Chinese electric car
Credit: The Atlantic
China could use an expected boom in electric vehicles to stabilize a grid that depends heavily on wind and solar energy, officials from an influential Chinese government planning agency said Monday in Washington D.C.
“In the future we think the electricity vehicle could be the big contribution for power systems’ stability, reliability,” said Wang Zhongying, director of the China National Renewable Energy Center and deputy director general of the Energy Research Institute at China’s National Development and Reform Commission.
The Chinese do not see the cost of renewable energy as a significant obstacle to its widespread adoption, Wang told a lunchtime gathering at Resources for the Future, a non-partisan environmental research organization in the Capitol.
“The biggest challenge for renewable energy development is not economic issues, it is technical issues. Variability. Variability is the biggest issue for us,” said Wang, who explained variability like so: “When we have wind we have electricity; when we have sun we have electricity. No wind and no sun, no electricity.”
But if the […]
The problem is getting batteries to full charge. If you don’t do that both the efficiency and the life of batteries declines rapidly. I think they would have a hard time storing enough in the cars during the day to be able to to tap them for power during the night without reducing the range of the cars. Pumped storage, bio-diesel, and bio-gas are the likeliest candidates for industrial-scale storage and reducing variability because they already exist. Also, the wind often blows at night.