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 2021 world total energy production of 14,800 MToe corresponds to a little over 172 PWh / year, or about 19.6 TW of power generation. 2021 world electricity generation by source. Total generation was 28 petawatt-hours
(https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption&ved=2ahUKEwiK4cXF4tmLAxVRSPEDHWEmNV4QFnoECBQQAw&usg=AOvVaw3y0z_aW8KHR5rwDVkVAjIZ)
You said that for every Watt generated there are 2 Watt of waste heat, that means that the total waste heat due to human power generation amounts to:
19.6*2 TW ~ 40 TW
Power received from sun:
The Sun is the major source of energy for Earth’s oceans, atmosphere, land, and biosphere. Averaged over an entire year, approximately 342 watts of solar energy fall upon every square meter of Earth. This is a tremendous amount of energy: 44 quadrillion (4.4 x 10^16) watts of power to be exact. (https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/135642main_balance_trifold21.pdf%3Femrc%3D5b9a71&ved=2ahUKEwjessyh4tmLAxXBbfEDHWfyCyQQFnoECBcQAw&usg=AOvVaw06pgksHN9NeF4SESUj2C_p)
The average over a year is 4.4 x 10^16 W.
Ratio between human waste heat generation and power received from sun:
40 x 10^12
————————————- = 0
4.4 x 10^16
The conclusion: “They heat up our planet even more.” is invalid.
The average albedo of earth is 0.3 meaning it reflects about 30% of the sun’s energy back. The albedo of a solar panel is close to zero, such that for every 1 kWh of electricity produced, about 1.8 kWh of additional heat is retained in the environment. That includes the electricity which ultimately turns up as heat, which would otherwise bounce right back up to space.
In terms of useful energy over added heat, the solar panel is operating at 55% “efficiency”. This is very similar to a conventional power plant.
Large solar farms actually cause heat islands to develop, which can be a problem in places.
The heat at the point of electric generation is almost inconsequential; it’s when we change the percentage of heat that exits the globe versus what enters it that we really have problems. That’s why greenhouse gases matter way more than the fact solar panels are usually darker colored than what they are covering. And that’s why the coverage of clouds and snow/ice matter quite a bit for how much heat gets absorbed by the underlying land as well as how much can radiate to space.
Technically, world poverty has been going down for a century and less people now are living subsistence lifestyles in abject poverty without any money or access to technology. Two things have happened: the rich countries got so much richer relative to the poor, and the poor countries experienced a population explosion thanks to new methods of cheaper food and other production with the import of technology from the richer countries.
The newfound income among the less developed countries made an increasing portion of their people mobile, with enough money to travel and pay people smugglers to get to the richer countries and take a slice of that cake. Rather than continuing the improvements at home, developing economies and societies to reduce their poverty, they simply attempt to take the shortcut to higher living standards. Unfortunately those living standards cannot be maintained if they have to be shared with the whole world, without the rest of the world developing their own societies up to par. This movement of people is hurting both the rich and the poor countries by draining economies at both ends.
If we need to store energy somehow and reduce carbon (apparently but lets not get into politics) then we should be re-using existing infrastructure not trying to replace everything built over the last 100 years which something entirely different becos “reasons”.
We should be using excess energy to create carbon neutral fuels which flow into vehicles tanks or down pipelines or into storage tanks.
Because that use of and creation of renewable energy makes a lot more sense than batteries & power grids which as we all know do wear out faster than tanks and pipelines and waste energy in transmission.
But forcing you to buy everything in your life again is going to make rich people even richer.
If you care for an analogy; it’s like owning Star Wars on VHS then being forced to buy it on DVD and then BlueRay because they want to obsolete the format, stop it working, and force you to buy it again.
No, this sounds better especially if you’ve grown up in a petroleum based society and instinctively believe it to be the more trustworthy and traditional option, even though it’s only been several generations of using it. Renewable fuels do work for some situations, like in Brazil where they have sugarcane ethanol fuel. But we’ve dragged our feet for so long that we can’t just do what we should have done a few generations ago. We’re chemically dependent on the energy contained in fossil fuels – and while renewable fuels have embodied energy too, fuels waste too much of it compared to batteries. However much power we can generate, we should try to use a lot of it directly when possible instead of preemptively committing to wasting most of it.
The big problem isn’t the availability of enough fuel anyway – we could just keep drilling if that was all – it’s that we need to gain energy and lose co2 at the same time. But it’s harder to make fuels from plants than to dig up fossil fuels – more energy goes into it, the production is limited, the plants that are good for making various fuels are not the plants that grow the fastest, etc. So actually, if someone grew a bunch of biomass – doesn’t matter if it can be turned into fuel or not, just how fast it grows – they could char all of that biomass so that the remainder would be solid carbon and then make sure nobody lets the carbon get burned. Then they could go burn some natural gas, which is so cheap that we waste it, and they’d have a net negative on carbon and a net positive on energy compared to trying to grow an octane tree with diesel nuts. In fact a rare few places go one further and they actually turn natural gas into char while still extracting energy from it to produce fertilizer. That’s a nice idea.
As far as the other point goes, a lot of devices with batteries are just better than the nearest equivalent that runs on fuel or often even compressed air. And usually far more reliable than anything with a small carbureted engine; show me a person who’s never had trouble with one and I’ll show you someone who’s never used it. The only real limiting factor on electric devices is their batteries, and that’s been getting better for longer than I’ve been hearing people complain like it never will. I wouldn’t say they’re enough for everyone and everything yet, but the writing is on the wall.
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 cost of the battery is an interesting equation to balance.
It’s certain that some of your battery’s potential capacity is sitting unused because you’re not going to drive enough to wear out the battery – it will wear out by age first.
So, if you drive worth a 1,000 cycles, and the power company uses your battery worth another 1,000 cycles, this will not significantly impact your battery’s performance before it is decommissioned anyways. However, it means you both gain equal benefit from the battery – so who pays what for it?
If you’re getting paid mere cents per kWh then you’re getting short-changed as the majority of the cost of the battery falls on the consumer who buys the car, despite half the benefit going to the power company. If you’re paying equally, then the marginal cost of the returned power goes far above regular production costs and it becomes uneconomical to use the system beyond the worst peak hours – limiting the applicability of such a system. If it’s only economical to use a for a few hours per month, then you don’t need to equip every car and every parking lot on the grid with V2G and it would be cheaper to build a few dedicated battery stations instead.
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.
Huh? 1- Please go look up the “duck curve”. Greatest demand is in the early evening (around 6pm), so driving to the office, arriving needing a charge is perfect. You can charge up from solar panels in the late morning through early afternoon, then drive home and use the power at home after the sun goes down.
2- A vehicle battery size is overkill if you want to power your house. Compare a vehicle battery (50-200 kwh) capacity to your electric bill (being the equivalent of a “large” two fridge household, we use around 13 kwh per day). If you only decide to use the battery “for yourself”, it’ll be an extremely small % of your vehicle battery. 13 kwh/day ~= 6.5 kwh every 12 hours (i.e. overnight). A Tesla model S has a 60 kwh battery, so you’d use only 10% every night. (YMMV; these are gross estimates) You’re unlikely to put any measurable wear and tear on your battery battery that way. In a disaster situation, if you only needed to power your fridge, a residential fridge uses about 1 kwh/day, so a 60 kwh battery would keep your fridge running for 60 days.
The duck curve doesn’t apply everywhere in the world. It’s particular to California, where they’ve overbuilt subsidized solar farms to exceed the demand in the middle of the day.
You have to define carefully, what do you mean by “power a house”, and where? What kind of a house?
Do you include the gas heating bill, or just the electricity? I could easily run through 60-70 kWh a day in an all-electric house and twice that through the worst part of the winter. I mean, that’s why my old folks burn a bunch of wood at their house to save money.
Actually, I’m using below 6 kWh per day because I live in an apartment that gets its heat from the district pipe – so there’s easily a 10-fold difference in what people might experience and expect to power with the battery.
You obviously live somewhere with relatively mild weather and use gas or other source for heat, if you make do with something around 5,000 kWh per year in a house. The US average household consumption is over twice that amount.
Eh, the demand curve is still going to generally go up in the evening in places with the same habits, and any rational attempt to produce renewable power is going to have a lot of solar in the mix in many climates, so that concept still seems applicable.
It’s not just in a grid, it’s also if you might want to save money or increase reliability on cooling by powering it with solar. The temperature lags the peak sun, and the heat generated inside the house will spike when you cook supper, so if your battery storage is limited you might want to point your panels slightly west of south, to better match your supply and demand instead of wishing someone would make up the difference for you.
Where do you find these 3500 expected cycle real world car batteries?
Everything I find still says 2500 max expected.
Assuming little supercharging is done.
NMC is quoted between 1,000 – 5,000 depending on use and LFP is quoted at 2,000+. Then there are others like LTO which can last up to 10,000 cycles but are rarely used in vehicles (most notably in electric buses).
It doesn’t matter much for the point whether it’s 2,500 or 3,500. The batteries will improve over the time it would take to implement V2G.
To the manufacturer, cars that last less than 10 years are a feature.
Look at any modern IC car.
So what you are saying is essentially that EV’s make no sense and we should use renewable energy to make renewable fuels that work in all of our existing infrastructure.
Cool.
V2g trials in the uk showed no negative effect on batery life, as charge/discharge rates are low, and the battery spent more time in its healthy state-of charge range
Try “Leveraging your capital better”. V2G and V2L go hand in hand. You can profit from arbitrage and either provide a backup or replacement for other large expenses particularly generators. I’d love if my car could power my well, then I wouldn’t need to start up a generator and let it idle intermittently in between pumping water. Inverters that are big enough to start up a big well pump motor are expensive, and batteries the size of what’s in an electric car are too, and when it’s not just a function of the car you have to either put out a fair amount of effort or spend a fair amount on labor to get set up.
And of course the other thing is, cars are portable. Normally you’d have to have an engine-powered welder in the back to run electric power tools when you’re out in the field away from the grid. And maybe you need to use a separate engine for an air compressor, depending what you’re doing. But if the car could handle some of that so you could just bring along your regular one from the shop when needed? Seems convenient. Less stuff to maintain too.
The last 10+ years with teslas shows that batteries don’t degrade nearly as much as feared. Cars with battery management systems heat and cool the batteries so that they don’t damage the batteries during high energy and high or low temperature operations. The notable single car that fails at this is the leaf, which does not have a BMS. My tesla has 95k miles, has supercharged plenty, it’s 10 years old now. It’s lost 20 miles of range.
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
There currently is no political will to command loads and sources, because commanding the loads amounts to rationing of energy availability, and commanding the sources negates their economic point by denying them income.
Instead, the policies in place ignore the problem and keep the sources online by force. Grid utilities have to pay penalties if they force e.g. a wind farm to shutter down during conditions of oversupply, as many countries have “first-access” rules on renewable energy saying they have to fit on the grid or else. Net metering rules say the utility must buy all your solar power etc.
Then these wind farms need at their location something that they can dump their excess load into in order to benefit from the power being created and that isn’t batteries as that’s just kicking the problem down the road.
The need to build heavy electrical industry near by.
remember when nuclear power stations were being built, they were often coupled with things like aluminium smelters for good reasons.
Wind needs to be linked to renewable fuel creation. When the wind is flowing, ramp up the supply.
As you say, it’s all market forces at work, is if the excess wind needs to go somewhere it’ll make the cost of the fuel creation cheaper and everyone wins from lower prices.
Currently the problem with excess wind means energy is HIGHER priced. Insanity.
Excess wind generates electricity aplenty, just not always where it is needed the most. The costs are mostly due to the transmission lines, maintenance, loss of power, plus maintenance costs in the weird locations.
Prime example – close to me there are Appalachians, and plenty of free wind blowing over almost 265/24. There are few wind mills/generators, but they are standing near the crest, which in itself is not exactly heavy-machinery-friendly to start with. I drove past them plenty of times – they’ve been erected a decade ago – thinking “why only very few and not ALL OVER Appalachians?”
Also, factor in the environment protection bylaws that prohibit anything disturbing local population of ants or wild boars, which also skews what realistically can be built and at what costs. Additionally, pleasing all kinds of unknown “protectors” serving their private goals may also pretty much make it mission impossible – I am talking about the self-anointed non/pseudo-scientists peddling their private goals of unclear merit to the general public, not real scientists making well-established peer-reviewed statements publicly available.
Another prime example, Delaware, where I live, is pretty much flatland, and the southern part is mostly open to the sea winds – we could have ALREADY covered it with windmills like Netherlands and power all kinds of stuffs for mostly free (like run a network of narrow gauge light rail wind-powered public transit all throughout – again, like Netherlands did ALREADY), but instead we have all kinds of state laws and municipal bylaws that make it easier to fly to the Moon and back than building anything useful to average Sam.
I use 14kWh a day, this is 50000kWh per year or 1000 cycles on Kia 64kWh car battery which equates to 15000 miles a year extra on the car. The loss in value due to high miles isn’t economical unless you are dishonest when selling or buy a scrapped or aging motor like an early nissan leaf for £5k, that works. Putting 150k miles on a new £40k EV in the same time will make it unsellable.
Plus will the electric companies like selling electricity at 5p than 25p?
Your math is incorrect by a a factor of 10. 5.000kWh /year or 100 cycles is what you need.
Also Michael has baked in the assumption that you use 100% of the power out of your battery and zero from the sun and grid. If you charged the car from solar panels during the day and ran your house grid-free from the vehicle every night… well you’d discharge 11% of the battery’s capacity (7 kwh/overnight / 64 kwh battery). Most vehicle batteries, yes, if you discharge them 100% will have a few thousand cycles of life. But if you discharge only 50%? That goes up to well over 10k cycles. If you discharge only 10%? essentially unlimited, as the battery will age out before it is affected by cycling. Decreased wear also comes from the low amp draw. Even if you had zero sunlight, 14 kwh/day (assumes zero seconds spent charging; it just magically fills up instantaneously) 64 kwh car battery, is only a 22% cycle. https://suvastika.com/what-is-depth-of-discharge-dod-in-lithium-battery/ (for LiFePO4) demonstrates 1.5-2k cycles with 100% DoD -> 6-10k cycles with only 20% DoD, a 4-5x increase. So being selfish and only powering your house? Negligible battery wear. Now if you want to try and arbitrage electricity prices and sell when demand is high? well I leave that as an exercise to the reader. It’s not hard, just some spreadsheet’ing.
I believe the only long term solution is to have swap able batteries. This has a bunch of huge advantages. * It makes a “fuel stop” shorter then it now takes to fill a tank with gasoline.
* Especially for high usage cars (buses, taxis) this is a huge thing.
* It makes it easy to use the batteries for alternative uses. (big power walls, mains voltage peak demand)
* It stabilizes the value of a second hand car.
* You can use it as an “off grid” living system.
* It allows for improvement as battery technology improves.
There have been a few initiatives of cars with swapable batteries, but they are limited in scope, vendor specific, and have the chicken and egg problem of not having nearly enough conveniently located swapping locations.
Yeah, my impressions was the same – the VHS-vs-Beta standard wars with the swappable batteries was what ground that initiative to a major halt.
Swappable batteries means you need more than one battery per car stockpiled in the system. It’s less than efficient because you have so many locations where you could swap a battery, that have to respond to peak demands by having extra batteries piled up.
Take for instance, around 200,000 locations selling gasoline in the US, serving an average of 1,000 customers per day. If a portion of those customers were swapping out batteries at any one time, let’s say 15%, and you don’t have enough time to fully charge the spent batteries between customers because the battery swapping customers pile up at the end of the working day or at the start of holidays (see the lines at Tesla Superchargers at the start of Easter holidays), that would mean you have to stockpile 30 million charged batteries extra over those already in the cars.
That’s not exactly one spare per one car, but more like 1.2 batteries per car on average – an extra battery for every five cars – and with battery prices running in the tens of thousands, you would pay thousands of dollars extra for the convenience.
Plus you need to pay extra to the company that rents you the charged battery, of course. That adds another 5-10% on top because hey, they’re not going to do it for free and they need the money to build up and pay wages – another couple thousand dollars out of your pocket.
Then there’s the fact that you can’t push worn-out old batteries on the customers, so the batteries that do cycle in the system have to be decommissioned earlier than if they were owned by individuals who can decide what capacity fade and risk of failure they will tolerate. This also increases the cost to the consumer by a significant margin.
Then there’s the point that batteries need active cooling and heating, and if made swappable you’d introduce another point of failure in the system where you have to connect and disconnect coolant hoses. That’s one of the critical points where EVs often require callbacks, because a coolant leak or loss in the battery can have catastrophic consequences.
Tesla has figured out the old batteries issue.
Just don’t report the full capacity when new and only charge to 80% until worn.
Fools the rubes (there is one uptread claiming his 10 year old batteries only lost 20 miles or range) and makes the batteries last a little longer.
Now, instead of having one extra battery per five cars to swap in, you would simply have that extra battery sitting somewhere permanently connected to the grid. Then you’d have no need for special infrastructure and you’d have the full capacity available at all times. Cheaper and more effective.
Aren’t those serious bottlenecks only if you can’t also recharge in the current fashion? Swapping would be great for, say, a long road trip (though delivering lots of extra batteries to the middle of nowhere would be a logistical challenge) but in town, I’d still mostly choose to recharge slowly in my driveway?
If people don’t actually use the infrastructure, then there’s very little point in building it.
You would still need to have so many locations serving batteries, perhaps not quite as many at each location but still a huge number of them to keep adequate coverage, just in case someone might stop there. If you don’t have the coverage, then there’s very little reason for people to pay extra for the technology instead of just fast charging.
Seems like this problem was already solved by “pumping gas.”
Maybe we should look into that technology.
The long term solution is to stop messing with EV’s and create synthetic fuels, powered by green energy and being carbon neutral.
Using all the existing infrastructure without having to scrap everything and start over.
If batteries are an expensive wear item, people don’t want to trade their nice one for someone else’s worn out one, nor buy a spare. If they’re not expensive, but they charge slowly, then the few-hundred-kilowatt fast chargers can have batteries built in so that they can dump a full charge into your vehicle without having to physically work on said vehicle. If they’re not significant wear items, you won’t care that fast charging wears out the battery faster, and they’ll probably push charging rates higher until they do start to become a wear item again, unless it’s too expensive to do so. So there’s only some conditions where swapping can make sense, logically.
Tesla already build swappable batteries into the original tesla model s. They demonstrated this in California, it was automated and required no human interaction. They built one public station that got little public use, they eventually shuttered it. There was no demand. With superchargers the problem is basically solved. I’ve driven across the us 3 times in my 2015 tesla model s. We are already in an age where you can just drive where you want in an ev. There may be some narrow circumstances where battery swapping could be useful but it’s not widespread for normal EVs. I think maybe for a city with lower range vehicles like scooters it could make sense. Indeed this is in widespread use in asia for years.
I agree with many of the points made here, it’s a fantasy idea that absolves energy providers of the necessity for investment in generation and storage capacity.
The more efficiently energy can be generated and stored (fewer generating plants running more efficiently and storing energy rather than idling along ready to be brought fully online to take up peak demand) the better but IMHO grid storage should be provided by the generating companies, not random members of the public with EVs.
Though it does offer up the intriguing option of entire towns which are blessed with land that could be used for solar/wind/hydro etc and storage being able to go independent of the grid and energy self sufficient.
So are vehicle owners to be compensated not only for losing the electricity they already paid for back to the grid, but also in the added wear-and-tear on the vehicles’ batteries through additional discharge cycles? Not to mention the inconvenience of losing range due to the vehicle not being fully charged when intended to be used?
Then let’s figure out AC phase synchronization on a circuit with thousands of different power sources.
Solved problem: houses with PV solar on the roof already back-feed into the grid in our region. Hawaii (essentially a micro grid, and the place to watch for these sorts of problems) hasn’t collapsed. in fact they recently reported that 59% of the power used on the Big Island of Hawaii comes from the sun (vs bringing it in on a tanker) https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/hawaiian-electric-surges-to-36-renewable-energy-on-grids (see graphs at the end show 16-20% privately generated renewable energy)
This is not a good idea. Every time we put electricity into another storage media, more losses are incurred. Heat loss is a thing. If this was a good idea, utilities would be building their own large battery banks. Why do you think they want you to do it, because it is advantageous for you?
Nailed it!
Exactly. The charger for the car is not 100% efficient, the batteries are not 100% efficient, and an inverter to put the stored energy back on the grid won’t be 100% efficient either, and to add to that, net metering ended a couple of years ago where we are, meaning that even if the preceding were 100% efficient, you’d still be losing money. It’s a losing proposition all around.
General problem with grid storage: if you depend on price differences on the market, the idea is instant dead. Why? Assume the perfect grid storage levelling every imbalance — that’s what you want to have — then there is no difference between max and min, and therefore no price difference, so nothing to gain. The moment something costs you even 1 ct, you are bancrupt.
What’s with the market? The maximum gain is archieved when there are lots of peaks in both directions — that’s what you want to prevent at all costs — so all market participants will try to perform as bad as legally/unnoticed possible to maximize their profit (including intended oscillations, this has already happened). The grid quality therefore approaches the worst possible border you set for the market. At this point it is obviously better to skip the whole market idea and instead just put the market borders as requirement to connect to the grid.
The financing of the storage must therefore be founded on the ability and willingness to provide or absorb a given amount of energy within a given time slot. The costs for the difference between provided and absorbed energy (losses, used or generated energy, think electrolyzer and pump storage with natural flow into the upper reservoir) will probably need some tuning in the contracts to get good results.
Nothing of this requires digitalization, it is all possible and has been done before. Computers and simulations, however, are a valuable tool to get the tweaks right to properly include small appliances, which then require no further data connection to do their job.
Something which requires big server farms to work cannot be part of the solution, because it is part of the problem.
The price difference paid for energy storage will tend towards the cost of the batteries. It will never become zero, since as you point out, nobody would be making money from it.
Battery storage will increase the power price to the end user, but that’s just the cost of running the system. The question is rather, which comes cheaper, batteries or load-following power generation? If batteries, then the question is whether it’s cheaper to have stationary batteries or V2G?
Nope, it will tend towards the highest price you can get away with. If that is less than the battery cost, you perish.
so you have to treat it as system cost, that’s what I said
It will be a mix of storage (in part batteries), load-following generation and generation-following load. But it won’t work out if you mix up system cost with working cost.
Stationary by a long shot, since you lose all the vehicle constraints when optimizing the battery, and all the trade-offs these constraints force on you. V2G is just shifting a low cost solution in a no-budget environment to a high cost solution in a high-budget environment.
If there is demand for it, the price will always exceed the cost – because that is what people have to pay in order to have the thing. If there is competition, prices will drop towards the marginal cost, but not below it.
If there is no demand – no people willing to pay the cost – then you obviously never build it in the first place.
There’s no difference. The customers pay everything in the end. If you need batteries, because the power system wouldn’t work otherwise, then you must increase the price of electricity so much so you can build and operate the batteries.
Supply meets demand.
You can’t build it, if it kills the price by doing its job, because then you don’t get your investment back — either because the price is killed or because it is not doing its job. It is necessary to find a pricing that doesn’t completely collapse once you are in business.
That’s why you have to distinguish between system cost and working cost: the grid does not need a certain amount of energy on-demand, but the ability to call in a certain amount of energy on-demand, so your pricing must be coupled to that.
Grid stability depends on generation = load at any time, so if your business model requires a disparity, it obviously doesn’t work. But if you can get paid for keeping the parity, you can win, even if the energy price is constant or even zero. Pricing the delivered energy is the first case, pricing the ability to deliver energy the latter.
That’s assuming total monopoly over both generators and the grid. The cases where power companies maximized profits by constricting supply were when they were able to fake it by limiting transmission capacity and pretend that they don’t have enough power available.
Many countries separate the producers from the grid operators by forcing grid owners to let independent operators transmit power at controlled prices, solving the monopoly issue. If you try to constrict supply by not building enough power plants, someone else will, and if you try to constrict grid capacity, you’ll only be refusing money.
“and pretend that they don’t have enough power available.”
That was done in e.g. California where the power company double booked their transmission lines and shuttled power in and out of the state to pretend they’re at maximum capacity when they were not.
…and we here in SoCal are paying $.33/kWh for the first tier, and if you go over the first tier, you start paying $.42/kWh, which is far more than much of the country is paying. (I have my last electric bill in front of me.)
That never happened Dude.
You’re in the GD industry, stop listening to fools who don’t even understand what wheeling is.
FYI I was the dude that got the power trading system VAR (value at risk) report bug because the utility had exceeded the grand total just before the power pool opened…IIRC It only had room for +-99 billion currency, obviously $US in CA.
They where short their entire service area’s load, having bet the company by just saying ‘OK’ to the generation divestment order…Everybody expected that to be in court until the pool was running for years.
They were also barred from long term supply contracts because of previous fraud between them and their unregulated out of state corporate siblings (decades long history of shenanigans under ratebase).
Ask me why I hate the SEC…I fixed that bug before anybody else on the team could see it and get themselves in trouble.
Some where smart enough to think ‘out of the money put options’ but dumb enough to also think “Pelosi gets away with it, so can I’.
FYI CA’s power pool mess was caused by 3 things:
1. No price cap on the clearing price.
2. NIMBY under rate base preventing any new plants being built.
3. Utility executives with perverse economic incentives (would still make a good porn movie title).
They lost little by bankrupting their employer, but had a lot to gain had it gone the other way.
IMHO PG&E and SoCalEdison’s executive teams had options, not stock…
Also note:
It’s not just the transmission from out of state that’s a huge issue.
It’s that PG&E owns all the transmission in/out of the SF bay area and the two big utilities together own the transmission up/down the central valley.
If that wasn’t true, SF would pull a PUD in a second.
There are many “less than 100%” use cases. In Hawaii, buying power costs $0.43-$0.52 per kwh! Buying PV is insanely cost positive, so anyone who can afford to does it. But you still need power at night, and again, at that price point, the cost is worth it, especially if you can get an inverter that runs off the PV panels during the day and off the car battery at night – no extra cost! “discharging” your car by 10% (and that’s for small batteries) is essential unmeasurable wear.
if you go by the current cost of about $3/watt install cost ( https://www.google.com/search?q=pv+install+per+watt&oq=pv+install+per+watt ) , that’s about $3000 per kw install cost. Hawaii gets 4-7.5 “peak sun” hours. that is, you can assume your panels produce max power for that many hours per day ( https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/peak-sun-hours-explained ). so $3000 purchase price / 1 kw * 1560 hrs per year ( http://sunroof.withgoogle.com ) = $1.92 per kwh if you only operated it for one year. Payback is 4-5 years. That covers mid-day. For night, if you assume that you have an inverter that can do double duty, you only need to add a battery. If you assume 10 kwh per evening, that’s about $5-10k if you bought a dedicated “house battery backup” system. otoh, a “used leaf battery” with a car attached can run you as low as $4k. At the most expensive, 10kwh / $10k would need 10 years to payback. 5 years for a cheaper option. Yes, this is the best case, but electricity prices are skyrocketing, and just “providing your own power” is pretty dang affordable. The numbers may not work for everyone. It is an exercise in spreadsheet’ing, then deciding if it’s worth it for you.
The panels’ rated power is for sun’s rays perpendicular to the panel, and the panel is cool, clean, and new. Note also that the charge controller won’t be 100% efficient, and neither will the inverter. I put in a small supplemental solar system at home eight years ago. We were promised that the panels’ output would drop not more than 10% after 25 years. Well, now after only eight years, they’ve dropped about 40%, and yes that’s when they’re clean. I really need to buy more panels to get up to the planned output; but the good thing now is that they’ve gotten cheaper. I should go way overboard though, assuming the new ones will also be way down after a few years’ service.
You have to de-rate the panel by the availability factor. Obviously it’s going to be dark for half of every 24 hours, so you only have sunshine for 50% of the time. Then you have cloud cover for much of the rest of the time. I see in Ohau it’s 60% average cloud cover, which brings the expected availability factor to 20% at most. Factor in efficiency losses and you’re somewhere around 15% actual vs. nominal panel wattage over the average day. That’s very common. You get around 5% availability factor in Sweden, around 11% in Germany, and around 14-18% in California (desert areas see less clouds).
So 1 Watt nominal makes 0.15 Watts actual over the average 24 hour period, which is 1.3 kWh per year. That would be around $2.30 per kWh for 1 year payback.
Average daily equivalent full sun hours is the # you are looking for.
The Sahara desert gets 5, S.Cal gets 4, bad places for solar get 3 and under.
Seattle gets 0.1, same as England…
Wait a moment, you’re not suggesting that all of that heat might contribute to global warming.
I thought this green tech was going to “save the planet”.
Better keep quiet about that, if the truth got out then people wouldn’t be able to continue to con us into paying for everything all over again to virtue signal whilst they make coin.
I don’t want to buy an EV until I can get one with V2G. Here in Australia, it’s fairly common for wholesale energy prices to go negative during the day when solar output is high. A large percentage of homes and businesses have solar here. During the evening, prices spike. People get home from work, turn on the AC, start cooking, plug in their car, etc. During those peak times (after solar output has dropped to negligible levels), the wholesale price of power is high, sometimes outlandlishly high.
There’s an opportunity for those with V2G EVs to soak up the free power during the day and sell it back for much higher price on the evening. Some folks are already doing this, but only a small handful of cars available here support it, and only 1 very expensive charger is approved for it.
Unfortunately, regulation in Australia makes it extra hard. I know there’s a trial program with a few hundred Leaf’s, but today’s costs on inverters (which is duplicative of a solar PV inverter) are kinda nuts.
For example why should we have two inverters? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHZWGLzT7gg You don’t need to have a inverter that powers your entire house, you just need “enough” to offset your bill.