> electric cars actually tend to get charged at night, while people sleep, when solar isn't generating.
Because there's no incentive to do otherwise. Of course people don't time shift their electric use when there's no incentive to.
Because there's no incentive to do otherwise. Of course people don't time shift their electric use when there's no incentive to.
People talk about "demand management" as if it's free. Not much power available, just shut down some factories. But if you're running your factories only half the time, you need to build twice as many factories to make the same stuff. You're making renewables look artificially cheap by externalizing costs to their customers.
Instead, "you can charge it while you work". Not many people drive more than an hour a day - that's 23 hours where it sits. I see lots of cars parked in residential streets during the day. Paid parking lots catering to commuters can also offer charging services.
> just shut down some factories
That's your strawman. I didn't propose that.
Same principle applies to most things. If electricity stops being readily available all the time, then you're introducing a new constraint that people have to optimize for. If that means they change their behavior, then they're doing something more expensive than whatever they were doing before, when they optimized without that constraint.
That extra cost generally isn't figured into the optimistic estimates of how cheap renewables are, but it's still a cost that society pays.
Building lots of charging stations at employer parking lots is also a new cost, that doesn't get counted against renewables.
> Building lots of charging stations at employer parking lots is also a new cost, that doesn't get counted against renewables.
The cost needs to be compared with building grid storage batteries.
Many factories don't run 24/7. And yet more factories don't run their most energy intensive processes continuously even when they factory is "running".
If every parking space had a 7 kW connection (230 V, 30 A single phase) almost all cars could be fully charged while their owners were at work. In fact even an ordinary 3 kW connection would be enough for most people; even my 2015 Tesla Model S adds more than 12 km per hour at 3 kW.
If car owners aren't paying for the power, then who is?
And either way, what does it cost to wire up all the parking spaces?
Paid parking lots solved that problem eons ago.
> what does it cost to wire up all the parking spaces?
I wonder how people ever managed to electrify street lamps, any exterior powered things, even the per-stall electric parking meters I've encountered.
All I'm saying is, the costs of these sorts of demand management measures for renewables should not be overlooked in comparisons with the cost of nuclear, which doesn't need them.
True, you'll need a heavier wire. And the cost of installing wire far exceeds the cost of the wire. When my house was wired up, the cost of the installation was 40 times the cost of the reels of wire.