[mschuster91]

> The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles. Nowhere near everyone is always charging all the time.

The problem is that our electricity grids are nowhere near up to the challenge. They're not as rotten as the US grid, but still - barely any smart capability, no realtime insights anywhere but on the generation and distribution level, no small-scale dynamic load management...

To support even 10% of an electric vehicle fleet getting plugged in after people arrive at home, not to mention large-scale small renewables, grid operators will have to do extensive upgrades. Street transformers need real-time load monitoring, PLC support must be present everywhere to make sure all the components of the grid can still talk to each other, and vehicle chargers and solar inverters need to talk with the grid as well.

And there are barely any standards in that area.

[ivan_gammel]

>The problem is that our electricity grids are nowhere near up to the challenge.

This is not a problem. Our electricity grids are usually matching the current demand. In the past they were upgraded at sufficient speed and economic model of that upgrade was reasonable. I do not see, why we won’t be able to continue the same way. We have 25 years to upgrade until majority of customers will switch to EV. That is a lot of time.

[mschuster91]

> Our electricity grids are usually matching the current demand.

Barely. Grid regulation has exploded in cost in the last few years.

> We have 25 years to upgrade until majority of customers will switch to EV. That is a lot of time.

A lot of infrastructure has been barely, if at all, maintained for far longer timespans. The 2018 fire, for example, was caused by a worn-out hook that may have been at least 88 years old [1]. What makes you think that utility providers will do the necessary upgrades in that time?!

[1] https://hackaday.com/2020/09/17/closely-examining-how-a-pge-...

[ivan_gammel]

How some fire in USA is relevant to our (European) infrastructure?

[mschuster91]

Because our infrastructure isn't in much better shape, not since the EU all but forced privatization and the new owners focused more on shareholder returns than on maintenance.

We're living on borrowed time.