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If you dump BEVs on a grid that's transitioning towards renewables, you'll delay that transition. It doesn't make sense to account for the emissions as being th
by reitzensteinm 7y ago
If you dump BEVs on a grid that's transitioning towards renewables, you'll delay that transition. It doesn't make sense to account for the emissions as being the average of the grid, because you're delaying shutting down your dirtiest power to deal with the marginal load.
BEVs are clearly the future, and offer opportunities for distributed storage and demand dispatch that will help us keep the grid stable even with high renewable mixes. They're going to be great in the future, and for that we need to build up a market for them. That's where the real difference will come from.
- Nasrudith 7y agoDoesn't that contradict itself? Increased storage capacity delaying the transition to renewables? When storage at scale is the hard part and electric car batteries can power a house for a few days? Not to mention that the transportation sector is a part of the grid fundamentally. Even if it interferes with one metric it is still better overall which makes the complaint seem like it misses the point.
- reitzensteinm 7y agoIn the short term, it means you're just keeping fossil fuel power plants online for longer (if you're in the process of transitioning). You stop burning oil in your car though, and it's still a win, though in terms of ROI not an amazing one. In the long term, once you're generating so much renewable energy that it's causing instability in the grid and you can't pump more in, BEVs are a probably an essential component of handling that. Certain grids at certain times have already reached this point (the SA battery being a great example of where BEVs could have helped), but most are many years away from it, depending on how the price of solar trends.