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

nature.com

231–240 of 278 posts

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

#231
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And keep in mind it's to store energy from renewables (minus hydropower), i.e. mainly solar and wind. Solar is nonexistent at night. And although it varies, wind is generally strongest during the day and delivers less energy at night. But night-time is exactly when the vehicles are charged in people's homes, at least currently that's the situation and it would necessitate a ton of new infrastructure to change that. H…

Charging at work seems like the thing to do. Not only is there excess solar energy at that time, but workplaces are more concentrated than homes so the installation costs for chargers should be less.

Even with US levels of 11,000 miles of driving per vehicle per year, or 30 miles a day, that's about 10kWh a day.

Why can't you charge that with a 1kWh draw over 10 hours you park the car overnight?

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

#232

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…

You are mixing up battery management system (BMS) with thermal management system. BMS is practically mandatory with multi-cell li-ion systems. Even cheap consumer devices such as laptops have one.

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

#233
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…

>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.

Does it now make sense why so many hydrocarbon companies want to fight against climate change and push and promote some inefficient processes – like hydrogen that mostly still use hydrocarbons to power them?

They know that weaning people off oil directly means a hit to their easy money streams. They don't want their hegemony to die and they are doing their very best to keep us addicted to easy and "cheap" energy.

At this point in time, if you have a politician that wants to slow down decarbonisation they are either in the pocket of big oil or just stupid. The alternative, tightly coupled energy system that feeds dictators and polluters, is not something we should contribute to any longer.

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

#234
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are mixing up battery management system (BMS) with thermal management system. BMS is practically mandatory with multi-cell li-ion systems. Even cheap consumer devices such as laptops have one.

Can we agree that what modern EVs do for battery management is very different to what early models did and that that has greatly improved battery longevity?

I think it's all called battery management. But early EV models did not have a whole lot of it. It obviously had some electronics to read out the current charge and put some basic limits in place. But no thermal management or cooling or any of the smart battery management features you see in more recent models.

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

#235
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.…

And keep in mind it's to store energy from renewables (minus hydropower), i.e. mainly solar and wind. Solar is nonexistent at night. And although it varies, wind is generally strongest during the day and delivers less energy at night. But night-time is exactly when the vehicles are charged in people's homes, at least currently that's the situation and it would necessitate a ton of new infrastructure to change that. H…

The real issue is hidden in the title: it’s short term storage, ie the daily cycle. Mid-northern Europe has much more of a seasonal supply problem.

That said, smoothing out the daily cycle would help a lot too, even in cold winter days. But Germany and friends have decided to phase out nuclear before alternatives are actually deployed, which has led to like the worst winter… so far.

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

#236
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your range figures seem pretty crazy high. Pretty sure most EV batteries are smaller than 100k--my Model Y is only 75k for instance, and I'm not getting anywhere close to 500km per cycle because (1) my Model Y doesn't actually get 500km on a full charge and more importantly (2) like most EV owners, I don't charge to 100% and run my battery down to 0% but rather something closer to 80%/20%. So for my Model Y scenario,…

When speaking of battery cycles and lifetime, people almost always mean "full cycle equivalent". So when you say "I only go 80%->20%" then that would be considered 0.6 cycles counted against the lifetime.

I don't, LFP batteries are quite resilient. 80% -> 20% is a usability nightmare nobody with a $50k vehicle should accept. My Ioniq (first gen) doesn't even have an LFP battery and is optimized for 100% -> 13%, maybe even 100% -> 10% (turtle mode starts at 5%). Still at 100% SOH after three years.

Way more important for battery life is the charging rate (again, LFP are more resilient there too). Which wouldn't be an issue for grid use.

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

#237
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.…

And keep in mind it's to store energy from renewables (minus hydropower), i.e. mainly solar and wind. Solar is nonexistent at night. And although it varies, wind is generally strongest during the day and delivers less energy at night. But night-time is exactly when the vehicles are charged in people's homes, at least currently that's the situation and it would necessitate a ton of new infrastructure to change that. H…

It's a complex problem but there are fairly obvious strategies that longer term can address most of the points you raise.

The company I work for in the main strategy is to facilitate AC charging points in places you are naturally stopped for enough time to top up charge. So home, work, shopping areas being the most obvious.

So small frequent incremental opportunities to top up or in the case of this article contribute to the grid.

There are definitely lots of solvable problems in this space that underpinned by the correct financial models will contribute a lot positively to climate change.

Topping up from solar during the day and from wind during the night along with predictive (per driver) charging models will go a long way. Whilst complex the challenges feel very much in the realms of scheduling and loading cargo onto ships Vs autonomous driving from a software side. For hardware (chargers) it's really down to plentiful supply in the main.

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

#238
post #89

Please say a prayer for the people of the Congo who will have to mine the cobalt we want.

As other comment wrote batteries are moving to cobalt free LFP. Now can it be said that we just rob the future from Congo by preventing them capitals from their cobalt?

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

#239

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…

> The Nissan Leaf had no battery management system when it launched.

You are ignorant of battery systems. It's okay to be ignorant of things but it's not okay to spread misinformation.

I am an electrical engineer. I have worked on battery management systems with 100+ million units produced.

I can tell you that it would literally be an incendiary bomb without a BMS, and that no part of modern production battery systems are "simplistic", including the Nissan Leafs.

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

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> With electricity spot market, this sort of money is around This happens precisely because of supply-demand - peak dispatchable bulk generation is more expensive. VtG brings a lot of cheap supply bringing prices down and causes balancing stress on distribution grid, increasing distribution costs. 5x sounds like an absolute pipe dream

The price level would be determined in the market of course, maybe most vehicle owners would be ready to participate with lower reimbursement ratio. Anyway, I doubt this would cause a lot of stress to the distribution grid as the vehicle batteries are probably closer to the loads than the large scale power stations. The EVs powering neighbourdhood ACs and so on. So at least the distribution transformers could easily see lower load than without V2G.
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