| > One thing I can't shake about the EV "revolution" is that it's going to require a massive expansion of our renewable energy capacity, like solar and wind, but we also need that renewable energy for other things, like household energy usage. The big problem we have with renewables right now is matching generation with demand. Solar is really cheap for daytime generation, but what are you going to do at night? Electric cars don't have that problem. They're parked for most of the day, they need to be charged once a day or less, so they can be charged whenever renewable generation is available. Which makes deployment of renewables more economical, which means we get more of it. > If we were rational and serious about making the biggest impact, we would reduce car dependency so the green electricity we generate can go to less wasteful means. We can do two things at once. The biggest thing we can do to reduce vehicle miles traveled is to relax zoning near urban areas to allow higher density housing to be built closer to jobs. That works, it makes housing more affordable (which is independently good) and people waste less time commuting. It also takes years before the new housing is actually built and even then doesn't solve the entire problem. You can't replace last mile truck deliveries with higher density housing or mass transit; you need electric trucks. Nobody is going to build low ridership mass transit to the low density suburbs that already exist, and they're not all going to cease to exist. 100% of cars are not going away anytime in the next century, but making the large majority of new cars electric is feasible within the next few years. This is not a problem with a single solution. It's a problem with 100 solutions that each have a niche and you solve the problem best by deploying them all, each in the place where it makes the most sense. |
That hasn't stopped utilities from deploying wind and solar for 40% of their new generation over the last year or two, while shutting down coal plants left and right. For half a decade it's been considered settled fact that solar and wind are cheapest and the way forward. So, maybe this isn't as big a deal as you think it is.
Attention long ago shifted toward planning the grid to accommodate that, and also on grid-scale storage projects. Pumped hydro has been used extensively in the UK for decades because every time the BBC finished a program, everyone watching TV would fire up their electric kettle at the same time. There are several pumped hydro installations in Canada and the US as well.
Most EVs can schedule charging cycles and numerous utilities provide special rates for customers who agree to some level of utility control on their charging similar to how utilities provide discounts to people who let them tweak their AC thermostat; you can still override it, in most cases. In Australia, going back several decades, there was a grid load reduction signal system that worked by generating a harmonic that load reduction switches would look for.
An increasing number of EVs are set up to be able to backfeed power into the grid, and the idea is that they could do so on request from the utility.
Lots of utilities offer off-peak billing incentives. Imagine a world where your fridge does most of its cooling during the day, and "rides" through the night, etc.
EV charging stations are starting to come with their own local battery systems because DC fast charging, particularly at 800V, is enough power that it can be difficult to get enough electrical service and in some locations the station sits unused for a fair period of time.
Add in the fact that lithium ion battery prices continue to plunge following expected rules about production costs, as well as other technologies maturing; there's an iron salt based flow battery that looks really promising, made of very cheap and extremely prevalent materials (salt, iron, and water mostly) and scales fairly well.