Most national plans to combat climate change include increasing the electrification of vehicles and the percentage of electricity generated from renewable sources.
But some projections show that these trends might require costly new power plants to meet peak loads in the evening when cars are plugged in after the workday. This could also lead to overproduction of power from solar farms during the daytime which can waste valuable electricity-generation capacity.
MIT researchers have found that it’s possible to mitigate or eliminate both these problems without the need for advanced technological systems of connected devices and real-time communications, which could add to costs and energy consumption.
Instead, encouraging the placing of charging stations for EVs in strategic ways and setting up systems to initiate car charging at delayed times could make a significant difference.
The researchers used data gathered from anonymised records collected via onboard...