> How do you get people to only charge their cars when it's windy?
My electrical provider gave me a good discount on my fixed rate plan by letting them micromanage the charging times of my car. I tell them I need it X% charged by some time in the morning, and they'll make sure it's at that charge by that time.
If I really need to charge it right away I can still just do that, but the vast majority of the time I don't need to think about it. My car sits in the garage for many hours, there's plenty of time to optimize the charge timings.
Chances are they even pick up a lot of time where spot prices go negative, so they're making money selling it to me and buying it from the grid.
That can encourage it, but people will need to charge even when it's not windy. Having a smart charger wait for cheap electricity which may never come is a great way to end up with dead battery.
That's not too smart then. I'm talking about something with a bag of weighted goals. Having a dead battery would have a strong enough cost that it would pay more for higher market rates if state of charge is low.
The solution seems obvious in the use of wind turbines: when the wind blows there is power, the lines are cooled and the cars charged. No wind, no power, no need for cooling.
Am I missing something? A <sarcasm> tag maybe?
On a more serious note on how to get people to change their electricity use there is a real solution in flexible (hourly) pricing. This is what we have where I live - Sweden - and it can be a way to lower electricity bills quite a bit [1] by moving power hogs like water heaters, tumble driers and car chargers to the lowest-priced times of day. If you have solar panels and a contract which enables you to sell excess power at market rates (like we do) you can decide to feed their output into the net when prices are at their peak - usually around noon and somewhere between 17.00 and 21.00 (when it is still quite light in much of Sweden given that we straddle the polar circle) - while using most of it for power hogs off-peak.
[1] on the assumption that flexible pricing is controlled by supply and demand, not by some policy-enforcing surcharge. Electricity prices need to be able to go lower as well as higher than 'normal', not just normal or higher.
The quote is saying that transmission line capacity is higher when it's windy and lower when it is windless (due to less cooling).
If you assume that EV charging is the marginal load which would put you over the windless capacity, but not the windy capacity, then in order to prevent overload you'd need to prevent EV charging when there is no wind and therefore the transmission capacity is lower.
Taking a step back it's a general problem with this type of optimization, what to do when the system has become accustomed to, and is designed for, capacity which isn't available. How do you get people to use less power in order to avoid a blackout?
Maybe it will some day. I have two electric cars in my garage sitting idle most of the day and night. I have no way to connect them to the grid in a bidirectional manner. There is nothing a local electrician can order and install for me that will allow it. If I had a Ford Lightning truck, they could get me a proprietary Ford Charge Station Pro (which doesn't use ISO 15118-2), that's about it.
- Large grid to decouple weather patterns
- Demand response
- Storage
People already get on hourly contracts and schedule car charging for when it is cheap. The next step is automating it and making it more streamlined.
Some companies already support chargers which integrate with the pricing, they can even give you money back through demand response.
https://support.tibber.com/en/articles/5597987-smart-chargin...