Month: October 2022

• Electric cars won’t overwhelm the US grid anytime soon, energy and transportation experts say. 
• EVs don’t consume a lot of energy now, and it will be decades before electric cars take over fully.
• EVs can be charged when it’s best for the grid and may even be able to store energy for the future.

Battery-powered Teslas, Fords, and Volkswagens aren’t about to overwhelm the US electrical grid, despite what Tucker Carlson and some Republican politicians say. 

Last month, electric-vehicle skeptics had a field day when California’s utility urged customers to conserve power during a scorching heat wave by not charging their cars during certain hours. Some conservatives questioned how the state expected to ban sales of combustion-engine cars by 2035 if it couldn’t handle the number of EVs on the road today. 

On his Fox News show, Carlson bashed electric cars as a “new way to overburden California’s already collapsing energy grid.” 

Energy and transportation experts disagree. More electric cars plugging in will increase energy demands over time, necessitating a more robust grid and smarter charging habits, they say. But there’s no cause for immediate alarm. With careful planning, there will be plenty of electricity to go around. 

EVs may someday make the grid stronger and more resilient. 

EVs aren’t a big power suck

Though California has more electric cars than any other state, they make up just .4% of all energy consumption during peak hours. Even at 2030 estimates, some 5.6 million electric cars, trucks, and vans would only comprise 4% of peak loads.

“Saying they’re what’s straining the grid ignores 99.6% of today’s challenge,” Max Baumhefner, a senior attorney with the National Resources Defense Council, said in a recent blog post. 

Though EV sales are rising, Americans keep their cars for 12 years on average, so it’s going to be a long time before the entire US fleet changes over. The Rocky Mountain Institute, a sustainability-research group, projects that total US energy demand will grow 1% to 2% annually as a result of electric-car adoption. That’s comparable to the increases utilities saw during the energy-consumption booms of the 20th century, with the proliferation of refrigeration and air-conditioning, the group said.

“Load growth is something that some utilities haven’t had to deal with for a while, but it’s generally well within the range of what utilities can plan and manage for,” Chaz Teplin, a principal at RMI, said, adding that the larger challenge will be transitioning the country to renewable energy sources.  Still, grid upgrades will be needed to handle the extra load, experts say. According to a 2020 study from the Brattle Group, 20 million light-duty EVs on US roads by 2030 will require a $45 to $75 billion investment in more robust energy generation, distribution, and storage. 

EVs are uniquely flexible

Unlike a refrigerator that needs to keep food cold 24/7 or an air conditioner that might draw power for hours on end on a hot day, a typical electric car might be parked 23 hours out of the day. That affords lots of flexibility in terms of when they’re charged. Shifting charging to times that are most advantageous to the grid — like overnight when demand is low or during the day when solar generation is high — can greatly reduce peak grid stress, even with increased demand from EVs, experts said.

“For the foreseeable future, we can do a lot with the grid we already have,” Nick Nigro, the founder of Atlas Public Policy, a transportation-focused consultancy, told Insider. 

RMI sees California’s recent heat wave as proof that managed charging works: People adjusted their habits and the state avoided blackouts. If drivers continue to charge whenever they feel like it, “then it means we need to build an extremely robust grid,” Matthias Preindl, an electrical engineering professor at Columbia University, said. But smart-grid technology that instructs vehicles when to charge could do wonders for managing peak loads and negate the need for infrastructure upgrades in many areas, he said. Some utilities have smart-charging programs, but they aren’t commonplace yet. 

A recent study of the 2035 EV ecosystem found that encouraging people to charge during the day could save Western states billions on energy-storage investments. Increased solar generation will require batteries to store electricity for nighttime use, but daytime charging cuts down on that need.

In the future, EVs can support the grid

Some experts envision a future where EVs can strengthen power grids if used cleverly. Vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, technology would transform plugged-in electric cars into a distributed battery system that could help utilities store electricity for emergencies or times of excessive demand. 

This future is far off, but car companies are dabbling in adjacent technologies. The Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck can act as a backup generator and power a home for up to three days, for example. Preindl said V2G will be key for storing energy generated by wind and solar and transitioning the US to clean energy sources. ”If all cars are electric, the amount of energy storage we have access to is huge,” he said.

Pedestrian fatalities, unresolved safety issues, overachieving and overweight trucks — overweight electric trucks — and divisive attitudes about vehicles equipped as is the new Hummer EV, are very much on the mind of Robinson Meyer.

Mr. Meyer, who suggests that the 1,000-horsepower pickup is a cross “between an ambulance and a race car,” is a staff writer for The Atlantic, a well-respected, long-lived journal founded in 1857. His recent essay in the monthly’s flagship magazine starts off describing a scary video clip posted online by Edward Barseghian that features the 9,000-pound Hummer hurtling full tilt towards three lanes of cars idling at a light (the driver stops it in time). Then he goes on to pretty much berate the machine.

“The Hummer EV haters and lovers had discovered one of the most important facts about electric ‘super trucks‘: They are very heavy, and they go very fast,” he writes. “If you imagine an ambulance that can accelerate as fast as a Formula 1 car, you’re imagining a vehicle only slightly more unwieldy than the new Hummer.”

Meyer goes on to discuss the issue of allowing battery powered vehicles that weigh as much as the Hummer does onto public roads. “The weight of EVs is a safety issue that drivers — and cyclists and pedestrians — will only have to keep worrying about as these cars go mainstream,” he explains. “Suffice it to say that cars as huge as the Hummer EV need to face some kind of regulation, especially in cities and towns, where they pose a distinct threat to the public.”

To Hummer devotees, them’s fightin’ words. But Meyer takes pains to present a sort of response from Anthony Schiavo, a research director at Lux Research, a global advisory firm: Why is the Hummer so heavy if its batteries weigh only about 3,000 pounds?

“It’s absolutely a design choice and a marketing choice,” Schiavo answers. “People like larger vehicles, and the reason why those larger vehicles are getting made is because they sell.”

The author concludes by bringing into his thesis the issues of climate change, liberal and conservative politics. In some places, his arguments wander; they become muddled. But for those enthused about electrics and big trucks, “Frankenstein’s Hummer” is worth a read.

Related video:

Last month, the Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba revealed a powerful new cloud computing system designed for artificial intelligence projects. It is used by Alibaba’s cloud customers to train algorithms for tasks like chatbot dialogue and video analysis, and was built using hundreds of chips from US companies Intel and Nvidia.

Last week, the US announced new export restrictions that will make future projects like that unlikely. The Biden administration’s rules forbid companies from exporting advanced chips needed to train or run the most powerful AI algorithms to China.

The sweeping new controls are designed to keep the country’s AI industry stuck in the dark ages while the US and other Western countries advance. The restrictions also block the export of chipmaking equipment and design software, and ban the world’s leading silicon fabs, including Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung, from manufacturing advanced chips for Chinese companies.

“The United States is saying to China, ‘AI technology is the future; we and our allies are going there—and you can’t come,’” says Gregory Allen, director of the AI governance project at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), a think tank in Washington, DC.

Chris Miller, a professor at Tufts University and author of the recent book Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, says the new export blockade is unlike anything seen since the Cold War. “The logic is throwing sand in the gears,” Miller says.

The US action takes advantage of a decade-long boom in artificial intelligence in which new breakthroughs have become coupled to advances in computing power. Pioneering new projects often involve machine learning algorithms trained on supercomputers with hundreds or thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs), chips originally designed for gaming but also ideal for running the necessary mathematical operations. That leaves China’s AI ambitions heavily dependent on US silicon.

Baidu, the leading Chinese web search provider and a key player in cloud AI services and autonomous driving, also uses Nvidia chips extensively in its data centers. Last October the company announced one of the world’s largest AI models for generating language, built using Nvidia hardware.

ByteDance, the Chinese company behind TikTok and its counterpart in China, Douyin, relies on Nvidia hardware to train its recommendation algorithms, according to its own software documentation. Several Chinese companies, including Alibaba and Baidu, are developing silicon chips designed to compete with those from Nvidia and AMD, but these all require manufacturing from outside China that is now off-limits. Alibaba and Baidu both declined to comment on the new rules. WIRED did not receive responses to requests for comment made to ByteDance and several other Chinese chip firms.

Big Tech companies in China—as in the US—have made large AI models increasingly central to applications including web search, product recommendation, translating and parsing language, image and video recognition, and autonomous driving. The same AI advances are expected to transform military technology in the years to come, and shape how the US and China butt heads over issues like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Taiwan’s claims to independence.