EVs Are Essential Grid-Scale Storage

I would never voluntarily use my vehicle to charge the grid.

I might use my vehicle to power my house, if the grid is down. But there I would prefer to have batteries inside the house that are used for that purpose, and backed up by a generator.

The power that I would have in the vehicle is my last resort of getting out of the house, if things have gotten bad enough that the household batteries are drained and the generator is down.

Kind of. Consider solar panels. A lot of the time, you'll be using around 30% of the discharge capacity to keep you overnight. However, some days will be cloudy, so you might have to use more of the capacity.

In this situation, a Lead-Acid will have the full capacity that you bought, but will age like you're using 30% of the capacity most of the time.

The cars need to be designed in a way that facilitates that rate of discharge. Not all electric cars have been.

There needs to be a specialized charging (and discharging) setup in the garage. People who charge using a regular extension cord without installing additional hardware will not be able to do V2H or V2G.

The charging setup needs to be able to cut off power from the grid to the home. This involves a more extensive modification to the home's electrical setup. Note that there's a different culture with housing in Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_Japan

> An unusual feature of Japanese housing is that houses are presumed to have a limited lifespan, and are generally torn down and rebuilt after a few decades, generally twenty years for wooden buildings and thirty years for concrete buildings – see regulations for details. Refurbishing properties, rather than rebuilding them, is a relatively uncommon practice in Japan, though its prevalence is increasing, indicating that attitudes towards older houses may be changing.

> ...

> The taxable value of a house is controlled by its building material. Wooden houses are considered to have a lifespan of twenty years, and concrete ones to have a lifespan of thirty years, and the assessed price depreciates each year contrary to housing markets in other nations.

This means that basically every 20 years the house is rebuilt and you've got more recent electrical setup. If you're building/buying a new house in Japan and had an EV, the incremental addition to the cost of building the house isn't significant.

The house I am living in was built before electricity was available, had gas pipes to each room for lighting (though not in use), and had functioning knob and tube wiring as recently as 2010.

I do look at a home generator (and the corresponding changes to the electrical wiring needed) - but that's not a small change. If I was getting an EV, and considering V2H as an add on, it would likely not be something I'd do.

Yes, I know what you're up against. It is quite frustrating. I have a habit now of testing new appliances by pulling the plug on them mid-cycle and then to plug them back in again to see if they will continue where they left off, do some graceful recovery (for instance: if the washer will re-heat the water or continue to work with cold water instead). Found a couple of positive surprises and an endless list of disappointments but you only really need one of each to get to a workable solution and this sort of brute force allows you to retrofit remote control into anything by virtue of a powersocket with a local internet hookup.

I can definitely recommend the 'Shelly' stuff, it's been absolutely problem free and super reliable, they have a nice range of sensors and controllers.

Essentially what I want is moderately simple: appliance vendors should offer an optional remote control of the machine, a simple ModBUS, like "hey, if you want, pay this and get a small card allow to replicate/bypass the physical knobs/controls of the appliance, so you can automate it/control it from remote, WITHOUT adding crappy cloud-based services, of course.

Some actually have happened, like minisplit with optional remote control module to be installed easily lifting the front top and some hot water heater, but such controls are still very rare and damn limiting...

A small example, I cite it because it's not on sale anymore (there is a slightly updated version, with a different name) my home hot water is made with a Daikin/Rotex M2O EKHHP it feature a "renewable integration" witch consist in two dry contacts who allow just to tell the machine:

- do not run

- run as you want

- run full power (heat pump, if possible PLUS classic resistive stick)

- run for an hour with heat pump only, then full power.

Those who design such logic have NO IDEA about domestic p.v. self consumption. Why the hell such logic instead of:

- do not run, except antifreeze

- do run full power (heat pump and resistance)

- do run ONLY in heat pump mode if possible

- do run ONLY with resistance

My actual "solution" is:

- knowing the outside temperature in HA, so being able to decide if I can run the heat pump or not

- decide to trigger the "run for an hour with heat pump only, then full power", switching to "do not run", switch again to "run for an hour with heat pump only, then full power"

just to limit the load to ~600-800W of the heat pump, BUT for instance sometimes I can use more, like the 2kW resistive stick BUT NOT 2kW+600-800W and for that I have no option. Sure it does not change my life, but it's absurd. Why not give such simple controls?

My VMC is even nicer: it have a range of ModBUS controls, with some registers badly enough documented I can't understand what they mean, some not documented but understandable through observation manually command the machine via it's own keyboard/display.

I've decided to buy an absurdly expensive EV domestic charger from the same vendor of my main home inverter, a Victron EVC. It claim formally to be integrated. Actually in p.v. mode all it do is staring a charge at 6A if there is at least them available from p.v. of course if there is room to more amps no way to change them, it seems to be hardcoded. Only option use the manual mode driven via ModBUS from Home Assistant. At that point I do not even understand the dams logic, the only thing better than a far cheaper charger is that it's three-phase, I have a 3-phase 36kVA domestic contract so if I need a quicker charge I can run around 7*3kW from grid. But that's all. Other domestic chargers for EVs are not better and still with absurdly high price for a simple metered socket with some extras on a mini-board computer, something who can cost around 30€...