1) This only works when the overlap peak electric demand and peak vehicle demand do not overlap. Night time, when the cars sit idle, is also a low demand time of day, and the afternoon energy demand peak coincides partially with the evening commute.
2) The loss of value to the owner based on cycles used needs to take into account that the failure of the battery in a vehicle can be what causes its final retirement, i.e. the condition of the vehicle itself does not justify a new battery expenditure. EVs are more like cell phones than ICE cars, which can have lifespans of over 30 years in the right climate. So losing 10% of your cycles to grid support could mean buying a car at nine years instead of ten years.
Take a $40000 EV with half of the value being in the battery. Financed, say it's $600/month on a six year loan. With a ten year life span that's four years of no payments. With V2G say you lose 10% of your cycles, so you have three "free" years instead of four. Your real cost is 12 * $600 = $7200.
You can't just calculate the pure cost of the battery with V2G, you need to take into account the depreciation on the entire vehicle as it relates to the battery. In fact, we know very little about how BEVs will depreciate.
And keep in mind it's to store energy from renewables (minus hydropower), i.e. mainly solar and wind. Solar is nonexistent at night. And although it varies, wind is generally strongest during the day and delivers less energy at night. But night-time is exactly when the vehicles are charged in people's homes, at least currently that's the situation and it would necessitate a ton of new infrastructure to change that. High voltage charging everywhere - ideally even DC charging and the necessary transformers, power cables etc. Even for street parking, because that's where a lot of cars are parked. So assuming there will be more EVs and we want to reach those net zero goals politicians always talk about we'd need charging stations everywhere.
Meanwhile in the real world, here is the result when the green revolution doesn't go as imagined, due to failures in planning and mismanagement. Case study Germany:
> But night-time is exactly when the vehicles are charged in people's homes
Average wind production over the last 2 years in the UK is 5.8GW, with the peak (>6GW) between 1400 and 2200, and trough (<5.7GW) between 0200 and 0800, a total of 140GWh a day
But that's only a 5% variation between high and low.
Total demand though is lower at night than in the day. It's 25% down on the low at 0300-0400 and 17% up on average from 1800-1900, which more than offsets the daily variation in wind.
Throw in grid solar and sure, more renewables during the day (domestic solar isn't measured aside from a drop in demand) and you get an average 24% of current UK electricity driven by renewables, with a peak of 33% at midday and trough of 18% from 1900-2100.
But if you doubled wind that average peak would be 52% at 1200 for renewables, and a trough of 36%.
Assuming an infinite capacity grid (as the data isn't readily available), doubling wind+solar energy would save 40TWh of gas a year even with current demand. Tripling would save 60TWh, increasing 5-fold would save 76TWh, reducing Gas usage from 88TWh a year to 11TWh a year.
Those savings are based on real world generation and demand data from 2021.
Sure wind and solar can't entirely replace gas on its own, but it can knock usage down by 90% quite easily by putting up more strings between areas of the grid and simply building more.
You don't need to eliminate fossil fuels completely to make a difference.
The real issue is hidden in the title: it’s short term storage, ie the daily cycle. Mid-northern Europe has much more of a seasonal supply problem.
That said, smoothing out the daily cycle would help a lot too, even in cold winter days. But Germany and friends have decided to phase out nuclear before alternatives are actually deployed, which has led to like the worst winter… so far.
Charging at work seems like the thing to do. Not only is there excess solar energy at that time, but workplaces are more concentrated than homes so the installation costs for chargers should be less.
Yeah, I mean if you really think about it, this sort of concept would still work very well.
If everyone has an electric car and that car is always plugged in when not in use, regardless of where you are, then car batteries are only out of grid use while they're being driven.
The electrical grid must be such a difficult thing to manage, even with cars acting as local grid storage we'd need supplemental neighbourhood/regional storage units as well as a way to handle any unexpected peaks.
I mean I know there's the whole "Coronation Street finishes and everyone turns their kettles on" thing but imagine if at x time on x day everyone collectively did turn their kettles on - literally everyone, every single household. It would blow the grid no matter what the operators tried to do.
In a way we need grid storage in the form of batteries to enable better use of green/local energy sources, but I think it would be smart to include some sort of chemical based generation capacity with that local storage, some way for us to store energy in a solid form say, then never use it apart from very unexpected peaks where the system needs to scrabble to find more juice.
Unfortunately a lot of potential fuels are also flammable, not really the best thing to have a huge stockpile of in your neighbourhood. Maybe a huge flow battery fed by massive underground tanks, if we ever manage to improve that technology...
It's a complex problem but there are fairly obvious strategies that longer term can address most of the points you raise.
The company I work for in the main strategy is to facilitate AC charging points in places you are naturally stopped for enough time to top up charge. So home, work, shopping areas being the most obvious.
So small frequent incremental opportunities to top up or in the case of this article contribute to the grid.
There are definitely lots of solvable problems in this space that underpinned by the correct financial models will contribute a lot positively to climate change.
Topping up from solar during the day and from wind during the night along with predictive (per driver) charging models will go a long way. Whilst complex the challenges feel very much in the realms of scheduling and loading cargo onto ships Vs autonomous driving from a software side. For hardware (chargers) it's really down to plentiful supply in the main.
V2g has a a few challenges of course but people seem to not be aware that their EV batteries are much better than they think. The early ones from ten years ago had no battery management systems and had issues with wearing out relatively fast. But the newer ones have battery management. So, the wear and tear is a lot less these days.
A typical car battery is rated for thousands of cycles. 3000 cycles is a number you hear often. If you have an EV that has a range of 300 miles, we're talking about 900000 miles. That's more miles than the vast majority of cars will drive over their lifespan. The average driver drives less than 15000 miles per year. The car will die before the battery typically, not the other way around. And the battery isn't completely dead at that point, it should still be good for 80% of its original charge. The vast majority of EVs ever produced are still driving with their original batteries and will be for years to come.
A second point is that EV batteries are designed to discharge in a few hours to drive the car. There is no way you'd discharge at that speed via v2g. Most home connections charge/discharge only at a few kw. It's a comparatively light load for the battery and the wear and tear is pretty modest. Battery degradation happens a lot faster if you stress the battery. There are some indications that suggest that v2g discharging has only a very minimal impact on battery life. You wouldn't fully discharge the battery. Not even close.
A third point is that with smart chargers, you would be able to control when the battery is allowed to discharge and how much. A million cars contributing just a single kwh each is 1 gwh. That's a huge amount of power. You would not fully cycle the battery typically but maybe only a few percent. If you start with 3000 cycles and you use 10% of that every day (which would be a lot), you could do that for 30000 days. That's longer than most humans live.
Finally, instead of providing power to the grid, you could use a system like this to power your house and make save significant amounts of money in the evening by using your car instead of expensive grid rates using power that you got from your solar panels during the day for free.
Those savings can really add up over the years. If it worries you, you can invest in a house battery instead. In the end the argument has to be financial and v2g is probably cheaper overall than that. People are spending tens of thousands of dollars to put solar on their roofs. So, throwing their car battery in the mix is a comparatively small step and a perfectly rational thing to consider. But the numbers have to make sense for people to opt in to that.
> The early ones from ten years ago had no battery management systems
I think you misunderstand what a battery management system is. If a Li-Ion battery had no BMS -- especially one that is large, high power, and composed of many cells, it would literally be an incendiary bomb if not carefully managed by the user. The BMS is responsible for maintaining the cells -- they must be equalized and cannot go below or above certain voltages, and the charge controller is not the unit responsible for doing this while the pack is in use.
By claiming that there were no battery management systems in earlier EVs you are showing ignorance about the workings of these systems to the point where it is difficult to trust the other things you say. What is your background for this knowledge? Can you provide references to your claims?
The Nissan Leaf had no battery management system when it launched. Many similar cars from that era lacked a BMS. E.g. the Renault Zoe and a few others. I'm not sure about the early Teslas. I think they saw the need for a BMS pretty early.
I think you are just playing semantics here. Obviously they had some simplistic controls on the electronics. But no smart distribution of load, cooling systems, etc.
Calling people ignorant is not nice BTW. Says more about you than me. Insisting on references is also a bit weak. Where are your references? I suggest you do your homework with some Googling and then come back to apologize. Would be the nice thing to do.
I cannot claim that it is impossible to run a lithium ion battery pack in an EV application without a BMS but I can claim that if you do that it will almost certainly catch on fire. Quote below from (https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-908-battery-managem...):
"The purpose of a BMS is to:
1. Provide battery safety and longevity, a must-have for Li-ion.
2. Reveal state-of-function in the form of state-of-charge and state-of-health (capacity)
3. Prompt caution and service. This could be high temperature, cell imbalance or calibration.
4. Indicate end-of-life when the capacity falls below the user-set target threshold.
Not all BMS offer all these features. The most basic functions are battery protection and showing state-of-charge (SoC)."
Without battery protection and while running many hundreds of individual cells your battery will catch on fire. I will bet the house on that. No EV maker would ever make an EV without a BMS.
You have gone beyond ignorance at this point by claiming that you are insulted and asking for an apology. I won't ask you for one, but I will ask for a public correction and acknowledgement that you were wrong.
You are mixing up battery management system (BMS) with thermal management system. BMS is practically mandatory with multi-cell li-ion systems. Even cheap consumer devices such as laptops have one.
Can we agree that what modern EVs do for battery management is very different to what early models did and that that has greatly improved battery longevity?
I think it's all called battery management. But early EV models did not have a whole lot of it. It obviously had some electronics to read out the current charge and put some basic limits in place. But no thermal management or cooling or any of the smart battery management features you see in more recent models.
> Nissan Leaf had no battery management system when it launched.
Citation needed?
As far as I know even the 2012 Leafs had a per cell thermal management.
I think in the earlier Leafs a lot of the intelligence on charging operation and battery cooling/heating was offloaded to the BCM module but it is a bit of a hyperbole to say that there was no battery management.
They may not have had a dedicated BMS module in the OEM sense of BMS (like what Infineon now makes) but they certainly had temperature/charge management controls.
There is thermal management and then there is thermal management.
Nissan leaf had cell level voltage and temperature monitoring, it also had a rudimentary heating element that would not let the battery freeze solid.
Its battery also was poorly designed so some of the cells had worse conditions than others and the batteries "died" because a few cells went out of limits and the BMS would limit the performance/range of the car. The rest of the cells could go much further. Also you should never charge lithium batteries (other than LTO) below freezing as it forms crystals that are lost to the capacity. Leaf did not to my knowledge compensate for this.
Moreover 24kWh battery doing 1000 cycles is about 100 000 km of driving.
Then there is Tesla batteries that have liquid cooling and heating of the whole pack. Battery is never charged below freezing, also above freezing the charging is adapted to the cell temperatures and for fast charging the battery temp is raised up to 60C, above 65C the cooling kicks in.
The batteries are much larger in Teslas, typically say 80kWh. That combined with better efficiency, better battery management, lower power draw per cell, etc means that they get more than 1k useful cycles out of it. Say 2k (tho they claim more, and there is considerable variability due to use and environment). So 500km * 2k cycles is 1 million km.
The battery may degrade due to age before it reaches its cycles.
Also as mentioned above. Tesla does draw up to 300kW out of the battery. The onboard AC charger is 11kW so if that is bidirectional then the it is really gentle on the battery.
That said, I'm not dissing Nissan, they were truly innovative and we owe them lots of gratitude for popularizing EV's and they have also evolved their tech considerably. Others are doing battery management very well as well nowadays.
> The Nissan Leaf had no battery management system when it launched.
You are ignorant of battery systems. It's okay to be ignorant of things but it's not okay to spread misinformation.
I am an electrical engineer. I have worked on battery management systems with 100+ million units produced.
I can tell you that it would literally be an incendiary bomb without a BMS, and that no part of modern production battery systems are "simplistic", including the Nissan Leafs.
Absolutely. As an EV owner who wants to keep his car for at least ten years, it doesn't make sense to me to dull out the high capacity batteries to support the grid. It seems to me that it would be better to use recycled batteries for home PV storage etc.
I'm not too obsessed but it was easy enough to look up the data on what charge states result in the least loss of range over time.
What if your car battery had a chemistry that could sustain ~10000 cycles if well handled, and aging in general was a bigger issue than cycle degradation?
We’re approaching this with the recent LFP generations.
LiFePO4 batteries I bought in 2017 were rated for 4000 cycles of 80% depth of discharge. Shallower discharge counted as partial cycles. Even at such a heavy use, that's almost 11 years of heavy use every single day -- after which the battery still continues to operate just fine, with slightly lower capacity.
People are afraid of actually using their batteries, and engaging in FUD about their aging. It's weird.
> People are afraid of actually using their batteries, and engaging in FUD about their aging. It's weird.
And some of the same people change cars a year later (talking about EVs, of course — because it doesn't have HW4, 4680s, etc.). Some of it is human nature, though.
What if you were reimbursed 5x your meter price for the power you sell back to the grid? With electricity spot market, this sort of money is around and should of course go to the vehicle owners, at least a big share of it. Only a fraction of the total battery capacity would be involved in this scheme and with light load, so the battery degradation would not be that big. And this would not happen daily.
> With electricity spot market, this sort of money is around
This happens precisely because of supply-demand - peak dispatchable bulk generation is more expensive. VtG brings a lot of cheap supply bringing prices down and causes balancing stress on distribution grid, increasing distribution costs. 5x sounds like an absolute pipe dream
The price level would be determined in the market of course, maybe most vehicle owners would be ready to participate with lower reimbursement ratio. Anyway, I doubt this would cause a lot of stress to the distribution grid as the vehicle batteries are probably closer to the loads than the large scale power stations. The EVs powering neighbourdhood ACs and so on. So at least the distribution transformers could easily see lower load than without V2G.
or not just recycled EV batteries, but alternative batteries that don't need to have good weight ratios. PV storage should maximize the cost-efficiency, since that is the determining factor, not weight ratios like in a car would optimize for.
A sibling comment mentions (but maybe doesn't realize the importance of) what battery storage is primarily useful for: night power. Solar is cheap and easy for power when the sun is up, but doesn't exist when the sun sets. The "evening commute" is mostly during the time when the sun is up; where you run into issues is:
1. After the evening commute in the early hours of the night, people are still awake at home using energy.
2. Homes are less efficient than offices + schools for many reasons (human density is generally more power efficient than everyone being spread out and not sharing resources), so demand goes up.
3. And that demand goes up precisely as supply — due to sunset — goes down.
In that light, EVs are actually great for energy storage, assuming you get appropriate compensation from the utility companies for the cost of battery degradation — which also could be in the form of "demand pricing" where it's cheaper if you don't draw power from the grid at certain times. They are available for use right when there's a supply problem: early in the night. And then you could schedule them to recharge when demand drops late at night and the grid has excess power... Or, as more charging infrastructure gets built, you could also charge while at work and the sun is up.
In some places there might be parts of the year where you still face a supply issue with solar: if the sun regularly sets before 5pm for part of the year, you'll still face some supply issues (although at least only when people are crowded in offices and schools, so demand is lower).
California has hourly graphing of electricity demand vs supply, which is quite useful: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx You'll notice that while demand begins to climb at around 4pm, it's still fairly low at 5pm, and really only peaks at 7:30-8pm. By midnight demand has bottomed out again, which is a great time to have your car schedule charging time, leaving you with plenty of juice for the morning commute — a standard US dryer outlet will charge a Model 3 at about 30 miles per hour; assuming you leave at 8am that's 240 miles of range, so even if you ran it to zero — and probably you should not do that and only run it to 20%! — just about anyone would be be to make it into their workplace, since the average American round-trip commute distance is less than 50 miles.
> The "evening commute" is mostly during the time when the sun is up
I admittedly live on the eastern edge of my time zone (Boston), but my evening commute is fully past any meaningful solar production for almost half the year (solar is producing under 25% for ~14 hours per day on a year-round basis, more in winter).
As we continue to electrify space heating, more electricity will be demanded on winter overnights (when you lose solar PV but also have increased building net heat loss).
To me, this points towards “use nuclear for base load, dummies…”
Yeah, Boston is not great for local solar production IMO. Def agreed on using nuclear for base load, especially there (but also in general). That being said, solar is great and cheap for other places, like CA! So it'll just vary regionally I'd bet.
A standard US dryer outlet is rated for 30 amps at 240v. For a sustained rating of 80% that's 5760 watts, which at 4 miles per kwh is 23 miles per hour, not 30.
Frankly it would take a hell of a lot to convince people to be ok with getting home, plugging their car in, and having the charge level go down instead of up. I certainly wouldn't be comfortable with it.
Imagine you get home, plug your car in, the car runs your home heating for the remainder of the evening for free, then you go to sleep and the car recharges for cheap. Sounds like an attractive proposal?
Because I might have to go somewhere without hours of notice. Maybe I need to go somewhere I can't leave the car plugged in. Maybe I'll get stuck in a traffic jam. Maybe I'll have to drive to a hospital a hundred miles away, as has happened before.
I might sign up for this if my household kept at least one ICE vehicle, but not otherwise.
> EVs are more like cell phones than ICE cars, which can have lifespans of over 30 years in the right climate. So losing 10% of your cycles to grid support could mean buying a car at nine years instead of ten years.
I feel like we should be mandating easy and near-cost replacement for EVs to make sure that this is less of a problem. Battery wear aside, EV's have the potential to greatly outlast ICE's. We should be treating batteries just like tires and brakes.
I agree that using EV batteries as grid storage isn't a particularly great idea.
Right now AFAIK batteries are placed deep in the guts of the car, cf the "electric skateboard" design. This is because they are large and heavy so you have to spread the weight around.
Regarding (1), this is a few years old but has some pretty interesting charts showing typical electricity consumption as a function of time-of-day, US region, and season: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
I think EV owners would need to find some level of compensation for the additional cycles they would incur. Electric vehicles are expensive because of the battery so deteriorating the life of one of the most costly parts of the car doesn't feel like a great solution.
Assuming Tesla prices and full cycling of battery (aka from 100->0), draining a kWh puts about 2cents wear on your battery, so compensation would need to be above that price.
In practice you'd never allow your operator to drain you to 0, so 2 cents is very much on the high side.
In the California Tesla VPP trial, they pay 50 cents per kWh.
The 2 cent figure is per kWh, not per cycle. Multiplying by the 75kWh pack size gives $1.50.
What about the remaining 10X? The calculation you’re doing isn’t the right one, because the battery wear isn’t directly related to miles driven; Tesla’s battery warranty is pricing in a “full stack” picture of battery degradation while actually driving.
Your computation implies that the battery has 0 value after ~1000 cycles, but battery manufacturers commonly warranty 3,000-5,000. In addition, cycle count is only one variable affecting degradation, others include the depth of discharge, the charging and discharging profiles, the thermal management, etc.
(This is one reason why a 10-year-old Tesla has noticeably different battery degradation than, say, a 10-year old Nissan Leaf, which has no thermal management and a very poor BMS)
Finally, even when battery degradation occurs, it doesn’t remove the battery’s entire capacity, so degraded batteries can still be used for stationary storage applications. While an extreme degradation like 50% is very bad for an automotive application, it doesn’t matter so much for small-scale grid storage, since space is usually not the limiting factor.
The nature paper seems to assume the car is doing a fast discharge to supply enough energy to the grid, so something like supercharging-- probably not the best on the battery. Tesla only warranties 375 cycles, so not sure what you mean? The 18 cents/kWh already assumes a more generous 1,000 cycles.
The $12,000 battery pack replacement cost is current market price, including any recycling or potential reuse of old pack.
I don’t know about the nature paper’s assumptions, but supercharging provides far more power than could possibly be supplied to the grid via V2G — for instance, a 100A home service can draw at most 24kW (AC), while supercharging draws up to 250kW (DC). V2G would use the car’s onboard AC/DC converter, which usually tops out at 10-12kW, so it would be relatively slow discharge from the car’s perspective.
Edit: from the paper:
> We assume the home charging power as 1.92, 6.6, 22, and 1.92 kW for small, mid-size, large BEV, and PHEV, respectively
I don’t think the 22kW assumption is reasonable, but the others are comfortably within current L2 AC charging rates.
1,000 cycles is only 3 years (assuming a daytime commute plus discharging to the grid plus re-charging back up counts as a cycle). Most cars are definitely still under warranty after 3 years of driving (assuming a 5 year / 50k mile warranty).
Regardless, if you do have a high mileage ICE car that you want to save, the used engine is probably the way to go, and won't suffer a crippled range of a used battery.
In general, I like the idea of electric cars, but battery packs are not on the same level as an ICE engine in terms of replacement. If you're in the unfortunate position of owning something like a Volt, odds are you literally will not even be able to get replacement battery- and if you could, it would cost more to buy and install than the car would be worth when you were done. That exact scenario hit the news at least twice in the last year.
Presumably as we use more renewable energy, we'll need more temporary storage. Buffering out day/night cycles from solar generation, for instance, would be a daily occurrence not a rare event. $9/kwh might be reasonable in an emergency, but even 18 cents/kwh seems pretty high for daily use.
For you though that cost is just part of the normal depreciation of using the vehicle. Allowing the utility to discharge your battery isn't part of the normal utilization for yourself so the cost should get included. We also don't usually think or talk about how much depreciation using a particular gallon of gas costs you so it muddies comparisons.
the "real" time-based prices have much more variability, if you have time-based prices you can buy for a lot less and sell for a lot more during peak. That difference can easily be double that 18 cents/kWh.
That excludes the cost of transmission and distribution, which is more than half the cost of electricity prices to rate payers.
And using batteries to smooth out the leaks will allow greatly reducing the peak size of equipment for T&D.
Additionally, look at wholesale markets for electricity, such as Texas', and you will see price swings during a day far far in excess of 18 cents/kWh. This indicates that storage is extremely economical today.
This makes much more sense with large lifepo4 chemistry batteries that are expected to outlive the car by a wide margin.
Lifepo4 batteries > 50kwh should easily handle 500,000 miles.
Higher performance lithium ion will degrade at a rate faster than any expected return from a scheme like this.
At least in Northern California it’s now cheaper for me to run solar+battery off grid than to pay pge. Lifepo4 pushes it over the edge into profitability.
If off-grid is competitive, selling at peak prices is a no brainer.
I have 100k miles on my 2018 Model S having Supercharged it the majority of the time the last four years. It has only 6% battery degradation of the 100kw pack. Tesla warranties their powerwalls for 15 years when configured as part of their aggregated virtual power plants. The batteries are demonstrated to be durable.
New LFP chemistries that are heavier but more stable are ideal for stationary storage and high cycle counts, but the evidence shows in general that these packs are built for longevity (with very occasional early failures). You could probably do well buying a salvage Tesla and shucking the pack for working modules and coming out ahead economically (safety warning, do at your own risk, etc) if you don’t want or can’t get dedicated stationary storage (although it comes with generous federal, state, and utility subsidies in California).
> if you don’t want or can’t get dedicated stationary storage (although it comes with generous federal, state, and utility subsidies in California).
I installed stationary LFP batteries (from Enphase) on my house in CA 1.5 years ago, but I then discovered that the state and utility subsidies [1] only apply if you are in a very low income (for CA) bracket, have a health condition that requires backup power, or live in a high fire risk zone.
I don't qualify for the first 2 categories, and my luck is that the high fire risk zone starts about a mile away from my house, so good from the fire risk perspective, but not for the subsidy. Still got the 26% federal tax credit (with IRA, it's now back up to 30%).
How do you like your Enphase batteries? I was pondering buying them, already have Enphase solar.
I'm particularly interested in whether you're doing any load-shifting with them, and if so, how easy it is to do with the software. I'm paying $.90/kWh at summer peak, so while I'm still on net-metering, I'm somewhat interested in going ahead and fully arbitraging during peak.
I'm mostly happy with them. The batteries are pretty much set-and-forget, but I change the reserve level by season (90% in winter, 30% in summer). The system automatically decides how to do load shifting to optimize for your particular rate structure. I will say the monitoring software can be janky at times. It's gotten better, but sometimes it is very slow to connect to the system.
> I'm paying $.90/kWh at summer peak
Whoa, where is that? That's 2x more expensive than California or Hawaii. You must be on a wholesale rate plan with very low off-peak rates if you are considering arbitrage. It's also good that you waited until this year, because before the IRA, the residential battery tax credit was only available if you charged it with on-site renewables, not from the grid.
I don't do any grid arbitrage in the sense of buying low and selling back to the grid from my batteries when rates are high. That's not possible for homeowners in CA, is it in your area? However, several places in Southern California already have home-battery based virtual-power-plants that you can participate in, and I think it integrates with Enphase batteries. In those programs, the arbitrage is managed by a 3rd party company which then compensates the homeowner.
However, my evening loads during the peak rate hours do draw on my battery until it hits its reserve level, so what I do is more like peak-rate avoidance than arbitrage.
My batteries also don't charge from the grid, just from my PV array. With subsidized net-metering 2.0, the difference between peak and off peak for me is only $.07/kWh, so there's really not a ton of economic value there, maybe like $70-80/year at most.
I live in Berkeley. PG&E’s peak EV-A rate for generation plus distribution was $.92 this summer. It doubled in a year or two.
My off peak rate for charging the car went from net $.15/kWh to $.36 during the summer.
It’s news to me that load shifting (if you’ve got batteries and solar) isn’t allowed by the CPUC, that does take the wind out of my sails a bit. But the peak rates are so high that just zeroing out my peak consumption is still probably worth it.
Does the system come with a “disconnect from the grid during emergencies” shunt?
I’ve heard conflicting reports about the availability and legality of those systems.
> I live in Berkeley. PG&E’s peak EV-A rate for generation plus distribution was $.92 this summer
I live in the same service area. The peak EV2A rate (including both generation and distribution) is currently $0.55/kWh, and the off-peak is $0.24/kWh.
Not sure where you are getting $0.92/kWh, but would be curious to learn.
> It’s news to me that load shifting (if you’ve got batteries and solar) isn’t allowed by the CPUC, that does take the wind out of my sails a bit. But the peak rates are so high that just zeroing out my peak consumption is still probably worth it.
Load shifting in the sense of shifting your load to different times to consume cleaner/cheaper electricity from the grid, is fine and even encouraged by the CPUC. There are all kinds of programs to encourage this. You can achieve this by simple behavioral changes, timed appliance runs, or by using battery storage.
What you can't do as an individual homeowner, AFAIK, is arbitrage power by buying low from the grid and selling back high to the grid later.
> Does the system come with a “disconnect from the grid during emergencies” shunt?
> I’ve heard conflicting reports about the availability and legality of those systems.
The only "emergency" that causes a disconnect is a power outage. That's no different than what solar inverters already do. The difference with the batteries is that when that happens, they form an isolated microgrid on your premises, thereby providing backup for that scenario.
What other sort of emergencies were you imagining? If you mean minimizing grid load during peak grid load events, then that's what the virtual peaker programs do, and those are completely legal, and active participants in the CAISO energy markets.
Good to hear about the S. I just got a used model X with free unlimited supercharging. Tesla doesn't recommend supercharging for around town use, which is strange considering it only goes over 1C for 5 minutes or so and only barely over, with active cooling.
The other strangeness for me is the recommendation to stay between 50 and 90 for daily use.
Studies of li-ion have shown 80-20 to be the optimal usage pattern for maximizing usable watts over the life of the battery.
end-of-life Battery usage will compete with recycling them and especially as material needed per kWh is going to keep going down it might be more economical to recycle them into a new battery - it also depends on costs of raw materials. I'd expect the share to be neither 0:100 nor 100:0 and to fluctuate quite a bit
It makes sense to move a lot of load to older stationary batteries as those become more plentiful.
But more capacity is better, and getting things online sooner is better. And in 2030 almost all the capacity is going to be in non-retired packs in their original cars.
Utilities buy most of their power at wholesale rates, which are lower than the consumer rate they charge the end user. Net metering rules in some jurisdictions obligate the utilities to buy solar/battery power from users at consumer rates. That can be a good financial opportunity for homeowners and it’s driven a lot of the investment in home solar setups. But local policies can change. The rules are changing in California and it’s not going to be such a good deal anymore in the future.
Utilities are, by and large, not economically rational actors. In addition to extreme bias in the C-suite towards old tech, they are highly constrained in decision making by public utility commissions, and decision making is often based on information that is 5-10 years old. It takes papers like this getting published, then publicized enough so that they PUC can't ignore it, before info can enter an IRP that plays out over 5-10 years.
LFP batteries can do 3k-10k cycles. Assuming a range of 500km per cycle out of an 100 kWh pack, that's 1.5 million km of total range (assuming 3k cycles). Only a small number of people will ever get that much out of a car - maybe 40% that, if maintained very very well. But we're talking Prius/Mercedes level endurance here, most cars won't make it that long. So in most cases, 70+% of the usable cycles in an LFP pack won't be done by the EV it was first installed in. Knowing that, selling cycles is actually a great way to offset purchase costs.
Your range figures seem pretty crazy high. Pretty sure most EV batteries are smaller than 100k--my Model Y is only 75k for instance, and I'm not getting anywhere close to 500km per cycle because (1) my Model Y doesn't actually get 500km on a full charge and more importantly (2) like most EV owners, I don't charge to 100% and run my battery down to 0% but rather something closer to 80%/20%. So for my Model Y scenario, it's closer to half of your total range figure.
Also, I'm not sure what components would wear out in an EV before the battery such that it would total the car out. If the EV batteries in totaled cars can be repurposed for grid use, then great, but I would expect them to get recycled and put back into cars unless strapping them to the grid is cheaper than recycling (seems maybe plausible?).
When speaking of battery cycles and lifetime, people almost always mean "full cycle equivalent". So when you say "I only go 80%->20%" then that would be considered 0.6 cycles counted against the lifetime.
I don't, LFP batteries are quite resilient. 80% -> 20% is a usability nightmare nobody with a $50k vehicle should accept. My Ioniq (first gen) doesn't even have an LFP battery and is optimized for 100% -> 13%, maybe even 100% -> 10% (turtle mode starts at 5%). Still at 100% SOH after three years.
Way more important for battery life is the charging rate (again, LFP are more resilient there too). Which wouldn't be an issue for grid use.
I think you do. If you drove 10 miles and recharged, you wouldn't consider that a "cycle". You could do that 100k times (probably more), but no one would say the battery cycle life is 100k.
Is that how it works? Can I just charge every night, even if I've only driven a few miles, with no more wear on my battery than if I did full cycle charges? My vague impression is "no", but I really have no idea.
It is, with lithium, basically no different to go from 80%->20%->80% once or from 80%->75%->80% twelve times.
The only complicating issue is calendar life of the battery when it is above 80%. Over time a battery loses capacity just because it exists, which I'm calling calendar life. The closer your battery is to 100% the calendar life decreases at a roughly quadratic curve (a battery at 80% has about 1/8 the calendar life loss of one at 100%). AKA you lose 8x more capacity per year at 100% than 80%. Temperature has a similar effect above room temperature or so.
So if your frequent charges keep the battery above 80%, that would reduce calendar life (increase capacity loss per year) on its own. LFP has far greater calendar life than lipo, but also cycle life too, so I think it's just as important to keep your EV at 80% or below, whenever convenient, regardless of chemistry, unless your usage will cause cycle life to end the battery usefulness before calendar life is significant; i.e. multiple full cycles per day. But also at multiple full cycles per day you probably won't spend much time above 80% even when charging to 100%.
Ah, to summarize, I'll repeat my simple advice: I think it's important to keep your EV at 80% or below, whenever convenient.
If you keep the charge between 20 - 80%, your battery will last for far more cycles than when charging 0 - 100%. So you'll only get 60% of the kWh per cycle, but the battery will do 3-6 times as many cycles.
In fact, the battery management system won't even let you fully charge or discharge the battery for exactly this reason. When it shows 100%, there will still be 1-2 kWh empty and the same for a zero percent charge.
For example, a Toyota Yaris use a tiny (0.7 kWh) lithium ion battery and it gets charged/discharged constantly while breaking/accelerating, but it still last a long time because the charge is kept at about 50%.
There are 100kWh EVs out there, and they will quickly increase in number. For them, 500km is a rather conservative estimate.
> I would expect them to get recycled and put back into cars
In that case, you'd also get something in return for not having used those cycles. It's a matter of choice then - do I rent out my battery during use, or do I sell it after 8 years.
I don't doubt they exist, I doubt that they're common enough to treat as the general case.
> In that case, you'd also get something in return for not having used those cycles. It's a matter of choice then - do I rent out my battery during use, or do I sell it after 8 years.
Yeah, but which is more economical is the salient question.
Did you know that the standard DC chargers communicate with the vehicle using PLC (Powerline communication) chips even though that communication is not over the high power conductors? I've always had the feeling the grid operators got that included because they thought they were going to communicate directly with the battery management system to control it as they wish. It never happened and now the standard is stupidly complex and they're still trying to use cars as storage without much consideration for what vehicle owners want.
Sure, offer variable rates. Offer interruptabke service. But stop wanting V2G, nobody actually wants it.
Utilities really want V2G, so it's probably going to happen one way or another. It's probably less applicable to an individual homeowner, but commercial and other fleet operators are going to find this appealing at the right price.
School buses seem like possibly the only real use case here, since they have a very seasonal usage pattern. For other commercial vehicles, the operators buy them to operate, not sit around and power the grid. When are they envisioned to be powering the grid?
Municipal buses are parked in depots overnight, right? That would kind of make sense - they already have to own the land for that, the vehicles already have to stay there in specific conditions, etc.
I don't think that makes sense given that you'd probably want a full battery in the morning to start your day, and night-time is when you'd want to draw from the battery (assuming solar becomes a much bigger component of grid power).
It's possible I suppose that cities and school districts could have busses that have more capacity than they strictly need, and so it makes sense to use any surplus capacity for grid storage (while maintaining a reasonable margin in case a bus has to make an unexpected trip because some other bus had a flat tire or something).
Assuming V2G means Vehicle to Ground, this is something I would like to see for the following use-case.
I would like to use my car battery as a temporary home battery in the inevitable case of a grid outage. This opens the option to bring energy home from another location. Reduce or eliminates the need for a battery in a grid-tied house.
Am I crazy?
Edit: Granted that doesn't mean the energy company can use my car's battery at it's whim. I think compensation would be required and would actually make a lot of sense. It isn't like the electric company could build out a battery system for cheaper. It would need to be a higher compensation than to PV though. Batteries are more expensive and should be compensated as such.
V2G = vehicle to grid. It’s quite possible for this to operate as a backup battery, but like a Powerwall it requires extra “gateway” hardware to ensure that your house is isolated from the grid when the battery is discharging.
V2L (vehicle to load) is a simpler form that lets you power 115/230V appliances directly from the vehicle. Quite a few EVs (Hyundai, Ford, etc) already support V2L.
There's two ways to power your house off your car battery. You could have your car act as a mobile electrical outlet that you can run extension cords off of to plug things into, or you could have it tie in directly with the wiring of the house so all your electrical outlets work.
The former is pretty straightforward. The latter would need a lot of electrical upgrades to the house. (I'd expect you'd need to do about the same thing that people do when they get solar, which is to replace the meter with something that can measure power flows in both directions, and is smart enough to disconnect the solar panels from upstream power when the power goes out, so you don't electrocute people trying to fix the power lines. If you don't have a local battery, that means basically turning the solar system off in a power failure.)
If you aren't planning on selling storage capacity to your local utility, maybe all you really need is an automatic shutoff switch to disconnect your house from the grid when the power goes out.
Either way you'd need some sort of power inverter to convert DC to AC. That could be built into the car, or it could be attached to the house.
> I would like to use my car battery as a temporary home battery in the inevitable case of a grid outage. This opens the option to bring energy home from another location. Reduce or eliminates the need for a battery in a grid-tied house.
Question is "how long?" and "how much?"
Lets take a 100 kWh battery which matches a Tesla Model S battery option and is a nice number for doing conversions from.
> The recent figures, as of 2021, show that the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer is 10,632 kilowatthours (kWh). If you divide that by 12 months, the average monthly electricity consumption is 886 kWh per month. What about in a single day? That would be 10,715 KWh divided by 365, or 29 kWh. Then the average daily electricity consumption is 29 kWh.
So, hypothetically, 100 kWh would give you 3 and almost 4 days. This can be improved by unplugging things that consume more power. The other part with this is a "once that 100 kWh is drained, you're stuck stuck."
You're going to still need something between the mains power and the circuit breaker box. I'm also going to note I don't know what rate it can discharge.
And from that, look at the "this is what we want" and the question of "generator or battery" becomes interesting.
Then consider also, you can get a 10,000 watt generator (that does a cutover in event of a power outage in 7 seconds) for about $3000 which can provide 10 kW at 40 amps.
Anyone expecting regular 4+ day outages is already going to have a generator. What people want is for the car which is already plugged into their house to kick in when the power goes out for an hour or two.
At an hour or two, that's ballpark 3kWh of power you'd need. There are battery backup solutions in this range that are $3k to $6k (that are frankly quite interesting.
Those have the instant on design so that if the power is lost to the house you have a few seconds and its back up and running.
You may not be at home during the power outage. This could impact things such as aquarium support, home security, or cold food storage.
You may need additional equipment or an upgrade to existing equipment to do the power outage cut over. To do this (and not just support an outlet from the vehicle), it is necessary to remove the house from the grid for the duration - suddenly changing phases can damage equipment (e.g. when the power comes back on). Additionally, if you were still connected to the grid, it would mean that your batteries are trying to support the portion of the entire grid (which it will fail badly at).
This also depends on the equipment that you currently have. Not everyone has a battery backup Tesla power wall. If you are plugging the car into 120v or 240v outlets, that doesn't have the circuitry to support isolation of the house from the grid after a power outage and the wiring for the 120v or 240v outlet isn't heavy enough to support the current draw for the rest of the house even if it was isolated.
> This New Vehicle Limited Warranty does not cover any vehicle damage or malfunction directly or indirectly caused by, due to or resulting from normal wear or deterioration, abuse, misuse, negligence, accident, improper maintenance, operation, storage or transport, including, but not limited to, any of the following:
That's not crazy, it's actually a publicized optional feature on the F-150 Lightning, and the F-150 hybrid has an optional 240V 30A output that can be used as a home backup as well (although that'd be a bit more manual).
Depends on your appliances. 30A @ 240V is 7.2 kW; which is plenty if you don't have AC or electric heating or cooling. If you do have those, you'll at least need to be sure not to run any two of those at once, if you can run them at all; you need to be careful with things like dryers, heaters, heat pumps, air conditioner, oven, stove, water heaters (especially tankless, but check your amps on an electric storage water heater too). Well pumps can be big loads too; mine is rated at 30A by itself, but many people have smaller pumps or utility water.
FWIW, the F-150 Lightning car to home option only goes up to 40A, which isn't that much more.
As a semi-related side question, does anyone have good numbers on how plug-in hybrid batteries deteriorate over time? I bought a (2022) last March and I do a full charge/discharge cycle on it nearly every other day. I've averaged half my miles on electric since buying it...
I haven't noticed any range loss ... yet. I know on mine the physical capacity is 14.4 kWh but it'll only let me use a band in the middle (?) of ~11 kWh (it eats 12 kWh charging and I'm assuming a 90% charging efficiency) (I also don't know if the chargepoint chargers report delivered or stored energy). This is all what I'm presuming to be enforcing no full charge/discharge cycles to lengthen the battery life.
Assuming you're using Chargepoint level 2 chargers (3.3/6.6kW AC, not DC fast chargers), they are reporting energy delivered. There is no data channel to report energy stored; only level 3 (DC fast charge) charging ports establish a data connection.
Varies a huge amount. I have an 8 year old tesla s 85kwh battery with 65k miles on it, known to be above average, 5 miles lost from ~272 range. Tesla has the best results for long life, it's basic matter of heating and cooling the battery. Cars without that have significant battery degredation when supercharging/fast charging because the battery gets hot. The worst is the leaf, almost every recent car except that has batt. mgmg. system. You also heat and cool battery when driving.
I've read that nearly all range reduction occurs in the first year. If you're seeing ~80% usable energy out of it, then it's probably keeping you between 10% to 90% which is probably fine. Another major factor is battery cooling. Some only air cool the batteries, and in a hot climate they will die much quicker that way. It would be nice if the details were made available as not all manufacturers will use the same limits. Even better would be if it were configurable to some degree.
Selling electricity is compensation, like with solar panels. You only need hourly energy prices to make it profitable. Plus an app that does the profitability calculation and discharging.
Sounds similar to Uber using a contractor vehicle's hidden depreciation and maintenance to shift the real cost of their service.
I doubt the hourly price will ever truly be fair to individual car owners. Maybe we'll start to be asked whenever we plug in our phones to tip the owner of a car our electricity is coming from.
If there are consistent price cycles and a good API for reading price, it should be pretty easy for an EV owner to control how much they interact with the arbitrage opportunities with some simple rules. Ex. "only sell if it cost at least 15% less to charge", "always charge to X%", "charge to 70% if < $Y", charge to 100% if < $Z", "never sell below X%"
The aesthetic vibe of having an autonomous energy trading bot in my garage is attractive to me.
Part of the issue isn't the controls to do that it's that the prices to compensate wear on a battery are a) likely significantly higher than the base price and b) pretty hard to calculate.
Yeah, I'd try to model the deprecation cost of the battery to some extent while tuning my magic numbers in the trading bot settings.
~1,500 cycles per $16k battery replacement. Shouldn't sell a full cycle for less than ~$15. Don't arbitrage a 1% point of battery life unless it yields at least $0.15. Might just set it at $0.20 per 1% for healthy margin/price-in hassle of battery replacement.
You're not actually getting the full 100% out of a cycle probably when the utility drains it though. They'll take a portion of your battery then it'll either charge up again using a partial cycle or your car will get charged at home like normal where the math you did is closer.
It's also not super clear how much wear small charge discharge cycles does on a normal battery if it's not in the bottom or top 20% of the battery.
Considering the market is moving towards pertual licensing, by the time this is a thing, you probably won't be an owner and it won't matter to anyone except some bean counters when they update lease rules.
We also need EV designs where the batteries are modular and easy to swap out. I wouldn't be interested in a deal where I was compensated financially for quickly wearing my non-replaceable car battery out, because the battery wear alters the usability of the car, e.g. I might find I can only take my family on shorter trips than planned, if my battery is now 80% of what it would have been.
I also wouldn't want the battery level timed around the grid vs my own transportation needs. What if there is suddenly a heavy demand on the grid, and now I can't take my sick family member to the hospital, because the charge was sold to the grid?
> We also need EV designs where the batteries are modular and easy to swap out.
Battery swapping is already a thing. In China. Nio[1] sells luxury cars and there are lots of more utilitarian vehicles that use battswap, but get no press outside China.
In the west, Ample[2] is working with manufacturers to modularize batteries and make them swappable between vehicle brands, so a "gas station" business/industry model will work.
Edit: I believe that EV manufacturers that don't offer battswap will confine themselves to the luxury niche of the market. The mass market wants low sticker prices on its vehicles.
Energy price volatility will probably increase because natural sources are more volatile and other sources have spin up / down cycles. A car battery is like 3-4 days of continuous house usage. The car battery being used to top off the top 10% in short term pricing for energy would give a very nice ROI I expect. The rest is software? Don’t overcharge, don’t go under the limit I set for continuous availability as a mode of transport. And that’s all within reach in front of the meter, thus under my ownership. Heck, without self driving becoming common a family might even have 2 EVs on the driveway, giving a week of off grid potential.
Come to think of it - a harder part is how super local the grid is and energy pricing should become. In my somewhat affluent neighborhood in high summer the voltage rises too high and the supply of solar falls. And tragedy of the commons - we are still installing solar because it’s massively incentivized (2 years before investment returns itself). To solve this with EVs requires very granular prices. There might be clouds 50 km away. But again, those are software solvable issues. (I’m not holding my breath. It’s like IoT-superplus.)
Unless it's voluntary (which it darned well better be).
I envision a future where individual appliances (including EVs) can opt in to spot pricing for the electricity they consume (or produce). That would naturally incentivize charging during off-peak hours and discharging during peak hours, all without requiring any government incentives or coercion. It could also be useful for other major appliances which could benefit from the lower prices afforded by load shifting, such as hot water heaters.
>> I envision a future where individual appliances (including EVs) can opt in to spot pricing for the electricity they consume (or produce).
I remember when high speed internet was coming into being and there were a lot of pundits talking about how high speed bandwidth would be sold as a commodity on the NYSE. If someone needed say an hour of high bandwidth for a video conference, they could do what you're saying, buy an hour of high speed access. Of course, high speed internet eventually became so cheap and so readily available, those ideas faded pretty fast.
I might be remembering this wrong, but wasn't Enron doing what you're talking about?
>> I envision a future where individual appliances (including EVs) can opt in to spot pricing for the electricity they consume
When 1,000 devices jump on the grid the moment electricity hits $0.01/kWh, the demand spike will cause more generators to come back on line and increase the price back to $0.05/kWh -- thus causing the 1,000 devices to drop-off the grid.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
How do you compensate for the potential grid instability?
Generators aren't going to spin up just to cover a brief fluctuation like that. It would cause too much wear on the system, so most likely anyone selling electricity to the grid via generators would program their system to only turn on when it predicts the price change will last more than a few seconds.
Assuming instability does actually become a problem though, that sounds like a very straightforward technical problem with many possible solutions. Just off the top of my head, the simplest market-based solution would likely be futures trading. If all these appliances reserve their electricity usage 10 seconds in advance, then sellers can know exactly how much demand there'll be and adjust their production accordingly, maybe even bidding on that capacity so they know in advance exactly how much they'll need to produce. I imagine the high-frequency trading industry probably has tons of experience with this sort of thing.
>bryanlarsen, we noticed that your location is at home but your car isn’t plugged in. Please plug it in and drink a verification can within the next 10 minutes to avoid a noncompliance charge
It feels like an iceberg has been slowly turning over for the past 10 years, and is now flipping quickly.
Economic growth is now more correlated with carbon reduction than increase.
The useful work of preventing coal plants is over and we need to switch gears to get home appliances, ev cars, solar, wind and transmission out as quickly as possible. Environmental groups and common knowledge haven't caught up yet, but the fastest route to a low carbon future is a lot of factories producing ev cars, appliances, and batteries.
There are many zombie environmental groups that will continue to fight against anything humans try to change about the built environment, but over time the astonishingly good economics will move them to the side.
One of the nice thing is they don't really have much power other than stopping solar farms and stopping clean energy transmission. For 80% of the things we need to do, it's just people going to home depot.
And in many ways old school environmentalists are already losing the policy wars, the inflation reduction act is chock full of pro growth, pro abundance carbon reduction.
In window heat pump 80% more efficient at heating and cooling. Helps with the big ticket/renter problem for heat pumps.
https://www.gradientcomfort.com/
And it's not like Enr and other suggestion you propose will not need insane amount of ressource extraction.
Heat pump usually need a well insulated home, just isolating all the needed house in the next 25 years is probably a challenge itself between cost and having enough workers. And it's not like there was an article last week on electrician shortage ...
I guess when I look at that chart I’m actually optimistic:
- coal and oil not really growing (but there is Covid at one end and no Ukraine war effects). This is especially noteworthy for coal because china continues to increase coal power generation so the only way for it to be flat is many others decreasing
- the ‘other’ section growing at 16% per yer (doubling in less than 5 years) is basically renewables
I am sad that fossil fuels continue being burned more and I’m sad nuclear isn’t growing but the growth in renewables is encouraging.
A thing people often say when looking at per-country data is something like ‘emissions in developed countries are only decreasing because they are offloading polluting industry to developing nations which you can see are burning more’ but this doesn’t appear to be true. Studies that try to measure trade-adjusted emissions find that they aren’t massively different from the raw amounts and that the difference has stayed pretty steady for a while even as developed countries’ emissions have fallen despite growing economies.
I think you are being optimistic because you are neglecting the urgency of this issue. We have maybe 10 years left to get to 0 emissions. We are not even decreasing.
If this graph were something happening in the 80s, I would be ecstatic (well, if I had been born and had known about global warming). Right now, it's far too little far too late.
This is not a time for finding a new way of abundance, it is a time for accepting that we have been growing our economy on burrowed time, and we have to significantly shrink the global economy ourselves, or the planet will do it for our children or grandchildren 20-50 years from now.
I don’t think the crises or emergency phrasing is particularly accurate. We have already locked in a great deal of climate change over the coming decades and urgent actions now won’t change that. I don’t think ‘emergency’ should apply to situations where things get worse over the next 30 years but actions today may cause them to be less terrible in 80 years.
The narrative about shrinking economies doesn’t make sense to me because for lots of countries like the US, they emitted more when their economies were smaller. We don’t want to go back to that.
I think pushing to reduce emissions by shrinking economies is unconscionable as it effectively corresponds to reducing standards of living across the world and particularly harms the poorest countries. I also dislike it because it is obviously politically unpalatable and so the people who favour it either long for some kind of authoritarian to impose it[1] or get to smugly say they were right while their desired plan doesn’t get implemented. I would much rather governments were pushed towards policies that would be desirable to people while also reducing emissions.
[1] I also note that the biggest authoritarian country is burning more and more coal with increasing emissions while the biggest non-authoritarian countries have falling emissions and growing economies.
US domestic emissions have fallen slightly - much less than US manufacturing was moved overseas.
Also, I am definitely in no way advocating for authoritarianism. I'm advocating for realistic, charismatic politicians to present the real situation to people and help them understand the urgency of this threat to the future of the world.
Not to mention, there is plenty of room for reducing economic activity without materially impacting living conditions for the vast majority of consumers. All the cheap plastic crap being produced and shipped overseas is an obvious contender, which produces both massive emissions and additional, faster working pollution. Fast fashion and fast food need more care (as they are important to many poor people around the world), but more sustainable alternatives that reduce overconsumption without impact on basic necessity are certainly possible. Regulating and reducing advertising is a more indirect approach that would help revert the trend of encouraging massive overconsumption in all aspects of life (since one of the biggest focuses of modern advertising is simply to increase the whole market, and only incidentally to advocate for a particular brand).
And note that this very much is an emergency, even if the effects are slow to be seen. It's like a contamination with prions - if you don't stop it right this second, it will inevitably produce disastrous effects 5-10 years from now, with no possibility to stop it or even mitigate it later. Just because the disastrous effects will happen later in the future doesn't make the current moment any less of an emergency.
Regarding the first sentence note that trade-adjusted emissions for the US have still fallen - though offshored emissions fell most around the time of the financial crises. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption... (enter United States into the ‘change country’ box)
I don’t really have much of a response to the rest of your comment. I can’t tell if the foundation of the argument in your comment above is on that false claim or not.
I don’t think it’s true that a charismatic leader will cause people to vote for to make their lives worse in the short term with a truthful promise of making their lives worse in the short term. If people vote for such a leader, they will vote them out when their lives get worse. I don’t really understand why I should be convinced that the way forward is for some supreme charisma to appear (from where?) and persuade the World’s people to suffer hardship for the greater good. I am particularly unconvinced because I think that kind of suffering is unnecessary and not particularly helpful for reducing GHG emissions or climate change.
I continue to not think it’s an emergency for the same reason that your mortality is not an emergency when you are in your mid fifties.
I roughly expect: government-support / industrial policy causes low-carbon power generation to grow a bit faster than predictions, and gets cheaper to the point that fossil fuel power generation becomes uneconomical apart from leaker plants which take longer to die out; new cars to become mostly-electric sooner than predicted because most car companies get good enough at them and the electric cars are just better cars (potentially hybrid cars should be preferred as a policy if cars are limited by battery production: most miles are short journeys so would still be all on the smaller batteries); global warming / climate change to continue increasing for a while; maybe some improvements to carbon capture but I’m a bit doubtful it would be done much unless power gets a lot cheaper; much migration and ensuing strife due to the uneven consequences of climate change; some powerful country that cares less about the ethics of it (eg China) doing some big geoengineering thing (eg silver particles in the upper atmosphere) to try to reduce the effects of climate change they suffer. Bit of a mixed bag but not entirely hopeless.
Maybe that's because Global Warming isn't the only environmental issue that they're concerned about? We started getting massive bio diversity reduction since the 70s and that wasn't because of AGW. Human consumption of natural resources (esp. habitat) is a huge issue for the environment and "a lot of factories producing ev cars, appliances, and batteries" will accelerate that.
> There are many zombie environmental groups that will continue to fight against anything humans try to change about the built environment, but over time the astonishingly good economics will move them to the side.
I think environmental groups are just the tip of the iceberg that gets blamed for things because they're visible. They just don't have that much political clout (aside from the very large "environmental group" that's people who are concerned about climate change -- which may be a majority of all living humans at this point).
As an example, consider strict environmental regulations on oil refineries. It seems like those must be pushed by environmental groups, right? But it can also be a case of regulatory capture by the incumbent refineries. The regulations don't apply to them because they were grandfathered in, but the regulations are their moat protecting them from any upstart competitors.
Or consider fuel economy standards. Those must be pushed by environmentalists, right? But then why do light pickup trucks have very strict fuel economy standards, and larger trucks have looser, easier-to-meet standards to the point where it's hard to actually make a light truck that conforms to the standards and isn't really slow and underpowered. It's almost like the incumbent automakers have been successful at lobbying for regulations that protect the lucrative market for oversized trucks by ensuring that smaller trucks are unappealing, unavailable, or too expensive. (The chicken tax is another example.)
>It feels like an iceberg has been slowly turning over for the past 10 years, and is now flipping quickly.
>Economic growth is now more correlated with carbon reduction than increase.
Does it now make sense why so many hydrocarbon companies want to fight against climate change and push and promote some inefficient processes – like hydrogen that mostly still use hydrocarbons to power them?
They know that weaning people off oil directly means a hit to their easy money streams. They don't want their hegemony to die and they are doing their very best to keep us addicted to easy and "cheap" energy.
At this point in time, if you have a politician that wants to slow down decarbonisation they are either in the pocket of big oil or just stupid. The alternative, tightly coupled energy system that feeds dictators and polluters, is not something we should contribute to any longer.
> Environmental groups and common knowledge haven't caught up yet, but the fastest route to a low carbon future is a lot of factories producing ev cars, appliances, and batteries.
Not sure where you are getting this, but sounds like you just have an axe to grid.
Environmental groups have been pushing for decarbonization and accelerating the shift toward a renewable grid for forever and a day. They were the ones who educated the public about the imminence and perils of climate change, drove legislation in places like California that created the environment where EVs became popular. It wasn't Chevron, or Ford, or even Tesla that did that.
The groups that weren't onboard until now are mainstream capitalists and consumers.
> For 80% of the things we need to do, it's just people going to home depot.
As someone who has recently built an entire electrified high-performance house that consumes a fraction of the typical house's energy, I could easily buy into this, but it is flat out wrong.
What I accomplished was building a cheap-to-operate, comfortable, and healthy house for my family. It negligibly reduced the CO2 emitted on the grid, and significantly reduced the amount emitted on my behalf (by eliminating my direct natural gas usage) but I'm still reliant on a grid that is 50% fossil fuel powered.
What I did is not particularly easy to replicate either, unless you are doing a full gut remodel or new construction - so not something that trips to home depot can accomplish. The bottom line is that it's not a scalable near term solution for our climate issues.
Instead, a huge amount of what has to happen in the near term is development and deployment of firm grid scale renewables and the systems to coordinate and transmit energy between those and flexible sources of demand.
It's a little bit more complicated than that. They've held onto their legacy concerns about certain non-carbon power sources for other reasons, and many environmental groups seem convinced that there is no future where the planet is safe and our current economic system stays in place.
I could even be convinced of the latter, but I know enough to know that both of these policies are political poison pills in effect.
Plenty of environmental groups have done plenty of harm to the cause, largely from not accepting half a loaf.
> They've held onto their legacy concerns about certain non-carbon power sources for other reasons,
Is there a reason you are unable to just use the word "nuclear"? Non-proliferation was, and still is, a major concern for nuclear power. Add to that the fact that current uranium supply lines end in Russia. It may have a role in the future, and we should continue to invest in that possibility, but it's far from conclusive that it will be viable economically.
> and many environmental groups seem convinced that there is no future where the planet is safe and our current economic system stays in place.
Our economic system is always changing and evolving in response to social pressures. That's how we got the 5 day work week, Medicare, and historically low tax rates. Globalized capitalism itself is experiencing a retrenchement at this moment, which is as much a response to growing internal inequality in the developed world as it is about the aftermath of the pandemic and concern about onshore strategic manufacturing capacity.
Furthermore, negotiations are underway for the wealthy world (who put most of the CO2 into the atmosphere) to pay the developing world for the damage they have incurred due to climate change, and to develop in a renewable way.
Which is all to say, our current economic system is changing no matter what.
Yeah, because nuclear isn't the only one. Environmental groups never object to hydro power, right? They've never objected to helping brown coal be replaced by less CO2 emitting ones in poor countries right? They've never objected to replacing biomass burning with coal or coal with natural gas? Nope. They go to Africa and tell people to put soda bottles in their roof instead (ie our trash).
It's not just nuclear, but nice try.
The rest is too hostile to bother with. Sorry I dared question holy environmental groups who have never shot themselves in the foot.
Of course it will have to change. The point is how. I want it done, I just don't want to sacrifice our industrial society and I don't want to listen to pseudo-science justifying bad trade offs just because of vibes, mostly because I don't think most other people will either and then you get little or nothing.
France—not the US, ok, since I know US bad—has this all figured out. I'm sure you think I'm some sort of global warming denier or whatever. I'm not. I urgently want solutions. So urgently, I'm willing to look for less than utopian solutions.
Anyway, so how's this approach working out for you? Have we solved it?
I paid a premium of about $60/sqft (about $90K in my house) for the high-performance stuff (heat pumps, HRV, airtight weather barrier, dense pack blown-in insulation, etc).
The remaining $/sqft is just like any other build in the Bay Area, so quite expensive, but a lot depends on structural changes, finish levels, premium features (or lack thereof), and other things that have little to do with energy performance of the building envelope.
As with all things, the bigger the house, usually the lower the cost per square foot for an individual system like a heat pump that have high fixed costs but scale up more cheaply. But the costs for things like a high performance external weather/air barrier and high performance insulation scale with the external surface area.
I'm not including things like electric stoves/ovens and heat pump dryer in that because those price differences are easy to find online.
In a new build, I think the premium for high performance could be brought down much lower, but only if performance is considered from the design stage.
We're nowhere near close to home charging for the number of EVs estimated by 2030. Go ask around, very few organizations are working on it compared to public chargers. Apartment managers and condo associations aren't demanding them and only homeowners have a say, after they pay for the upgrade. Not to mention, the power companies hate the idea. They won't even let people with solar panels feed their excess power to the grid.
We would need a federal mandate to get there, and I don't see it happening.
It is not true, but they do make it very hard in some places and as a group utilities do kind of hate the idea. Almost all states require net metering, which what allows people to sell their solar to the grid, and there is some federal regulation too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005). Despite these requirements most utilities make it pretty hard to set up.
I opted NOT to sell my excess to PNM (New Mexico), because the agreement allowed them to claim my 6.7kW array as part of their own progress towards renewable conversion.
What I didn't understand was that I ended up with an even better deal! I get back the excess kW/h on a 1:1 basis. This is much better "pricing" than I would have received if I had sold it for cash.
Granted this model only works if there's a part of the year when you produce more than you need and another part of the year where you produce less. Since we heat more or less exclusively with electric air source heat pumps, but need no heat or a/c during summer, this works extremely well for us.
What's wrong with them counting your solar as part of their conversion? Nothing wrong with you declining if the price isn't high enough, but if they're paying someone for solar power, whether it's an individual or a company, I think they should count that as part of their renewable portfolio.
Even if there's nothing morally wrong with it, not agreeing will make their numbers look worse, with might encourage them to build more of their own renewable generation. So it's also a way of encouraging more renewables.
In Australia, you generally get paid for your panels contribution to the grid, but with any recent installs/contracts the feed-in tariff is puny.
Early adopters sometimes got long-term contracts with much more attractive feed-in tariffs, but that was back when people were installing fewer panels. Now those people usually have to decide between maintaining the great rate or upgrading their systems and having to create a new contract.
This has to do with lack of demand during high PV production. This excess energy still has to go somewhere, it doesn't just disappear. This costs the grid operators money, so either they charge you or don't let you feed the excess power to the grid.
Are you saying the price is negative during high PV production? In sane markets like Finland solar panel owners need to pay for generating electricity to the grid if the price is negative (which is it sometimes).
> In sane markets like Finland solar panel owners need to pay for generating electricity to the grid if the price is negative
If this were the case, why would solar panel owners not stop "selling" power to the grid at their expense when that happens? What incentive would ever exist to pay to put power on the grid?
I think the point is to encourage people to have a way to stop exporting when there is not the demand by passing on the negative price that all generators would see in that situation.
Apparently not generating power will cause the panel to slightly overheat which will add additional tear on the panel, so it might make sense to pay the negative prices instead.
Note that electricity generated will first be used by the consumer and only excess is sold to the grid.
Regular consumers don't offer their production on the energy markets so they don't set the price. Maybe your panels can be counted as part of the energy company's solar production, in that case I guess they could indirectly have an influence? I'm not sure if this is done though. A negative price can just be a result of tax subventions (in case you still make a profit even if the price goes negative) or when it's simply cheaper to bid a negative price so that you can keep producing instead of having to turn off production and then reboot it at a later time.
The Taiwanese scooter company Gogoro recently announced something similar: Their scooters come with swappable batteries that you rent. The swapping station they have throughout the city are basically walls full of batteries. Since the company owns all the batteries, they can then use them to provide power to the grid during peak load.
That makes more sense as it can be better planned based on projected demand. They also have more batteries than customers. With individual car owners, they often can't charge when it's convenient for the grid because they drive their car and need it when they need it.
Is the energy in these batteries for scooters or the grid? So you need to store more energy than the scooters need so that energy is not depleted from servicing the grid. Now you have excess batteries in the middle of urban area. Not what you want. The amount of energy needed for some scooters is peanuts when talking about the grid. Not to mention that scooter usage and grid power consumption surge will roughly correlate. Have scooters, sure. Have batteries of some form to handle the grid, sure. There is absolutely no need for this to be combined.
This is already happening today in California, a couple gigawatts of batteries are charged during the day and released in the evening to offset peak demand.
The population of California is ~ half that of France, and presumably California sells power to neighbouring states too, so it doesn't seem that out of whack.
Considering that most "EV batteries" are actually just smaller batteries glued together to bigger cells, modules and packs, I don't think this is as much of a win as people think it is.
It's like saying "We can green the planet with Duracells." Ignoring what's in the batteries or what it takes to manufacture them. Or how they degrade over time.
We may need to look at hybrid battery solutions with alternative energy storage systems, like graphene supercapacitors.
It's not as black and white. EV batteries are getting produced and will get produced quite a lot it seems. We'll be using them for transportation, but if we can also use them for short-term grid storage, that certainly improves the sustainability math. Using things better is a win, so let's do it.
We can't green the planet with Duracells, but it's certainly better than producing and not fully using the Duracells.
Supercapacitors aren't that useful for grid storage. The energy density is very low. They have a very high power density which allows them to produce or store enormous amounts of energy in a short time, but that's not really a problem that needs to be solved if you're already using some sort of lithium ion battery which already have a power density that's way beyond what you'd need in that application.
Cylindrical cells are fine as long as they can be made cheaply and the costs (economic and environmental) can be amortized over a long life.
We'll probably start seeing more LFP batteries in coming years, which are more ideal for grid storage. (They're cheap and have a long life.)
Battery recycling needs to improve, but we'll probably get there eventually. Right now the volume of batteries that need to be recycled is just not very big. The Nissan Leaf, for instance, was only just released in 2010. Most of the EVs that have ever been manufactured are only a few years old.
"may need to" -Power Utilities worldwide have been looking at flow battery models for decades. What they lacked was supply chain committed to the longterm specific model, and a pricepoint which matched their needs. Lithium batteries were being made in volumes with a supply chain for multiple uses: cars, home storage, this industrial-scale purpose. It provided a pricepoint and a supply chain and logistics to match for BMS and demand management at scale.
Flow batteries are good. They exist. They didn't get the capital required to drive them to ubiquity, in industrial scale deployment .. yet.
Also, putting to one side "duracell" typically means a non rechargable, we actually can green the planet WITH canister sized individual battery instances ganged up into bigger units, because that's precisely what we are doing. The mistake is thinking batteries can do it alone. Not what format they come in and how we aggregate them. There are gigawatts and gigawatt-hours of Tesla batteries in deployment which provide frequency stability, and other load demand management services, and extend the duration that solar and wind power can be supplied without "firming" from Gas or other peaker plants, and they supplant traditional condenser spinning loads, and actually DO supply power. They have helped significantly alter the trajectory of change here.
This is a bit like saying "great: we can't build skyscrapers out of something as small as gravel, this is stupid: we invented bricks for a reason" ignoring the structural role of gravel as aggregate in concrete.
Individual cell technology is not the limiting factor here.
Policy will be able to signal enough value for home owners to recoup the costs of degrading their asset (in this car care battery) and provide the margin for whoever is operating all the assets at the same time. I suspect that the players who aggregate across assets will provide a payout for the Tesla owners however that payout is less than the depreciation of their asset as a result. Most people won't be wise though.
Energy arbitrage rarely make sense financially - you could operate an asset for awhile but the high cost of LiON batteries aren't made for energy arbitrage (typically financial differential between peak and off peak is not significant enough).
Again unless there is a valuable pricing signal OR someone like OhmConnect makes significant in roads to market penetration / policy makers / execution of product.
Except that they won't because a) EV manufacturers won't allow it (Tesla doesn't), b) EV owners won't want to drain their EVs' batteries for others' benefit, c) even if EV owners wanted to allow it, they wouldn't necessarily all have their EVs plugged in when needed.
This paper covers only one aspect - estimating demand. But the cost of the EV batteries is another affair. Recently it has come to light several human rights violations involved with the lithium/cobalt mining industry. Both are necessary for making batteries and other electrical components that make up rechargeable batteries.
But today, at least for the short-term, the only solution to stop those inhuman practices is to provide humanitarian aid. The proliferation of violations are at such a scale that even if some major tech players come together and decide that they should provide this humanitarian aid to the "miners", the profit margins drop drastically.
Hence EV batteries may not become viable to the end-consumers.
Lithium is one of the more common elements on this planet. It's not a rare earth mineral. And there are ways to get lithium now that don't involve boohoo stories with small children breaking their backs under inhumane circumstances. E.g. Tesla is opening a lithium refining facility in Texas. And there are several battery chemistries that don't use cobalt at all now as well. And of course you can source cobalt from reputable mines as well these days if you do need it. And many companies make an effort to do just that.
And of course batteries can be recycled and this is expected to be a big business pretty soon. Most EV manufacturers are already recycling their batteries. These things won't end up in landfills.
So, it's not the case that all batteries must involve child labor and mass pollution. There are definitely some sustainability issues around battery production of course. Can we do better? Absolutely. But it's not that horrible to begin with. And it pales in comparison to the oil and gas industry. Lots of crocodile tears get expended on behalf of the children in the Congo. But nobody ever wonders where their petrol comes from. Double standards/hypocrisy.
Battery makers are moving away from cobalt. Tesla already switched half of their batteries to a version based on lithium iron phosphate (LFP) which does not contain cobalt.
As other comment wrote batteries are moving to cobalt free LFP. Now can it be said that we just rob the future from Congo by preventing them capitals from their cobalt?
I'd really like to use my car (Bolt) as a battery for the house, but this isn't actually achievable in the US right now. We're not going to be doing this in 2030 if the equipment doesn't support it.
Or, you know, we could just build more nuclear power plants instead of such an overengineered solution which requires millions of car owners to be cooperative citizens.
It includes both. But since EV manufacturing capacity is ramping up so fast, the amount of battery capacity in cars is going to be a lot larger than the amount in EoL car batteries for a while.
EVs with BrakeFlow resistive protection against thermal runaway also will have a big impact –– allowing for faster discharge into the grid. Increasing cRate for grid services can "bring forward" the point in time –– so 2030 could even happen a few years sooner if these high performance batteries from Enovix come to the EV market soon.
It'd sure be interesting for manufacturers to rent batteries to car-buyers and then have access to transmit energy to-and-from those batteries as a utility. If employers had hookups, during the day this could be done (set the time you'll be back for full charge) and this could also be done while cars are in garages at night.
The elephant in the room -- unfortunately, there cannot be enough batteries made to support this. That is why I invested in Tesla -- don't care about EVs, but the battery play is good! Backup power for personal/family use? I use a Firman generator - 20 litres of fuel per day of operation at load. (here, $30 Canadian). Since the generator was only $300 and load is 3000W, this is a much better deal for me.
And... at the rates being bandied about here... if anyone EVERY offers, say, $1/KWh - That grosses me $70 per $30 of gas. I would take that incentive. Note that the generator would pay for itself every 10 days by my reckoning.. And the recycling of the motor is already a solved problem.
So... $1/KWh is way too much. $0.50/KWh is also too much (and note that my gasoline pricing is around $1.50/litre at the pump -- $22.41 US for 20 liters ...
So the actual amount should be around 32 cents per KW/h... 50 cents work fine because that factors in "wear and tear" -- do those numbers work for batteries? Of course, buying electricity is 7 to 15 cents/KWh here.
I would want LiFePo4 for this application; at current rates, a 10KWh battery runs $10,000. From that, I determine that I can "just" buy much more effective gas/natural gas/propane burning generators. Something like the Generac 6551. Natural gas is .23/c3 or around $1 for one hour of 7000W operation... actually looking competitive with electricity grid rates (except wear&tear on the generator).
Note that I do have a hybrid car. So, not "anti-electric" by any means. I just don't think that enough batteries can be made for this application. Certainly NOT be 2030 (6 years? Oh really?)
> unfortunately, there cannot be enough batteries made to support this.
Why do you say this? It contradicts what everyone in the industry thinks.
There are no material shortages for the materials used in lithium batteries, and there are several alternative chemistries under active development, that are at least two of cheaper, more durable, or higher power-to-weight than lithium.
Manufacturing battery cells is very energy intensive, so I’m guessing that the recent sky-high UK energy prices spooked their investors and made UK battery manufacturing look unviable.
Something like NorthVolt, on the other hand, works because they have access to reliable low-cost hydro in Northern Sweden.
Yes, Northvolt tried building their factory further south in Sweden (Västerås) but was denied due to limited grid capacity. Turns out they were somewhat lucky, since electricity prices are cheaper furter north, and the energy crisis happened!
Hmm, but how often and for how much? If you could get $500 to discharge 50% would that make it worth your while? If you only did it once a month? There are price situations like that on the grid already.
9 * 72 minus some losses, minus the delivery fees, maybe $600 for what would hopefully be an incredibly rare event.
Meanwhile, after selling all the power in your Tesla in a house that's constantly getting colder with frozen pipes and no electricity you've now sold your best options of leaving with your family for a warming shelter. How many days was the power mostly out?
Personally I'd keep the power in the car in an emergency like that. I'd much rather have the ability to flee if things get worse than sell my best way out in the first few hours of an emergency.
As others have mentioned power companies in California pay a lot for virtual power plants when the demand is high. If power companies can avoid running an expensive peaker plant once a month, everybody wins.
I'm all for battery rental because I think battery-swaps instead of recharging is the future. The model already works in a number of other vehicle sectors.
It'll be interesting to see the progress of Nio over the next few years. In China they have gone all in on battery swapping. Currently (mid 2022 youtube video) swaps take around 10 minutes. Nio claims gen 2 (or 3?) swap stations will cut that to about 3 minutes.
In Europe (mainly Norway atm) Nio offers the choice of owning or leasing/swapping the battery, and an overwhelming majority of customers choose to lease. This in luxury cars. (Naturally they call it Baas, battery as a service.)
Battery rentals sounds awful without standardization.
Imagine having the power source of your own car being managed and controlled by the original manufacture without any alternatives, and having to buy electricity only from them.
Or being unable to get batteries rented to you anymore because the companies decides not to for whatever reason, and with no option to buy a battery pack outright. Like what Tesla is doing with supercharging right now.
Destination charging and At-home charging is going to be the future, not driving to a station to get a fresh battery.
Newer cars like the EV6 can also do 10-to-80 in under 20 minutes nowadays.
As this gets more popular, I guess net metering will be offered less and less. But you should still get some credit for supplying electricity to the grid.
On the contrary, I would expect to be paid higher rates for the energy I'm supplying to the grid than those I paid to charge it in the first place. Otherwise, what's the point? I'm not going to buy a kilowatt-hour high, then sell it low.
Only way these grid balancing schemes work is if the pricing is real-time, and I have an opportunity to supply marginal peak demand at rates that are higher than what I paid to charge (while still being lower than what peaker plants would cost)
It's worth pointing out that Tesla's Virtual Power Plant in California -- which is used primarily in emergency events -- compensates owners $2/kWh. [1]
Obviously, that rate is not going to be sustainable for routine energy storage, but PG&E is already compensating EV owners a substantial amount for peak electricity needs.
> I would expect to be paid higher rates for the energy I'm supplying to the grid than those I paid to charge it in the first place
The Tesla VPP[1] model was 1$ KWH to send it back, better than Net Metering which should have paid only 42c.
However, this was coordinated with PGE to match the lack of production (in advance, which is its own miracle) and unlike a car, the battery doesn't change locations or need to be unplugged at random.
This is the future, like it or not. There’s a lot of energy tied up in batteries, or at least their can be. And until we solve the problem of harnessing intermittent energy sources for when they aren’t generating energy, we aren’t going zero emissions.
Maybe before we get too excited about scaling production of EV batteries, we should solve the horrific abuses in the cobalt mines in the Congo [1] which provide 70%+ of all cobalt for all lithium ion batteries.
A 50% return on a 6 hour investment? Where can I fucking sign up? That won't happen. What will happen is you will pay the max rate when charging because your new smart meter now charges you based on peak consumption (not what it was sold as) and then you'll get the minimum when you involuntarily sell back. Oh and the govt will take its 21% tax on both transactions.
Wholesale rates on electricity can swing quite a bit. I've been watching rates on ERCOT swing from lows of -$1.40/MWh to the current spot of $43/MWh to highs in the few hundred dollar range. It would take a pretty massive capex to hedge it enough to really get a stable return though.
It's definitely been making me itch to put up a lot of solar panels and batteries in a field though, looking at these wholesale rates over the last few years.
It's nothing compared to the cost of building and maintaining the grid. You're not on equal footing with a power company just because you have some batteries. A battery in your garage isn't meaningful capital to produce passive income. This isn't how economics works.
It will never work that way, except for the lucky few.
Have you ever tried selling books back to the school store? They'll buy it from you for $10 when you paid $100 for it. Same thing will happen for this.
EVs can still be driven when they aren't 100% full at the start of the trip.
If your vehicle has a range of 400 miles and you know you only need 60 miles of range in the next 48 hours, why not sell 100-200 miles of range for short-term grid storage? You're only going to drive 60 miles, so it doesn't matter if you start with 400 miles of capacity remaining or 200 miles.
The difference is with the book your alternative is to not sell it back and getting 0$, assuming you've extracted all value.
In the case of the car, you can choose to not sell it, and use it for driving instead.
The incentives are completely different. You're comparing a scenario where they have you by the balls with a case where both parties are more or less equally powerful market participants.
2) The loss of value to the owner based on cycles used needs to take into account that the failure of the battery in a vehicle can be what causes its final retirement, i.e. the condition of the vehicle itself does not justify a new battery expenditure. EVs are more like cell phones than ICE cars, which can have lifespans of over 30 years in the right climate. So losing 10% of your cycles to grid support could mean buying a car at nine years instead of ten years.
Take a $40000 EV with half of the value being in the battery. Financed, say it's $600/month on a six year loan. With a ten year life span that's four years of no payments. With V2G say you lose 10% of your cycles, so you have three "free" years instead of four. Your real cost is 12 * $600 = $7200.
You can't just calculate the pure cost of the battery with V2G, you need to take into account the depreciation on the entire vehicle as it relates to the battery. In fact, we know very little about how BEVs will depreciate.