By day…electric vehicles are taking the world by storm: their sales are doubling every year, their fuel efficiency is off the charts, and some of them can even accelerate from 0-60 mph about as fast as you can say Elon Musk.
By night…the electric vehicle (EV) community continues to make waves. While you are in bed dreaming about how some day you too might own an electric car, many EV owners are doing something dramatic; something unusual; something that is reshaping the energy landscape.
They are using gobs of electricity.
Today we once again crack open Opower’s energy data storehouse (the world’s largest, spanning more than 50 million households worldwide) – this time to examine the energy usage behavior of an increasingly important segment of utility customers: electric car owners who charge their car in the wee hours of the night.
To fuel our analysis, we evaluated anonymous data from about 2,000 night-charging EV owners in the western US (see Methodology) — a region where Teslas, Nissan Leafs, and other plug-in electric cars abound.