Manc33 wrote: ↑4 Aug 2021, 1:41am
axel_knutt wrote: ↑29 Jul 2021, 6:30pmElectric cars can be charged at night, when there's bags of surplus capacity.
Not if everyone's charging their car at night (fast forwarding 30 years)
It's all fuzzy... "everyone" isn't going to happen, "night" isn't a constant, and change will come gradually.
But:
1 Many of the desirable sources of electric power are intermittent. And with variable degrees of predictability... solar, tidal, wind.
2 EVs spend a lot of their time sitting still.
3 Current (!) EVs only need to be recharged for a small part of that time.
So choosing when to recharge EVs can reduce that problem of intermittent generation. That means that you don't have to build so much capacity.
Taking that a stage further the batteries in EVs can be used to feed power to the grid. That means that you don't have to build so much of other types of storage.
Of course this requires a financial system that gets the incentives right. And even the simple step of smart meters hasn't gone well in the UK.
For vehicle-to-grid it also require that the effect on the EVs' batteries is acceptable. There aren't any warning signs appearing on this, but it's a bit early to see if it will affect the useful life of the battery and possibly of the car.
Jonathan