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Comment by dontreact | Hacker News Reader

What about if storage improves? Can't that smooth out the intermittent nature and provide for the base load?

To be very honest, I feel like the car culture in the US gives every household a potential large battery to sustain their house with. In a future where every car is an EV, every American house has two giant batteries, if not more, hooked up to it all night.

If you use your car as battery during the night it won't have energy in the morning when you need it. It defeats the purpose of having a car.

Modern Teslas can store double the daily usage of a US average household. And that's assuming you have literally zero generation at night (hydro / nuclear / geothermal / pumped storage ).

But what happens in the morning when people wake up to an empty car battery and they need to drive to work?

A) How much electricity do you think is consumed at night? ( US average daily consumption is 30 KWh)

B) How much electricity do you think can be stored in a car battery? (Tesla batteries are >= 50 KWh )

C) What happens to existing sources of renewable power that will continue to operate at night? ( They can still provide a baseload that accounts for any shortfalls )

>What about if storage improves?

But it isn't. There is no storage solution that is able to bridge the intermittency gap to make wind/solar workable for a modern economy.

Storage needs to improve by a few orders of magnitude to make that possible, and it's not clear that we even know what storage technology to use.

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