Highway EV charging will need a ton of power — sooner than you think – EQ Mag
A new report warns that EV charging along Northeast highways will require sports-stadium levels of grid power by 2030. Where are the plans to supply it?
The typical electric-vehicle charging site today has a few EV chargers that can make do with the power grid that’s already there. But within the decade, demand for charging battery-powered cars and trucks at sites along highways will start to exceed the power draw of sports stadiums — and supplying that kind of power will require major interconnections to utility transmission grids.
That’s the warning from a new report that finds there will be truly massive future power needs for EV charging in New York and Massachusetts, two states that have committed to selling only zero-emissions passenger cars by 2035 and moving to emissions-free trucks by 2045 and 2050, respectively. Similar megawatt-scale needs are likely to arise for the EV fast-charging networks already being developed in EV-forward states such as California, and now being planned in all 50 states with billions of dollars of federal funding.
“Right now, when people are talking about capacity” for EV charging, “they’re asking which distribution transformer has capacity, or which feeder, or even a substation,” said Dave Mullaney, report co-author and a principal on the Carbon-Free Transportation team of nonprofit RMI.“But when you start to throw tens of megawatts on a distribution system, you’re quickly overloading it.” (Canary Media is an independent affiliate of RMI.)
By 2030, over a quarter of the 71 highway sites studied in the report will require more than 5 megawatts in charging capacity to meet peak charging demand, the report found — roughly equivalent to the power demand of an outdoor professional sports stadium. By 2045, some sites could reach around 40 MW in peak charging demand, equivalent to a major industrial site.
The new report — from RMI, clean transportation nonprofit Calstart, Northeast U.S. utility National Grid, and fleet-vehicle technology-services companies Geotab and Stable Auto — is one of the first of its kind to examine future charging needs with grid power availability in mind. Today, charging developers choose where to site stations based on factors including traffic, expected utilization and land availability, the report notes. But electric infrastructure “should play an equally critical role and can drastically impact development costs and timelines.”
It takes only a few months to install EV chargers, but it takes years to approve and build major transmission grid extensions. Only a handful of truly megawatt-scale charging hubs now exist, and some of them are already facing delays in getting the grid connections they need, whether in densely packed urban areas or at remote highway sites.
If state agencies and utilities don’t coordinate on how to supply high-voltage grid interconnections to the mega-charging hubs coming down the pike, the result could be delays and higher costs that hinder expansion of a technology that’s key to decarbonizing transportation.
“If we wait 10 years or 15 years to make these investments, I can guarantee you they’ll be double or triple” what they would be if they were planned well in advance, said Brian Wilkie, National Grid’s director of transportation electrification in New York. On the other hand, “proactive planning and anticipatory investment” could lower the cost of project implementation by about one-third compared to projects that fail to take grid capacity and availability into account, he estimated.
That’s why National Grid is sharing this report with transportation agencies, utility regulators, community stakeholders and EV-charging companies, he said. “What we believe needs to happen is the transportation planning sector and the utility sector need to come together and join forces.”
From bare-bones highway charging to a multi-megawatt future
This challenge has not yet been taken up by most of the states implementing the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program, said Benjamin Mandel, Calstart’s senior director for the Northeast region. Created by last year’s federal infrastructure law, the program has $5 billion to help every state build at least a skeleton of charging networks along major transportation routes, while allowing states that currently have relatively low rates of EV adoption to avoid installing more costly chargers than they’re expected to need in the next few years.
But while initial installations made with NEVI funds might not draw a lot of power, state governments and their private partners would be wise to locate those small charging hubs where they’ll have the capacity to grow.
NEVI calls for at least four high-speed charging stations supplying at least 150 kilowatts of charging along every 50 miles of major highway corridors — a peak load of a little more than half a megawatt per site. But the new report presumes that high-traffic sites will need 10 to 20 chargers capable of supplying 350 kilowatts apiece within the next five years — which would pull up to 7 megawatts of peak load — and 30 to 40 chargers in the next 10 years, or as much as 14 MW of peak load.
The following graphic shows how sites with the amount of charging needed to support New York’s and Massachusetts’ EV targets will drive increasingly high peak loads at a typical mixed-use highway plaza serving both passenger EVs and medium- and heavy-duty electric vehicles in New York or Massachusetts by 2035.
Source: canarymedia
