Electric vehicles will change household electricity demands
Although an EV charging grid has been installed across South Africa, the debate as to the viability of buying and owning one, is ongoing. The reality is that this technology, in its current form, is simply beyond the reach of most South African families.
A recent study by ABI Research refers to how governments aggressive goals to ban or at least limit the sales of internal combustion engine vehicles, motivates manufacturers to commit to the rapid development of electrically driven vehicles.
It further indicates that households with one electric vehicle, may in fact use 37% more electricity and that EVs will shift the in-house demand for electricity from 4-8 kWh to 11 kWh. This increase in demand will increase the risk for of outages during peak times of the day.
“While many regions have enough electrical energy available to meet the future EV demand, energy supply is not always available when needed. In the face of these facts, OEMs, end consumers, governments, grid operators, utilities, and other energy supply and distribution stakeholders must work together to enable a smooth transition from ICE to EVs.”
Smart charging may be an effective tool to alleviate some of the challenges. “Provided chargers are connected to charging operators, strategies such as dynamic power sharing – the ability to control the energy available to plugged-in EVs preventing sites from exceeding their maximum energy capacity – and dynamic pricing – the ability to influence customer behavior by altering price per kWh based on utilization – can easily be deployed with significant results.”
“As EV adoption continues to grow, so will the reliance on electrical energy, and the significant peak consumption increase is worrying. Therefore, ecosystem players must collaborate to deploy tools to balance the grid and develop and adopt standards to make these tools widely available to end consumers,” James Hodgson concluded.
These findings are from ABI Research’s Electric Vehicle Smart Charging Platforms application analysis report.
For more on this particular report, visit www.abiresearch.com.
