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

nature.com

211–220 of 278 posts

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

#211
post #165

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.…

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 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.

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

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

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

#213
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.

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…

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.

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

#214

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…

these are already available.

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> 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…

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.

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

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

> 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.

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

#218
post #165

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.…

> 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 tr…

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.

Thus hard to replace.

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

#219
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.

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So far we've mostly replaced coal with gas. That is a questionable improvement. Total carbon emissions are still rising quickly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
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