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UK Renewable Energy Capacity Surpasses Fossil Fuels For First Time (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The capacity of renewable energy has overtaken that of fossil fuels in the UK for the first time, in a milestone that experts said would have been unthinkable a few years ago. In the past five years, the amount of renewable capacity has tripled while fossil fuels' has fallen by one-third, as power stations reached the end of their life or became uneconomic. The result is that between July and September, the capacity of wind, solar, biomass and hydropower reached 41.9 gigawatts, exceeding the 41.2GW capacity of coal, gas and oil-fired power plants.
Imperial College London, which compiled the figures, said the rate at which renewables had been built in the past few years was greater than the "dash for gas" in the 1990s. However, the amount of power from fossil fuels was still greater over the quarter, at about 40% of electricity generation compared with 28% for renewable sources. In total, 57% of electricity generation was low carbon over the period, produced either by renewables or nuclear power stations. In terms of installed capacity, wind is the biggest source of renewables at more than 20GW, followed by solar spread across nearly 1m rooftops and in fields. Biomass is third.
Imperial College London, which compiled the figures, said the rate at which renewables had been built in the past few years was greater than the "dash for gas" in the 1990s. However, the amount of power from fossil fuels was still greater over the quarter, at about 40% of electricity generation compared with 28% for renewable sources. In total, 57% of electricity generation was low carbon over the period, produced either by renewables or nuclear power stations. In terms of installed capacity, wind is the biggest source of renewables at more than 20GW, followed by solar spread across nearly 1m rooftops and in fields. Biomass is third.
If I had a dollar for every time someone suggests OMG EV battery storage for the grid....
You nailed the problems on the head. Using an EV to supply battery back to the grid is like loaning out your car to the general public... You had better be paid princely for the "miles" they put on your vehicle, in this case, the charge-discharge cycles put on the battery.
Most vehicles are not wired to allow this at residential level - the J1772 standard doesn't allow the vehicle to pump inverted AC power out, although that would be a neat trick (and probably feasible in future cars). The crutch required with current tech would be some expensive DC Fast Charge-based inverter you plug into at night which can go bidirectional at the request of the grid - charge the EV over DC when appropriate and pull DC from the vehicle, invert and feed into a grid-tie system much like solar or wind.
The next best thing may be load trimming, which eMotorWorks has in the form of JuiceNet - juicenet compatible J1772 chargers can trim the available current as needed to create a large-scale electrical load shedding system.
the real at&t mix