EV alternative for light/medium duty trucks

thomas201 wrote:
I address the design of a straight renewable system, because I was one of the engineers that studied it for my company, to support the pumping and lease custody systems on about 1,000 coalbed methane wells. The study was due to our local utility putting us at the bottom of the priority list when power was knocked out by a snowstorm for about a week. Despite the fact that we supplied the natural gas for their power plants.

First, you design for your peak load, plus about 25%, for planned and unplanned outages, along with either real hot or cold weather. The average load is meaningless. You need 99+% up time. Now if you do not want to always have a spinning fossil back up generation capacity (big money waster) you need storage. In the Mid Atlantic of the United States from research, modeling and monte carlo simulations, plus engineering judgement, then better figure about 3 days (peak usage not average). Three days is also good, because it takes about 3 days to bring a laid up, cold, utility sized steam boiler on line.

Now you see it. You will need at least three times your average usage in renewable generation capacity. Gotta plan for peaks, gotta plan for night (what is solar giving me on a 16 hour winter night), windless days and nights, something broken, a tree falls on the wrong power line and the big one, you gotta charge up your storage when you pull it down. Fossil plants were built with this stuff in mind, ditto a true renewable system. This design stuff fills books by the way. Most authors still say at the end you need a dispatchable back up, probably fossil. If it was easy, this is how we would do it.

I suspect most of this went over peoples heads.

It's even worse with solar (supposedly the cheapest if you believe the proponents)...because peak demand is typically early evening on a hot night...result, solar provides 0% of that need, so you need backup power plants or storage capable of completely replacing any solar.