It'd sure be interesting for manufacturers to rent batteries to car-buyers and then have access to transmit energy to-and-from those batteries as a utility. If employers had hookups, during the day this could be done (set the time you'll be back for full charge) and this could also be done while cars are in garages at night.
EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030
171–180 of 278 posts
Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030
#172Earlier 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.
Your whole car depreciates, not just the battery. Depreciation cost for driving a mile is a lot more than the electricity cost.
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Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Not a plug-in hybrid, and not data, but I'm down 5-10% total range after 80k miles over 6 years in a plug-in (full) electric vehicle.
What car do you own? I’ve wondered about the Nissan leaf which apparently has no active cooling on the batteries vs others which do.
Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
We also need EV designs where the batteries are modular and easy to swap out. I wouldn't be interested in a deal where I was compensated financially for quickly wearing my non-replaceable car battery out, because the battery wear alters the usability of the car, e.g. I might find I can only take my family on shorter trips than planned, if my battery is now 80% of what it would have been. I also wouldn't want the batt…
> We also need EV designs where the batteries are modular and easy to swap out. Battery swapping is already a thing. In China. Nio[1] sells luxury cars and there are lots of more utilitarian vehicles that use battswap, but get no press outside China. In the west, Ample[2] is working with manufacturers to modularize batteries and make them swappable between vehicle brands, so a "gas station" business/industry model wi…
NIOs are very much for sale in Europe and Oslo, Norway has two battery changing stations (more coming supposedly).
Very interesting what happens to car depreciation when decoupled from any particular battery pack.
Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030
#1751) 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.…
Regarding (1), this is a few years old but has some pretty interesting charts showing typical electricity consumption as a function of time-of-day, US region, and season: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030
#1761) 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.…
> Night time, when the cars sit idle, is also a low demand time of day
Not if you schedule your EV to top up the battery at night.
Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030
#177Who's paying the capex on charging cycles for personal car batteries?
Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. This further degrades the meaning of owning private property.
Unless it's voluntary (which it darned well better be). I envision a future where individual appliances (including EVs) can opt in to spot pricing for the electricity they consume (or produce). That would naturally incentivize charging during off-peak hours and discharging during peak hours, all without requiring any government incentives or coercion. It could also be useful for other major appliances which could ben…
>> I envision a future where individual appliances (including EVs) can opt in to spot pricing for the electricity they consume
When 1,000 devices jump on the grid the moment electricity hits $0.01/kWh, the demand spike will cause more generators to come back on line and increase the price back to $0.05/kWh -- thus causing the 1,000 devices to drop-off the grid.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
How do you compensate for the potential grid instability?
Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030
#1791) 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.…
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 energy.
2. Homes are less efficient than offices + schools for many reasons (human density is generally more power efficient than everyone being spread out and not sharing resources), so demand goes up.
3. And that demand goes up precisely as supply — due to sunset — goes down.
In that light, EVs are actually great for energy storage, assuming you get appropriate compensation from the utility companies for the cost of battery degradation — which also could be in the form of "demand pricing" where it's cheaper if you don't draw power from the grid at certain times. They are available for use right when there's a supply problem: early in the night. And then you could schedule them to recharge when demand drops late at night and the grid has excess power... Or, as more charging infrastructure gets built, you could also charge while at work and the sun is up.
In some places there might be parts of the year where you still face a supply issue with solar: if the sun regularly sets before 5pm for part of the year, you'll still face some supply issues (although at least only when people are crowded in offices and schools, so demand is lower).
California has hourly graphing of electricity demand vs supply, which is quite useful: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx You'll notice that while demand begins to climb at around 4pm, it's still fairly low at 5pm, and really only peaks at 7:30-8pm. By midnight demand has bottomed out again, which is a great time to have your car schedule charging time, leaving you with plenty of juice for the morning commute — a standard US dryer outlet will charge a Model 3 at about 30 miles per hour; assuming you leave at 8am that's 240 miles of range, so even if you ran it to zero — and probably you should not do that and only run it to 20%! — just about anyone would be be to make it into their workplace, since the average American round-trip commute distance is less than 50 miles.
Re: EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030
#1801) 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.