fool.com is appropriately named.
“Doesn’t renewable energy’s trajectory look a lot like coal in 1850 or petroleum in 1900? Maybe it’s time to consider renewable energy’s disruptive potential rather than dismiss it as its market share grows?”
Heavily subsidized renewable energy does not constitute a viable growing replacement for fossil fuel. The density isn’t there and what is more... batteries are not renewable energy... they don’t create energy, they store energy created somewhere else by something else. Yes, you can argue that oil and gas are merely storage media for sunlight...
What are these renewables? Wind, solar and biomass... none of which are capable of replacing hydrocarbons on any scale. None, even at saturation and 100% efficiency. If they were it would already be done.
If batteries improve significantly and will also outlast the life of the car, that could overcome one of the biggest disadvantages of solar and wind, i.e., it’s intermittent nature that requires a full base load of conventional power to be on standby at all times.
It strikes me that the nation’s fleet of cars is an ideal storage mechanism for wind and solar generated power, especially if all were eventually plugged in to smart meters so that the car owners could specify a price they’d pay for a recharge.
Cars sit idle 90-95% of the day. If they were plugged into a smart grid then utilities could feed any surplus power from wind and solar to the cars by simply lowering the price of power at such times. Say the rate is 15 cents a kwh when the base load is up and running, then the wind picks up. Instead of cutting the base load in response (or turning of the wind mills, as is done now), just cut the price to the smart meters instead, thereby feeding the power to the smart meters set to turn on at, say, the 14 cent price. If that doesn’t absorb the excess power, cut it some more. The lesser-used cars would be sitting there waiting to absorb power at, say, a nickel or so. That is, those meters would only feed power if the utility dropped the rate to a nickel, and only for so long as the rate remained there. To allow everyone to charge that way, the meters could be programmed by the car owner to raise the acceptable price as the next drive time approached, so that the car would be fully charged by then.
Solar power, also an intermittent source, could be handled the same way.
In this way, the base load would handle traditional electric demand, with wind and solar adding to it on hot or cold days if available, but any time the base load had to be reduced, just feed the power to car storage. And those who need power regularly every day for their cars would just recharge regularly at the full rate and become part of the base load.
I realize this is all contingent on cheaper sources of wind and solar power, and on better batteries, but it would seem to address the intermittence issue.
Any thoughts on this?