> "just programming cars to charge smartly, is a trivial social and technical problem in the coming 10-20 years."

One problem I've heard about this idea in the past is that cars and their batteries are expensive, and people won't want to run down the lifetime of their car battery more quickly by also using it as a home battery rather than just for driving.

Obviously this can be solved either by making it so cheap to replace car batteries that nobody cares, or by legislating that people have to use their cars this way. But is either of these solutions easy to happen any time soon?

I don’t think its a long term issue. The cost of battery storage is below 10c per kWh, whereas a peaker plant costs above 20c per kWh and runs 10% of the time.

So if you get paid double the value of your battery the incentives are there for an economic model to work. Today.

And batteries are only getting cheaper, gas is the opposite.

Plus batteries take surplus solar/wind, at these times they have a negative value. Add that and the economics are a no brainer. It’s a matter of time.