How much electricity does the grid need for full fleet EV ownership?

QUESTION

Hi John,

Hoping your engineering brain could assist to verify a calculation I’m struggling with:

Not sure if you’ve covered mass EV uptake in Australia on the channel. If so, I must have missed it somehow, otherwise would love to see it.

How much extra ‘lectricity do we need to produce to power an Australia full of EVs?

A quick look at this awesome website https://opennem.org.au/energy/nem/?range=1d&interval=5m shows Australia runs on about 25,000MW (closer to 30GW peak in Summer)

Capacity likely would be greater than 30GW but not sure exactly what peak output is.

Let’s say:

- Australia has 20M vehicles driving 12,000km/year (33km/day)

- Energy required is 10KWh/100km/ton

- An EV weighs 2 tons (so 20KWh/100km)

- All EVs would be charging, effectively continuously through the day

In one day 20M vehicles drive 660M KM which requires 132M kWh (132,000 mWh).

With my assumption vehicles are effectively charging continuously is that 132,000MWh/24 = 5,500MW of additional power required?

Is this even remotely accurate?

We’d need around 20%-25% more electricity generation capacity to approximately power the whole country’s (current) travel needs in EVs?

I tried to pay attention in school – but that was a long time ago. I’m probably failing in the MWh->MW thing somehow.

Thank you!

Michael

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ANSWER

Hey Michael,

Yeah - I think you’re in the ballpark. For someone who just paid attention at school but without tertiary STEM qualifications - well done indeed son. (I don’t often say that.)

With a few better assumptions (14,000km/yr) and a better number for vehicles (we’re only replacing ‘passenger’ vehicles, for example) I think it’s about an 18% increase in electrical energy.

We probably don’t need more power stations (ie - generation capacity) to do it, so they’d just need to up the base load supply (burn more coal at night).

It’s completely do-able, and we are totally energy independent on coal. (Climate change: Huge, separate problem. ’Separate’ for the purpose of analysis of your electrical capacity issue.)

A bigger issue is that the local poles, wires and apartment complexes can’t cope with every dwelling drawing an additional 32 amps (7kW) at once. Even worse on three-phase. There would be a lot of dark trendy apartment blocks if we try that without a local grid upgrade nationally.

Check out EVs & Climate Change Deception >> for more on this issue or get the Truth About Cars and Carbon Emissions here >>

JC

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