With more than 1.9 million electric vehicles registered across its roads, accounting for more than a third of all EVs nationwide, California leads the U.S. in convincing drivers to switch away from internal combustion engines. Yet despite this success, the state is still failing to make the most of this important transition.
The cheapest and cleanest time to charge an EV is when the power grid is flush with solar energy — that is, when the sun is high in the middle of the day. This makes electric cars quite different from conventional gas-powered vehicles, whose pollution levels aren’t affected by when a driver pulls into the corner station.
In fact, while switching from gas-powered vehicles to EVs charged overnight can cut emissions by 80%, daytime charging can actually slash emissions a further 80%. But convincing Californians to change habits and fill their batteries midday isn’t easy.
Most EV owners now have chargers at home and can conveniently replenish their vehicles’ energy stores overnight. With our current energy mix, that means these cars are largely powered by natural gas that fuels the grid when the sun isn’t shining.
At UC San Diego, I’m part of the team running the world’s largest scientific experiments on human behavior when it comes to charging EVs at the workplace, meeting drivers where many are parked midday.
UCSD has created a great opportunity to study this emerging field by building a massive charging network — 550 ports today, with plans for 1,200 total by early 2026. These ports are spread across 42 parking lots, located on campus and at satellite locations such as hospitals and coastal labs. Although the typical lot hosts around 10 EV ports, some parking structures have space for more than 100. These are all “Level 2” stations, typically three to five times as powerful as a regular outlet charger and capable of replenishing more than half of a typical EV’s battery during a workday charging session of at least four hours.
We’ve leveraged this living laboratory to test how information shapes habits. It turns out that describing the benefits of daytime charging can effectively shift driver behaviors — albeit slightly.
Bigger changes in behaviors will require stronger incentives and more opportunity to refill batteries away from home. The best incentive could be for utilities to price electricity based on the real costs to provide it. Today, retail prices for electricity mostly vary based on grid infrastructure costs — that’s why retail rates are cheapest overnight, when our transmission and distribution lines have lots of unused capacity. In contrast, wholesale prices — what your electricity provider might pay a power generator — already demonstrate that electricity used midday usually costs less to generate and transmit to consumers.
Workplace EV charging networks were expected to triple by 2030, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation. However, the current pullback of federal support for more public EV stations will mean even greater need to add workplace ports.
Policymakers also need to focus more on the quality of the networks we’re building, not just on the number of chargers we can install. California has started addressing this issue by setting reliability requirements for EV stations to qualify for subsidies, but monitoring and enforcement have lagged. Continuing to push forward on network expansion and function, along with improving price structures to reflect the benefits of midday energy use, would go a long way.
The scale of this challenge — and the opportunity it represents — is vast.
Last year, California squandered enough solar and wind energy to supply more than half of all the EV charging needed in the state. We simply couldn’t use or store it all at the time it was generated. Charging EVs midday would be a huge step toward utilizing that power. Using the cheap, clean energy we’re already generating is an obvious win to reduce costs and emissions, and supportive policy can help us adjust our habits to get there.
Jeff Myers is a research associate with the Deep Decarbonization Initiative at UC San Diego.
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