Hydrogen vs. Battery Electric Cars

10:07 — “if we replace all 15 million cars in CA with [battery] electric cars, the grid would fail.”  There is truth in that claim, but it’s ultimately not meaningful.

First, we can’t and won’t roll out BEVs out that fast, so it’s a meaningless hypothetical in the first place.

But more importantly, most people who make such claims, imagine that you have to charge the entire capacity of the battery upon plugging in every evening.  That’s extremely unrealistic, because the average American drives about 25 miles/day, after factoring out occasional long road trips, since they’re not charged from home.  That’s somewhere around 7.5KWh/day for a typical BEV.  The BEVs themselves typically have a 60ish KWh capacity, so you can stagger that by street address, say, or by when overnight the charger kicks in.