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

nature.com

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

#131

Post by vel0city »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #83
maliker wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Texas was paying $9/kWh for electricity during their blackouts. If you had 72kWh of electricity in your Tesla that'd be a nice payout...

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.

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

#132

Post by readams »

brianwawok wrote: post #119
xyzzyz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

18 cents per kWh is something like 5-6 times the wholesale price of kWh. This means that using EV for large scale storage is highly uneconomical.

During a brownout energy is worth a lot more, dollars to tens of dollars.

But this article is not talking about brownouts this is talking about routine use.

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

#133

Post by vel0city »

Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote: post #121
iso1631 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#134

Post by elihu »

nemomarx wrote: post #104
ralph84 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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

#135

Post by cyanydeez »

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.

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.

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

#136

Post by shagie »

jackinloadup wrote: post #37
phkahler wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stupi…

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…

> 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.

https://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-household-electricit...

> 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.

You might also want to look at a system that is a dedicated whole house battery backup ( https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/energy/best-home-batte... )

The zdnet article links to a Lowes worksheet - https://www.lowes.com/pdf/portable_generator_wattage_chart.p...

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.

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

#137

Post by danans »

garbagecoder wrote: post #122
danans wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. P…

> 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.

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

#138

Post by dokem »

cschmid wrote: post #59

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.

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.

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

#139

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

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…

> As someone who has recently built an entire electrified high-performance house

How much did it cost? If you don't mind me asking.

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

#140

Post by epistasis »

xyzzyz wrote: post #88
georgeg23 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I calculate about $12 per Model Y full battery cycle, how did you get 2 cents? $12,000 (Model Y bat replace cost) * 300(miles for full drain)/300,000(total miles per pack) = $12 per cycle Edit: or 18 cents per kWh

18 cents per kWh is something like 5-6 times the wholesale price of kWh. This means that using EV for large scale storage is highly uneconomical.

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.

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