Won’t PHEVs require us to build even more power plants?
Not at first. PHEVs will be programmed to charge at night, when electricity demand is low. (You’ll plug it in when you get home, and the car will know when to charge.) One of the U.S. Department of Energy’s labs, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, looked at how many plug-in vehicles today’s grid support without modification, and concluded that 73% of cars, pickup trucks, SUVs, and vans could be supported by the existing infrastructure. This is made clear by the picture above from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), a utility-funded lab.
