雅思阅读 124: The Grid's New Challenge（电网的新挑战）

改编自 International Energy Agency / PNAS（2026年）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://gcn.com/iea-projects-ev-charging-electricity-demand/21262/

Reading Passage

A. The shift from internal-combustion engines to electric vehicles is usually discussed as an environmental story: fewer tailpipe emissions, less dependence on imported oil, quieter streets. But an equally profound, if less visible, transformation is taking place inside the electricity network itself. Every charging point, whether a slow home charger in a suburban garage or a rapid 350-kilowatt unit beside a motorway, pulls power from local distribution wires that were not designed with such loads in mind. As electric cars move from early-adopter curiosities to mainstream transport, the infrastructure that supplies them is being stretched in ways that no one fully anticipated a decade ago. The International Energy Agency's Global EV Outlook 2026 projects that global electricity demand from EV charging could exceed 1,500 terawatt-hours by 2035 — roughly six times the 2025 level. That figure alone is enough to make utility planners pause. It also assumes a relatively optimistic deployment scenario: slower EV adoption would lower the total, but the localised problems of transformer loading and peak timing would persist regardless, because they depend more on where and when cars plug in than on how many are on the road.

B. The core difficulty is not total energy consumption but its timing and location. A residential charger, drawing seven kilowatts overnight, is unobtrusive if a handful of neighbours use them. But when a street where half the households own electric cars all plug in shortly after returning home from work, the local transformer — a device that steps high-voltage grid power down to domestic voltage — can overheat. Voltage imbalances appear, because the three phases of a residential distribution network may not share the charging load evenly. Congestion peaks in the early evening, precisely when household cooking and heating also draw heavily on the system. A 2025 study of Chinese cities found that deploying 2,000 ultra-fast charging stations in a single urban area could widen the daily peak-to-valley load difference by more than 31 per cent. Fast chargers make the problem worse per vehicle: a 350-kilowatt unit draws as much power as several hundred homes simultaneously. Even at the residential level, a street where every household has installed a home charger can overload the local transformer within minutes of the evening rush, unless the utility has quietly upgraded the hardware — a cost that ratepayers, not the EV owner, typically bear.

C. Geography compounds the engineering problem. China, by far the world's largest EV market, installed fast chargers at a staggering pace — from 310,000 units in 2020 to roughly one million projected by 2025 — and has had to build its distribution network in step. Europe grew more slowly, from about 40,000 fast chargers in 2020 to over 130,000 by the middle of the decade, but its older urban streets present their own constraints: narrow roads, underground cables and listed buildings make trenching for new supply connections difficult and expensive. In the United States, the problem is less about dense cities than about sprawling suburbs, where home charging is the norm and public rapid chargers are sparse outside major highways. A PNAS analysis published in 2025 found that higher EV adoption triggers hundreds of gigawatts of additional investment in wind, solar, natural-gas peaking plants and battery storage — meaning the charging transition is not merely an upgrade of wires but a wholesale redesign of generation capacity.

D. Not every solution requires spending more on physical infrastructure. Smart charging — shifting when vehicles draw power to off-peak hours — can flatten evening peaks without building a single new transformer. Even more ambitiously, vehicle-to-grid technology allows parked electric cars to export power back to the grid during emergencies, turning a million batteries on wheels into a distributed storage resource. Early trials suggest that optimised V2G programmes can reduce a charging station's peak-to-average ratio by close to 28 per cent and increase the share of renewable energy consumed locally, because cars can soak up midday solar output that would otherwise be curtailed. Power-electronics devices such as distributed static compensators, installed at charging hubs, can also correct voltage imbalances by injecting or absorbing reactive power in real time. The trick is not technical but behavioural: persuading drivers to delay charging until midnight, or to hand control of their battery to an algorithm, requires tariff incentives that most regulators have been slow to design. In Norway, where nearly all new cars sold are electric, time-of-use tariffs have already flattened evening peaks significantly, and some utilities report that smart-charging programmes have reduced the need for local transformer upgrades by as much as 40 per cent in trial areas. The missing ingredient elsewhere is often not the technology but the price signal that tells drivers when their car is drawing power that the grid can ill afford.

E. The stakes of getting this wrong are high but the rewards of getting it right are larger still. A grid that cannot absorb EV demand will either suppress electric-vehicle adoption — locking in decades more of petroleum consumption — or force utilities to build expensive redundant capacity that ratepayers will ultimately fund. Conversely, a grid that treats parked cars as flexible storage can integrate far more wind and solar than would otherwise be economic, reducing the cost of decarbonisation across the entire energy system. National plans now reflect this dual reality: governments are simultaneously mandating public charger networks, funding distribution upgrades and rolling out time-of-use electricity tariffs. The next decade will reveal whether the charging network grows as an uncoordinated patchwork of ad-hoc connections or as an integrated system in which millions of vehicles and millions of solar panels are orchestrated as a single intelligent organism. The technology for the latter exists; what remains uncertain is whether regulation, market design and consumer habits will catch up quickly enough to deploy it.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. The timing and localised nature of the load problem ii. How internal combustion engines work iii. Regional differences in charging infrastructure deployment iv. Smart charging and vehicle-to-grid alternatives v. Why getting the transition right matters vi. The cost of gasoline in 2025 vii. How solar panels are manufactured

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. By what factor does the IEA project EV charging demand to grow between 2025 and 2035? A. Twofold. B. Fourfold. C. Sixfold. D. Tenfold.

6. What did the Chinese cities study find about ultra-fast charging stations? A. They reduced peak loads by 31 per cent. B. They could increase peak-to-valley load differences by over 31 per cent. C. They had no effect on grid stability. D. They required more home chargers.

7. What benefit does vehicle-to-grid technology offer? A. It eliminates the need for charging stations. B. It allows vehicles to export power back to the grid and reduces peak demand. C. It increases the price of electricity for all users. D. It works only in rural areas.

8. According to the PNAS analysis, higher EV adoption leads to: A. Less investment in all forms of generation. B. Additional investment in wind, solar, gas and battery storage. C. A reduction in total electricity demand. D. Fewer distribution network upgrades.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. The main difficulty posed by EV charging is the total amount of energy consumed.
10. A single 350-kilowatt rapid charger can draw as much power as several hundred homes.
11. China had approximately 40,000 fast chargers in 2020.
12. Vehicle-to-grid technology can increase the share of locally consumed renewable energy.
13. Most drivers have already fully accepted handing charging control to algorithms.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The challenge of EV charging lies not in total energy but in its (14) __________ and localised impact on distribution networks. Smart charging and (15) __________ technology offer ways to manage demand without building more physical infrastructure.

答案与解析

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