Re:Company Update
by tootie on Friday January 18, 2019 @09:09AM
(#18939363)
You're not entirely wrong, but that's still a cynical point of view. Electric cars are a huge win over combustion and don't require us to rebuild the infrastructure of the entire world. Just saying "it won't save the world, so it sucks" is the wrong attitude. It's an improvement. And we're going to need a lot of improvements to add up while we work towards a moon shot solution that may not appear for 50 or 100 years.
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I disagree. The power consumption of electric cars is enough to transform entire cities. If everybody drove electric right now, the current power grids would just collapse.
With the right pricing incentives, there's still a lot of slack during lower demand periods (overnight). The grid must be able to handle peak demand during the day but after say 10pm demand falls sharply. Offer discounts on overnight electrical usage and you can smooth out demand throughout the 24 hour day. We still would need to invest in upgrading the power grid but that investment is long overdue anyway.
That's not even what I'm talking about. People will want to load their cars at the supermarket or at work. That's when power demand is very high anyways, so the grid will be under a lot of stress.
And you missed my point. If it costs $10 to charge at work and only $1 to charge at home, people will charge at home overnight. The worst electric vehicles easily go 100 miles on a charge in cold weather. The number of people doing commutes greater than 50 miles each way is statistical noise.