Originally Posted By: double vanos
When uptopia happens: electric cars have same range as the current gas cars, electric cars can be refueled in the same amount of time as gas cars, and finally, the electricity for the cars comes from solar fields.
Is it impossible? No. But it will take time to get there. The internal combustion engine has been under active development for roughly 118 years. With today’s computing power, I’d guess it’ll happen in half that time. There’d be no reason to go for a gas car at that point.
Now turbine engines, that’ll take a much longer time, if ever.
Solar has several things going against it that make it basically impossible:
1. It can't, independently, follow load
2. It needs batteries to allow it to do any load following and those batteries have finite charge capacity
3. To cover night, you need absolutely insane amounts of battery volume, distributed, that have enough excess capacity to cover every conceivable load scenario over the longest night and reach that state of charge with the worst case scenario solar output while still covering grid demand.
Solar is horribly inflexible, has the worst energy density of any current means of generation and has unpredictable and highly variable output. Planning a system that requires, at all times, large amounts of electricity for essential services, around this is, to be blunt, insane.
SMR nuclear technology is a far more reasonable choice, has 5x the lifespan, can follow load, produces power around the clock, can be built anywhere and doesn't require batteries. It can also be used to produce hydrogen which in turn could be used to replace jet fuel in turbine applications, a scenario that is far, FAR more viable than trying to make a battery-powered jet.