EV’s and the supply of power

Electric vehicles are already part of the present and clearly will be a bigger part of the future. As we increasingly work from home people are asking the question can I charge my electric car whilst I am at the home. Many of us live in apartments and the question is becoming how do we allow people to charge their cars at home bring some from of community garage. I suspect we are going to need to introduced metres in our garages which allow us to levy people to recharge their vehicles according to volume and to time when the charging occurs. Many Australian city residential buildings today have rooftop solar which is used to provide power to common areas including garages with the surplus power being stored for use at night by batteries and/or being sold to the grid. I think the solution lies in apartments and townhouses introducing metering systems and charging based on the export price achieve by the building selling power back into the grid or on the basis of the purchase price of power into the common area. What is important is this modern problem needs to be addressed as increasingly there is no free electricity. Whilst this is very much a first world problem, it does remind us that the power to drive an EV needs to come from somewhere.

Paul Raftery