Wind is now opposed by people here because it ruins the landscape. Funny but it's what it is. And there's not enough physical space for solar arrays of this size.
Curiously, how many cars need charging(at night even) in this area? Maybe I missed the intent behind your comment.
But it doesn't sound like there is much daily driving.
Perhaps "...hands wet on the wheel..." like in the Golden Earring song often? )))
Many households have multiple cars - one or two for the parents, then maybe one for the eldest child that still lives with the parents. Each car is used daily or almost daily.
There definitely is less daily driving per vehicle - but there's much more vehicles per square kilometer.
IMHO the usage patterns and the population density make this a much harder problem here than in the US.
The average population density of California is 250 per square mile, for Germany it's 620. Considerably less than one order of magnitude in difference.
> For most people here, workplace is 15-30 minutes walk/public transit away, that's not going to solve anything about car charging.
If people are not driving to work, their cars can charge at home during the day, so it's already solved.
> And there's not enough physical space for solar arrays of this size.
There most certainly is. People overestimate the required space to a ridiculous degree.
Anyways, the average is deceiving - I think you should compare the average of a city like Berlin or Munich or Warsaw or Amsterdam to cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco, not Germany to California.
People here live in very dense cities with empty space in between, you don't have that in US cities which are mostly long stretched of single-family households. We don't have single-family households at all except for the few villas of the ultra-rich and the few people living in the villages around the cities.
> If people are not driving to work, their cars can charge at home during the day, so it's already solved.
That's not solved at all! That's exactly where the issue is - The grid isn't able to provide that much power. It's already nearly overloaded. It would need significant capacity upgrades and the people here don't want to pay for it.
This is probably why California continues to warn that rolling blackouts may become a thing. They raised that specter last year, and they're preparing to do it again this year.
Total system capacity is not improving at a rate commensurate with the forced adoption of EVs in the state.
Which may be fine on it's own, but if you're planning on bringing a bunch of new demand on to the grid, you're headed towards an uncomfortable corner.
https://calmatters.org/environment/2023/01/california-electr...
Also I think that workplace charging is the future of EVs. With the peak of the duck curve at mid-day, the obvious way to match that up to battery demand is to provide incentives for ubiquitous EV chargers in office parking lots, as well as charging the consumer for electricity consumed by their car.