What Tesla owners are doing while you sleep

An interesting article. Some of the comparisons are a little odd, though. The author makes the point that households with an EV are wealthier. Why then, compare their electricity use with a typical household if we have established that an EV owner is not a typical household to begin with?<p>It would be more interesting then to compare EV owners against non-EV owners in a similar income bracket (or household size, or assumed wealth, or somesuch grouping). I wonder how the picture would change?<p>Likewise, when the article introduces solar comparisons, it runs into the same problems. I&#x27;d guess that the households with solar panels are again likely to be wealthier, and so much less likely to be a &#x27;typical household&#x27;.

A daydream of mine is to finally get solar panels on my house and buy a Tesla. My car would run on sunshine!<p>However, during an unproductive daydream session, I realized that my solar panels would produce electricity during the exact hours that my car would be parked at work. In fact, during peak solar hours, my house uses very little energy at all.<p>Reverse meter billing would perhaps net out the cost of energy used at night with the energy produced during the day -- but I&#x27;m fairly certain by the time I get around to doing all this our utility will have implemented demand-based pricing on electricity, making it fairly cheap to charge your car at night.

Would have been more interested to know how the avg EEV household electricity consumption compares to offset gasoline usage (as energy). My understand is that the efficiency of power plants is so much higher than automobile combustion engines that even if all power plants were gas-powered, EEVs would be an efficiency improvement thermodynamically.<p>I mean, of course EEV household consume more electricity, and of course they are parked at night...and that happens to be cheap electricity hours.

This article has some fun graphs, but the writing is a bit sloppy.<p>“They are using gobs of electricity.” What? The observation (that EV car households use about 6kWh or under $1 of electricity above a normal household per night) is if anything remarkable for how <i>low</i> it is. Does the average owner of a new electric car drive only 16 miles per day? More likely, a large part of the daytime use is also spent charging the car. But the average daytime use is only 3kWh above normal. 9kWh only gets you 24 miles per day or about 9000 miles per year, still below the national average driven per year. If I bought an EV vehicle, I would drive it as much as possible, since it only costs 1&#x2F;3 what a normal car does to operate.<p>The hypothesis that “EV owners may be especially likely to use more power at those times because they have bigger homes as well as bigger amenities” is plausible, but from the given data the opposite could be true instead; they may spend all their extra electricity charging their vehicle and spending <i>less</i> electricity on their other appliances.<p>Also, why mention Tesla multiple times (and in the title), when far more Nissan Leafs and Chevy Volts have been sold and are part of the data?

Interesting data, any speculation as to what might occur when the electric car leaves the garage of the executive and enters that of the service industry employee?<p>The automobile was all fine and dandy when only in the hands of the wealthy, but drastically changed the landscape of the country when adopted by the masses. Will there be any serious structural problems if this happens with the electric vehicle?

Are off-peak incentives only being introduced now in the US market? Here we&#x27;ve had it for decades; you can have a plan under which electricity is cheaper at night and on Sundays, and slightly more expensive otherwise.<p>Since washing machines are one of the biggest consumption devices in our house, and we spend most of the day out anyway, it saves us some money. We just need to program the machines to wash at night.

The article seemed to miss the point. EV owners use much more electricity at night. The rest is a series of comparisons and factoids that don&#x27;t really add up to much info for me.

&#x27;Households with electric vehicles&#x27; are defined as households using an electricity plan than benefits you to use lots of power at night, rather than any indication they actually have an EV.<p>So the headline here is: people who pick power plans which are cheaper only if you use lots of energy at night will use lots of energy at night.<p>Once you strip out all the fluff around it, this isn&#x27;t telling us anything at all whatsoever about EV usage.

There&#x27;s an important correlation vs causation distinction in there:<p>&gt; People are more likely to be home in the morning and evening; EV owners may be especially likely to use more power at those times because they have bigger homes as well as bigger amenities<p>In other words, it&#x27;s important to note that this is by no means an &quot;all (other) things being equal&quot; comparison to start with.

I suspect there are some HN readers with experience with how electrical grids work. Can somebody speak to this increased night load and presumably decrease in variance between daytime load and nighttime load. How would those changes impact grid operations? I&#x27;d guess that having a more consistent load is overall beneficial, but it&#x27;s just a guess.

Do you have to wake up in the middle of the night to plug the car in, or can the car&#x2F;charger system be programmed to run at certain hours?

There shouldn&#x27;t have been people who thought they were getting something for nothing.

Electric vehicle owners use more electricity, in addition to the electricity they use for charging.<p>Perhaps electric vehicle owners are in a higher income bracket and have larger houses.