> Though in the long term, it might be useful to do what you propose to produce carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuel for things that need exceptional energy density. Like air travel or space launch vehicles.
Yes that's what I had in mind - thanks.
I do remain sceptical that electric cars will save us. If everyone buys an electric car, and then plugs them in the evening to charge - I'm not sure the grid will cope very well. IMHO there is still a valid case for running cars, trucks and trains on hydrocarbons.
Why would they plug them in the evening though? If you're using the car, you're likely to be parking it at a place with a high car density (e.g. a large parking garage or an employer's parking lot), where chargers can be deployed cheaply.
If you have a short commute, you might also not care how fully charged your car is as long as it is enough. So you may specify that you want a state of charge of 50-80% at the end of the day, and the grid can decide when to charge your car. It won't be enough to smooth out all the fluctuations in renewable generation, but it surely will help.
10 million cars (~20% of the cars existing in Germany) attempting to charge is at least 10 GW of load that can be shed when necessary, and significantly more than that in load that you can sink when there is excess power (I'm assuming each car needs to charge e.g. 10 kWh over 10 hours). Wikipedia says the total Regelleistung (operating reserve?) in Germany is 12.5 GW (7 GW in one direction, 5.5 in the other) and that this is responsible for 40% of the cost of the grid fees.
Hourly priced electricity will be the future. Solar is creating this huge abundance of power during the day and electric cars are basically a huge grid of batteries. Since you are not using your car for the majority of the day and usually not during the middle of the day where peak solar kicks in, you can just plug your car in every time you leave it parked and then a charge controller sits and does nothing until power prices drop to the expected lowest price before charging. With some kind of fail safe where they charge anyway if no expected low occurred.
But another problem is that road construction itself is a huge cause of greenhouse gas emissions and isn't solved at all by electric cars. Only fewer and lighter cars would make things better. Personally I think electric scooters could replace a fair bit of car travel. The little sit down ones are sufficient to get you around for most trips and carry a bags worth of stuff.
Yes that's what I had in mind - thanks.
I do remain sceptical that electric cars will save us. If everyone buys an electric car, and then plugs them in the evening to charge - I'm not sure the grid will cope very well. IMHO there is still a valid case for running cars, trucks and trains on hydrocarbons.