It takes, conservatively, 6.5kwh of power to refine 1 gal of gas. My Volt travels around 27 miles on that much electric power.

Basically, if you stop refining gas you'll have pretty much enough power for all EVs.

This article disagrees with the factoid that it takes 6.5 kWh of electric power to refine a gallon of gas. It says it's a few tenths of a kWh of electric power.

https://www.cfr.org/blog/do-gasoline-based-cars-really-use-m...

Maybe electric cars will be the solution to the duck curve?

They are one of the four main reasons why I don’t worry about the duck curve.

What are the other three?

1) Non-car storage (including but not limited to immobile batteries, pumped hydro, and hydrogen electrolysis)

2) Non-solar renewables (including but not limited to wind, geothermal, and tidal)

3) Inter-time-zone power grids (because PV is getting so cheap that 67% losses, 1000 watts at source being 330 watts at the plug, isn’t totally insane).

Electric vehicles use roughly a third of the energy so that 30 PWh only needs to be an extra 10 PWh for the grid. We need to increase overall capcity by 50%.

10 PWh / year (just over 1 TW average) is currently a half-trillion dollar installation cost, assuming $0.23/W PV with a 50% duty cycle.

Yes, this is still an improvement; yes it should be done; it’s just not trivial.

Also, most charging will happen at home, at night.

I doubt that; PV is cheap compared to storage, so it makes more sense to install twice as much PV as needed and include the charging plugs in existing car parks (and waste some power during commuting and lunch breaks), than to add enough immobile storage to allow most car charging to happen at night.

The thing about nighttime is that thats when the car isn't moving around much. Best time to charge.

Only when the power doesn’t come from PV. If it does, you need (three?) times as much battery capacity: the car’s battery, the immobile battery that the car charges from, and the battery which powers your houses (and some industry and commerce) overnight. If you charge your cars during the day, you can use some of the battery capacity in the electric cars, partially discharging some of them overnight to supply your nighttime needs.

Yeah I see what you mean. Maybe everyone will need to commute nocturnally once we're running everything on solar!

So one year the defense budget.

Seems possible

Chances are the network isn’t used at full capacity, so if people are willing to charge their cars outside peak hours (e.g, between midnight 7 AM, we wouldn’t need 50% more, network wise.