Explain this to people who have been doing that for years....

This goes in at length before making the point about more power available via PV in daylight hours.... But doesn't note the available wind energy overnight. Anything not put to use is potentially wasted. And daytime PV generation can power industry.

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Sounds like whoever did this study had a vested interest in people using charging stations...

Yeah, like the people who insist we use gas stations instead of piping gasoline directly to the house. Bastards.

From reading the article it looks like the actual problem might be that people charge their cars when they get home, where there is already stress on the grid. If the put off charging their car until 2 or 3 am, when demand is really low, then there wouldn't be an issue. I think the problem is how they define "overnight"

Maybe someone could design a charger that you plug in, but don't immediately start charging with. Perhaps you use an app to schedule the charging to start at 2am. Then the car trickle charges just enough to not lose all power until 2am at which point it switches to full charging mode.

I'll admit that I don't know all that much about electric cars, but this shouldn't be too hard of a problem to crack. It might even be doable with current technologies. I know some chargers intelligently stop charging when your battery is full, switching to trickle charging afterwards. This would basically be the opposite with a timer built in.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of cars can already do this. Alternatively, you could also just slow charge your car on a regular 120 volt outlet. This will ensure that the power draw isn't too high at any one time. A level 1 charger can get you about 8 km of charge capacity per hour. So for most people, charging on a basic outlet is enough to charge a car for their daily needs overnight. Most people aren't driving hundreds of kilometers every day.

Most of your better chargers can do that, they have a setting for off peak hour charging. Others rely on your settings in your car.

This is interesting. One of my obstacles to buying an electric car, besides the price of the car itself, was the cost of getting a charging station installed. If I could charge it nightly from the regular outlet on my porch, that would save some money and make an electric car more affordable.

I'm hoping my current gas car lasts for awhile, but it's 14 years old so it might not keep going too much longer. When it finally dies, I want to at least get a hybrid if not full electric.

I figured that this would be easily doable with current technology.

You'll be interested in this video and also this video if you have time and want to learn a lot.

I’m pretty sure all the EVs out there allow for scheduled charging

All models of Teslas have it. It’s built into the software

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GM recently advertised that they offer something towards the cost of charging stations. Of course, those rebates are added to the cost of the car anyway.

The Tesla app lets you specify when it starts charging at home to avoid high rates. We pay reduced rate in evening so my home charge starts after midnight

EV drivers shouldn't change to accommodate the electrical grid. The electrical grid should change to accommodate EV drivers.

They're piping dangerous electricity to houses with children in them!

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We live in a remote mountainous area with few nearby services. Nearest EV charging station is maybe thirty miles away. The regional power utility goes dark here in storms anyway. No EV is in our immediate future, thank you. Easy fix: Stock up; stay home.

It would be great if PGE gave hourly usage breakdowns to download. Something they offered before and it was handy to determine if time-of-day bills would save money. The data isn't available any more (or very well buried). In any case, when we buy an EV, we will probably just use a 120v/20amp circuit. Our heat pump is the main power pig.