All well and good....
But do you want to swap brownouts for electric cars?
'cos state of the national grid says your gonna have to have one or the other.
I don't think that is accurate. At present we pay power stations to close down during off peak periods, like overnight. We also shut down turbines at off peak times. This is all massively inefficient for contraptions and buildings that have a finite lifespan. The argument being that electric cars are essentially batteries on wheels, that can be plugged in and charged overnight and reinforce the national grid during the day.
So, you can keep the power stations and turbines going through the night, filling batteries at off peak times with the lowest costing energy (until recently you could even be paid to use electricity overnight on some tariffs, to help incentivise keeping power stations open). Then during peak demand periods, the cars that are plugged in can actually feed energy back into your house and/or the grid. I believe the conservative figure is that the average car is idle for 90%+ of the time, so there is ample time when it isn't needing charged, but is available to feed modest amounts of electricity back into the grid.
Upwards of 2/3rds of cars in Norway are electric and they don't get solar power for much of the year. Yet you'll struggle to find stories about brownouts in Norway even though they have to run their cars inefficiently in wintry conditions. Of course a lot lf this requires common sense infrastructure like new build houses having domestic batteries, solar panels and heat pumps. So that's the UK gubbed then!
Demand for Tesla Inc's mid-sized models helped push up electric car sales in Norway to nearly 80% of total car sales last month, data showed on Friday.
www.reuters.com
If you think Norway isn't a good comparison. How about the most populace country on earth? Soon over half the cars sold in China will be EVs and instead of brownouts I expect we'll only hear about how kids born 10 years ago are seeing their first blue skies in city centres (although China does have some ongoing issues with its grid I believe as its middle class booms and consumes).
Warren Buffett-invested BYD led the pack
www.forbes.com
Existing combustion engine manufacturers as a rule do not make good EVs or good batteries. Tesla and the Chinese build much better EVs, with much greater battery capacity so will make a greater contribution to national grids 'batteries on wheels'. You could take 10% of the energy out of their batteries at peak times and they'll still have 300 miles range left.
The area of giant battery storage units to store renewable energy for use at a later time is an area where technology is lacking, but with the rate of progress in this field and the development of all kinds of battery alternatives (e.g. non-Lithium or cobalt) I'm very confident this will be solved. There is already big bucks in renewables and EVs, and the bigger the potential profits, the more money that is thrown at research and development.
Generally I'm not an optimist for humanity, but the technology is there and getting more efficient and cost effective every day, for power supply and lower pollution levels to go hand in hand. We probably do need a couple of decades more of nuclear as part of the equation though.
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