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adrianN | on: Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
Solar+A couple of hours of batteries is already economically viable. The storage problem that is still expensive is bridging days/weeks of insufficient sun and wind.
traceroute66 | parent | next
> The storage problem that is still expensive is bridging days/weeks of insufficient sun and wind.

It might help if the US wasn't so anti off-shore wind at the moment.

HDThoreaun | parent
The US uses around 4TWh of electricity a night. A battery with that capacity, to get through the night with no generation, would cost over a trillion dollars. Of course thered still be some generation at night, but still, using a battery just to get through the night is not even close to viable
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thelastgallon | root | parent
US has ~250 million cars. If they are all EVs (100KWh), it is 25TWh capacity.

Reserving 20% of that capacity to supply power back to the grid is 5TWh.

EVs can be charged for free during the day, ~20% of solar is lost due to curtailment. Even if a significant percentage (10 - 20%) of the people decide they are going on long drives from Florida to Vancouver and turn off supply-power-to-grid-for-money in the app, its fine, there are plenty of cars. It is the cheapest, most resilient, distributed and self-healing energy ecosystem. Only one problem, it won't make the super billionaires money. Unless it can be packaged in a way to make the super billionaires money, its a no go in US.

This infrastructure buildout costs nothing, people buy new cars all the time (~20M/year), just buy EVs instead. Because people are providing the capital and the storage infrastructure, they should be paid for it.