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Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

Counter-intuitively, having more and cheaper batteries will help with that. Given cheap enough distributed battery storage gives you leverage on scaling back the current requirement that all electricy currently produced needs to be consumed at the same time.

So combining distributed generation (solar) with distributed energy storage can dial down the need for the currently planned, highly contested HVDC links by buffering the capacity and making the load less spiky.

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I think there will be more spikes, assuming people go back to commuting. As soon as folk get home they will plug in their car and draw large amounts of power. This article is fairly informative: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...

If you are on 15 min based pricing and charging when at home is 5 - 20x more expensive vs at nought or during the day, I think it’s a matter of time before someone releases a software update for your charger or car that coordinates charging your car with optimal energy prices.

In NL you can already get prices by the 15 minutes and sometimes I get paid to use electricity on windy and sunny days. eg see easyenergy.com. You get the prices 24h in advance, so you can even plan optimally without the need for advanced predictions.

Agree, connected smart charging is the way to go. But the fact is if a car needs to be charged by the morning you are going to see spikes in the evening. I am rather ignorant about how often people with plug ins actually change, maybe you don't need to charge every evening.

I plug my car in whenever I get home, but it only ever charges between 1:30 and 8:30 am because thats when my electricity is cheapest, so thats when ive set it to charge.

It's crude but if what you're saying actually became an issue, you could solve it by doing the same thing and charging people more at those high demand times.

What's actually more likely to happen though is covered in the article you linked: cars hooked up to the grid will charge when there's excess electricity, and discharge when there's a demand for electricity. See page 8 here: https://www.chademo.com/wp2016/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/CH...

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