To those of you who propose 100% renewables + storage. In cases with no access to hydro power. How much energy storage do you need? How does it scale with production/consumption? What about a system with 100TWh yearly production/consumption?
EVs with VTG. Problem solved. More importantly, energy production (solar plus wind) and storage (batteries) are completely decentralized, which is a huge security improvement for the grid. It amazes me that a platform that is decentralized doesn’t beat the drum for the same for energy production and storage.
Is there any more in-depth analysis to show how many EVs would be needed to make this feasible, how this would work with time of day use of power from commutes vs generation from solar power, how long the grid could stay powered this way, impact on consumers range, etc? I think the concept seems simple at first but would it actually be resiliant relying on just EV batteries? A cloudy week could see everyone run out of power, for example.
Yeah at higher latitudes the energy consumption is highest when renewable production is lowest.
A single Tesla powerwall has 13.5kwh of usable energy. An average Tesla car has between 70-100kwh of usable energy. The average American home uses about 30kwh/day (https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3). There are about 141 million houses in the US. There are 275 million personal and commercial vehicles in the US. So there would be plenty of capacity once you replace a significant chunk of those vehicles with EV.
Cloudy weeks don’t occur over large areas - if you look at solar or wind production over an entire county or state, for example, it varies very little (that’s also the advantage of using both sun and wind - when one is bad the other is typically good). So the solution to intermittency is mass adoption.
How do you generate energy during the winter? Are we going to run HVDC to the Sahara and connect them globally?
Interesting product. Reading about it quickly it seems to have a problem with self discharge. But perhaps they have ironed out that problem. There is no shortage of promising battery news, but there seems to be a problem getting them to mass production. Hoping this one is different.