When it comes to electrifying transportation, the future has arrived ahead of schedule. And we believe we’ve found a winner in WeaveGrid, which we recently invested in.
Auto manufacturers long derided electric vehicles as impractical – today, they are investing billions to catch up with the inexorable.
The rate at which consumers are buying EVs has consistently beat projections. Electrification is spreading across all categories of vehicles: two-wheelers in Israel, three-wheelers in India, passenger cars in Europe, and even airport buses in the US.
Electrifying millions of vehicles is one of the most exciting opportunities in climate tech. But this mobility revolution is also an enormous challenge: how do we charge millions of EVs without compromising the electrical grid?
Because as EV adoption accelerates, so too will the demand for electrons to charge them.
There are already ~2.5 million EVs on the road; by 2030, ~44 million will be sold each year. Charging a single EV from home increases a house’s energy consumption by 2-3x. So when thousands of vehicles charge at the same time, they can push the grid to its limit. And we’ve seen how when the grid is already at capacity, as was the case in California this summer, grid operators struggle to get EV owners to delay charging.
In short, our ‘dumb’ grid wasn’t designed to transport so many electrons.
Source: Pecan Street via Canary Media
Today, utilities’ only solution is to spend money on costly infrastructure upgrades. BCG estimates (Read more…)