I don’t think that’s actually true, transmission grids are built to handle peak demand, and a doubling or a tripling of total electricity use does not mean a doubling or tripling of peak usage.
In temperate climates for instance charging of cars will almost entirely happen overnight, with a significant rate discount. The basic existence of such a large battery will smooth out the peaks as well as add to them. In fact you’re likely to get far better utilization out of the existing infrastructure, and any new infrastructure which is built, which will bring the per unit costs down.
And in any case, the electricity grid pays for itself, if people are willing to pay the going rate then the infrastructure can be built to satisfy that demand. What is the amount of money spent each year on maintaining and upgrading oil and gas infrastructure? For that matter what is spent maintaining the existing grid? These are huge figures, electricity companies will not be doing this for free, they are happy to maintain the grid in exchange for the revenues that come from it, and they will be only too happy to grow into competitor markets and use what was their competitors’ revenues to fund their expansion.
> transmission grids are built to handle peak demand, and a doubling or a tripling of total electricity use does not mean a doubling or tripling of peak usage.
Well, in theory no. But in practice, if you look at the duck curve [1] of any electrical distribution system, you find that the difference between lowest and highest load during the day is pretty small, maybe 30% of peak load. So really there is a very limited potential to be had by smoothing out the curve, maybe you can get a 20% increase in total electricity use, but certainly not a 200% increase.
> What is the amount of money spent each year on maintaining and upgrading oil and gas infrastructure? For that matter what is spent maintaining the existing grid?
Annual maintenance cost for the US T&D grid is $40 billion. We're talking "increase it by a factor of 10". If you assume the power companies pass this cost onto customers with zero profit margin, it's an increase in the electricity price of 9 cents per kWh. Current national average price is 10 cents per kWh. So it's doubling the price of electricity, while saying "we will use 2x-3x as much of it". An increase of 4x to 6x in your electricity bill.
To estimate out how much slack there is in local distribution systems, you want to look at the demand curve rather than the duck curve. Further, you want to look at the peak of this curve on a high-demand day -- for California, that means a hot summer day. For northerly regions it will be a cold winter day.
The peak last year was 46 gigawatts on July 25. The peak in 2017 was 50 gigawatts on September 1. So I do think it's fair to say that there is a 2x factor of minimum:maximum use on at least some existing grids.
There's one more issue, of course: how much minimum-period slack is left on the day of high demand conditions? Using the date picker on the demand curve to go back to July 25, 2018, it looks like demand bottomed out at 26 gigawatts around 4:00 AM. There is still a significant diurnal variation in demand that could be used for several hours of nighttime EV charging without increasing system capacity.
The difference between peak load and lowest load change a lot depending on where you look. Geography plays a huge role (heating/cooling running in the night?).
The effect on the individual subgrids can also be much larger than on the grid seen as a whole. For example if you look at [1] (a graph of a hot California day in 1999 taken from [2]) you have commercial peak load at 3 times the low point, residential peak at about 4 times the low point, and industrial peak and agricultural peak at maybe 1.3 times their low points. However because of the way the peaks are offset from each other the total demand only varies by a factor of two. So the spare capacity in off-peak times of any individual power line might be much higher than a graph of total demand suggests.
> Annual maintenance cost for the US T&D grid is $40 billion. We're talking "increase it by a factor of 10”
You quoted $2300bn to replace the transmission and distribution system, you say you’d need to increase the $40bn maintenance figure tenfold to replace the grid, but $400bn a year would mean doing that in five and half years. In reality whatever increases turn out to be needed have to happen over thirty to forty years.
And of course doubling demand would be accompanied by huge extra revenues, the electricity system takes in on the order of $400bn a year, doubling the unit production of electricity would mean $12tn of extra revenues, $24tn in total revenues over a 30 year timescale, relative to this it’s difficult to see how $2tn of extra costs on its own can mean a doubling in electricity rates, as you suggest.
In temperate climates for instance charging of cars will almost entirely happen overnight, with a significant rate discount. The basic existence of such a large battery will smooth out the peaks as well as add to them. In fact you’re likely to get far better utilization out of the existing infrastructure, and any new infrastructure which is built, which will bring the per unit costs down.
And in any case, the electricity grid pays for itself, if people are willing to pay the going rate then the infrastructure can be built to satisfy that demand. What is the amount of money spent each year on maintaining and upgrading oil and gas infrastructure? For that matter what is spent maintaining the existing grid? These are huge figures, electricity companies will not be doing this for free, they are happy to maintain the grid in exchange for the revenues that come from it, and they will be only too happy to grow into competitor markets and use what was their competitors’ revenues to fund their expansion.