The concept of having a big batt for the car and small batt for the house and of course at least 1 EV car, along with a hefty solar array plus a grid connection gives you better than average resilience, but quite obviously is outta da budget for 95% of the population even in a relatively "rich" country like the FSoA. The whole system is predicated on the suburban model of living where everybody has their own house and car. What about all the folks who live in apartments in cities and don't even own their own car? Apartment buildings aren't suitable for solar, there's not enough surface area with sun exposure for the number of living units stacked vertically on the property. They also don't usually have a parking garage right under the building you might wire all the car batts to the living units from. In other words, this whole model is unsuitable for anyone who lives in Manhattan or downtown Seattle, even the rich folks there who might be able to afford it.
Moving outward to Brooklyn and Queens where you mostly have Brownstones and attached housing the people do generally own cars, but mostly use street parking so being able to connect home and car is probably not possible, at the least it is impractical. The 1/8th to 1/4 acre plots these dwellings sit on barely would provide enough space for your pv array, ussuming you have good southern exposure.
Once you make it out to Long Island or NJ and start finding the McMansions on 1/2 acre properties with attached garages, the paradigm becomes possible, but these days said domiciles go for $500K & up, to which you are now adding another $100K probably for the EV car, home batt, inverters, pv array and assorted wiring. What percentage of the population can afford this solution?
Moving rural, the land and home sizes are larger and come cheaper, but at the expense of fewer high paid jobs so affording the whole package is still limited, and the total population also much smaller.
Taken all together, while this option is possible for a small segment of the population, it's not a society wide solution. Nevertheless, EV transportation and solar powered homes are still held out as the Holy Grail for the Green Amerikan, like 2 cars in every garage and a white picket fence were the grail of post-WWII subdivisions like Levittown. The Amerikan Dream for everyone. Everyone never got that one, and even fewer will get this one.
RE
Tech Won't Save Us
Started by RE Jul 05, 2023, 04:23 PM
Message path : / Society / Tech is always to the rescue / Can The U.S. Power Grid Handle The EV Boom #6
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