Comment by spacebanana7
4 hours ago
One thing I'm really scared of is EV charger software being modified by users, hackers or bugs to pull max power at times that don't suit the grid.
In the UK, for example 10 million EVs all pulling 7kw would overwhelm the roughly 70GW potential of the grid. Even a million EVs charging at an inconvenient time could add a 7GW draw which is enough cause a problem.
It will first damage the batteries very fast, second, most users don't want to mess with that, they want to plug and play. So, on both counts your fears are misplaced.
It sounds like a genuine attack vector to me. If someone hacked say teslas firmware supply chain and made all chargers pull max power at the same time, it could be a national infrastructure crippling attack.
In the event of an internet outage, wall box chargers are legally required to default on. In practice most chargers interpret this as taking the full 7kw - whether this is a bug or misreading of the intent of the law doesn't really matter from the perspective of the grid.
Large ISP outages that affect millions of people are not uncommon on a decade by decade basis, and I suspect an uncomfortable number of UK EV chargers are in some way linked to eu-west-2.
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2021/1467/regulation/7/m...