I think you're making too much of this distinction. It's really all that matters when you have a rolling blackout. To say: 'hey, your air conditioners and office equipment would work great at midnight' is really missing the point. The infrastructure _must_ meet peak demand, or else it's insufficient: it's as simple as that. And adding a significant number of electric cars would significantly tax the existing infrastructure: there's no way you'd get people to "only" charge at night, for one.
> Electric cars with decent battery capacitiy could be
> charged at night, during off peak hours. Thus your existing
> electric infrastrucure, that is electricl plants would
> handle it.
Again, I think you're making too much of this distinction. In fact, a substantial shift to "off peak" would remove much of the current benefit of "off peak" -- there wouldn't be as big of a difference between "off" and "on" peak. Further, currently as demand declines in the late afternoon, _so does capacity_ -- off-peak time is used for maintenance of the generation capacity, which means you'd put a lot more strain on the existing infrastructure. Also, you'd increase the downside of having capacity shortfalls _at all hours_ inducing signifcantly more systemic risk than we have today.
> Time of day pricing is not a difficult switch - lots of
> electric companies have used it.
It is _offered_ by many utility companies, but very few customers take advantage of it -- most of them large, where it can make a real difference. Switching PG&E's largest customers (in the 1000s range) to this has been relatively painless (and of course individual consumers are paying for it!); it would be a HUGE deal to move some signifcant percentage of individual consumers to this kind of tarrif. In the current situation, off-peak pricing is sort of an arbitrage; if everyone did it, it would no longer be an arbitrage.
I'm not saying all this shouldn't get done. I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying you're vastly underestimating the impact of such a change.
>> And of course there's that nasty little problem of utility
>> companies who have refused to provide power on uneconomic
>> terms: what will PG&E do when a significant number of
>> consumers change their energy consumption patterns? No
>> one knows.
>
> Which moves the problem back to the realm of politics, which
> is my main point.
It's only political if you think you can force companies to operate on uneconomic terms -- and I'll point you to disaster insurance in California or Florida. Maybe if you nationalized these things you'd get some result (good luck), but otherwise they will just stop providing the service.
Remember when local phone service was cheap and long-distance was expensive?
> Continuing to burn fossil fuels is not due to technical
> barriers to change. It is a political and social problem.
It certainly is a political and social problem. But it is also a huge technical problem as well. Denying that just seems silly to me. It is not just a matter of will. I could give you a long list of challenges, but I suspect you already know them: you're just downplaying them for some reason. Ok, I'll give you one:
>> Electric cars with decent battery capacitiy could be ...
This is a very hard problem, and it's not advancing the way you'd need it for significant change. Batteries are big, heavy, inefficient, expensive, and dangerous. It's getting better. There is a whole industry devoted to it. In the time that people have been saying "electric cars with decent battery capacity could be ..." we've also seen the availability of better-than-zero-emission gasoline-powered cars. Food for thought ...
/jordan