> electric cars actually tend to get charged at night, while people sleep, when solar isn't generating.

Because there's no incentive to do otherwise. Of course people don't time shift their electric use when there's no incentive to.

The only way most people can time-shift charging their electric cars to the daytime is if their parking spot at their job has a charging station. Practically, that means a very large fraction of office building parking spots will need charging stations. That sounds prohibitively expensive. Incentives can only nudge so far before you run into genuine problems of logistics.

Building charging stations isn't that expensive, definitely not prohibitively so.

Charging stations can be installed and can make money by charging the commuters to charge their cars while they work. If the price differential between day & night is enough, it will be worthwhile for both the parking lot owner and the car owner.

Much cheaper than nuclear

charging stations for building parking don't need to be high speed, so the cost is just putting in an outlet (probably a 240 volt one)

Yes but "you can charge it while you sleep" is a pretty popular selling point of electric cars. You're arguing that we should purposely make electric cars less attractive.

People talk about "demand management" as if it's free. Not much power available, just shut down some factories. But if you're running your factories only half the time, you need to build twice as many factories to make the same stuff. You're making renewables look artificially cheap by externalizing costs to their customers.

> Yes but "you can charge it while you sleep" is a pretty popular selling point of electric cars. You're arguing that we should purposely make electric cars less attractive.

Instead, "you can charge it while you work". Not many people drive more than an hour a day - that's 23 hours where it sits. I see lots of cars parked in residential streets during the day. Paid parking lots catering to commuters can also offer charging services.

> just shut down some factories

That's your strawman. I didn't propose that.

Any factory wants to run full-speed 24/7. How are you going to manage their demand without reducing their production?

Same principle applies to most things. If electricity stops being readily available all the time, then you're introducing a new constraint that people have to optimize for. If that means they change their behavior, then they're doing something more expensive than whatever they were doing before, when they optimized without that constraint.

That extra cost generally isn't figured into the optimistic estimates of how cheap renewables are, but it's still a cost that society pays.

Building lots of charging stations at employer parking lots is also a new cost, that doesn't get counted against renewables.

Have you ever noticed that pump gas prices vary every day? That's demand shaping. It works.

> Building lots of charging stations at employer parking lots is also a new cost, that doesn't get counted against renewables.

The cost needs to be compared with building grid storage batteries.

It also needs to be included in comparisons with the cost of nuclear.

> Any factory wants to run full-speed 24/7

Many factories don't run 24/7. And yet more factories don't run their most energy intensive processes continuously even when they factory is "running".

A few commuters to the little town I live in can charge their electric cars during the day while they are at work.

If every parking space had a 7 kW connection (230 V, 30 A single phase) almost all cars could be fully charged while their owners were at work. In fact even an ordinary 3 kW connection would be enough for most people; even my 2015 Tesla Model S adds more than 12 km per hour at 3 kW.

Drive around any residential street during the day. You'll see lots of pahked cahs. They're not all off at work.

If car owners are paying for that power, then you need more than just electrical outlets. You need something that takes payments.

If car owners aren't paying for the power, then who is?

And either way, what does it cost to wire up all the parking spaces?

> You need something that takes payments.

Paid parking lots solved that problem eons ago.

> what does it cost to wire up all the parking spaces?

I wonder how people ever managed to electrify street lamps, any exterior powered things, even the per-stall electric parking meters I've encountered.

Charging a car takes way more power than running a parking meter.

All I'm saying is, the costs of these sorts of demand management measures for renewables should not be overlooked in comparisons with the cost of nuclear, which doesn't need them.

> Charging a car takes way more power than running a parking meter.

True, you'll need a heavier wire. And the cost of installing wire far exceeds the cost of the wire. When my house was wired up, the cost of the installation was 40 times the cost of the reels of wire.

Also night is a pretty good time for grid load since wind does decently at night, and power use is very low. (since most offices/factories don't use power at night)

Also if your home has a "NightSaver" meter (just what they're called here in Ireland, but basically a day and night meter), the night rate is often nearly half the day rate, so it makes sense to charge at night.