Tesla says one million EVs would barely make dent on Australian grid, and mostly soak up excess solar

The director of Tesla Motors in Australia and the head of its local energy team that focuses on battery storage says the rapid growth of EVs in Australia will have limited impact on the electricity grid.

Josef Tadich, the regional director of Tesla Energy in the Asia Pacific, says there are current around 100,000 Tesla EVs in the country – it is the best selling electric brand by far in the Australian market with well over 50 per cent of sales to date – that together consume around 150 to 200 gigawatt hours of electricity a year.

“That is about 0.1 per cent of NEM (National Electricity Demand),” Tadich told the All Energy conference. “So if we go to a million vehicles in Australia, that’s going to be a bit less than 1% of annual demanded.

“If you think about that in context of the Australian electricity system … that’s a lot less than the amount of renewables we’re curtailing.

“So the energy is in the system, and we can tailor it right now, because there’s negative prices during the day, and we’re flooding the system (with solar) that could go quite easily into the fleet with a million vehicles with in my opinion.”

Tadich also noted that the the company’s Supercharger fleet, already at more than 100 supercharging sites, is doing most of its charging during the day, when electricity prices are often negative, which mean Tesla often gets paid to charge its EVs. “That’s just showing the way that the energy systems are evolving,” he says.

Chau Le, the head of e-mobility at Origin Energy, says the growth of EVs is presenting a unique opportunity to transform two major industries.

“We’ve got an energy system that needs to decarbonizse, and EVs provide such a valuable energy asset to support that decarbonization journey,” she said.

“These cars have batteries, like 60 kilowatt hours, multiple times the batteries that people put in their home.

“So if we can connect all of these millions of batteries on wheels to the energy system to soak up all of that excess renewable energy that is otherwise curtailed and then feed that back into the grid during periods of high demand, that is massive value that the transport sector can add to the energy sector.

“The transport industry needs to go through its own decarbonisation journey, and electrification is the most efficient way to do that.

“But the other trend that we see in transport and in mobility is the emergence of new business models like subscription like car sharing, like ride hailing, that is really challenging the notion of traditional car ownership, because if you think about, you know, your car, it’s the most inefficient form of capital investment that we make as consumers.

“We spend 1000s of dollars investing in car and sitting there, 95 cents of the time doing nothing, just actually depreciating. So that’s why I see a huge trend towards newer mobility models.”

The important of the decarbonisation of the transport industry was highlighted by Ross de Tango, the head of energy and infrastructure at the Electric Vehicle Council, who pointed out that Australia currently imports around $50 billion worth of fuels a year for the nation’s car fleet.

An all electric fleet would require around $20 billion of electricity, which is a saving of $30 billion a year, and means that the money that is spend is on local production.