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As California is starting to show. Authorities banned combustion cars from 2035 and then are asking people not all to charge their electric cars from 16:00 to 21:00 with all the air conditioners and stuff on. What do people do in Norway? They have more electric cars don't they? They don't have California's heat but there must be cold in winter, I guess they burn fossil fuels for heating and so the grid isn't so stressed ? Or do they have a stronger grid ?
Edit: contrary opinion.
Yes, although that article is for the australian market where they have a lot of solar pushing the price down during that day, at least if you're on a reactive tarrif. In europe the cheapest part of the day is normally overnight, because less people are using it, and it's more effective to leave those nuclear power stations running 24/7, plus wind turbines don;t stop turning just because the sun's gone down. Most newish electric cars have timers in them that you can set to tell them only to pull power while we sleep, at least on the days you need to plug them in. Going forward we'll have something call Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G), which'll let grid maintainers skim a kilowatt hour off everyone's car, which'll act like an extra power station on the grid, but will only take you car about 10 minutes to refill once the cost of power drops.
 
Yes, although that article is for the australian market where they have a lot of solar pushing the price down during that day, at least if you're on a reactive tarrif. In europe the cheapest part of the day is normally overnight, because less people are using it, and it's more effective to leave those nuclear power stations running 24/7, plus wind turbines don;t stop turning just because the sun's gone down.
Southern Europe could also deploy quite a lot of solar. But again my concern is not power stations.

Most newish electric cars have timers in them that you can set to tell them only to pull power while we sleep, at least on the days you need to plug them in. Going forward we'll have something call Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G), which'll let grid maintainers skim a kilowatt hour off everyone's car, which'll act like an extra power station on the grid, but will only take you car about 10 minutes to refill once the cost of power drops.
Yes, it's better to schedule and organise all those cars than having all of them suck all the power at the minute the cheapest tariff quicks in. But it's still a lot of power flowing through the grid that now comes from fossil fuels. I understand that the current grid is sized for the maximum current each household needs, not the average, so if you can average your power across the hours, you could sort of make do with the same grid, but I doubt that's enough. It depends on how long people commute and so on, but charging a car twice a week could still be easilly triple the power that the household is using now (assuming only one car in the house). If that's just 10% of the houses in the neighbourhood, it's ok. But if they're all the cars in the neighbourhood, I don't know. Even if 5 neighbours are charging their car from five other neighbours cars now and five others next hour, there're going to be power lines in that 30 houses neighbourhood carrying more power than they're carrying now.
It's also not clear to me how V2G should work. The moment the grid wants to take power from your car is the moment electricity is expensive, so it's probably the moment you want to use the power from your car to power your house instead of paying the grid for electricity. The company is always going to pay you less for the electricity you sell them than what it charges for the electricity you buy from them. So I see the usefulness of vehicle to home, but will vehicle to grid be profitable for the car owner ? At some times your electricity needs are so low you could probably power your house and the grid from your car, but 1) those should be cheap hours, just when you want to charge the car, not discharge it 2) will that still leave your car charged enough that you can refill it later and keep always some range to get to the nearest hospital or so ?
Vehicle to home should require less technical and contractual burden than vehicle to grid, and still ease the stress on the grid by lowering demand at peaks instead of increasing supply. Maybe if people buy cars with much more battery than the range they usually need... But home batteries should eventually be considerably cheaper than car batteries (they can be bigger and heavier). So maybe it's more practical to buy a house battery so that you can charge the smaller battery in your car more often and cheaper, and you can power your house at peak tariff even if the car is away, instead of buying a car with an oversize battery and then use it to power your house or the grid. Moving a bigger battery takes more energy, so you're better off leaving as much battery as you can at home.
 
Yes, the Ford f150 electric can do vehicle to home (as long as you pay for the parts and installation cost). I'm not sure what the techinal difference between vehicle to home and vehicle to grid, since the former powers you home grid, but your home grid is connected to all other grids (albeit by the fuse box).

I'm interested in sodium-ion batteries for home storage needs. Slightly heavier than lithum-ion because sodium has all those extra protons and neutrons in it, but it's the next group-1 metal so it behaves similarly to lithium, but is less flammable. Sodium is also more available than lithuim because it's common in seawater, so there's less of a scarcity. I tend to think that price has more to do with the number of people that want to buy it, and hence I'd expect it to start out more expensive even if later it comes down in price.
 
Yes, the Ford f150 electric can do vehicle to home (as long as you pay for the parts and installation cost). I'm not sure what the techinal difference between vehicle to home and vehicle to grid, since the former powers you home grid, but your home grid is connected to all other grids (albeit by the fuse box).
I'm not well informed, I think it's the metering on one hand (needs to count how much you give, not only how much you take) and some safety circuits . I was surprised to know that when you install solar panels in your home you have to set up things so that if there's a blackout, your panels stop working (or was it they stop pouring electricity to the grid?). The idea was that if an eletrician comes fix the grid, they'll cut power from the grid for repairing safely, but we don't want them fried by electricity from neighbouring panels.
If you don't give electricity to the grid and just save some of the electricity you take from the grid, the same metering is enough and safety circuits are simpler, I think.
I'm interested in sodium-ion batteries for home storage needs. Slightly heavier than lithum-ion because sodium has all those extra protons and neutrons in it, but it's the next group-1 metal so it behaves similarly to lithium, but is less flammable. Sodium is also more available than lithuim because it's common in seawater, so there's less of a scarcity. I tend to think that price has more to do with the number of people that want to buy it, and hence I'd expect it to start out more expensive even if later it comes down in price.
Yes, I meant it should be cheaper eventually. They also say some North America - China collaboration (MIT, Wuhan and other universities: Peking University, Yunnan University, and the Wuhan University of Technology in China; the University of Louisville in Kentucky; the University of Waterloo in Canada; Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee; and MIT.) found a potentially cheap battery with aluminium electrode, sulfur electrode and chloro-aluminate or something as electrolyte. Sulfur is currently a waste product, aluminium the most common metal, and Cl is the other part of sea salt. So it should be cheap. They said it worked good at 25 C but better (25x faster charge/discharge) at 110 C. The battery warms when used, so it's mostly a matter of thermal isolation, not so much heating the battery. But it all is maybe too bulky for cars.
 
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I'm going to the beach for one week at the beginning of October. Holden Beach, North Carolina, if anyone's interested in stalking me. I'm debating about bringing my tablet. I wanna be present, but not stir crazy.
 
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Good news. The Queen is going to receive the highest honor America can bestow: a moment of silence before a gridiron football game.

 
Less than one year ago:
600km is a long way that would need a lot of batteries to run an electric motor for. The most I've heard on new cars is 400km, althogh it's far to say a mini van would have more load capacity for more batteries. Or maybe space for liquified hydroogen in tanks which gets uncompressed and fed through a fuel cell creating electricity which can turn a motor,

Nowadays, Aptera has finished its design but it's short of cash to manufacture it, but BMW is saying (not in the market yet):
Gen6 batteries will give us 30% or more range than our current Gen5, but we won’t go over 1000km [620 miles] of range, even though we can. We don’t think that such a long range is necessary.
And they claim to charge at 270 kW (what's that like, a lightning strike every fourth second? scary and NIO is talking almost double that).
I don't think one size fits all, but more than 150 or 200 km built-in range seems too much. What would be good is to have place to
carry additional battery packs in the car that you can remove for more luggage space or add for more range. And a charging
system at home that can use the same battery modules as the car for home storage (in addition to cheaper static batteries).
Or just public stations where one can quickly swap battery modules for a fee, like already done. Pity systems may be incompatible.
And stations may need robotic swap, but home systems may need manual handling, so different car designs likely.
Still thinking all that is hardly scalble to so many cars as there are now, so hopefully trains and tramways with catenaries so they
don't have to haul their own batteries will become more common.

And I'm not sure that cars that drive to you to pick you up are going to come any time soon. We still need to work out who's to blame if it runs over a pedestrian in the activity of getting to you.

I'm a little hopeful that some companies are finally backpedaling about self-driving. I'd still prefer on board human driving than remote control, but it's better than cars driving themselves.
 
The latest fully charged show was about fast charging with GEC's Aion cars (in china, natch). They seem to have quietened down about that 1000km range now and are more pushing liquid cooled fast charging.
 
Tropical Storm Fiona’s current projected track has it turning into a hurricane on Wednesday, but it also has it turning north and east, away from the US, much like Earl. It’s too early to say what it’ll do exactly though. Only 70% of storms stay within the projected track.
 
I'd still prefer on board human driving than remote control, but it's better than cars driving themselves.

 
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