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EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030

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Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030

#121

Post by Am4TIfIsER0ppos »

iso1631 wrote: post #21
Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote: post #5

Imagine the government draining your tank at the gas station instead of filling it.

Imagine the gas station selling you a tank of gas for $10 and buying it back for $15 later in the day, all while your car sits on your driveway

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.

Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030

#122

Post by garbagecoder »

danans wrote: post #118
joshe wrote: post #85

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 t…

> 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 e…

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.

Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030

#123

Post by vardump »

claytongulick wrote: post #110

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. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIWvk3gJ_7E

Cobalt is becoming less and less important component of the batteries in the EV business.

It's just not necessary, and can be replaced for example by nickel (and manganese) or iron (LFP batteries).

Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030

#124

Post by dan-robertson »

Timshel wrote: post #102
joshe wrote: post #85

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 t…

Meh when I see that we are barely able to stop the growth of fossile fuel usage ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_cons... ), I'm not sure why peoples are so optimistic. 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 ch…

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.

Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030

#125

Post by JoshTriplett »

nawitus wrote: post #99
cinntaile wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030

#126

Post by aurelwu »

tuatoru wrote: post #100
Dylan16807 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aren't they best suited to do this??? They don't have a million EV batteries, purchased outside the scope of this program, sitting around idle and connected to the grid. Their customers do.

Utilities don't yet have a million EV batteries laying around, but they (or specialist EoL battery companies) will soon. From the abstract:- > Participation rates fall below 10% if half of EV batteries at end-of-vehicle-life are used as stationary storage. Half seems conservative to me. There are already lots of startups wanting your end-of-life EV 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

Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030

#127

Post by paraselene_ »

criley2 wrote: post #30
meltyness wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible for market forces to drive batteries out of consumer reach, and then you'll own the car and rent the battery. Is that better?

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. 30 minute quick charges are not the future

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.

Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030

#128

Post by jvanderbot »

lja wrote: post #2

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.

Deferred cost is enough, just let the Tesla power the house once in a while, like the Ford Lightning can.

The extra regulatory and technological stuff to make the Tesla power the neighbors house through the city grid is just overkill.

Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030

#129

Post by elihu »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #79
georgeg23 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your 18 cents/kWh. That's slightly more than the average cost of electricity in the US?.. That is interesting, that means for home-charging your electric cost (per mile) is about equal to the battery degradation cost. Thats 2x cost than most think.

They'll only want to buy back electricity at times when demand exceeds supply. In Texas the price of electricity is $9/kWh during those times.

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.

Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030

#130

Post by ggm »

PeterCorless wrote: post #90

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 s…

"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.

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