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> Cars will charge from the grid.

Hell, let's not forget that the current plan is for people to charge their cars at night. That's when my car is plugged in; during the day I'm either parked at a public garage, or, you know, driving it around. Sure, there's probably still wind, somewhere, at night, but you're still charging your cars when your renewable energy sources are at their minimum.



>Hell, let's not forget that the current plan is for people to charge their cars at night.

The obvious solution for that is for people to plug in at home or at their job - chargers cost less than $500 (that includes installation costs), so it's not entirely impossible for workplaces to install one charger per employee and charge a margin on top of electricity prices to recoup prices. This will be desirable for EV owners once daytime electricity is cheaper than nighttime electricity, and therefore profitable for any location-owners to install.

If you have a car with ~600KM of range, then considering people drive an average of 60KM/day, you can imagine that most of the time most people basically don't need 90% of their battery and can wait until the next day. And considering people only use their car for an average of (IIRC) 2 hours a day, most of the time peoples' EVs will be idle for the charging somewhere.

For special roadtrips that might change, and perhaps midnight EV charging will spike on boxing day or such, but for the other ~360 days of the year people will largely be charging with solar.

Also, as serious as the issue is, let's remember we're talking about a projected ~5% increase on the electricity demand once the entire population goes electric. Over a decade that's less than 1% increase per year. That's not that hard, especially if we're planning to replace over half of the grid with renewables anyway.


> but for the other ~360 days of the year people will largely be charging with solar.

You do know that weather happens and there are many days where solar output drops to zero or near-zero (think snow storm as an example).


And as mentioned before, statistically most people don't need to charge every day. If the cost of charging goes up because it's overcast, people will put it off in case tomorrow is sunny and cheap.

We're talking about averages here. If solar is 10% cheaper then it doesn't matter if the price doubles once a fortnight.


Charge a battery at home during the day or whenever energy is available, then charge your car from that battery at night.


Or charge at work. Or, these days, work from home. That has greatly reduced my gasoline consumption.




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