Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, grid capacity planning is a very active topic.

Many larger municipalities are incentivizing more solar installs with battery capacity. Having solar generation and battery storage distributed throughout the city will reduce the need to have the grid import all of the energy demand from far away sources.

Modern solar, battery, and charger combos can easily be configured to store energy produced by solar panels on the house and operate the charger in a way that primarily pulls from the solar generation and the house's battery capacity (by telling the battery to discharge while the car is charging, essentially).

Power companies are also moving heavily toward "virtual power plants", which would be a good search term if you want to learn more.

I just put 14.4 kW of solar up, one of the largest installs in my community. I put 25 or so kWh of battery capacity, also respectable.

Problem is, there are plenty of days where my system only generates 10-20 kWh of energy. Which is not even enough to run my house, much less my cars. And this is sunny California.

Obviously I like the tech which is why I invested but I'm not sure it is going to help alleviate this issue completely (enough generation that's centralized).

The grid capacity isn’t really a monolithic topic either. Here in the Northeast we have easily enough generating capacity with already planned additions. Coal generation is also virtually extinct.

Don't know about virtual power plants, will look it up.

Wrt. solar, that is why I specifically mentioned appartment blocks. We have many such blocks, which usually have one to two levels of garages underneath. I do not think solar power can provide enough power to charge the same area of cars (in cases of one level underground garage), much less twice such area.

Furthermore, solar power is fickle: it relies heavily on nice weather and we have plenty of cloudy or rainy days.

Yes, you can only charge via solar in fair weather, and not when most people really need to charge. Building-sized batteries made to charge other batteries seems silly and likely impractical.

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