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Here's What EVs Are Doing to California's Energy Grid
David Shultz
David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.
If you’ve been outside lately in Southern California, you’ll know there’s an ongoing heatwave here. In something of an annual tradition, the electricity grid is under duress because of the heightened demand for power-hungry air conditioners.
In response, the California Independent Systems Operator, which oversees the state’s electric grid, has issued “flex alerts,” which are essentially pleas to residents to conserve power during peak usage (4 p.m. to 9 p.m.) by turning off appliances, air conditioning, setting thermostats to 78 degrees Fahrenheit, and refraining from charging electric vehicles.
This last item–don’t charge your EVs–has drawn some schadenfreude from some news outlets which point out that, just last week, the state announced plans to ban new gas car sales. How can California possibly hope to power a fleet of around 20 million electric vehicles in the future when it can hardly power around 1 million cars today?
Whether or not it’s being asked in good faith, it’s a valid question. So here’s an explainer about what exactly is going on with the grid and the role that EVs will likely play in the future.
The problem is that it’s too hot right now. As always, no one can claim that climate change caused this heatwave, but the overwhelming majority of scientists agree that human-caused climate change is making heatwaves like this one more common. The future will certainly have more such heat events than the present, especially if we don’t find a way to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions.
When it’s too hot, people use a lot more air conditioning. Air conditioning is especially energy-intensive. The result is that–all at once–there’s more demand for electricity. When demand outstrips supply, blackouts occur.
“People think of ‘the grid’ as this uniform system. But really, it's a bunch of electrical connections that have evolved over time,” says Cascade Tuholske, an assistant professor of Human-Environment Geography at Montana State University. “Some aspects of the grid are super antiquated. And you can't just pump more electricity into a system without upgrading it.”
You can imagine the electrical grid sort of like plumbing. Like water in pipes of different diameters, there’s a maximum amount of electronics that can flow through different grid architectures, so simply adding more energy into the system doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.
The California electric grid, in other words, has failed to keep pace with the increasing demand for air conditioning. Or, as California Gov. Newsom put it in a press conference yesterday, “All of us have been trying to outrun Mother Nature, but it’s pretty clear Mother Nature has outrun us.”
Even without the increased demand from electric vehicles, the grid needs upgrades. But EVs–even a whole state’s worth–don’t add as much demand to the grid as fossil fuel advocates might suggest. The main reason EVs aren’t likely to cripple the grid is that they don’t all charge at the same time and they don't usually charge when demand is high. Like with smartphones, most EV charging happens overnight, while the car sits in the garage, while people aren’t awake to use appliances, while demand for air conditioning is lowest.
Nationally, EV charging accounts for just .2% of energy grid consumption, by some estimates. Adding a nation of EVs will absolutely add demand for electricity to the grid–as much as 25% more, according to scientists–but this transition is going to happen slowly, over time. Even California, which has the most ambitious EV adoption policy, is allowing 13 years before banning gas-powered car sales. It will probably be 30 years or more before 90% of the cars on the road are electric. The demand for more power will ramp up slowly, just as it has historically as Americans bought refrigerators, air conditioners, computers, etc.
President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act includes massive amounts of funding to address these exact issues, including $2.5 billion to “modernize and expand capacity of America’s power grid.”
Ironically, EVs actually may offer help to a stressed electrical grid if they’re used correctly. Cars with full batteries can be plugged in and used to supply energy to the grid – just as they did a month ago when Tesla pooled energy from its users’ vehicles to boost California’s supply. Of course this will drain your car’s battery, but you should be able to get paid for your troubles. A 50kWh battery like what’s found in an electric vehicle is more than enough to power the average house for a day.
“At least in theory, if they're integrated into the grid, you can draw the power off your EV battery during periods of excess demand,” says Tuholske.
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David Shultz
David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.
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PG&E Is Seeking EV Owners for Its New Program to Sell Energy Back to the Grid
06:00 AM | December 12, 2022
Photo courtesy of Ford
Pacific Gas and Electric is in the midst of enrolling customers into an ambitious new pilot program that seeks to use electric car vehicles as a means of powering daily life and stabilizing the grid.
The “Vehicle to Everything” pilot envisions a future in which automobiles not only draw their power from the electrical grid but can also strategically add electricity back in when demand is high — and generate some money for their owners along the way.
The concept of bidirectional energy flow using EV batteries isn’t new, and dot.LA has covered various vehicle-to-grid endeavors in the past. But having a utility company as large as PG&E onboard could begin to transform the idea into a reality.
Though the program’s website has been live for a few weeks, PG&E officially began to invite customers to pre-enroll starting on December 6th. The pilot has space for 1,000 residential customers and 200 commercial customers. PG&E isn’t releasing the numbers for how many people have signed up so far, but Paul Doherty, a communications architect at the company, says he expects the enrollment period to take several months, stretching into Q1 2023.
On the residential side, customers can receive financial incentives up to $2,500 just for enrolling in the pilot. That money, says Doherty, goes towards the cost of installing a bidirectional charger at the customer’s residence. The cost of installation varies according to the specifications of the residence, but Doherty says it’s unlikely that $2,500 will cover the full cost for most users, though it may come close, with most installations ranging in the low thousands.
But there’s more money to be had as well. Once the bidirectional charger is installed, customers can not only use the electricity to power their homes but also begin selling electricity back to the grid during flex alerts. Southern California residents may remember back in September when the electric grid was pushed to its breaking point thanks to an historic heatwave. During such events–or any other disaster that strains the system–customers can plug their vehicle in, discharge the battery and get paid.
Doherty says that users can expect to make between $10 and $50 per flex alert depending on how severe the event is and how much of their battery they’re willing to discharge. That might not seem like a huge sum, but the pilot program is slated to last two years. Meaning that if California averages 10 flex alerts per year like in 2022, customers could make $1,000. That could be enough to offset the rest of the bidirectional charger installation or provide another income stream. Not to mention, help stabilize our beleaguered grid.
There is one gigantic catch, however. PG&E has to test and validate any bi-directional charger before it can be added into the program. So far, the only approved hardware is Ford’s Charge Station Pro, meaning only one vehicle–the F-150 Lightning–can participate in the program. That should change soon as the utility company tests additional hardware from other brands. Doherty says they’re expecting to add the Nissan LEAF, Hyundai’s IONIQ 5, the KIA EV6 and others soon since it’s just a matter of testing and integrating those chargers into the program.
One name notably absent from that list is Tesla. So far, the country’s largest EV presence hasn’t announced concrete plans for bidirectional charging, meaning there’s no way for Tesla owners to participate in the pilot.
“We hope they come to the table as soon as possible,” says Doherty. “That would be a game changer.”
The commercial side of the pilot looks similar to the residential. Businesses receive cash incentives upfront to help offset the cost of installing bidirectional charger and then get paid for their contribution to stabilizing the grid in times of duress. PG&E says electric school bus fleets, especially, represent attractive targets for this technology due to their large battery capacity, high peak power needs, and predictable schedule–a strategy that mirrors what V2G pioneer Nuvve described to dot.LA back in October.
If California’s plan to transition all new car sales to electric by 2035 actually succeeds — which would require it to add nearly two million new EVs to state roads every year — that’s two million rolling, high power batteries with the potential to power our homes, our jobs and the grid at large. Getting there will be a colossal undertaking, but PG&E’s pilot should be a litmus test of sorts, assuming they can figure out how to get more vehicles than the Ford Lightning into the program.
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David Shultz
David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.
Meet the Founders Who Are Creating the Google of Lawsuits
10:04 AM | December 20, 2022
Andria Moore
Earlier this year, Kaylee Zhu, a portfolio manager at Actuarial Management Corporation (AMC), was pouring over documents when she noticed that Black Rifle Coffee, a corporation both AMC and many of their investment clients are stakeholders in, was in breach of contract. She brought the matter to AMC Holdings CEO Jonathan Wallentine who decided to file a lawsuit against Black Rifle Coffee in May, accusing the coffee company of securities fraud.
It was, however, only after AMC had spent $100,000 on lawyers and countless hours drafting the lawsuit, that Zhu learned there was a similar lawsuit, from a different company, already in the works. “It was the first time we realized that, oh, it's actually hard for people to find a complaint,” said Zhu.
So Wallentine wondered, “Why did we just pay $100,000 to draft this when we have the same exact complaint? We could have saved a pile of money, because it's just a copy and paste.”
That’s when he and Zhu decided to create a public platform that houses information about legal complaints in one place. Or, Google for lawsuits. That’s the best way to describe laWow, a digital search engine designed to serve the public by providing access to records of lawsuits and legal complaints. Earlier this month, laWow closed a $1.75 million funding round to continue bettering their platform.
“What we're building is we're putting all the information out there that doesn't exist online,” said Wallentine.
Wallentine and Zhu hope that laWow will help others avoid the headache of redoing work that already exists. By presenting all of the legal facts about a corporation including any existing legal actions brought against it, laWow helps people decide how they want to structure their own lawsuit.
“So, the real big idea is, 'why does this still have to be such a shadowy black market, when the public is entitled to this information, and it would actually do a lot more to benefit society, if [people] could actually read other complaints that are similar and be more knowledgeable?'” Wallentine said.
laWow works in the same way Google does — by prioritizing the information the user is searching for as the top results. Users can search lawsuits by corporation name or by using keywords, and the site will present all of the claims against that company in a growing database of more than 260,000 lawsuits.
“So when you search, like, ‘McDonald's sexual harassment,’ for example, you're going to get the top read result,” Wallentine explained comparing laWow to a micro internet. He added that, “Each complaint has its own website.”
Beyond the practical applications for journalists, civilians, and courts, Wallentine also thinks laWow will be immensely helpful to investors.
“So right now you have a situation where stock investors — they're buying into companies that have massive litigation and lawsuits against them and don't even disclose to their own owners that they exist,” he said. “So a lot of the [laWow site] traffic is like stock investors saying, ‘I'm not going to buy into this company unless I can at least go through laWow and check to see how many lawsuits are filed against them.’”
So, the next time you are interested in investing in a company, or curious about their morals, maybe check laWow. The evidence you find might surprise you.
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Andria Moore
Andria is the Social and Engagement Editor for dot.LA. She previously covered internet trends and pop culture for BuzzFeed, and has written for Insider, The Washington Post and the Motion Picture Association. She obtained her bachelor's in journalism from Auburn University and an M.S. in digital audience strategy from Arizona State University. In her free time, Andria can be found roaming LA's incredible food scene or lounging at the beach.
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