EDIT: Where I live, there is mostly 69 kV and 138 kV, with only a few 345 kV lines. There aren't nearly enough 500 kV lines, and 765 kV aren't present in the region.
1. Riba, J.-R.; Llauradó, J. A Model to Calculate the Current–Temperature Relationship of Insulated and Jacketed Cables. Materials (2022) 15,6814. https://doi.org/10.3390/ma15196814
Copper wires are copper wires. There are 3 of them for 3 phases. They are sized for AC and AC losses.
DC does not require 3 phases. DC does not have any skin effect or corona losses and thus can operate on smaller wires.
The problem, of course, is that HVDC requires a DC terminal which costs money. It is likely quite a bit easier to build two HVDC terminal on land that the electric company likely already owns than rip up and rewire a whole boatload of long distance wiring.
At what point does HVDC start to make sense? IGBTs have only gotten better and cheaper since I first read about HVDC, so it seems like the fixed conversion costs ought to have come way down.
HVDC is needed when you build between two non-synchronous areas like France and UK. Also if you don't have the option to build pylons and need to go underground/underseas, AC lines will suffer from capacitive load. the longer the line gets, the more capacitive load will be present, and so you can't build very long underground/underseas AC lines.
Since HVDC has significant fixed costs, it's not relevant for shorter lines.
Honestly I don't have that much knowledge in industrial sites, but from what I understand, many industries are interested in directly getting triphased because that's what turning machines need in the end.
I guess if you need 11KV DC for your industrial site, you're likely going to need a transformer anyway, because nobody transports at such a low voltage.
As for medium voltage in general, U=RI. The reason TSOs try to push voltage as high as possible is because that reduces costly power losses, as well as cable temperature, which means you can transit more power without endangering the line and people around.
It looks like during last year's heat wave, California FINALLY broke its previous all-time peak load of 50,270mW in 24 July 2006, with a whopping 52,061mW on 6 September 2023.
Still, peak usage year over year looks flat to my eyes.
I'm sure we can't keep time-shifting and efficiency engineering ourselves out of a fundamental need for more total energy for a huge % of EVs and the push to phase out natural gas, but it might do most of the work for us. All big power hogs are getting more efficient. Electric cars can charge "whenever", but I imagine a future where just spreading the EV load between 11pm and 6am is no longer enough. Plus, we need more energy storage or non-solar) sources to handle the fact that loads are going to increasingly move to the overnight hours.
I know the topic is anathema on HN, but a personal friend of mine was working with people in New Hampshire to help make the nuclear power plant a better solution for the regional power needs by equipping it with bitcoin miners that can be turned on and off algorithmically to deal with the fluctuations in demand.
I know next to nothing about nuclear energy (or most other kinds of energy), but what I understand from what she told me is that one of its biggest hurdles is that it can't adjust up and down for demand very well. If you want to meet peak demand, you end up massively overproducing the rest of the time. If you have the batteries available, by all means, store it, but if you don't, bitcoin mining rigs can very easily be turned on and off in whatever numbers you need to balance out the demand, or at least smooth it out enough that the nuclear production can handle the remaining fluctuation.
It's a different problem, trying to match energy production that would prefer to be constant with demand that fluctuates, as opposed to trying to match fluctuating production with fluctuating demand, but I think of it almost like a "battery" that stores the "energy" as money rather than directly. Like, when the demand drops, earn whatever bitcoin you can with the miners so you can keep it cost effective to run nuclear and you're not having to turn to supplemental, higher cost, less clean energy sources in times of peak demand.
But New Hampshire already has the plant built. That cost already happened. The question now is how best to meet the energy demand with the resources available, and that's already available.
New Hampshire is on the national grid. If they have more power than they can use they simply sell it to Massachusetts so they can turn down some of their natural gas generation.
Aren't all these things moot in a situation where the consideration is how much energy to produce from a plant that has already been built and is already operating?
New Hampshire's utility isn't considering whether to use bitcoin miners or whether to decommission the whole plant and stop using any nuclear energy. They're considering whether they can increase production to cover a higher amount than baseload by making sure they can burn off extra energy easily when demand drops.
Right, seems kind of silly to me as a utility guy. We have this nuclear plant that we don't want to use as baseload for some reason even though operating it is way cheaper than every other plant we have. Rather dump the electricity into mining bitcoin and expose the utility to those financial risks.
As far as I know, they do use it for baseload, but there's a very big difference between baseload and peak. In the summer in New Hampshire, for example, it's very common for people to run their air conditioners for a few hours during the hottest part of the day, but turn them off the rest of the time because it's not miserable. If you're fluctuating between peak and no heating/cooling need over the course of every 24 hours, that peak demand is a real problem, and demands a lot from the other energy plants.
If you could ramp the baseline production up a little bit and meet more of the peak demand from nuclear, it'd be cleaner than relying on the other plants, but you end up with too much energy produced, especially at night when it's cooler. Conveniently, cool temps are a benefit to bitcoin mining rigs, so it works out to spin up some ASICs overnight and make some money from the excess energy.
Nobody's suggesting the utility hold the bitcoin. The expectation would be that it would be sold whenever it's generated, so there isn't really any financial risk. But even if there weren't money to be made from it, having something that can easily be ramped up or down to compensate for energy demand is still useful.
Marginal versus average cost. Extremely low marginal cost (cost of the next unit to produce) but extraordinarily high average cost (includes capex). You typically make decisions for profit maximization on marginal cost.
You can safely ignore capex once the plant is built, though. Because nobody is going to give you the money back. And so, after the plant is built, the only relevant optimization parameter left is marginal cost.
This kind of question can only be definitively answered through market discovery.
If you can come up with an economically productive use of intermittent excess electric power, which beats Bitcoin in profitability, you can make a truly enormous amount of money selling whatever value you're generating to the people who want it.
Because it's a safe bet that excess intermittent electricity is going to be a growing resource over time.
I mean this is where pumped hydro would be pretty handy actually. Pumped hydro can't charge as fast as batteries, but can have enormous energy capacity.
You could almost certainly tune a pumped hydro installation to absorb the ramp of a reactor cycling up and down, but you'd lose the risk of running dry due to renewable unpredictability.
Most places where pumped hydro is viable already have it. The growth potential is limited.
Hydrogen is a more interesting option. Not necessarily for energy storage, but as a fuel for use cases where electricity can't be used (like fertilizer or methanol rather than cars or heating).
Pumped hydro can store more energy then any battery array. You can size a battery, or pumped hydro, to any power level you like, but batteries by their nature scale differently: the faceplate capacity of a battery multiplied by 4 is also pretty much the energy storage.
Whereas pumped hydro can store far more energy (limited by upper reservoir size) then any battery array, but you pay for it in the fact that if you have a 1 MW turbine system on it, and 100 MWh of storage, you still only have 1 MW of power capacity (and about 100 hours of storage).
The problem is 100 hours of storage isn't much use if your grid needs more then that right now and it also can usually only be "charged" at about half that rate, so that 100 hours takes 200 hours to accumulate and that number is fixed - there's no surge capability - but if you're dealing with solar panels putting out on average 30% of their faceplate power, but obviously peaking at 100% frequently, you need to be able to store the peak to store it at all.
You said "Pumped hydro can't charge as fast as batteries".
This simply isn't true, there are dozens of pumped storage plants that can store energy faster than any grid battery that has been constructed to date. If you meant that the typical battery reaches capacity faster, that's not really a feature, it's a limitation.
> equipping it with bitcoin miners that can be turned on and off algorithmically to deal with the fluctuations in demand
Interesting that people are doing this! When I was thinking about this ~10y ago [1] the economics didn't work out because of how quickly the ASICs depreciated, but they've probably stopped getting better quickly by now?
> one of its biggest hurdles is that it can't adjust up and down for demand very well
This is a historic limitation. We have the technology to perform load follow with the legacy fleet. Most utilities just designed their fleets around the assumption that nuclear would be base load and therefore are less incentivized to operate their nuclear reactors this way.
No, it's an economic limitation. You can of course turn the output of a nuclear plant up and down, reasonably quickly. The problem is that nuclear power is mostly capex. If you throttle your plant to 30% output, it just means that you produce power at three times the price.
I don't believe that I said it was not. Although, you should look at France as a special case.
> You can of course turn the output of a nuclear plant up and down, reasonably quickly.
Well, yes and no. Most contemporary reactor designs do have the physical capability to fluctuate between about 30%-100% power. But the ability to model such a core (accurately) has been a relatively recent thing, which has knock on effects for developing a core loading plan, doing a safety analysis, and performing monitoring/prediction. This was because most of these reactors were specifically built to satisfy base load requirements for their communities, there was no demand to develop the methodology initially. The whole economics reason came about much later when people started talking about actually developing said methodology. Its kind of a big deal because your AO bands are part of your licensing basis.
It is a interesting (but seems strange) solution, but my guess is there is probably a better way. I would think a better way would be to avoid producing power that is not needed (and to avoid needing so much power, if you can avoid it). However, if you cannot avoid producing power, then it is better to store it (like you suggest). Bitcoin seems a possibility, although there are probably other (better) things that can use power too. If you do not have batteries, I would think it would be better to add batteries (unless the batteries are too inefficient, I suppose; however, I do not actually know how much inefficient will be "too much inefficient"). Another possibility might be a combination of these things.
Renewables can't do base load. Renewables can't do base load. Renewables can't do base load.
If you have enough storage, you don't have to adapt your reactor second by second. You let the storage buffer out the peaks and valleys and you use the reactor to backfill the storage over the course of hours and days.
I think your "just" is carrying a lot of weight here. Building more renewables requires buy-in from a LOT more people, like state and local government officials, never mind the actual construction of them, with all its cost overruns and boondoggling. It takes a long time.
Setting up a bitcoin mining facility is comparatively a lot easier, especially when your goal isn't "mine the highest value at the lowest cost" (which would require the latest and greatest hardware, etc.), but rather "burn off this extra energy and make a non-zero amount of money off of it in the process."
I think you, like almost all the other commenters, are missing the point.
Of course investing in better long-term solutions would lead to better long-term solutions. But it would require more investment. You'd have to get so damn many people on board, especially in state government, to authorize projects like that, never mind all the bidding and constructing and cost overruns and what have you.
If you want to set up a Bitcoin mining facility to burn off excess energy, you need a well-ventilated room and a bunch of hardware. You don't even need the best of the best hardware, because the main purpose is burning off the energy, and the money earned from it is ancillary, so maybe saving money on the hardware cost and making less money than you could but more money than you're making now is worth the tradeoff.
This doesn't require government and voters to get involved. The utility company execs can make that decision, and then either keep the profits or reduce the local energy costs.
If the problem is extra energy, producing something people will pay you for with your extra energy is a viable solution, even if you think the people are stupid for wanting to buy that thing from you. And if you don't want to have to wait for the political process or deal with trying to build things by committee, bitcoin mining is one way to burn a lot of energy generating something people will pay you for, in a way you can turn on and off programmatically so you're only burning energy when you have extra energy you need to get rid of.
These days with even off-peak being 40-80c / kWh the best way to charge EVs (which are mostly owned by homeowners) seems to be to bypass the grid and charge using rooftop solar during the middle of the day (or time shifted using battery storage).
Obv. not possible for renters or condo owners or for people who can install solar.
> Obv. not possible for renters or condo owners or for people who can install solar.
That can be as much as 67% or more of the households in large Metro areas. This is really why I think EV adoption is a pipe dream. It is probably a boon for the grid as well.
Although your bill might only show one bundled price depending on who supplies and delivers your electricity, the cost of electricity in the US usually includes both a "supply" or "generation" charge and a "delivery" charge. Based on what I'm seeing on that page I think it's almost certainly only showing the electric supply rates, not the combined total of supply + delivery.
I don't live in California so the nuances are lost on me, but it looks like for SF county the residential delivery rate is about 19c/kWh, the supply rate ranges from roughly 12-16c/kWh, and "surcharges" are 0-1c/kWh, for a total of 31-37c/kWh. For San Diego county the delivery rate is 25-26c/kWh, the supply rate is 15-18c/kWh, and surcharges are 2-5c/kWh, with a total of 45-46c/kWh.[1]
To be clear when I said 0.11/kWh in Chicago I was giving the total price, including both the supply and delivery.
California has some ridiculously expensive power costs. I moved to Chicago in 2021 after living in the bay area for 11 years, and the amount I spent on electricity absolutely plummeted.
California has lots of problems, but availability of money is not one of them. I have no worries whatsoever about our ability to properly handle changes in demand going forward. Will a bunch of money get wasted and mis-managed? Of course. It wouldn't be CA if we didn't do that! But we'll still grow just fine.
Unless you're in jail for tax evasion or making below what you're worth (which; your reputation precedes you, you definitely are) which means you're not meeting your earning potential, which is a failure of the economic-maximalizing society you live under, you're complicit. (email in profile, apparently this thread has been marked
by HN already)
These ‘grid enhancing technologies’ look like cheap fixes that can only buy some time before real work is needed. Sure, with better monitoring and some overload management systems you may work closer to some limits, but that’s not a solution for long-term usage increases.
Where I work, they are used a lot to adjust for renewables power surges, not to increase transit.
The bit about automaticaly shifting power to other lines in a strained network is interesting, but I wonder how much security analysis is run to make sure it’s safe (or if it’s just an automation system working within bounds the operator deemed safe).
Sure, I get there’s only so much that get squeezed out of existing lines without any physical infrastructure changes.
But reconductoring seems like it buys you a lot of extra capacity over the existing physical right of way, and if you use advanced conductors you don’t even have to replace the towers if they’re in good condition. Yes, you have to replace a lot of equipment at substations, but my understanding is that while there is a shortage of some of this physical equipment, getting permits for new transmission lines is a far harder problem.
Is this not just the same question as for decades?
Which is cheaper, a peaker plant after the transmission line hitting peak capacity, or increased transmission line capacity for a small percentage of the time?
Now it's just battery storage instead of natural gas peaker plants. You can still smooth out the transmission line capacity with downstream storage.
Or have we already done that to the max with peaker plants and now transmission lines are running at their capacity 90% of the time? I haven't read the numbers in a while, it used to be really bad!
Here is the thing: planning a grid is always done with cost in mind, we do not build golden pylons for the sake of it.
But on the other hand, reasonable grid planning is done a decade ahead, more for some equipment. Money spent in a hurry is likely to be wasted in that business.
Storage to optimize grid (not production) cost is neither efficient nor resilient as far as I know.
Also having a peaker plant solves production peaks, not transmission limits. And nobody builds a second peaker at the other end of a line to save on grid costs. Redispatching is a thing, but it is a small optimization, not a solution to an underdeveloped grid.
Yeah, although distributed power generation is an actual solution to reduce transmission loads, I agree that it's too soon. It is very complicated (but I think doable!), but even then probably takes too much space for populated areas.
I like the idea of knowing if a transmission line is hot enough to start a fire, but that isn't a substitute for new transmission capacity from remote PV farms or just to be more resilient.
Space, cost, reliability, of course it's complex to integrate new generators that require communications to work together properly alongside planning the real wire infrastructure.
I believe it can be done, sure, but it's still complex and utility companies are not a fan of complexity.
If one day there is a battery for every house or even flat. That is double the capacity of Tesla power wall at half the size while lasting twice as long. Do we still need to upgrade the grid infrastructure?
I assume With that many buffer in place the whole thing should be able to self balance relatively easily. But I wonder if that is also a false assumption.
If EVs are competing with power walls for charge, then presumably you couldn't charge overnight, so a longer-than-normal heat-wave could drain all the household batteries.
The article says they are buying the time. New lines are slow to build, so while they are being built, it is possible to squeeze more from the existing lines.
I get it, I'm just baffled with the hint the article gives that the stuff needed now wasn't planned 10 years ago. I guess this is yet another "US infrastructure disaster" article, but with a positive outlook.
this is talking about grant awards that are happening in the current year, so it's not like they were planned 10 years ago.
hindsight is 20/20 but some things like the growth of data centers was probably not predicted, particularly their ___location. As a general example, Ireland had to put a moratorium on new data centers until 2028. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/15/power-grab-hid...
> not being built though. Not at nearly the rate needed
…according to “consultancy Grid Strategies and commissioned by trade group Americans for a Clean Energy Grid (ACEG).” This is like the civil-engineering society perennially failing our civil-engineering spending.
That doesn’t make them inherently incorrect, in the same way that oil companies are correct that building more pipelines is safer and more environmentally friendly than oil trains.
Another big thing is streamlining regional abilities to accelerate permitting for replacing old transmission line conductors.
Modern conductors can transmit significantly more energy by better conductor design, so replacing ancient conductors is a relatively cheap way to increase transmission capacity while also reducing line sag which makes the transmission lines safer.
I have 0 faith in our governments to carry out any long-term projects that aren't military-related. Like wasn't a trillion dollar infrastructure bill passed a couple years ago? Where has all that money gone?
My town is busy replacing lead service lines, fixing up water mains and building a new treatment system at the water plant. Users are paying a significant share of it, but there's federal infrastructure funding also.
The trick is to claim all projects are military related.
"Yes, Senator, upgrading the covered wooden bridge to Sleepy Hollow is essential. It cannot presently bear the weight of a column of M1 Abrams tanks, such as would be required to defend the nation from invasion. Let it not be said you are weak on defence, Senator!" /s
I mean, the federal government funded the Interstate Highway System largely to be able to get troops from one end of the country to the other, now someone just needs to make a similar case for bridges and high-speed rail.
As per the third paragraph of the article: "In New York, Algonquin Power won a $42.9 million grant to install devices that automatically redeploy power when lines are overloaded. Virginia’s Dominion Energy won $33.7 million for a project that includes devices that will let it adjust power distribution in response to changing conditions on the grid. The funds are part of a $3.5 billion program for grid-boosting projects the Energy Department rolled out in October."
When you adjust for inflation, the price tag of the 2021 infrastructure bill is twice the construction cost of the entire Interstate Highway System. Are we getting two entire Interstate Highway Systems worth of infrastructure for our money? If not, I think that's the first problem that needs to be solved.
The BIL alone has already funded ~30,000 Road/Bridge projects totaling $95 billion so far, plus hundreds of billions more on other infrastructure. Would you mind pointing to the specific working group funding that you have an issue with and which specific bridges need repairs but had their funding rejected?
I mean, for just one example, the DoT awarded $600 million to replace the I-5 bridge between Washington and Oregon. I don't pretend the funding is perfect but it is reaching real projects.
Lines? Why? Why aren’t we taking better advantage of wireless power transmission? Seriously, Tesla planned to construct Wardenclyffe Tower back in 1901!
Modern electrical generation, transmission and distribution systems are protected by "relays" that open breakers to prevent damage. I did a quick search on "Carrington event protective relaying" and found https://www.pes-psrc.org/kb/report/115.pdf. It seems that what is needed is to properly configure the protective relaying for the possibility of a geomagnetic storm and to make sure that all relaying is operational and modern enough to do so. Anything new or upgraded should meet these criteria. Older stuff probably needs to be reviewed.
Summary: utilities will use dynamic rating and other tricks to squeeze a bit more performance out of existing lines.
(Transmission lines have losses, these heat up the wires. If they get too hot, they droop too much. So they have a maximum power rating. Dynamic rating takes weather effects into account to vary that maximum.)
I was intrigued by one of the other ways—"high-performance wires"—which they don't explain at all. I found one article[0] (podcast, I guess, but with a transcript) that goes into it: old wires are aluminum supported by steel. By using aluminum supported with carbon fiber, you get less weight and less thermal expansion, allowing for more aluminum and without it sagging as much.
High conductivity, less transmission loss. Potentially fewer towers (because you can space them out a little further), offsetting the cost of the wires. Neat!
Outside China, companies and governments usually have to be careful when making investments. They can't decide to start building transmission lines/housing/fast train lines/deploy 5G everywhere and spend huge amounts of money if the return is small/non existent... And so usually things are only built or improved when there's a demand for it.
China can make a 5 year plan to build UHVDC everywhere and the grid operator won't go under no matter what. This has been working for them so far (even though it creates some serious problems) and certainly gives them an advantage, but you can't do that in most places.
It works in the wake of a decimated economy. War. Natural disaster. Cultural revolution. There is so much slack in the system virtually anything will be put to productive use.
In that state, you can build a road to nowhere and people will put it to use, not because it’s a well-placed road, but because it’s the only road in the vicinity.
China’s is not a decimated economy and they haven’t been in cultural revolution for decades. Their government functions much more like a corporation than the popularity contest that will likely give a reality TV star his second term.
> China’s is not a decimated economy and they haven’t been in cultural revolution for decades
Correct. I’m describing the era of anything-goes growth. Because, without exaggeration, anything went.
America saw this in its Manifest Destiny era. (Suppose I should add depopulating conquest to the list.) Switching gears was existentially painful.
> government functions much more like a corporation
This was the pre-Xi CCP. A genuinely-effective meritocratic oligopoly. Now it’s a bog-standard dictatorship, with Chinese characteristics.
Also, good analogy. Corporations are mortal. States, theoretically, are not. The problem with dictatorship is it trades immortality for temporary stability. The deal with the devil is in the difficulty of swapping back.
People were saying the same things about their high speed rail network ten years ago, and now it is in an existential crisis and desperately hemorrhaging money. I am definitely not saying the same will happen for the HVDC projects as I am not clairvoyant or qualified enough to make any claims, I am just pointing out that grand infrastructure investment and central planning almost always looks ingenious in the short term, but that isn’t always sustainable because predicting the future is really hard.
The US has numerous HVDC lines and the market is set to grow in the next 5 years. It could improve and be better of course. Renewables will probably force more adoption.
(Warning this is a tangent). Cooling/air conditioning actually uses a relatively small amount of energy compared to heating. As we transition away from fossil fuels for heating over to electricity the real existential crisis will happen in cold periods.
This can be understood intuitively: air conditioning is used when it’s 85° outside to make it 70° inside. Heating is regularly used to make it 65° inside when it is 20° outside. It turns out fossil fuels contain a truly remarkable amount of energy that happens to be really easy to release into a living space.
The aging power grid is not capable of charging millions of EVs on instant high current demand.
Until that happens, EVs will never be useful enough to make ICE cars obsolete.
"It's the infrastructure, stupid".
The US and other countries should have spent those trillions on infrastructure instead of wasting lives and treasure on stupid military adventures. Too late now, the countries are going down the gurgler big time.
It's not that much power compared to the terawatt or so of peak capacity, and the "instant" nature of a single car doesn't affect the overall grid in the slightest.
For some rough math, people drive 10 billion miles per day in the US, and at 3-4 miles per kWh that's an average of 105-140 gigawatts. Average production is half a terawatt, so replacing half the cars on the road might only need 10% more average power production, and almost all of that charging can be done off-peak without an impact on transmission.
In the optimistic case, electric cars can even reduce peak loads on big distribution lines.
> How do you get people to only charge their cars when it's windy?
My electrical provider gave me a good discount on my fixed rate plan by letting them micromanage the charging times of my car. I tell them I need it X% charged by some time in the morning, and they'll make sure it's at that charge by that time.
If I really need to charge it right away I can still just do that, but the vast majority of the time I don't need to think about it. My car sits in the garage for many hours, there's plenty of time to optimize the charge timings.
Chances are they even pick up a lot of time where spot prices go negative, so they're making money selling it to me and buying it from the grid.
That can encourage it, but people will need to charge even when it's not windy. Having a smart charger wait for cheap electricity which may never come is a great way to end up with dead battery.
That's not too smart then. I'm talking about something with a bag of weighted goals. Having a dead battery would have a strong enough cost that it would pay more for higher market rates if state of charge is low.
The solution seems obvious in the use of wind turbines: when the wind blows there is power, the lines are cooled and the cars charged. No wind, no power, no need for cooling.
Am I missing something? A <sarcasm> tag maybe?
On a more serious note on how to get people to change their electricity use there is a real solution in flexible (hourly) pricing. This is what we have where I live - Sweden - and it can be a way to lower electricity bills quite a bit [1] by moving power hogs like water heaters, tumble driers and car chargers to the lowest-priced times of day. If you have solar panels and a contract which enables you to sell excess power at market rates (like we do) you can decide to feed their output into the net when prices are at their peak - usually around noon and somewhere between 17.00 and 21.00 (when it is still quite light in much of Sweden given that we straddle the polar circle) - while using most of it for power hogs off-peak.
[1] on the assumption that flexible pricing is controlled by supply and demand, not by some policy-enforcing surcharge. Electricity prices need to be able to go lower as well as higher than 'normal', not just normal or higher.
The quote is saying that transmission line capacity is higher when it's windy and lower when it is windless (due to less cooling).
If you assume that EV charging is the marginal load which would put you over the windless capacity, but not the windy capacity, then in order to prevent overload you'd need to prevent EV charging when there is no wind and therefore the transmission capacity is lower.
Taking a step back it's a general problem with this type of optimization, what to do when the system has become accustomed to, and is designed for, capacity which isn't available. How do you get people to use less power in order to avoid a blackout?
Maybe it will some day. I have two electric cars in my garage sitting idle most of the day and night. I have no way to connect them to the grid in a bidirectional manner. There is nothing a local electrician can order and install for me that will allow it. If I had a Ford Lightning truck, they could get me a proprietary Ford Charge Station Pro (which doesn't use ISO 15118-2), that's about it.
