in off-peak rate hours most of the day, although they may still use more electricity simply by doing stuff at home than by being at the office during the day (though commuting to the office could consume more energy than whatever home use a WFH person may consume).
Time-of-use rates align consumer incentives with actual costs, since a kWh is actually more expensive to generate during peak hours (since the more expensive generation sources are the ones turned off during off-peak hours) and carries a greater risk (of grid overload) premium during peak hours.
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Before Covid I had switched to the night flex plan which gave me 400 kW for free during the nighttime hours but the charge during peak hours which here was something like noon to nine was higher than their standard rate. Once Covid hit and we were home all day it seemed pointless to have a rate during the peak hours that was higher than what we would get on the standard plan so we switched back from the night flex plan to the regular electric bill plan without the nighttime incentive. That said I still tend to have my car programmed to charge between midnight and 6 AM
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I like this idea. The tax should be based on individual choices. My car doesn’t weigh as much as some bigger vehicles. Bigger vehicles are harder on the road. They should pay for that choice. The other options are equally practical. Too bad nobody will think logically and implement these great ideas
We have had Time of Use/off peak rates for decades, long before we had an EV. It’s a great way to save some money on the bill. We run the dishwasher at night. Try to run the dryer at off peak hours. Weekends are always off peak.
BTW, we just had a power outage for about 12 hrs last night because a tree in the neighborhood fell on overhead lines during a storm. Car charging was a non-issue though because we had already charged when we got back Monday from our 340 mile road trip to the mountains. So we amused ourselves by driving to Lowes to return something and then checking out the Wegmans (hubby had never been) and then took a walk in the rain to pick up food (just wanted a walk).
It’s always nice to have the car during a power outage. We don’t get rolling blackouts here but we do get localized tree-fell-on-line or car-hit-pole outages a few times a year.
There have been outages in the winter when we just go sit in the car and enjoy the heated seats to warm up. No problem to run the car in our garage unlike a gas vehicle that can cause a build up of carbon monoxide and other pollutants. ”Idling” an EV takes very little power and, of course, no emissions but it is a great place to charge your phone and laptop. We had Onstar for awhile and that was pretty cool because it meant the car had its own WiFi for one thing but it’s fairly expensive so we knocked that back to the minimum.
Whether y’all have EVs or not if your utility offers Time Of Use rates it’s worth doing some math and seeing if it would save you any money. It had definitely saved us $$ over the years.
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We’re getting a little off topic here so this will be my last post on the subject, but, one of the barriers to time of use rates is metering. Standard residential meters only record the amount of electricity you use. Utilities need to install new smarter meters that can differentiate between on and off peak usage in order to offer time of use rates. That can get expensive both from the cost of the meters plus the manpower to install. Unless they are being incented to do so by their regulators, they will be reluctant to do this.
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No, but you piqued my curiosity, so I turned to Google:
From that article:
Here’s one article where 4,500 gallons of water was needed to fight a Tesla car fire:
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Live in a NYC high rise, so no home charger option. That leaves public chargers at $0.49 -$0.59/kwh which is more or less at par with $5/gallon gas.
Electric is completely impractical under those circumstances, without even considering the inconvenience of charging on long trips
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My brainstorming mind wonders if water is the best way to put out an electrical fire - usually it’s not recommended.
Besides getting more data, I hope folks are figuring out other methods that can easily be incorporated into a firefighter system. Even with fewer fires per type of vehicle (at least for now, over time who knows), there’s still a need.
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Of course, many NYC high rise residents do not own cars and take public transportation instead… and electric makes a lot of sense for city buses as well as subways.
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the excess water is used to cool the batteries, to stop thermal ignition of the cells not yet ignited.
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Subway hasn’t been that much fun last few years. Nowhere near as bad as the bad old days, but definitely heading in the wrong direction.
Pretty good write up of a 1560 mile road trip here (780 round trip). https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/w9izc6/road_tripping_in_a_kia_ev6/
They have patience, no way I can drive that long going just 2 over the speed limit. I would rather stop to recharge more often.
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Agree 100%.
I think what gets lost in translation is that the definition of “road trip” is quite different for different people. For me, that trip that the person was writing about should take 13-14 hours (assuming good traffic) and we will stop at most three times and, if all is going well it’s not unreasonable to think we would only stop twice.
If “road trip” means going the speed limit and stopping at a hotel overnight during a 784-mile drive, then that’s just a different bar.
And this is before we get into the fact that I need to carry five people with three rows of seats and 40 cubic feet of storage behind the third row.
It will be feasible at some point, but it’s just not feasible now (for me at least). I will stay closely tuned, but everything in that write up, together with the Reddit OPs additional remarks in the comments, reinforces the idea that an EV would slow me down.
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Perhaps they are beater 2004 Toyota Priuses that are worth $2-3k each. But why have two?
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