This is not a bad idea. EVs can charge during the day, go home fully charged, connect to the grid and supply power to the grid. EV batteries are humongous and a large number of them will become an energy reservoir. All excess production during the day (which is being curtailed now) can be stored in Evs and reused later throughout the day.
The best thing is that EV owners can be paid during the day for providing demand and paid again in the evening and at night for supplying.
I'm an EV owner and homeowner and looked into V2X when planning my solar/residential battery system.
On the home side, the hardware is largely there. The charger I'm buying and many others support it - though many need a future software update. On the vehicle side though, it's very inconsistent; there are only a few vehicles that support it and even for those, what my installer told me is that the manufacturer warranties typically either void the warranty entirely if V2(G/H) is used or harshly limit the amount of energy that can be used. They're concerned that it will lead to excess wear on the battery, the main component of an EV.
And I think I agree with them. With current battery technology, I don't think using EVs as a grid-scale storage system for renewables is viable. For grid-scale or residential storage, you want a battery that can be as heavy and physically large as it needs to be but it needs to deal with a lot of charge/discharge cycles. Your best option here right now is LiFePO. For the kind of EV people are generally willing to buy right now, you need to cram as much range into the car as you can, which means the battery needs to be as energy-dense as possible and charge/discharge cycles are less of a concern. That means LiPo.
I think the most realistic use of EVs for grid-scale integration is what they're calling "virtual plant", where they're treated like a separate source of energy that the grid can tap into in exceptional situations.
This seems really inefficient, everyone transporting around a bunch of excess capacity? Smaller, lighter, cheaper electric cars paired with a properly built and resilient grid seems like a better goal to me.
They’d wear out roads less, use less resources to make, be safer to others in crashes, etc. I dislike the trend of increasingly larger vehicles just to move a single person around 87% of the time.
Extra "wasted" capacity has many benefits for EV battery packs.
It allows distributing load across more cells. It allows using cells with a lower C-rating, which typically have better energy density, and longer lifespan.
Distributing load reduces energy loss during charging, makes cooling less demanding, while allowing higher total charging power, which means adding more range per minute.
The excess capacity makes it easier to avoid fully changing and discharging cells. This prolongs life of NMC cells.
(but I agree that cars are an inefficient mode of transport in general)
V2G is a pipe dream. Nobody has gotten out of the pilot program phase, largely because the return on investment isn't convincing. If you can't make a profit off it it doesn't happen.
Seems a bit early to come to this conclusion, but I would also suspect, that the value of a parking garage full of EVs is not in providing energy to the grid but as a large scale consumer for load shaping.
What do you mean? If the house takes less energy from the grid (compared to doing nothing) it's effectively the same as if the house uses the same energy while also feeding the grid with the car's battery. The former, however, takes less additional infrastructure.
The utility. The utility operates a 24/7 electricity marketplace that perfectly matches supply and demand. Supply must follow demand. If demand decreases, pricing becomes negative until supply decreases. This is problematic because we aren't utilizing all the excess energy generated by solar and wind. Which is all free.
Regional clusters emerged, for example, in the Permian Basin in western Texas, and in Kansas and western Oklahoma in the Southwest Power Pool (SPP), negative prices accounted for more than 25% of all hours. Negative electricity prices result either from local congestion of the transmission system leading supply to exceed demand locally or due to system-wide oversupply. :https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/plentiful-electricity-turns...
Ive read this (as much as i can due to paywalls) but still don’t get it. Why would anyone pay to get of power? And if that happens, why would they build a solar farm over a carpark ton pay users of that power?
Someone with generation that takes time to curtail will need somewhere to put it; at the limit, they may pay someone else to take it. Also, some generators are getting paid in multiple ways, if you're getting a subsidy for every kWh you put on the grid, you might be willing to pay for the privilege of putting it out there.
I agree though, if the typical case is negative pricing, during solar peak, it doesn't make sense to build more solar capacity. One trend is to have solar panels oriented toward morning or evening sun rather than midday sun, less kWh generated overall, but possibly more valuable kWh due to time of day.
If you get enough grid accessible battery capacity, during normal conditions, the price ceiling falls and the floor raises. Of course, when all the batteries are full or empty, the price can go negative again.
If you set the app to allow it to be drained overnight, then it may be drained overnight. Similar to forgetting to pump gas into the tank and getting stranded in the middle of nowhere. Most people are a bit smarter than that.
What about the top 10% or 20%? It would be just like using “reserve mode” but you’d get paid for it. And have the option to turn it off before a road trip.
And have extra wear on your battery that would far outweigh anything you’d get out of it?
I’m down about 18% capacity after 4 years of owning my current EV. It’s still plenty for my needs but I would be very disappointed if I saw this capacity drop much sooner or if it drops much more.
A replacement would be ~$15k and the cost of replacing the car would be a lot greater.
I’m very much digging the current strategy of grid-tied batteries and the myriad of companies working to re-use battery packs for grid batteries.
If it's any reassurance, I think the consensus is that the rate of degradation of your battery will slow considerably once it gets past 20% (of the order of 1-2% per year, i.e. the battery will outlast the rest of the vehicle by a long way) [0].
If $15k gets you a pretty big LFP battery, then you can get hundreds of thousands of kWh of use under gentle conditions like V2G. There are plenty of situations where 2-5 cents of wear per kWh is very worth it.
And if you do replace that battery, and you can't get a huge discount from selling the old one, then slap on a $500 inverter and install it at your house to keep using for the next 20 years.
I think it's perfectly sensible to charge it at work to full, then partially discharge in the evening after coming back home. Especially since that energy could mostly power your own home. If you have enough left in the morning to drive back to work it would be fine.
Basically you would haul (hopefully cheap) electricity form your work, to your home to use it in the evening.
Depends, there have been cases where certain cases or classes of consumers get discounts. Time based pricing was one example. Industrial and commercial rates can have these types of claw backs as well.
The best thing is that EV owners can be paid during the day for providing demand and paid again in the evening and at night for supplying.