>> they would most likely even out 24-hour usage patterns rather than overstressing the grid.
Take a look at exactly how much power goes into an electric vehicle. I once worked out how many solar panels one would need to charge a tesla once per day in my local. The math pointed to something like a solid acre of land dedicated to sustaining a single car. (not an acre of panels, at my latitude you need proportionally more land on which to mount panels). A shift to all-electric transport would produce a demand for which LEDs could never compensate. Only the very wealthy would ever own enough land to actually self-sustain through renewables. Cities will need power grids for a long while.
Take electric transport out of the equation and things start looking much better. Hydrogen-powered vehicles would imho at least allow the possibility of "de-electrification" in north america.
Do you drive 200 miles a day? I don't. You rarely need to charge an electric car from empty.
I agree that solar is significantly less attractive in high-latitude, cloudy locations, though. All of those panels that Germany installed would have been much more useful in Arizona.
Hydrogen, of course, is a boondoggle: it's primarily a fossil fuel, needs a whole new distribution system, is less efficient than pure electric, and requires very expensive vehicles.
Worse than that: if you buy hydrogen today (e.g. for some fuel cell car prototype), it is almost certainly created from fossil hydrocarbons. So hydrogen is not even a battery now but just a very elaborate way to burn fossils. "Equivalent to batteries" is the best case future scenario (e.g. in presence of abundant electricity from controlled fusion power plants).
Almost no one needs to fully recharge a Tesla once per day, in fact that's really bad for the battery. More likely, they'll be doing only a quarter to half-charge every day, on average. Also, Teslas aren't the most efficient EVs around; they're big and high-performance. A Leaf will use less electricity.
People don't need to own land to recharge their EVs; they can just hook up to the grid, just like normal people today don't have solar panels usually and just buy gasoline and electricity. There's tons of room in cities for more solar panels though, on top of roofs, on large commercial buildings, and also over parking lots. Fill up all that wasted space with PV panels and we'll have more electricity than we know what to do with.
Maybe someone uses less. Maybe two people live together and drive two cars, doubling the load. It's just an example, a way to illustrate how many panels might be needed or, conversely, how much energy is actually used by an electric car. It's still going to be far more panels than most people realize.
1887 hours of sunlight in my city per year.
100w per m2 of solar panel. = 189kWh per m2 per year.
100kWh tesla battery *365 / 189kWh = 193m2 of panels perpendicular to and tracking the sun perfectly. Getting that in reality means far more panels on far more land. Depending on slope, horizon and weather, you get to an acre (4000m2) very quickly.
The math for something akin to a gas station, something that might want to "fill" 200+ teslas per day, becomes staggering. And big electric trucks? ... there isn't enough room in cities or even the suburbs. Widespread adoption of electric vehicles will need an extensive electrical grid.
There's a lot of well-founded speculation that the twin, contemporaneous technology shifts of electric cars and autonomous driving will, in the long run, lead to decreased--possibly radically decreased--car ownership, as the cars become more practical and convenient to summon on demand. That may offset a lot of the per capita charging arithmetic being discussed here.
And nonownership will lead to much smaller cars. It can be witnessed on island tourist destinations: the rentals at the destination airport are consistently smaller than the cars parked at the home airport. Without status considerations or speculative "what if" use case estimations over the whole span of ownership, people take the smallest car that will do the job. Ubers and taxis are big cars only because the driver is the most expensive "component" and cheaper hardware would not affect the cost of a ride enough to make a difference.
Worth noting that this could also lead to incredibly worsened suburban sprawl, as the factors which make driving a long distance to work suck (time, cost) are obviated.
That is indeed worth noting. As a critic of suburban sprawl, I'm disheartened that the balance of Silicon Valley's efforts in this arena seem to be in making the world better for cars, not for people.
Yeah - so far I haven't seen anyone else point this out:
* Automated driving permits you to nap, read, etc. while traveling in a car
* Coordinated automated driving permits much greater throughput on the roads with high speeds and smaller following distances
* Land farther from cities is cheap compared to land close
* Electric vehicles are much, much cheaper than petroleum-powered ones on a per-mile basis
I worry that everyone will want to live on a 3 acre estate on nice cheap land 100 miles from the city. After all, why not? Transportation is nearly free and you can kick back and nap for the 45 minute drive in to work (at an average 133 ish mph).
100 years from now, if humanity is somehow still around, I suspect California will be a gigantic skidpad with one giant metropolis that sprawls for ten times the distance they do now. Why not commute from San Luis Obispo to Los Angeles every day? Or Yosemite to San Francisco? I mean, some people already do Stockton to SF (hellishly) and that's half the distance right there. For that matter, back in college I dated a girl and drove from San Jose to LA every other weekend. I'd wake up at 4:30 AM in LA and be in work by 11 or so, traffic permitting. If I could've slept in the car and made the drive half as long I would've done it a couple times a week.
But you don't need the grid. Instead of pushing power around via wires you make the hydrogen near the power plant and push hydrogen around. That's the de-electrification, the lack of the extensive grid to move power between source and demand.
You've got to be kidding. Due to hydrogen embrittlement and fire risk from leaks there's no safe way to push hydrogen around in an underground pipeline network. The closest we can get is distributing natural gas and then converting that to hydrogen near the point of demand, which still requires a lot of electricity.
"Push" includes transport in tanks ... something that happens today. And if vehicles are going to be running on hydrogen, they are going to be transporting it in tanks too. Just like gas stations today, the hydrogen will be transported from the plant to the stations somehow. That movement of energy, as opposed to pushing electricity over wires, would reduce the need for grids as opposed to electric cars which will increase the need for grids.
I would assume that it's just simpler to synthesize methane (power-to-gas) and use that to (e.g.) fuel vehicles. Assuming you're pulling H from water and CO2 from the air, the methane is carbon neutral, so there's no huge reason to try to transport hydrogen.
I find this difficult to believe. Filling up a low-end Model S requires 60kWh. Assuming you use one "tank" of charge per day (210 miles) and you have 5 hours of sun per day, this is 12kW of panels. Nowadays you can get around 200 watts from a square meter of panels (modulo proper cosine=1 mounting) so this is 60 square meters. Multiply by 1.2 for efficiency losses and it's 72 square meters. Granted that's a lot more than most solar houses need, but it also assumes you're driving 210 miles per day, which is more than most people.
Why do you need an acre to mount 72 square meters? Even if you're in the Arctic Circle, you don't need that much. And you won't be charging in the winter anyway :-)
Take a look at exactly how much power goes into an electric vehicle. I once worked out how many solar panels one would need to charge a tesla once per day in my local. The math pointed to something like a solid acre of land dedicated to sustaining a single car. (not an acre of panels, at my latitude you need proportionally more land on which to mount panels). A shift to all-electric transport would produce a demand for which LEDs could never compensate. Only the very wealthy would ever own enough land to actually self-sustain through renewables. Cities will need power grids for a long while.
Take electric transport out of the equation and things start looking much better. Hydrogen-powered vehicles would imho at least allow the possibility of "de-electrification" in north america.