If you read, it’s promising that EVs can actuallly be upgraded with tech that will have EVs plugged in will be a great help. And banning them now isn’t going to have a meaningful impact on the number of EVs this summer.
The thing that’s despicable is the lack of nuclear power. A few more plants would completely stabilize the grid.
Nuclear power is good for providing base power not for reacting to spikes in demand. You cannot just spin up production of a nuclear power plant when you need it and shut it down when you don’t. They’re always producing so when demand is low, they’re producing too much and wasting it. If the California grid cannot meet its demand at its lowest, then yes, base power like nuclear would be a good solution. Heatwaves generally pass though.
That's pretty much the same issue you have with renewables, especially wind. Sometimes it will just produce more than you need. The solution is the same: use overproduction to produce hydrogen or for desalination plants. It's actually easier in the case of nuclear, because demand is more predictable than weather, and you have excess energy day, not only on a few days per week or month.
> The solution is the same: use overproduction to produce hydrogen or for desalination plants.
Does anywhere actually do this? Storing hydrogen at scale seems insanely difficult and desalinating water wouldn't let you use the energy later. AFAIK, most places deal with surplus energy by putting it into a big battery, usually the physical kind of battery like pumping water up hill and holding it behind a hydroelectric dam.
Many pumped hydro station were originally built to use cheap overnight electricity from nuclear plants when demand was low, and timeshift it to spikes of demand later.
Ok, so industrial users buy hydrogen. And then how do you convert the currency they give you into energy when you need it later? If you're just trying to find an economic use for excess power, you might as well mine Bitcoin.
> You cannot just spin up production of a nuclear power plant when you need it and shut it down when you don’t. They’re always producing so when demand is low, they’re producing too much and wasting it.
Yes you can, pretty much any plant built in the past 20 years does that and in France/Germany even older plants have been designed to do it.
(Economically it's undesirable of course, because the marginal operating cost of a nuclear plant is very low.)
I think the financial markets can solve this. People like me who like the luxury of having reliable electricity every day of the year can buy futures from a nuclear operator. And people who don't mind cooking in the middle of the night or having a week-long power outage now and then can buy solar or something on the spot market.
A surplus of energy is always better than a deficit.
You could have scheduled applications to divert the energy to if storage is not built out. Desalinate the pacific, for example, pump the water inland for drought time when supply exceeds demand.
1. Nuclear can be built safely to handle emergency scenarios. It's not the catastrophe you see in movies. Fukushima which used a very primitive design, suffered from bad maintenance, and suffered a historic tsunami, still was kept fairly safe.
2. You don't built right ON the fault line. Electricity delivery over long distances is a thing even without HVDC. The fault lines for Diablo Canyon were discovered after the fact but the design was adjusted to handle that information.
3. New reactor designs are waaay better. And guess what. The more reactors we build, the more nuclear scientists there are, the better we get at building them. Why do you think America, the country that invented nuclear power, has 55 plants while China ALREADY has 47 with another 11 along the way while most construction started ~7 years ago. China is going to absolutely OWN the US on energy policy unless we get our head in the game.
I guess a nuclear reactor is only 2 typical coal plants so they'll need to 10x their current nuclear capacity to get rid of coal.
The only annoying thing is they're still building coal plants. I don't understand what I'm missing since nuclear is supposed to be cheaper. Maybe SNF still poses a logistical challenge they can't handle vs venting CO2 into the atmosphere.
The thing that’s despicable is the lack of nuclear power. A few more plants would completely stabilize the grid.