Putting Electric Charging Needs Into Perspective

Last weekend, the Oktoberfest also known as Wiesn started in Munich – the world’s biggest beer fest. Last year over 7 million people attended the 2-week event drinking 6.5 million liters of beer. Every year, they are eating around half a million chicken, around 80,000 pork knuckles and amongst other food over 100 oxen roasted on a spittle.

What is also interesting is that within two weeks the Oktoberfest is consuming 2.8 million kWh in #energy. That number sounds huge, but probably doesn’t mean anything to anyone. So, let’s put it in proportion to the energy needed to #charge #electric #cars in the same period of time: in the Munich metropolitan region, electric cars needed 193,000 kWh in the same period. In other words: the Oktoberfest needed 14 times the amount of energy needed for the charging of electric cars. (Link to DCS Zahl des Monats)

Stories claiming that the charging of a fast-growing number of new electric cars will lead to the breakdown of our energy supply infrastructure are therefore greatly exaggerated. If a one-time peak of a public event is not breaking our infrastructure, a moderately growing demand by electric cars will be no problem for our public charging infrastructure.

There is definitely room for growth in electric cars on our roads – and they continue to grow. This year (until August), nearly 242,000 electric cars in Germany have been sold in Germany. Currently, 1.5 million electric cars have been licensed in Germany according to Statista.

Just the contrary: new technologies and services such as Vehicle-to-Grid (supplying energy stored in the cars’ batteries back to the public electric grid) will ultimately help our infrastructure to be more flexible and beneficial in many ways than our current energy networks. Let’s raise our steins of beer to the success of an electric future of mobility.