AI's strain on power markets

[alarmguy]

According to whom, exactly? I have no problem charging two up to 90% every night, and often before midnight. Adding a third would be more of a question of how much space I have in my driveway than not having enough juice in my utility service.

Maybe not possible for everyone, really depends on duty cycle and vehicle used. If you have 3 Silverado EVs with the big 200KWH batteries and you're expecting to charge all 3 from 5-100% every night on a 200A service, that's probably not going to work.

But for most people who have a 200A service? Probably not an issue.

Throwing out blanket statements is what the anti-ev crowd loves to do. The correct answer is that it's use case specific.

Your throwing out blanket statements, and I am not at all against EVs
I give you credit for acknowledging “maybe not possible for everyone“
If not, then, why do you accuse me with inaccurate accusations?

 

[alarmguy]

Why not? No one runs the battery down to zero and most charge to 80% regularly. I charge to 75% unless I am going further.

AG, IMO, much of what people seem to think about EV ownership is not reality. You learn. That's my experience.

What happens when the family of four all needs to charge three of their electric vehicles at one time?

Anyway, you’re all grabbing his straws and this is why I think many electric vehicle owners fail to see or acknowledge Gasoline will rule in many cases, convenience, and reality over the current electric vehicle technology.

However, you’re throwing in your personal experience as a one car pony and not in a family of four with three electric vehicles.
It’s completely insane to think those three vehicles will always be able to recharge at the house at just the right time on any given day.

Even you admitted in these threads many many times electric vehicles fill a specific purpose and use but not for everybody

 

[JeffKeryk]

What happens when the family of four all needs to charge three of their electric vehicles at one time?

Anyway, you’re all grabbing his straws and this is why I think many electric vehicle owners fail to see or acknowledge Gasoline will rule in many cases, convenience, and reality over the current electric vehicle technology.

However, you’re throwing in your personal experience as a one car pony and not in a family of four with three electric vehicles.
It’s completely insane to think those three vehicles will always be able to recharge at the house at just the right time on any given day.

Even you admitted in these threads many many times electric vehicles fill a specific purpose and use but not for everybody

Of course an EV is not for everyone; no one vehicle is.
A family with 3 EVs would probably need a set up to manage charging, including a relatively known schedule. But why would they all need to charge at the same time? That assumes they are all very low and need to charge to nearly full. Could it happen? Sure. Is it likely? No.

Cars generally have a lot of downtime. Just plug the dang thing in and forget about it. I get about 35 miles per hour.

EVs fueling is different; you learn. For the right use case, it is far more convenient and cheaper than gasoline.

 

[PandaBear]

AI is currently in an arm race, and therefore electricity price be ****ed if they can get those GPUs they better run them 247 at full power. Other data centers, not as much, and are just running typical human operating hours for high price and then background tasks or reduced speed and power at night. This is the good thing about data centers as the workload are shared between customers and you get to choose either cheap and wait or you get the top speed at highest price.

Data centers are in theory still more efficient than doing the same workload at home or in house. They have better and more efficient equipment and cooling for the same workload. People tends to forget that things moving to data centers also mean the same amount of workload and power is reduced in the office or at home. Companies also move to the cloud so they don't have to hire as many people doing the same workload when the service providers take care of that for you. Same guy probably update all the servers for all the customers vs each customer has to hire one person to do it. Except AI, they run them full blast 247 training because of this arm race.

I blame the current data center boom on an arm race when capital is cheap and dollar is inflating away in central bank all over the world. The only good story that sell investment is AI, gold, T bill, and everything else is not really a good investment for the risk. I personally like gold better but I still buy some AI stocks just in case it went to the moon. They took the money and build data centers with it.

BTW, I think last week there was one MSFT corp bond having a lower yield than one US federal bond, I am not sure which one but this reverse is strange. This is how much people are believing them (or not believing them) right now.

 

[PandaBear]

Of course an EV is not for everyone; no one vehicle is.
A family with 3 EVs would probably need a set up to manage charging, including a relatively known schedule. But why would they all need to charge at the same time? That assumes they are all very low and need to charge to nearly full. Could it happen? Sure. Is it likely? No.

Cars generally have a lot of downtime. Just plug the dang thing in and forget about it. I get about 35 miles per hour.

EVs fueling is different; you learn. For the right use case, it is far more convenient and cheaper than gasoline.

In the worst case, in emergency, in the suburb or urban area, there's Uber and rental car companies. People with unpredictable schedule either don't drive EVs or they get into a habit of charging at every single stop they make.

But again, for the sake of refreshing our argument, EV being cheaper than gasoline should include the additional depreciation of the battery replacement cost over time. Your EV, if similar to a Nissan Leaf, can have a battery that wears out before the rest of the car do, or has a concern most owners share and therefore will have to discount when selling used, if the battery is not replaced. This is part of the cost of ownership and IMO going to be a bigger factor than EV vs gas.

 

[Brons2]

Your throwing out blanket statements, and I am not at all against EVs
I give you credit for acknowledging “maybe not possible for everyone“
If not, then, why do you accuse me with inaccurate accusations?

Ok, maybe I didn't phrase my response very well, or went too far with the last sentence.

I stated that it's use case dependent, and gave an extreme example to where it probably would not be possible to charge 3EVs overnight with a 200A service.

I think for some subset of the population, it would be possible to charge 3 EVs overnight on a 200A service. Whether that's 80% or 20% of the population, would be hard to know without examining individual use cases with regards to battery capacity of owned EVs, mileage driven per day, etc.

At 32A/240V, you're going to get around 7.2kwh. 3 of those going full bore would be 96A, or a little less than half of a 200A circuit. At 7.2KWH you could charge a 72KWH battery 0-100% in about 10 hours.

That said, I have never started charging from zero percent at home, in fact typically I'm above 60% when I start charging at home. Lowest I ever plugged in was 23% at home after a 165 mile round trip through a charging desert between my house and Houston. I have started an L2 session at a hotel on a road trip where I was at 11%, we left at 10:00 the next day and the truck was at 100%, but anyway.

In case you have one driver that drives more than the others, you'd probably want adjustable EVSEs, maybe let one go 48A to charge faster and limit the others to 24A that don't drive as much, or some permutation thereof. Many EVSE have dip switches, but there are also EVSEs like Emporia that have sensors that can auto adjust to available panel voltage as well, which could be another way you adjust to meet household needs.

 

[Brons2]

https://shop.emporiaenergy.com/prod...kZzEkdDE3NTkzNDEyNDEkajQyJGwwJGgxMzM0NzM4MTM3

This is the Emporia Pro, it's not cheap, but has load balancing to keep from going over your panel limit. Probably cheaper than a service and panel upgrade for someone who has a 100A service.