Good News & Bad News, page-30897

Just a note on @robeks post on electrification and grid capacity.

As the world shifts to more renewable resources the intermittency of power becomes greater (more reliance on wind / sun). Therefore, we will head to a place where, unlike traditional combustion generators, we will have to oversize renewable power supply. I.e. 40-80% of renewable power capacity will be sized to meet 100% of electricity demand (example figures only). The point being - they'll be times when there excess power.

At these times, and this is already happening the UK, people are being paid to use excess power - i.e. negative pricing. Having an EV, or home battery, will allow you to earn more money. Making you net savings from an ICE vehicle even greater. Effectively all EV / battery owners will become a big decentralised power plant - offering buffering services to the grid.

Taking the AUS grid for an example, or NSW specifically, it hit a peak of 10GW yesterday. If we assume a car battery is 70kWh and people say to the grid, yes you can have half my battery during the evening peak for energy, 35 kWh available per car, that would mean we'd need about 286,000 cars to cover the grid for an hour. There are roughly 8 million people living in NSW. That's 0.04% of the population.

That's 0.04% of the population who will be getting paid for the energy their selling to the grid from their car - probably on a variable tariff to encourage discharge - so being paid to drive their EV. The issue isn't the grid having capacity, the issue is charging / discharging at the right times to move intermittent energy to the times we need it. We can quickly reach the capacity to do that.