Electric vehicles might avoid an electricity shortage

You read that headline correctly.

Utilities are in a tough spot, financially, when it comes to new power station. Generating stations are expensive and risky. Choose the wrong technology and you could get into trouble for it. Build a power station and if the demand doesn’t materialize, shareholders will call for blood. Especially if it’s a nuclear plant - those most expensive of powerhouses.

The problem is that power demand is not consistent. Commercial users tend to demand energy during the day, which is also the peak time for air conditioning during the summer as people fight the heat. During the winter, demand plummets. The result is that power companies have tremendously expensive assets sitting around idle, or nearly idle.

One solution is conservation, giving customers incentives to cut their power usage or to move it to the night time (which is why daytime power for industry is far more expensive than night-time power in many areas). That both avoids the need for new power plants and evens out usage a bit. Some utilities sign agreements with customers that cut their power levels slightly during peak times, a voluntary brownout which leaves most appliances working but still saves some energy.

But the ideal, as far as utilities are concerned, is probably simply having more capacity, but using it all the time. That’s where electric vehicles come in, and is no doubt the reason why 30 utilities are working with GM on plug-in cars. Having thousands of those things charging overnight would be a great boon to power companies that want to keep their expensive power plants operating at capacity both day and night, rather than running at capacity for nine hours and then dropping dramatically - or, worse, running peaking plants (generators that only run at peak times - sometimes the oldest, least efficient, and dirtiest ones) during selected days and having them sit idle for the rest of the year.

Some automotive writers have gotten nearly hysterical over how electric cars will destroy the electrical industry and cause widespread blackouts. In fact, as with many things hysterical auto writers claim, the opposite may be true. We may find that power companies are encouraging their customers to buy electric cars, on the condition that they charge them at night. Then the power companies will happily go out and build the new generating stations they’ve been coveting, perhaps even getting together to add the odd nuclear facility, now that there’s a way to pay for it.

After all, wouldn’t you prefer a nice, steady, year-round demand for your expensive new generator, over the possibility that you’ll only be able to use it during the day, for twenty days a year?