Future EVs should charge by day — study

The Stanford University study comes at a fluid moment in the trajectory of the electric vehicle and its fueling.

Automakers plan to deliver millions of EVs in the coming years, but drivers’ charging habits are still unwritten. Electric companies and the federal government, which will spend $7.5 billion in the next five years to build out EV-charging infrastructure, have not yet made key decisions about where chargers will be located or when they are intended to be used.

John Gartner, an EV and charging researcher at the Center for Sustainable Energy who is unaffiliated with the study, said the notion of moving charging to the sunny hours in an EV-heavy world makes sense.

“This load shifting of EV charging has great synergies to the growing percentage of renewable energy which on many days will be available in abundance before peak demand begins in the evening hours,” Gartner wrote in an email.