Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) has been hailed as one of the greatest advantages of electrifying transportation, but has so far remained mostly in the lab. Hoping to move things forward, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) has released the Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) Power Export Permitting Standard.
The new standards will allow vehicle manufacturers and charger (EVSE) suppliers to have a unified blueprint for sending power back and forth to the grid or the home, which has been a bit of a stumbling block so far toward adoption of a seemingly simple, but not easy, technology. As renewables make up a larger percentage of the grid, using the increasing number of EVs on the road as battery backup is a convenient solution.
While the standard will simplify the technology side of bidirectional charging, getting vehicle owners to opt into backing up the grid will depend on utilities and regulators developing attractive remuneration plans. Unfortunately, the standard itself is paywalled, but NEMA says the standard “could put money back in electric vehicle owners’ pockets by making it easier for cars to store energy at night or when turned off and then sell power back to grids at a profit during peak hours.”
We’ve covered some of the challenges and opportunities of V2G systems in the past and if you want something a little smaller scale, how about using a battery that was once in a vehicle to backup your own home?
Reducing lifetime of your vehicle’s battery to profit grid operators. Wonder why it struggles to catch on?
Maybe in future we’ll be obliged to lend our cars to Uber when they’re not in use. And of course it’s us paying for cleaning, repairs and damges.
Also, recent events prove that fairytale vision of world from mid-late 2010s won’t stick around*. Back then if some mainstream politician in the west said that it’s foolish allowing millions of people from hostile cultures to come and *integrate* he’d be branded extremist, fascists and whatnot.
Nowdays they’re saing it openly. Border walls are going up, border checks inside Schengen are implemented. We finally realized it was a major mistake that didn’t benefit our way of life (and in fact it harmed it).
Same thing might happen to electric cars. As the date for ban on internal combustion engines approaches, people at the top may realize it was not a viable solution and they’ll implement some law, that in very convoluted terms back off from previous legislation. Electric vehicles will be around, but primarily for tasks like deliveries where the car is used daily and only drives in city traffic.
* USSR and and it’s perverted vision of socialism was also mean to last forever.
Rising xenophobia and borders going up is to a large extent the result of the inequalities between rich and poor, making people living in extremely poor conditions seek towards better ones … And it is definitely not a fairytale. But let us not get into politics.
The biggest problem with electric vehicles is not that the idea is bad but rather that the infrastructure is not there yet. How many years did it take to build the oil-based economy? I have no answer, but I am pretty sure it took quite a while too. In many countries there has been a shift in heating patterns from wood to coal to oil to natural gas to electricity, each transition reducing the amount of pollution. I admit we are not quite there yet with electricity, but at least we are working on it with renewable energy covering increasingly larger amounts of our consumption.
Some day we will have fusion power, I am pretty sure, which could pave the way for more or less unlimited energy in the world.
But, we need a smart and resilient grid where power can be shuttled round from active producers to active consumers in real time. The upgraded power delivery grid needs to have the necessary capacity to handle a huge amount of relatively low capacity producers (like local solar panels) and high load consumers (like electric vehicles). It will take time but it is necessary, and we have to incessantly plan for it.
And now we are at it, dig new power cables down. This will help against the increasingly unstable weather patterns, help prevent some wildfires, and look better overall.
Pretty much “THIS” to all of that except for one detail.
I have to disagree there.
Yes, compared to fossile fuel or nuclear power generation fusion could/would be the best by far but it shares one fundamental problem with them: Terrible conversion efficiency and massive amounts of additional waste heat released.
None of those ^^ power plants have a heat-2-electrical conversion efficiency above 50%.
For every GW produced there’s another 1-2 GW of waste heat.
-> They heat up our planet even more.
Actual green energy like PV, wind and (inland!) hydro-power on the other hand convert solar energy more or less directly into electrical and part of that is then transmitted into space (EM-radiation: radio, light).
-> In summery they actually cool the environment.
Yes, I left out a lot of details and the “savings” are probably small but since our blue planet is already heating up faster and faster….
Maybe I missed something obvious (no, not building cost or its CO2 footprint) but I’m pretty sure in principle this is how it is.
The point being that using your car battery for grid storage wears it and therefore comes at a cost to the owner. Granted.
However, it is also a fact that electricity prices fluctuate (sometimes even below zero) and there is money to be gained from offering that grid capacity so that could make it worthwhile.
If otherwise the electricity companies would need to pay for that storage capacity, this still means that everyone pays for it. It’s not “me” vs “them”.
So having the option of V2G can be a nice thing, also for the EV owner.
The most economic use of a car’s battery is to use it as much as possible. Just driving it isn’t enough for the average user.
Let’s calculate: your car has a range of 200 miles, and the battery is able to last 3500 cycles (NMC or LFP etc.). You’re going to drive it 15,000 miles a year for 12 years (calendar life of battery or other age related failure). That’s 180,000 miles while the battery could go for 700,000 miles or more if optimally used. You’re only going to use 25% of the potential cycles of the battery if you were to just drive it.
So you’ve got 75% of the battery’s potential sitting unused – might as well make some money out of it.
If the battery is, say 50 kWh in size, you’re going to lose 131,250 kWh worth of total storage potential, and if they pay you even 5 cents per kWh to store it, you’ll make 6562 dollars/euros/whatever which is around half the cost of the battery.
The only trouble for the scheme is that grid demand peaks when vehicles are commonly in use, around the middle of the day, so they’re not sitting at home where your V2G enabled charger sits. You need to put V2G enabled chargers on every parking lot at offices, stores, schools, factories… and that’s a major infrastructure cost and decades of development.
The other failure point is not using the battery enough: if you designate 20% of the capacity for daily cycling, you’ll only use 876 extra cycles in 12 years. It’s not going to make you much money, though it doesn’t significantly impact your battery life either. To make the optimum, you’d need to designate more than 50% of your capacity to V2G to potentially earn half the cost of the battery, but then you’d save the same amount by just buying a battery half the size.
The other fault of the scheme is that when cars arrive to their destinations during office hours, when there’s the greatest potential to need the energy, they arrive with batteries that are not full and are likely to want a recharge just when they’re supposed to discharge.
So what you’re doing there is charging at home over night, then carrying the energy to work or wherever during the day, and arriving back home with empty batteries. That adds up to the range anxiety of electric vehicles. It negates the point of buying a long range EV because it’s going to behave like a short range EV – always running into the “student light” – not to mention the uselessness of hauling around a ton of batteries that don’t contribute to the point of driving. People want long range EVs not only because they need to drive long distances, but because it allows them to wait and shop for lower power prices – not needing to recharge every night regardless of the grid prices. This alone smooths the demand curve – otherwise all the EVs would have to charge for the next day even if the power grid is experiencing shortfalls, and that would make the problem worse.
If you can manage a shorter range EV, a more optimal choice for the point of grid load balancing would be to have the short range EV that costs less, and then investing the money in stationary batteries that don’t need special V2G infrastructure everywhere to operate. They could be placed in centralized locations and…. oh, now you’ve just invented grid batteries again.
what they are trying to force, is to only allow owners of new cars, under warranty, dealer maintained, certified install, with a contract with the power company, and special insurance, it’s just a perk for executives
vs a two way grid meter that just keeps track of how much THEY owe you, which should be easily possible if you have a big roof and dont use much power
You also owe them for the use of the transmission infrastructure. Whether you have power coming or going, building and maintaining it costs money proportional to the installed capacity and extent of the network, and someone’s gotta pay for that.
One of the unfair points about net metering schemes: a power company must buy your power and return it back 1:1 regardless of the difference in value. The value depends on your time of use – what the market situation on the grid is. When you have a solar setup, you’re pushing out power when everyone else is, so the value for the power company is less than the value of the power they must return you when everyone is not producing solar power, so the power company loses over the exchange. You also don’t pay for the grid infrastructure for the power you sell out, so the cost of grid upgrades to support the system fall on all grid users who buy power, which means other people are paying your share of the network usage.
thing is you can’t just connect sources to the grid with no additional investments. A village of 1k inhabitants can only handle single-digit number of 10kWp solar installs before a $50k+ transformer upgrade is required, which the distributor has to pay for, and this scales. There currently is no communication standard to command a load/source to back off or add on despite the endpoints being perfectly capable of doing so, even continually from 0 to max capacity…all we have is on/off with a reaction time in minutes…building up smart grids will take time