Yeah, most people are recharging 20-30 miles of daily driving not the whole battery. As long as the car pulls its 10-15 kWh overnight before it leaves the garage in the morning EV owners aren't going to care when charging happens.
With managed charging / demand response and day ahead weather forecasting you'd rarely need to spin up a gas turbine. On the coasts wind is strongest at night, the distribution grid is at minimum load and cars are parked. Seems like a perfect match.
Given the shitshow that I've heard that highway is, you'd think someone would have developed an economical public transit option specifically for skiers / mountain rec. Whenever I look into this kind of thing when I plan ski vacations I find the bussing options outrageously priced (for example from Calgary to Banff or Kelowna to Revelstoke, etc.) and it ends up being more economical for a family to simply rent a car.
Back in the early part of the 20th century Vermont had extensive train access to ski areas, apparently. And much of the alps is accessed this way (tho in general European travel by rail is much more of a thing)
>Back in the early part of the 20th century Vermont had extensive train access to ski areas
I'm guessing you probably still needed transportation of some sort from the train stations to the mountains.
One of the issues with just having a bus is that a lot of ski resorts have multiple base areas and most of the lodging and eating options are off-mountain. Some are pretty self-contained but the layout for resorts in the northeast for example pretty much presupposes that you have a car if you're going for a weekend.
There are self-contained exceptions of course but many aren't.
A few ski area towns in Vermont actually still have their own local transit. I know at least Waitsfield (Sugarbush / Mt Elln
& Mad River Glen) and Stowe have that kind of thing, to get you from local hotels and restaurants and the like to the hill and back etc.
And I recall that Steamboat Springs Colorado has something like this; shuttles from airport, hotels, ski areas.
Though you could regenerate part of that on the way back down. As I understand it electric cars are well suited to Denver and other mountain regions as regenerative electric braking saves on brake pad wear.
You'd think so, but in practice my electric car is less efficient going over the mountains than driving a flat stretch.
So yes, they will be able to recover some energy on the way down and reduce wear on brakes, but they'll have to make sure their batteries are up to the task.
Regen isn't 100% efficient, but its a lot better than dumping the momentum as heat. The problem is that the horizontal distance alone from denver to many destinations like lake city is enough to drain a battery.
