Where's my hydrogen car, though? Where's the nuclear plants required to produce all that hydrogen? The only fuel cell cars on the road right now are demonstration models, as there's no distribution infrastructure. It was always a dead-end technology that merely sounded good.
Imagine what good might have come if all that money was invested into developing PHEV technology. And the market pressures that would have accellerated it if CAFE standards hadn't been dropped. The recent advances we've seen should have come about 5 years ago.
But that's all water under the bridge, now, the question is what lies ahead. When I posted this thread, I was curious to see what ideas you all might have about the residential grid itself. As it stands now, no PHEV is sold with a timer, nor is any legislation like that planned. Without TOD monitoring, there is no incentive to install a timer, either- I don't know about you all, but I'd sure like to get home at 5pm and be able to drive my car again at 7pm.
What is the impact to the grid going to be? Will it be slow failure that the pocos can keep up with, or are we going to see massive simultanous failures across the nation that will leave the pocos and equipment manufacturers standing around haplessly? I don't see any financial incentive for the pocos to upgrade the infrastructure early. It's in their best interest to just wait for it to fail- the week or so those customers are without power isn't enough of a loss in income to justify the payback time on a transformer and upgraded line. TOD metering is the easy quick fix, but that's going to be wildly unpopular... I sure as hell don't want one on my house.
