> Except very few parking lots have superchargers. And those that do, usually have just 5 or 10 for a parking lot of hundreds of spaces.

The number of chargers increases with the number of cars.

> This whole idea that a grid operator is going to accept that traffic conditions are going to potentially cause blackouts is not where near feasible.

Pricing determines demand. Charging at the supercharger at the mall during sunlight is cheap so people go out of their way to do it, and the mall loves this because people come to the mall and buy things when they know it's a quick and cheap place to charge.

> Right so ultimately the solution is: keep using fossil fuels. Great...

Cloudy for an entire week happens, but it's rare. So 98% of the time you use nuclear and solar, then one week out of the year you use nuclear and fossil fuels instead, and you've got a 99% decarbonized grid.

Or you find something to burn instead of natural gas. You could quite plausibly have a one-week supply of biofuels or synthetic fuel, since it's for emergency use rather than everyday generation.

> And a 10GW deficit over a week is still 1,680 GWh of storage. This is massive several times annual global battery production.

Yeah, batteries don't really work for long-term storage. But the amount of batteries you need to avoid running the peaker plants on a normal day, combined with running the peaker plants 24 hours a day instead, gets you through a period of two or three days of low generation.

At that point you're doing demand suppression through pricing and things, but only when the period of low generation lasts for many contiguous days. And getting 50% demand suppression probably isn't reasonable, but 10% is, especially when you only rarely have to do it.

> Solar output is sinusoidal. Right after sunrise is still producing nearly zero energy.

"Right after sunrise" is nearly zero, but two hours after sunrise is more than 50% of peak.

And human activity is sinusoidal too. You start getting some solar generation before anybody is awake and you can put it into charging vehicles. Generation increases as more people start to wake up. Moreover, some people leave for work at 8AM, some leave at 9AM, some will charge at work or the mall, so you're still spreading the load throughout the daylight hours rather than trying to fit everything into the period immediately after sunrise.

> Base load is the significant majority of the electricity demand. It's not a small part of electricity demand, it's almost all of it.

Peak load in summertime is nearly double the base load.

> Uh no? Maybe in California, but here in Seattle we regularly see nighttime temperatures below freezing.

The average winter temperature in California is 46 degrees F, and California is >75% of the population of the west coast. The average winter temperature in Washington state is 33 degrees. The average winter temperature in New York, despite a more southern latitude than Washington, is 23 degrees. In North Dakota, still slightly south of Washington, it's 12.

The west coast has mild winters and less heating demand.

It also has a ton of existing hydro and existing high voltage transmission lines because the hydro is in the northwest but powers much of California, so you could fill California to the brim with renewables and then use the existing hydro as your batteries.