Cars charge at night, so they help flatten the duck curve and use mostly base power. They're good complements to wind power, which is usually stronger at night.
That's not what this word means though.
> Cars charge at night, so they help flatten the duck curve and use mostly base power
When the car is being used for daily commute, yes, but not when travelling (IIRC the majority of gas consumption is caused by long-distance travelling in my country).
> They're good complements to wind power, which is usually stronger at night
Do you have a source for that?Because me personal experience suggest the opposite actually.
> When the car is being used for daily commute, yes, but not when travelling (IIRC the majority of gas consumption is caused by long-distance travelling in my country).
Citation definitely needed, I strongly disbelieve this.
Even our 500 miles trip mostly use night energy -- charge overnight for the first 320 on cheap night electricity, add 200 halfway in between at expensive rates, and recharge to full at destination at cheap night rates.
> Do you have a source for that?Because me personal experience suggest the opposite actually.
First one that showed up in my Google: https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma...
Even where it's not true, the production delta between night and day is lower than the demand delta between night day, so wind provides a disproportionate share of power at night.
I don't know where you got your figures from, but wind and solar can almost never be the marginal production means at all[1], given they have a marginal cost of almost zero…
[1] unless there some very strong anti-renewable regulation going on forcing the renewable to only supply power to the grid after a threshold, but I don't know who would want to build wind and solar in such a context…