Quote:
Originally Posted by accord1999
Alberta and much of Canada will need smarter meters and time-of-use tracking which a lot of people find annoying.
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With smart EV chargers, it'd be pretty trivial to incentivize off-peak usage. The simplest would be offering cheap electricity rates for EV charging at off-peak times. You wouldn't need time of use rates for everything; they'd just need to track EV usage and adjust your bill accordingly.
And long term, utilities will likely incentivize customers handing over partial control of their charging to them in order to allow them to balance loads. So basically, the user would plug their vehicle in and set the time they want to be charged by, and then the utility could schedule everything to make best use of resources. BC Hydro already has a program like that in place for thermostats and EV charging, but it's pretty limited so far. Conspiracy theorists will have a field day, but in the end if the incentives are good enough, most people would probably be willing to go that way.