Whenever I hear someone say that the electric car is the future of the automobile I never hear that followed up with a statement about how we can trust the grid to be there to power it. Because we can't trust it! If we have brown-outs and black-outs across the USA during late afternoon and early evening because the grid can't currently support the draw needed to support all the commercial, industrial, and residential need that coincides at that time then how the hell can we support plugging-in the cars? I am reminded of the horrible sound on the work-floor of a software development department when the background noise of hundreds of hard-disks and cooling fans decays as they all stop spinning. You know viscerally that your productive day has ended. What is your neighborhood or town going to sound like when we all arrive home at 5:30 PM and "top up" the car?
Rant sparked by Wired's article Power to the People: 7 Ways to Fix the Grid, Now.