[eatmyshorts]

The beauty of EVs with respect to the grid is they present an opportunity to make our grid much more resilient and reliable, all while enabling renewables much greater percentages of our overall power generation. Renewables (well, specifically solar and wind) are very peak-y, with peaks that can overwhelm a grid and blow out transformers, and troughs that require additional power generation from other sources. This limits the base load power that can be generated from wind/solar to around 40% of total demand. Unless you have a way to store and retrieve power on demand. You’d need enough storage to handle roughly 2 days of power usage needs in order to smooth power usage to cover peaks and troughs. And, lo and behold, the typical EV car has enough power to cover a typical home for about 3 days!

If we incorporate inverters into home building standards today, we can guarantee that our EV fleet can be used to provide storage and auxiliary power for our grid and allow renewables to approach 100% of power generation. But we will need to deploy wind and solar in a distributed fashion so that power generation and storage is local to where the power is consumed. And a grid like this will be much more resilient to power outages and weather.