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Concerns such as, "will my car be charged in the morning -- or for that emergency hospital run?" are considered, I believe, and you can set things like a "minimum charge" with smart chargers.
Even if you completely do away with concerns of battery wear, I'd only be willing to participate in this as long as my household still had an ICE vehicle to fall back on. When I get home and plug the car in I don't want to have to think about whether I might want or need to leave the house at a particular time with a particular charge; I just want the charge to be as high as possible as soon as possible.
All you need is a ‘no selling electricity today please’ button.
Even if you completely do away with concerns of battery wear, I'd only be willing to participate in this as long as my household still had an ICE vehicle to fall back on. When I get home and plug the car in I don't want to have to think about whether I might want or need to leave the house at a particular time with a particular charge; I just want the charge to be as high as possible as soon as possible.
All you need is a ‘no selling electricity today please’ button.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
During most of last year prices in Europe were routinely over 300, 400 even occasionally over 1000 per MWh because there was an energy shortage. At the same time the prices can easily go negative if the conditions are favorable for renewables. It's not crazy to think that you would be paid to charge your car when there is an excess and then get paid a lot when there is a shortage. I don't know who would say no to thi…
My point is mainly that there are plenty of options available to stabilize grid prices that are way cheaper than using EV's. Europes energy crisis is temporary, over time the price fluctuations will go down.
This is never going to happen at scale. Energy is fungible: one cannot compete on "quality" of energy, just on price, a kWh is a kWh and the provider with the cheapest energy will always win in the marketplace. So this means any EV owner looking to make a profit is competing against large scale industrial storage entities that: - have large mass and purchasing power, optimizing their battery purchasing and operationa…
Aren't people wary about using their very expensive car batteries for the grid? E.g. imagine you plug in your phone for the night, but instead of a single top up change it is now constantly discharging and charging again. Lifetime of pocket sized batteries is not too great even now, and in such scenario they will go bust 2-3 times faster, in year instead of 3 or so. Also discharge swings would be probably much bigger…
Luckily, any degradation can all be predicted ahead of time. A 60kwh car battery might cost $10k, and allow 2000 charge cycles. So each kwh cycled into and out of the battery costs 8 cents. So a smart algorithm can decide it's worth draining the battery back into the grid if the profit to be made is more than 8 cents. Buuuut ... Delaying charging till later is free. So another car owner's car might see on the futures…
People drive during the day, and charge at night. So you could use EVs as a buffer during the night, but they still need to be charged. So EVs are still going to be a net energy consumer during the night, when you need the storage the most (no solar production).
I think the best course of action is to load shift charging of EVs and use it as "storage" in that way. Its an easy load to shed when needed, and an easy load to ramp up when renewables are plenty.
> The US’s transition to electric vehicles could require three times as much lithium as is currently produced for the entire global market, causing needless water shortages, Indigenous land grabs, and ecosystem destruction inside and outside its borders, new research finds.
> It warns that unless the US’s dependence on cars in towns and cities falls drastically, the transition to lithium battery-powered electric vehicles by 2050 will deepen global environmental and social inequalities linked to mining – and may even jeopardize the 1.5C global heating target.
We definitely need to figure out grid scale storage. But I'm not convinced Lithium Ion batteries are the answer. And I strongly disagree with the idea that electric car batteries are the solution.
Arguing for car batteries to be a primary means of grid storage basically presupposes we fail to make the transition away from cars, which means we're committing to a much more difficult and expensive path to the carbon cuts we need to make.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Luckily, any degradation can all be predicted ahead of time. A 60kwh car battery might cost $10k, and allow 2000 charge cycles. So each kwh cycled into and out of the battery costs 8 cents. So a smart algorithm can decide it's worth draining the battery back into the grid if the profit to be made is more than 8 cents. Buuuut ... Delaying charging till later is free. So another car owner's car might see on the futures…
People value things differently. You'd have to pay me way more than the 8 cents/kwh it cost me to use my battery. I'd want to be heavily compensated for the inconvenience of replacing the battery or car prematurely.