"And while yes of course, Germany’s energy policy is “ruinously” expensive, as anyone who has waded through the decrepit ruins of the once-proud city of Stuttgart can attest, that makes total definite sense and is true, the entire argument falls flat on its face in a bizarre pratfall just as soon as an ounce of thought is put into it. Electrical grids powered by wind and solar do not just completely collapse as soon as the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining. Not only are there stacks of traditional batteries to store excess energy for those low times, humanity has devised ingenious ways to store massive amounts of power in ways you might not think, just to get around this notion"
The author of this article doesn't know what they're talking about. The amount of energy we can store just isn't enough to supply the grid when wind and solar stop, and probably won't be for quite a long time if ever. (The "ingenious ways" they're referring to is pumped hydroelectric, which suffers from a severe lack of suitable sites, most of which are already in use. It's also probably one of the first things people think of as a solution.)
Just to clarify, the German electricity grid doesn’t stop functioning when renewable production drops because Germany imports power from neighboring countries to make up the demand and massively overbuilt its renewable sector compared to what would be required if renewables weren’t variable.
Its also important to point out that a large fraction of renewables used by Germany are biofuels that are significantly more reliable than wind and solar but are not what people here think of when they talk about renewable energy.
In reality, Germany is so “successful” investing in renewable energy because it is a rich country willing to spend significant amounts surrounded by neighboring states willing to provide electricity. In reality, renewable energy is still significantly more expensive at he moment and adding storage into the mix just increases the cost.
This keeps getting brought up but the power stored in your car battery is usually there so you can, ya know, drive. If grid uncertainty can deplete your car battery to smooth the grid out, then you have to accept that you could very likely not have your car on demand which is pretty unacceptable for most people. I mean can you imagine that on a particularly hot day, the car you took to the office and expected to charge at the charging station instead has a lower battery at the end of the day than when you arrived and now you can't drive home?
I had imagined they were talking not about depleting the battery into the grid, but rather choosing when to charge them. Right now Tesla is pretty primitive about when to charge, all you can do is give it a time to start charging.
But it is easy to imagine something much more advanced. Given some input like how long we've been plugged in, if we use the app to say "charge now", what utility we have (by selection or by GPS possibly), interact with the utility to adjust the charging rate.
At the moment I'm just set to charge starting at midnight. This is for 2 reasons: We recently switched to a 3x higher utility cost from 7pm-10pm, and also the car charging when I plugged it in made it hard to read my bill. We have these bills that say "You use X% more energy than your neighbors, can you think of anything you do from 5pm-7pm that you could cut back on?"
The moments where the electrical demand is the highest during the day, in addition to being at the time when solar production is starting/is winding down, is the time people are either leaving for their commute and so are expecting to have a full charge, commuting or finishing their commute with partially empty batteries in need of a reload.
Not that this would be and easy thing to do but I always read the demand curve as the best possible reason to have a lot of destination chargers (in addition to home chargers). People are out in the community with their cars during the day when solar production is highest. Start piping that production into those batteries when it isn't needed elsewhere.
While the WSJ take may have presented a somewhat one-sided take on the findings, those findings do exist and his presentation is just as one-sided. For example, his comparison to his Tesla is a vehicle with 384 grams of CO2/mile.
Well, that's probably a gasoline powered SUV or truck in the US.
In Germany, you typically have smaller cars, much smaller engines and, well, Diesels, which these days easily manage around 5l / 100km, and that's in the range of 120 g of CO2/100km. So definitely competitive with the Tesla and with those small differences, differences in production become more relevant.
The studies I saw indicated that when driven long distances, Diesels are (still?) somewhat more efficient than EVs. Over short distances, EVs are better, but then you typically aren't driving a lot, so the extra production costs may not be amortised over the life of the vehicle.
The best case for EVs are vehicles that are constantly moving, but only small distances with lots of stop-and-go. So public transit, taxis, etc.
That said, I'd still prefer an EV if possible: quieter, fewer/no emissions at point of use (so less concentration of emissions in the cities), amazing torque, fewer parts, etc. And once we go fully nuclear/fusion it becomes a real no-brainer.
And electric propulsion for airplanes is also really interesting: short power bursts possible without much weight penalty for cruise, cost, reliability, noise (big issue in Germany, the only country in the world where people can see airplane "noise")
This article made me wonder, if overnight everyone switched to electric vehicles what would happen to the coal industry? I'm not advocating for either, but would we see a significant resurgence? I'm unsure if electric vehicle use is factored into the daily requirements for places that are ramping up renewable energy...and if not I can only assume the requirement for every household charging their cars is massive.
I'm not sure the question is useful, but yeah if everyone were to shift to electric propulsion tomorrow, most electric grids wouldn't be able to cope. You'd have to throw any mean of production that is still working, coal plants being one of the probably still available but under-used means of productions.
But it's not happening tomorrow, it's happening in the next decade and any respectable grid operator is already planning the changes such that it isn't a problem.
The author of this article doesn't know what they're talking about. The amount of energy we can store just isn't enough to supply the grid when wind and solar stop, and probably won't be for quite a long time if ever. (The "ingenious ways" they're referring to is pumped hydroelectric, which suffers from a severe lack of suitable sites, most of which are already in use. It's also probably one of the first things people think of as a solution.)