To green up their transportation, many drive electric cars—and put renewable power on the grid to make that better. Unfortunately, what happens when you do that is really complex, and may cause more emissions than you might think
I recently made an effort to understand what happens when I pay to add some renewable generation capacity to the grid -- whether on my roof, or in a solar farm I buy energy from -- so that one can charge an electric car. Most people charge electric cars at night, when the power is much cheaper than during the day.
Peakers -- Can turn up and down quickly. Usually standard natural gas plants and hydro. An analogy is a gas stove that you can turn up and down quickly. Variable -- the renewables. They don't have a fuel cost, but we don't control, and may have trouble predicting, when it comes. If you don't sell the power when it does come, you just throw it away.
Each fuel is pretty different, too. Coal pollutes horribly and estimates suggest it kills millions from pollution and outputs the most greenhouse gas. Natural gas has few unhealthy pollutants, but produces CO2 and leaks methane -- and most of it comes from hydraulic fracking which has issues too. Nuclear has no emissions but produces nuclear waste and carries a small but real accident risk.
Same problem from wind. The wind stops blowing and suddenly you need a bunch more power, quick. When it starts blowing again, customers want to switch back to it, leaving the heat-based plant with a long and wasted cool-off. The"duck" curve actually has a dip in the daylight on a sunny day rather than a rise. The dip is lowest at noon when the solar panels are doing the most. It's a very deep dip on cool days when AC is not being used. Then, quite quickly between 5 and 8pm, the solar panels all fade out, the wind usually dropsthe people turn on their lights and ovens. All at once, a whole lot of power is needed, from non-renewable sources, from power plants that can be turned on quickly.
Thermal solar plants, unlike photovoltaic solar plants, are not variable in the power they generate. Due to the drop in the cost of PV, and the higher prices paid for daytime energy, people are favoring PV today. There are aggressive plans for the future involve solar thermal, offshore wind and tons of onshore wind farms and other resources to even out the variability from PV. Stanford professor Mark Jacobson predicts all energy needs could eventually be met from wind, solar and water based resources, avoiding even nuclear.
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