If all US homes and private vehicles are powered, power outages could skyrocket unless important measures are taken

A future where every home and vehicle in the United States is fully electrified can overwhelm power and risk outages unless major upgrades are made, says a new study conducted by Purdue University Engineers. However, several strategies could reduce two-thirds of the potential cost of strengthening the country’s distribution grid to handle this demand.

Electrification means switching your home heating system from a boiler to a heat pump and then from a gas or diesel fueled vehicle to an electric vehicle.

“If you install a whole new electric heating system for your home and use more electric vehicles and electric water heaters, your electricity demand will be higher. Basically, you will need to put thicker wires, larger transformers and other infrastructure in the power grid. “And if that happens, the utility will pass the cost of those upgrades to us, our customers.”

The survey, published in Sustainability on September 16th, found that strengthening the US distribution grid that provides electricity to residential areas could cost between $35-790 billion.

However, taking measures such as installing better insulation and air sealing, improving equipment efficiency, and adjusting the operation of electrical devices in your home could reduce grid upgrade costs.

An example of increasing the efficiency of home electrical equipment is to use a ground source heat pump instead of an air source heat pump, as ground temperatures with a constant air temperature reduce the energy needed to heat and cool the house. Adjusting the operation of your home’s electrical equipment can mean adjusting your home electric car bill when it is charged, and you can prevent the heat pump from happening at the same time as it is being used.

“If an electric vehicle can communicate with a heating, ventilation and air conditioning unit installed in a home, and if charging is required or when the home must be heated or spare, this strategy could contribute to a 40% reduction in grid reinforcement costs,” a student at Purdue’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and the first author of this paper.

“Suppose you’re coming with a cold snap. A heat pump can preheat your home, and an electric car in your home could be charged at another time to reduce tension in the grid.”

This study focused on counties in the lower 48 states of the United States. Researchers used public surveys of household electricity usage and electric vehicle travel available in each county, as well as public surveys of equipment manufacturers, building code guidelines, and weather data, to model the impact on fully electrified homes and vehicles grids. The team also calibrated home data against a fully electrified test house in West Lafayette, known as the DC Nanogrid House.

After analyzing the effects of full electrification on distributed grids, the researchers included home weathering and equipment efficiency strategies that they proposed to adjust the model’s parameters to reduce grid upgrade costs. For strategies to tune the operation of electrical equipment, optimization algorithms were used to devise the best solutions for when to charge the vehicle and how difficult it will be to operate a heat pump, taking into account heating, electricity needs and the use of electric vehicles.

Other studies look at the future of increasing electrification of housing and vehicle in the United States, but not the size of residential areas in counties across the country.

“On the one hand, that’s kind of scary. If you electrify everything, there may be a crazy, expensive future. But on the other hand, if you electrify it in a smart way, there’s almost no much of those problems,” Kilcher said.