Today I was just fiddling my phone, after a nice hot day, and I found the above picture on a friend's Facebook wall.
At first, it really touched me, to the point that I thought: "yeah, these electric cars are just disguised, energy production is still fossil, they are dirt". That thought, I believe, most people still have, and it really makes sense. Even for the people who are energy analysts, experts, you will find people believing that electric cars will increase demand for electricity generation, and that will upset the fossil fuels usage numbers.
Well, in my point of view, I believe that the yes, energy generation is going to be upset. But the cartoon is over simplified. And really, it would make sense a few years ago. However, today, everything has changed.
But what exactly has changed?
Batteries.
Batteries are going to or are already disrupting everything in the energy industry, and the innovations and capacity are moving faster than any internal combustion engine super-car. Don't trust it? Look at the latest Tesla Roadster comparison to the most powerful Internal combustion Engine, Bugatti. It beats the shit out of it, on every important specification. The battery with 200kwh capacity can take the car up to 620 miles on a single charge.
If that can be taken to larger scales, amassing one battery over the other, even cities can be powered with these batteries. In Australia there is super battery with 100Mw storage capacity. The idea to construct that super battery started over a prank on twitter between Elon Musk and a cybernetic, and the project was delivered in less than 100 days. Now, this bet is most probably the answer for the problem of intermittent renewable energy, and it was done in less than 100 days.
People wrote books saying that renewable energy is impossible, or maybe in 20, 30... 50 years because its intermittent. Even the Prime minister of India, President of China few years used to say they don't trust renewable... now they are in the forefront.
This makes me believe that even though electric cars might initially push the grid a bit, and use of fossils increase, the decrease in use of fossil fuels like coal for power generation has its days counted. Yeah, those coal reserves enough to be used for 4000 years, will go un-burned.
And even in the case, that governments resist having to lose those reserves, like Trump is doing, and coal its still used for power generation for many years to come, technologies like Carbon Capture and Storage will make more sense, since the point of capture of carbon is centralized. Its way more easy to capture Carbon if you know where it is coming from, something that is impossible to apply at a car exhaust.
All in all, electrics might have been the best thing in the last years for the energy industry. Its gonna shake everything up and down. We can indeed wait for days "cleaner" energy, thanks to it and whats in the hood: batteries.