Texas shut down 11GW of plants earlier this year
EVs could act as storage for US grid - report
Arrival of electric pick up trucks on US consumer vehicle market could help solve Texas grid problems
Electrifying half the pickup trucks in the state of Texas would provide the Texas grid with around 460 GWh of battery energy storage capacity and 38GW of power discharge capacity, according to a report by the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). Grid operators in Texas asked residents to conserve energy during one week this month after the systems struggled following the forced shut down of 11GW of plants. A 50pc market share for electric pickups would more than fill the capacity hole by these outages, the report notes. Texas has roughly 22mn registered vehicles on the road, at least 20pc of which are pickup trucks. Using the RMI metric, if half of those 4.4mn pickup trucks were electric vehicles
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