The Energy Information Administration is now reporting the amounts of electricity consumed by “light duty” electric vehicles in each US state, in its monthly electric power report. The EIA only recently started reporting this information, as an appendix to the regular report. These numbers are only estimates, but are probably fairly close to actual.
For the first three months of 2024, light duty EVs in the US consumed an estimated 2,431,713 megawatt-hours (MWh). This is a 50% increase over the same period in 2023. Each state and region of the US is listed. A summary of each region, for the January - March, 2024 period is shown below. Not surprisingly, there are some wide variations between regions…
January through March
EV electric consumption
New England 123,836 MWh
Mid Atlantic 279,434
E. North Central 217,940
W. North Central 82,550
South Atlantic 411,840
E. South Central 46,181
W. South Central 188,998
Mountain 219,102
Pacific Contiguous 845,953
Alaska + Hawaii 15,883
Total 2,431,713
2.4 million MWh is less than one percent of total electric generation in the US for that time period. Total utility-scale generation for the first three months was over 1 billion MWh. But, I suspect EV consumption as a percentage of the total will grow over time. Electricity consumption by cloud internet data centers, including bitcoin mining and AI computing operations, will also continue to grow over time.
Yep. And I suspect most EV charging is taking place at home in the overnight hours when electricity demand is much less. It’s going to be quite a while before we need to add baseline electric power generation capacity to cover EV charging demand.
The power demand for bitcoin mining and AI data centers is more of a concern.
EV consumption, per se, should increase with EV adoption but there is an offsetting scenario. The biggest problem facing the electric grid is the instant matching of supply to demand. During low consumption times much of the production capacity is idle while during peak consumption expensive peaker plants have to be fired up. This is being addressed by utilities with MegaStorage battery installations. At the same time, local storage used as VPP helps to lower overall cost by shifting production from high to low consumption hours lowering further the cost of electricity. And, I believe, also lowering the stresses on the grid by supplying peak power locally instead of from peaker plants.
With distributed (local) green electricity production, consumption likely will rise but it won’t be the utilities providing the extra power.
In case anyone was wondering, the estimated EV consumption numbers include the electricity used by plug-in hybrids. This is shown on Table D.1 of the report.