Why EV owners are so different from the rest of us

Greentech Media

rsz_ev_charging_310_231By day, electric vehicles are taking the world by storm: their sales are doublingevery year, their fuel efficiency is off the charts, and some of them can even accelerate from 0-60 mph about as fast as you can say “Elon Musk.”

By night, the electric vehicle (EV) community continues to make waves. While you are in bed dreaming about how you too might own an electric car someday, many EV owners are doing something that is reshaping the energy landscape.

They are using gobs of electricity.

Today we once again crack open Opower’s energy data storehouse — the world’s largest, spanning more than 50 million households worldwide — to examine the energy usage behavior of an increasingly important segment of utility customers: electric car owners who charge their car in the wee hours of the night.

To fuel our analysis, we evaluated anonymous data from about 2,000 night-charging EV owners in the western U.S. (more details on the methodology are available here) — a region where Teslas, Nissan Leafs and other plug-in electric cars abound.

Our statistical findings suggest how vastly EV owners’ energy profiles can deviate from normal; why the timing of EV charging is so important; how solar panels fit into the picture; and what it all means for utilities, their customers, and the future of the electric grid.

After a long day, it’s time for a good night’s charge

The wee hours have in recent years gained traction as a popular time for EV owners to recharge their vehicles.

In the hourly usage curves below, you can see that the EV owners in our dataset (light blue) exhibit a massive spike in electricity use beginning at midnight, shooting up to around four times the average level.

Graphic credit: Waleed Al-Alami 

Why the huge usage bump at midnight sharp? The answer hinges on incentives and utilities’ ability to shape consumer behavior.

Specifically, many EV owners in the western region of the U.S. (upwards of 60 percent, according to one California study) and all the EV owners considered in our analysis have signed up with their utility to get highly discounted electricity in the hours between midnight and 7 a.m., in exchange for a daytime price hike. The sudden surge shown on the right side of the graph above suggests the behavioral effectiveness of this framework: when EV owners enroll in a time-of-use rate plan, they tend to operate in alignment with it.

Graphic credit: Waleed Al-Alami 

Offering an off-peak rate plan is often a savvy move on the part of utilities: it helps them prevent power-hungry electric cars from overtaxing the electric grid during the day, when system-wide demand is already on the high side. As we’ve examined in a previous blog post, high electric demand in the afternoon hours is notorious for destabilizing the power grid.

That’s why utilities in numerous states ranging from California to Texas to Georgia have been quick to introduce targeted customer engagement programs and off-peak charging incentives that help smooth the integration of EVs into their territory. Last month, Minnesota became the first state to roll out a statewide approach for promoting night-time EV charging.

We’ve seen above that EV owners who have an incentive to charge their car at night understandably exhibit abnormal electricity usage during those hours. What may be more surprising is what happens after the sun rises.

After the sun rises, electric car owners are still different

It’s morning, around 7 a.m. Teslas have been charged, the time-of-use electricity price for participating EV households has cranked up, and the hourly electric usage from those households has diminished.

However, despite the marked reduction in usage, EV rate plan subscribers continue to out-consume their peers even during the waking hours. Between 7 a.m. and midnight, they use an average of 21 percent more electricity from the grid than the typical single-family household.

Graphic credit: Waleed Al-Alami 

EV owners’ outsized grid electricity consumption during the waking hours appears to register at specific times of day, particularly in the morning and evening. For a visual perspective, look at the hourly usage curves shown above, which illustrate that EV rate subscribers’ grid electric usage during the edges of the day (i.e., 7 a.m.-9 a.m. and 5 p.m.-midnight) are relatively high, but usage during midday is actually below normal.

Why? Consider a couple of key factors that may help explain EV owners’ distinctive usage pattern during the waking hours.

1) EV owners appear to have larger electricity needs, especially when at home

People are more likely to be home in the morning and evening; EV owners may be especially likely to use more power at those times because they have bigger homes as well as more amenities (see below); it’s also entirely plausible that some EV owners may occasionally charge their EV during those times, even though their time-of-use rate plan discourages this kind of behavior.

Graphic credit: Waleed Al-Alami 

 

2) EV owners are much more likely than their peers to own solar panels

One recent survey among utility customers in the western U.S.  found that 32 percent of EV owners had installed rooftop solar, which drastically reduces their grid electric consumption during the sunny middle period of the day. Likewise, we discovered that many EV households’ afternoon solar generation routinely exceeds their own needs. Our regional analysis shows that one in thirteen EV rate-plan subscribers regularly spin their electric meter backwards via solar, compared to just one in 86 typical households.

Thanks to their surplus solar generation, EV owners who are also solar super-users actually consume a tad less total daily grid electricity than the typical utility customer.

Graphic credit: Waleed Al-Alami 

In light of EV rate-plan subscribers’ unique behavioral and household profile, it’s striking that having a sufficiently large solar rooftop can make them look pretty darn normal when considering total daily grid electric usage.

More after-midnight action is on the way

With their huge night-time charging spike, bigger and fancier homes, and elevated grid electric consumption in the morning and evening, EV rate-plan subscribers are a distinctive type of energy user.

And it appears that there are many more of them on the way. Last month, eight U.S. states announced a market development plan to put 3.3 million zero-emission vehicles on their roads by 2025. This month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk released his company’s patents to catalyze the growth of the broader EV industry. Meanwhile, states and utilities are taking bold steps to support off-peak charging options that play nicely with the power grid and make EV fueling more affordable.

Utilities will play a central role in shaping how the EV landscape unfolds in the coming decades. As an increasing number of EV owners begin to plug in, utilities are well positioned to advise them and guide their behavior (e.g., encouraging them toward night-time charging) in a way that helps smoothly integrate electric vehicles into the modern electric grid — in parallel with other critical trends like distributed solar generation, changes in energy prices, and new controls on power plant emissions.

***

Barry Fischer is the head writer at Opower, where he manages the Opower Outlier blog. Ben Harack is an implementation engineer at Opower.

Source: Greentech Media. Reproduced with permission.

Comments

5 responses to “Why EV owners are so different from the rest of us”

  1. Professor Ray Wills Avatar
    Professor Ray Wills

    Earlier adopters of new tech are generally wealthier, and this is reflected in overall higher levels of energy use by early EV adopters, as it would with new tech TV adopters. The data above won’t be helpful in predicting future energy use patterns of a generalised future EV user base.

    I have an EV but am probably not typical either – I have solar on my roof and charge on solar during the day on most occasions, and so generally choose not to charge overnight. But this indeed may be more typical of the future as solar gets cheaper and we have excess domestic generation capacity.

  2. Rob Avatar
    Rob

    Not correct to say EV owners consume more energy. Might be okay to say they consume more energy in the form of electricity. IC car owners consume more energy in the form of liquid fuels. Likely that EV owners consume less energy overall as they don’t consume energy while waiting in traffic.

    1. Miles Harding Avatar
      Miles Harding

      EVs don’t get close. That 60 litre tank full of petrol contains something like 580kwh of total chemical energy and 580kwh is sufficient to drive a Leaf or i-Miev more than 4500 km!
      A single kw of typical solar panel can drive the same EV about 15,000km a year, not bad for $1000 worth of panels.

  3. Miles Harding Avatar
    Miles Harding

    In Australia, we should add that EV owners are also extremely rare with less than 1000 on the roads, nation-wide.

  4. Mark Melocco Avatar
    Mark Melocco

    The additional energy consumed by EV owners in the morning may be explained by the ability of their EV to pre-heat the cabin from grid power before they leave.

Get up to 3 quotes from pre-vetted solar (and battery) installers.