Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryland
It takes time, and fuel to throttle back power plants, and more time and energy to bring them back up, to me it would make sense to have EV's use a power plan controlled charger, as the daily loads drop, they switch your cars charger on, if you need to charge it in the day time then you pay more.
Or just get your own solar or wind system and charge it your self.
|
That's one of the better uses of solar or wind, the only problem being that you usually charge at night, when solar cannot be used. But it's a nice idea for wind power since you can just charge with whatever power it produces, charging a car doesn't require a constant input like computers or hospital equipment does.
Otherwise wind and solar don't have much potential to actually offset fossil fuels, it's not constant the way coal or nuclear plants are. Solar and wind are expensive, and can only really offset our current base load when one considers the absolute minimum that it might produce. If at some point wind and PV installations might produce 2% of their maximum output (100,000MW), that means that you need a 98,000MW reserve. That will probably come from natural gas, which can be cycled quickly, but that still means we're not getting rid of fossil fuel plants, just using them less.
If it gets into cycling coal plants it's quite questionable, since they will pollute more in the warm up stage and cool down. Ironically with the intermittentcy of wind power in Denmark they just run their coal plants 24/7, and when they get a lot of wind generation they sell it at dirt cheap prices to Germany and Sweden, where industrial users probably use it to smelt aluminum or something.
For the time being nuclear is the only option we have NOW. Solar power and wind power seem perpetually "just a few years" away from being economical. I'll believe it when I see it, but we shouldn't depend on a technology "eventually" being practical. Also solar panel manufacturers are piggy backing on the electronics industry right now using excess low quality processed silica, but a serious ramp up in production would mean they'd have to smelt their own and prices would have to jump.
I see far too much "feel good" focus on windmills and solar panels, and not enough consideration of the actual environmental impact. Also despite all the talk we're building 39 coal plants right now in America, Germany is building 4...
PS. Nuclear waste disposal, reactor safety are no longer technical issues, they're just political issues. France has no problems with it, we're just shackled politically by the psychological fallout from Chernobyl.