EEVBlog2 IONIQ EV Fast Charging

[Dr Bob]

Dave is getting to see how easy it is to own an EV. Some people think there needs to be millions of fast chargers all over the planet and that nobody but Tesla has them when that's not the case. In most areas, the power company has off-peak tariffs for EV owners to encourage charging overnight when demand is low. Doing this means that the grid isn't going to melt and it's fantastic for the electric company since they are selling more energy at a time when they've historically had very high capacity available. In some parts of the world the power company has had to pay companies to use power at night to maintain enough load on the system since it doesn't make sense to turn off big thermal plants and let them cool down. The same can apply to hydro as cutting off all flow downstream of a dam would cause big tidal swings on rivers.

Dave also will start seeing the importance of his ABC's (Always Be Charging). If NRMA is offering free charging, take it. It won't last forever. If the car can even be trickle charged while it's parked, that's not a bad thing and some shopping centers offer free or inexpensive charging as a way to bring in customers. Somebody would have to be parked all day to use up enough power to make much of a difference. People coming in for an hour to shop are getting what? $.70 of electricity from L2 charging? Hopefully the profit from their shopping is much more than that.

It has to be kept in mind that refining crude oil into petrol is energy intensive. Argonne National Labs did a study and found it takes 7.46kWh per US gallon to refine light sweet crude. Lower grades take more energy. The easy way to look at that is to convert that power to around 26miles of range in an EV without counting the energy in the petrol/diesel. If refineries aren't refining as much transportation fuel, there is more power left on the grid for EV charging.

Keep the updates coming, Dave. As an engineer, your observations will be based more on reality than some others. I'm interested to see how much of charging can be attributed to the solar panels on the house.