Electrify transport and solve the storage problem March 2, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Environment, Green in the City , trackbackThere’s a problem with wind power, in that it is available when the wind is blowing within the appropriate range for the turbine. That means that wind power can’t be relied upon to provide the base load that the national grid requires, and also that extra load has to sometimes be suddenly shed to prevent power surges. Apparently (and I can’t find the reference) one of the reasons Denmark is so successful in it’s use of wind power is that it can shed excess capacity to neighbouring countries fairly easily. For wind to work well, you need some way of storing or shedding that excess electricity
Reading this post over on Highly Allochthonous about decentralising power supply, a thought occured to me. If only 35% of the UK’s energy usage is electricity then why not increase that by electrifying road transport - cars and buses - and park them on charging units which only charge when there’s capacity available. If, say, 30 million vehicles were electrified, that’s an awful lot of battery storage.
Perhaps you could even use the batteries in your electric car to feed power back into the house at times when the grid or your microCHP wasn’t able to provide enough electricity.
Now there’s a thought for the government’s energy policy makers.
Comments»
no comments yet - be the first?