Here's what I mean by cheap renewables will become too expensive to charge your EVs.
It's a link and quote, so should be a little less confusing.
http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-ener...y-win-game.html
Quote:
What this means in practice is that if you build a solar system with a capacity of 100 megawatts, in practice it won't produce energy at that level all the time. So you might get 100 MW out of it when the sun is out, but at night or on cloudy days, you don't. If you average it all, you might only get a 20% capacity factor. But don't worry, when we look at the cost of 1kWh of wind or solar, we're talking about actually produced energy, so the capacity factor is embedded in that price.
The reason why this matters so much has to do with one of the big strengths of wind and solar: Once the wind turbines or the solar panels are installed and paid for, the power produced has basically a marginal cost very close to zero.
Quote:
As Bloomberg explains: "It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. As more renewables are installed, coal and natural gas plants are used less. As coal and gas are used less, the cost of using them to generate electricity goes up. As the cost of coal and gas power rises, more renewables will be installed."
Quote:
It's kind of like a flywheel, and the more solar panels we install, the more wind turbines are built, the faster it spins. At some point, doesn't make any sense to run fossil fuels on sunny or windy days, and overall capacity factors go down enough that prices are simply not competitive with storage, and rather than build new natural gas plants,
utilities will simply buy more renewables combined with storage.
As I've said, because the capacity factor of the solar panels is like 20%, you need 5 times as many to get the same power.
Then you need storage, to store the excess and distribute it out of hours...and for Li, that's about 25c/KWh round trip, even with free electricity...
As the article states, power prices will rise until it's cheaper to install storage...As I said, the excess capacity in daytime hours will force the prices to zero/-ve to encourage consumption.
Problem is that overnight, which is when the fossil/nuke fueled stations have the lowest prices to avoid coming offline due to demand...precisely the time that you intend to recharge your tesla, you will be doing it off batteries, at 25c wholesale levelised cost of storage price PLUS the premium that will be required to get new investors putting in batteries.
Using SHOZ' data (sans connection fee), that's 34.5c/KWh, just for storage and delivery, let alone profit and encouraging people to put in new batteries.
