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The beauty of EVs is you don't need guaranteed supply. If you only have power half the day you can charge during that half the day. Most EVs already support ti

The beauty of EVs is you don't need guaranteed supply. If you only have power half the day you can charge during that half the day. Most EVs already support time mode charging and price based charging exists in a few. For always needed power we can just over provision and for variable power we can just turn it off if it's a particularly calm night. A surprisingly large amount of electricity use can be adjusted by a few hours. For example see how car charging locations are now adding batteries to allow them to avoid high demand charges by time shifting loads.

mytailorisrich 6y ago
You need to guarantee a minimum level of daily production because even if an EV can charge at different times of the day it needs to be charged every day. This is in addition to all the other electricity needs. In the UK solar is not that great because of the gloomy winters (when heating demand is at its peak, and the UK wants to also move away from gas central heating...). Best bets, IMO are tides and offshore wind. But wind can also be quite variable. If you add all of this up "just over provision" becomes unrealistic. There needs to be extensive storage capacity but I don't think we're quite there yet. Certainly batteries do not seem a very environmentally friendly option. Even this may bot solve the problem. All in all I think renewables can minimise the need for nuclear power but cannot replace it, at least for now.