Energy from electric cars could power our lives — but only if we improve the system
Two apparently contradictory studies come together with recommendations
Oxford, November 22, 2017 – Power stored in electric cars could be sent back to the grid – thereby supporting the grid and acting as a potential storage for clean energy – but it will only be economically viable if we upgrade the system first. In a new paper in Energy Policy, two scientists show how their seemingly contradictory findings actually point to the same outcome and recommendations: that pumping energy back into the grid using today’s technology can damage car batteries, but with improvements in the system it has the potential to provide valuable clean energy – and improve battery life in the process.
Electric cars store excess energy when they are idle. Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology makes it possible to transfer that energy back to the grid when the car is not being used. This energy could help regulate the frequency of the electricity supply, reduce the amount of electricity purchased at peak times and increase the power output of the system.
Two recent studies, one by Dr. Kotub Uddin at the University of Warwick in the UK and the other by Dr. Matthieu Dubarry at the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, seem contradictory, with one suggesting that V2G degrades car batteries and the other that it improves battery life. But the two scientists worked together to look at how their studies overlap, showing that they actually come to the same conclusion.
“Although both our papers seem contradictory, they are actually complimentary,” said Dr. Dubarry. “V2G is not going to be easy, but, if done properly, it has a chance to make a difference for both utilities and electric vehicle owners. We need more research to understand the process better and benefit from the technology.”
The two authors agreed that in order to be economically viable, V2G has to be optimized between the requirements of the car owner, the utilities and the capability of the grid. In other words, the needs of the different people and systems involved have to be balanced. The question then became ‘can this technology be profitable?’
The previous studies had different approaches to answering this question: Dr. Dubarry showed that using today’s V2G technology can be detrimental to the car battery, while Dr. Uddin found a smarter grid would make the process economically viable, and even improve the battery. In the new paper, they critiqued each other’s work and found shared conclusions. With improvements to the system, V2G could actually improve electric car battery life and be profitable for everyone involved.
Measuring the impact of the technology on the battery is challenging. After two years of analyzing lithium-ion batteries, Dr. Uddin and his team developed an accurate battery degradation model that can predict the capacity and power fade in a battery over time under different conditions, such as temperature, state of charge and depth of discharge. That means the model can predict the impact of V2G on battery health. Using this model, they created a smart grid algorithm that shows how much charge a battery needs for daily use and how much can be taken away to optimize battery life.
Dr. Uddin says funding is needed to develop new testing standards and control strategies to guide policies that support V2G. One key element to improving the system, he says, will be the measurement of battery degradation.
“The metrics used to define battery degradation may also impact the optimization process,” he explained. “A critical component is who is responsible for estimating battery degradation? Utilities are currently taking the lead in the EU, but it might be more economical for the battery manufacturers or car manufacturers to do it. In this case, standards need to be written which define what we mean by ‘state of health’ when it comes to batteries, and the metrics that are used to determine it.”
###
The paper:
“The Viability of Vehicle-to-Grid Operations from a Battery Technology and Policy Perspective” by Kotub Uddin, Matthieu Dubarry, and Mark B. Glick. (DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2017.11.015). The article appears in Energy Policy (November 2017), published by Elsevier.
Link to the paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2017.11.015.
Ok…so who pays me for my worn out battery after 700 cycle discharges if I am helping to stabilize the grid?
Don’t be silly. In Marxism, everything belongs to the State.
It’s for the common good, don’t you know
What do you if your house catches fire just as your contribution to the grid has depleted the battery?
i guess you can push the car down the street.
“After two years… Dr. Uddin and his team developed an accurate battery degradation model… Dr. Uddin says funding is needed.”
—————–
Happy Thanksgiving!
Just don’t use your car in an emergency or unexpectedly and everything will be fine…
Just don’t use your car. That’s the goal.
It would appear that the energy usage in the morning and early evening is the highest which is also when we need our cars, to go to and come from work. How would the system make sure that cars are available with charge exactly when the system is most likely to be sucking the cars dry of energy? It wouldn’t.
They are make one really bad assumption. They assume that electric cars would not be needed during times of high energy demand and low energy production from our unreliable green energy sources. It also means that we would have no ability to rely on having a working car at any time needed. It also makes electric cars part of the grid which would necessarily lead to efforts by the government to control the plugging in of the cars. We cannot have the grid at the whim of the people can we? Clearly cars would no longer be privately owned and permanent plug-in would be the state’s preference, with the “owner”, of course, paying the maintenance and replacements of the batteries.
That’s why the bicycle is there. !!
AndyG55
My current bicycle has 4 cylinders, 95BHP, 1200cc’s and if I pedal hard enough it’ll do 150MPH with a 0 – 60 time of around 3.5 seconds. Tiring, but fun.
Kawasaki VN800 😉
Mine ISBN Honda 600 Shadow my son has HD ElectraGlide.
BMW R 1200 R. Only 125 hp.
Triumph Trophy SE (1200 cc’s)
ZX-10R :^)
Fergawdsake, the battery in a Leaf won’t even power your house for long, how can it backfeed the freakin’ grid? Total INSANITY!
Okay, I get it! Use my portable gas generator to charge my car while it feeds the grid in case I need to go anywhere. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
Hey, yes, that is the answer. Car battery energy is Green, so must pay three times the price of fossil fuels. So you charge the car with a diesel generator, and sell the car battery energy back to the grid at three times the price. Ok – sign me up……
R
Image going out to your car to drive it to work, and finding it’s half drained by the power company to help balance the load from an wind power not meeting needs.
~¿~
You should be willing to sacrifice your and your family’s well-being in order to help SaveThePlanet™, comrade. Why do you hate the planet and everyone on it?
Paul, you left out the ‘caring about your grandchildren’ part… 3 demerits!
and.. NO SOUP FOR YOU!
“The question then became ‘can this technology be profitable?”
Well, the UK’s wondrous Chancellor – Spreadsheet Phil – answered that in yesterday’s Budget. The answer is: for employees, yes, absolutely, for employers, not. He decided that electricity charged into batteries from the expected free, save-the-plant, workplace EV charging facilities would not be regarded as a taxable benefit in kind for the employee. So, following the finest traditions of unexpected consequences, anticipate employees across the UK to queue up every working day to charge their batteries to the full (and, hang on, why not have several batteries for this purpose?). Then drive those batteries home and use all that lovely free energy!!
Well done Phil! You have a clear grasp of all the eventualities here.
It’s easy when it’s OPM.
OPE – Other People’s Electrons
Ian, I think the idea is to discharge during peak hours and charge during off-peak. As most are at work during peak hours, you may expect to only come half way home from work 🙂
Too bad for the poor folk who work night shift with no charger until going home to plug in all day. They will even have to pay more for time of day use…
If everyone is charging massive battery banks overnight there is no “off-peak”. The term becomes a non-concept.
Then they put the Smart meter in for nothing…except for saving on labour for reading the bill remotely. Might even be someday, that the electricity is higher priced at night because everyone is charging their EV car at home at night. Whether or not there is actually more demand load on the grid or not. They have a captive ‘audience’ who need a fully charged car the next morning.
I recall that Gavin Schmidt, when confronted with a similar question mentioned Rebates as a solution.
Yeah, that’ll work…
It’s simple. Trans-oceanic grids carry the power from the day side to the night side and vicey-versey (nyuk nyuk). We’ll have a green-wired Gaia. All that is missing is your contribution! Send your pledge now!
Profitable????? I can’t see this as even being feasible. But send money so we can further research the matter.
Has academia ever actually been the group to decide if anythng is profitable? outside tuition and climate scamming of course
Earthling2
Never mind night shift.
I don’t have a drive, like 40% of the UK.
WTF do I do? Raid the nearest lamp post?
I guess time to emigrate? We need more WASP’s over here.
Or maybe you just answered your own question. The lamp posts could all be wired up to plug in a few cars with some wiring upgrades. Sort of kidding…I see some lamp posts are now wi-fi access points/repeaters for cities offering up free wi-fi.
I have a private drive 2 miles long at one of my places. What a pain to keep that clear of snow in winter.
Earthling2
I’m emigrating OK, ideally back to Scotland (I live in SE England, Dartford, Kent; the garden of England…..ahem) however, I’m not bothering whilst the insane socialist Scottish Nationalist Party is still in government up there. I would seriously consider Australia, but their government is just as nutty, Canada? No better as far as I can gather.
Where are you? I like the idea of a 2 mile long driveway (“at one of my places”?!!**!&?) snow or no snow. But on a budget of £300-400K, I don’t expect to find anything like that within easy striking distance of a reasonably sized town anywhere in the civilised west.
BTW, although you are correct, perhaps a bit assumptive describing me as a WASP. I mean, we hardly know each other. ~coquettish turn of the head, with fluttering eyelashes and a seductive smile as I exit stage left~. (difficult for an overweight, bald 6′ 2″ guy, but I carried it off well, don’t you think?)
🙂
Errrrrrrrr……….I forgot the heterosexual bit. Definitely hetro!
Hotscott…bring women. I have a nice property(s) that most people on the planet would die for, albeit a little bit isolated but it is in the northern hemisphere around your same latitude. Very pleasant overall. It is just the damn internet and TV where I see all this grief. And the odd grizzly bear or cougar out making a living.
Earthling2
I have lots of women mate, arguably too many.
Tell you what, I’ll deal with the Grizzly’s and Cougars, you deal with the women.
But to be honest, all the stuff you see on TV and the internet isn’t worth anything. Tomorrow, next week, next year, whenever, it’ll all change again, and the politicians will make out like bandits at our expense, again.
If you have a few quid in the bank and a comfortable life, if I were you, I would disengage from all this crap. We know the truth, the world has a climate, it changes, and there’s f*ck all mankind can do about it.
The politicians will screw us until there is another revolt, which will happen at some time, just history repeating itself. Natural events don’t respect, respect. We are a global, tribal community. Whatever anyone does in terms of globalisation, immigration, or integration, we will ultimately fracture into tribal communities. Humanity defies management.
The lunacy is, that politicians continue to try to manage humanity, largely by the blunt instrument called taxation. So far, many have lost their heads over their arrogant manipulation, and many will in the future.
🙂
This sounds accurate. The proposal is the technology version of paying individuals to dig holes and then paying them again to fill them in. And of course the paying is done by all of us taxpayers, and there should be no limit to that resource, right?
What happens to the the system when everybody goes to work each morning, fully discharging the battery, then goes home again fully discharging the battery. There are 2 major peaks each day that will have to be filled. Only then could the batteries be used to stabilize the grid. Sounds like the power companies will have to spend even more for peaking plants just to make this idea workable.
stephana
To be fair, most commuter journey’s are probably less than half an hour at, probably, less than 20MPH (in London the average speed is 11MPH) so daily discharge won’t amount to much.
most commuters journeys are less than half an hour ??? based on what? I have never in a lifetime had a commute that short, and observing peak hours that last 2-3 hours leads me to think that many/most have commutes way over 30 minutes.
yarpos
I have no idea where you live, but generally speaking, most people in the UK live within reasonable striking distance of where they work. So teachers, nurses, doctors; factory workers etc. etc. generally live in the immediate vicinity of work, mostly well within 30 minutes.
I live on the South East border of London. I used to drive to the North West corner which took me around 90 minutes, across one of the busiest cities in the world. Everyone I knew thought I was insane. I packed that in, bought a motorbike and halved my journey time.
My personal opinion is that if one is adding more than an hour or so onto each end of a working day, it’s not worth the angst or one’s family time.
The difference between a Brit and a Murrican; you think a hundred miles is a long distance, we think a hundred years is a long time.
Akatsukami
I suspect 100 miles on an American road is quite a different prospect to 100 miles between London and Birmingham (not quite, but close enough for this purpose) simply because of congested traffic.
I frequently travel between south east London and Glasgow, around 400 miles. Whenever I can, I drive at 95MPH and I have yet to do that journey in less than 8 hours. I usually have one splash and dash of 15 minutes or so. The journey has frequently taken me far longer, my worst example, over 12 hours.
An exception, but I went from Dartford in Kent, to Colchester in Essex. The round trip is around 2 hours. One particular day, it took me 12 hours. Nor is that unusual as the road network around the M25 (London orbital, 3 lane motorway) is frequently gridlocked.
Akatsukami – brilliant definition of the national difference!
Hotscot is right about UK car commuting…
But note that most of commuters into London use rail, then bus (and car journeys and ownership in London are still falling).
this link is interesting because it gives the commuting stats for 1854!
https://londontransportdata.wordpress.com/
Griff
With respect, what a London centric mentality overlooks is that life beyond London carries on without it. Throughout the home counties alone there are towns and cities where people work and flourish, largely without the transport services devoted to London.
Glasgow (a single, circular tube line), Edinburgh, Manchester, York, Newcastle, Oxford etc. have nothing like the transport infrastructure of London so people drive to work. And with all the tube lines available in London, they are building Crossrail, and planning a north south version. Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland gets a tram line, no better than Croydon.
Try going to your local school, the biggest car parking allocations are devoted to teachers, guaranteed! (And when the caretaker tried to chase me out of the ‘staff only car park’, I asked him how many teachers are declaring free car parking at work to HMRC; and should I make some enquiries? I now park in the Head Teachers ‘Reserved’ spot whenever it’s available). The vast majority of those teachers are local. Similarly, out of town factories, supermarkets, construction sites etc. etc. are almost always, only reliably accessible with a car.
Which forms much of my objection to many policies imposed on the rest of the country, like air quality. London doesn’t like diesels, so the rest of the country unaffected by them, pay to clean up London. And I understand a recent air quality survey found London’s air to be cleaner than Blackpool, a coastal town, that’s just not credible, or, something’s wrong with the London/restofUK balance.
Frankly, the sooner London becomes it’s own country and the UK can extract rent from it, the better as far as I’m concerned. We can squeeze it till the pips squeak, just as it’s been doing to the rest of the country throughout history.
i didn’t want to read the latest explanation of why some activist’s idea will work if I alter my life to help it.
I am just getting sick of idiots
This may be the dumbest study EVAH!! These yokels for some reason think that electric car batteries are somehow a mostly free unused resource the utilities can tap. They are attempting to determine the effects on the batteries from utility usage, presumably in order to determine how much the car owners need to be compensated. And they also talk of massive changes to the grid, apparently to allow utilities to tap car batteries, apparently during the day, while at work, etc. We are therefore talking potentially very large changes. The first criticism I can think of this scheme is that
it stupidly attempts to determine costs due the car owner , when the costs can be accurately determined in the manner any sane person would follow – simply buy batteries and don’t “rent” them
by using electric car owner batteries. By owning the batteries, there is no need to make any massive changes to the grid, and the battery energy would be available to the grid 24/7. Since paying owners will essentially cost the same as buying batteries and requires a whole lot of expensive grid changes, the idea of “renting” electric car batteries cannot possibly make any economic sense, or sense of any sort. The second issue is why these people think that
energy stored in batteries is going to solve the problem of non-dispatchability of renewable power generators wind and solar. Batteries STORE energy. They don’t GENERATE energy, folks. The energy to charge the batteries has to come from somewhere.If it comes from fossil fuel plants, then why the need for batteries? Just have enough fossil capacity to back up the renewables. If it comes from the renewables then you have a big guessing game : how much battery capacity is needed and how much renewable capacity is needed? Renewable capacity is an inexact number, dependent upon the amount of solar radiation or wind. So there is no answer – no matter how much battery and renewable generation capacity one amasses, your power generation remains unreliable. A suggestion : instead of all these nutty and complicated schemes that attempt to make an unreliable source of power reliable (an impossibility actually – at some point one needs a reliable generator, and a battery ain’t one), why not simply realize that molten salt small modular reactors are the answer and get in line to order a couple? It’s not as though doing something today will have any different effect from doing something 5 years from now. So quit trying to save the planet and avoid screwing up things you really don’t understand.
arthur4563
Calm down mate, this sort of thing isn’t going to affect you and I much, unless you’re in your 20’s, even then, it’ll probably be our grandkids who’ll have to deal with it all.
I suspect the overriding theory rumbling around in these guys heads is that we’ll eventually end up with a globally connected electricity grid, so when one side of the planet’s using juice, the other side ain’t.
Nice idea, until Russia, China, the USA and good old N.Korea get involved. Then the French’ll pitch up and really screw everything up.
I mean, the idea’s nice, but the infrastructure cost of something like that will make even a socialist’s eyes bleed……well, maybe not quite.
It’s a bit like mobile phones and internet access. Fantastic if you live in London, Paris, LA, Sau Paolo or Beijing, but venture anywhere even remotely, remote and Bps speeds in the UK drop to 8 or 9 as standard. And when I say remotely, remote, I mean within 5 or 10 miles of a small city like Glasgow or Edinburgh. If they can’t manage a now basic service with lightweight cables and fibre, what chance have they got with heavy duty high voltage electricity cables. The whole of the UK would be criss crossed with pylon mounted cables beefing up the current (no pun intended) wimpy network, because they certainly won’t spring for underground cables.
But seriously, we’ll be pushing up the daises by the time it happens, and unlike the greens, I’m happy for our kids and grandkids to sort the problem out themselves, just like our ancestors paid for the Napoleonic wars fought by their ancestors, and we paid for WW1 and WW2 fought by our parents and grandparents.
What really p*sses me off though, is that income tax was first introduced in the UK to pay for the Napoleonic wars, so how has it been distorted into the mass social, financial hammock it’s now become?
WTF did we all miss there?
Yep, the problem with with the idea of a globally connected electricity grid is that you will eventually run out of other people’s electricity.
PaulH
It’s the lure of perpetual motion. The holy grail of science.
Everyone recognises it’s unachievable, yet it remains the unutterable source of wealth and fame.
So the objective is, to get as close to it as possible, no matter the cost.
Nirvana, on an inexhaustible budget, exhausted when mankind finally ceases to exist.
It’s very source represents it’s futility.
But at least it represents hope and ambition, which has done mankind very well so far.
Okay, any votes on which of these guys you would trust with your wallet.
a) Duberry
b) Uddin
c) neither.
I’m in for c.
More science leeches making sciency noises.
AW, Is Google-WordPress shadow blocking comments? I have a comment lost somewhere in moderation that will not post, yet there is nothing that should send it to moderation language or vocabulary-wise.
AW,
On another discussion thread (the Google post) here at your WUWT, I verified that WordPress would not let me post a URL linking to a UK DailyMail article that exposed E Schmidt’s girlfriends.
It seems to me you may be getting certain posts shadow banned, where they don’t show up for a certain time (a delay), which prevents immediate impact.
Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) exposed shadow banning by Twitter, whereby many of his high impact followers would not see his tweets for many hours, greatly inhibited his ability to trend his Tweet and to get re-tweets.
The big data companies are clearly silently at work on censorship with hard to detect methods.
“I verified that WordPress would not let me post a URL linking to a UK DailyMail article that exposed E Schmidt’s girlfriends.”
Wow, that is Big Botheresque. Sort of like being put on moder@tion here if you use the wrong word. Which is understandable here, and/or if you are real bad here, requiring a human to read the comment to see if it is fit to post.
Encode it so that it can be re-assembled by a person, but not detected by a program.
Electric Phillip Hammond chancellor apparently knows more than Jeremy Clarkson about cars and about how electric driverless cars might behave. Jeremy apparently within 50 miles on the M4 was nearly killed twice by a driverless car. Phillip Hammond says driverless cars will allow the elderly to become independent again once they have had to give up their licence. Imagine minus 15C fog believing that the guy has input the right data into the GPS sets off and within 15 minutes goes to sleep – not unusual at 90 – only to wake up believing he was still safe in bed being driven at 90mph in thick fog hits a stretch of black ice and then slams into the back of pile up. Whose fault?? Or is this just another Paul Ehrlich type plot to reduce the population after the Co2 ploy has failed??
There are levels of survival the Progs are willing to accept. Your elderly pensioner will just be collateral damage on the road to Prog Utopia.
Just look at the pile-ups we have here due to fog, black ice, blowing snow across roads, blizzards. And many of these with fatalities.
Some years back a Yugo was lifted off the Mackinaw Bridge just by wind. Victim’s body not recovered until spring. At the time the bridge was clear of ice and snow.
For the first time in years I actually learnt something from the drivel that pretends to be the magazine of a learned engineering institution. And that was that the signal from the GPS system is so weak it is easily jammed. Yes, see all the fun we can have with self-driving cars for only a small outlay on ebay. But, there was something else. You can actually spoof GPS. They didn’t think it was possible but it seems to be happening in places. You can ‘move’ location 30 miles or so. Think of the fun in that.
You don’t have to be 90 to fall asleep in cars. I can do it easily and if I have nothing to do to keep me alert it is almost certain. I always fall asleep on the train home from work everyday. And as far as I can see the only advantage of self driving cars is to get you back from the pub after getting tanked up, where once again you will probably be asleep.
This is tremendously efficient. Convert AC to DC to charge the battery. Discharge the battery back into the grid, changing the DC to AC. Repeat as many times as possible.
It’s not just DC to AC though – like the feed in from domestic solar and wind, it would need to be converted from low voltage to high voltage to supply anything other than the immediate area.
Nah.. Just re-wire every house to run off 24VDC !
Electrons go both ways on a circuit…same transformer would send out AC electrons at 240 AC on secondary, and up to primary voltages on the HV transformer for Distribution to the neighbourhood. No rocket science required for any of this, other than some simple load management/priority switching in your house.
Should qualify that by saying electrons (can) go both ways on a circuit, obviously. But electrons on the same circuit always go to the closest load where they are utilized. Just like if you spin an Induction motor over speed by say 50 RPM, it becomes a generator and those electrons will be consumed at the closest load location at nearly the speed of light. You can even get near 3 phase efficiency on single phase induction generation if you put the right amount of capacitance on the unused legs of a 3 phase generator producing at single phase. The induction generator runs smoother, since less heat is wasted in the two unused legs. At 100% PF. You can even ‘lead’ the utility with excessive PF using excess capacitance, sending out free KVARS to the utility, (a benefit to the utility) although you risk ‘islanding’ your generation if the utility goes down, and you self excite. Would be very much frowned upon by the utility.
Sooo whats powering that induction motor?
H2O
Andy,
Ohm’s Law.
The current loads at 24VDC would require doubling or more the wire gauge to prevent overheating and a fire.
I = V/R.
At 24 VDC, the power losses due to wire heating would become substantial.
I’m always suspicious of academics who say their work indicates the need for more research and funding.
The claim that the energy is ‘clean’ once it’s been in the battery sounds like energy laundering to me!
What I find suspicious is when a academic admits the evidence is contradictory but decides it still proves his belief.
~¿~
I used to work in an IT consultancy. All our reports suggested what the next area of work should be. Nothing suspicious just self promotion.
Wouldn’t it be simpler just to have the battery and drive a vehicle of whatever type suits your needs best? Has no-one thought of having domestic battery backup for problems on an unreliable grid. Or even simpler use a reliable power source for a National Grid.
Living in rural Sweden, I have both battery UPS and three-phase diesel generator.
On my boat I have 7 batteries (engine, genset, windlass/bow thruster, house loads(x4), all lead acid), a windmill, two solar panels, a solar/wind charge controller, a battery charger, an inverter, a connection to shore power (the grid) with a large isolation transformer and very large wires that need to be manually connected/disconnected, a diesel genset, a high-output alternator on the main engine, monitoring equipment, and more switches than you can imagine. Plus I have sails to move the boat if I don’t want to use the engine.
I am an engineer, and even I get the switch lineups wrong, occasionally. My wife has no idea how the system works. My mother would not understand anything about it if all this was powering her house.
rxc, living on a boat for a long time, sailing to remote places with no chance of shore power or easy access to a diesel supply, you quickly learn just how and where the power comes from and just how much you can safely use! Maybe we should send some of these ill informed greenies to sea on a long ocean voyage.
rxc and Sara Hall: without a doubt! Running pretty much the same setup on a boat as rxc with no turbine – as yet – but beefed-up solar and a nice efficient 2 kW petrol generator with smart throttle.
The halfwit academics proposing their unphysical politically correct lunacy do indeed need to make personal practical demonstrations before the halfwit politicians oblige us all to live – or more likely die – in their fantasy world.
Perhaps a scenario where I could use my own car battery during peak times in my own house using time of night low rates, so when the EV is plugged into the house, I am using my own battery power, perhaps also combined with my own solar off the roof. The losses may not cancel out, but even if I had the house wired up such, then I would still have electricity in the house if the utility was down, or was on a rolling black out. Which would also take some load off the grid if I were using my own battery and/or solar.
The utility making use of my battery for peaking/stabilizing would technically work, but the losses on charging and discharging might make it a moot point. And not to mention my battery is wearing out with every charge and discharge cycle. I doubt there is enough Net left over to pay me a premium for using my battery. But I think it good to perfect the technology. I should be able to program my charger to keep it fully charged, and not be drained by the utility. This concept is good and might work if it were driven by honest market forces, but the problem is sooner or later, the Nanny State takes over and ruins everything. Just like OZ or Kalifornia, which is going down the tubes due to Marxist tendencies.
invest in after market battery futures…..
A couple of things.
First is that Li-ion batteries are relatively efficient in energy storage, significantly better than lead-acid batteries. With a significant price differential between peak and base load rates, it would be relatively easy to come out ahead if battery cost and lifetime are reasonable. That is cost per kw-hr divided by cycle life must be less than the peak versus non-peak rates.
Second is specifics on how battery charge is maintained can have a large effect on battery life, with the worst case of maintaining close to 100% charge at high battery temperatures. I also suspect that rate of discharge will have some effect on battery life, and a V2G application would probably have a lower discharge rate than freeway diving.
V2G is likely to be part of the solution to the solar duck problem, but poor battery management will kill the economics.
How long of an outage would the battery be good for and then what? How many people would have the knowledge to adjust load during a prolonged outage? I have fuel on hand for my generator for three days then there is the fuel in my vehicles.
Would depend on the size of your battery. At that point you would be islanded to your battery, so then you would be best to have an auto load controller, priority panel. So then your fridge/freezer is highest on the pecking order, and your electric heat or A/C etc, is last, or is a load dump priority if you have surplus generation from whatever you are generating with. i.e. solar, water, gen-set. The voltage level of the battery would be the guidance for the priority load controller. This is why I am keen on a PHEV 4×4 Jeep. Just autostart up the micro diesel ICE generator in the Jeep when the voltage drops and plug yourself into the Jeep. Imagine towing that down to Arizona in the winter behind the RV. As long as you have diesel/gas, you have all the convenience of home with the efficiency of electricity. I figure .35 cents USD per Kw/hr would be a break even, maybe with 2-3 Kw of solar panels on the RV, it is the same price as the utility power. And you are beholden to no-one.
Uh, no.
They are going to re-wire us all….top down…so they have more control over us
No. Even in the unlikely scenario of electric cars having their own portable power source, who’d feed the grid with it?
I was told by someone in the know….they use the Tesla S as taxi cabs in Sweden. They average 390 km a day. After 360 charges, or about 80,000 miles, the batteries need to be replaced. The limits of electric cars…exposed.
83% of electricity production in Sweden comes from nuclear and hydroelectric power. Their electricity is one of the cheapest in the EU because hydroelectric power provides about 47% of their grid demand.
Actually they passed 250,000 miles on the original battery. They only lost 7% of the battery capacity.
https://insideevs.com/tesla-model-s-250000-miles/
There are other taxi services that also use Teslas and they have the same experience. Generally the observation of owners is the battery looses 5% rather quickly and the battery loss slow dramatically to almost nothing. Also not these tesla taxies are using the tesla supper charger at least once daily which charges the car to 80% of capacity in about 20 to 30 minutes.
geoff – what’s wrong with
a new battery every
80 k miles?
think of all the
pollution that was
avoided
When/if all cars become electric, what happens to motor bikes? The only electric bikes I’ve seen are push bikes with a gentle electric motor assist. So, if electric motor bikes are impossible, and there are no longer any gas stations left . . . well, you get my drift.
There are some purdy nice e-motorbikes on the market. Some of them extremely fast in the 1/4 mile. Here is a nice one for general riding… http://www.zeromotorcycles.com/ca/zero-s
$21K, could get to town and wait 11 hours for the batteries to recharge for the return 100 mile trip.
The ‘Cost of Charge’ figures must be with unicorn dust.
Well, I did say some of them went extremely fast in the 1/4 mile. I didn’t say they went 300 miles on a charge.
The reason I charge my car is so I can use it. Why would I let anyone drain it so it might not have the range I need the next day?
I suppose there are some circumstances when I might be willing to do so for a fee, but I generally need my car fully charged.
Hmm. Network stability? Current electrical networks are designed such that generators are connected near the top of the grid hierarchy, where the network is ‘stiff’, that is moderate changes in power flow don’t impact on the network parameters too much. Consumers are mostly connected at low levels in the hierarchy, where the network is much less ‘stiff’ due to long transmission lines and their R, L and C values. Now, if we’re going to invert this significantly during certain periods, and a lot of power flow upwards occurs, I would not like to be the guy who tries to design the stabilisation systems, or the guy who manages the network, to maintain the supply at the edges within the tolerances mandated by the regulators. Or will these limits have to be relaxed, and we’re back to an early 20th century experience?
Plus a poorly designed controller, such that your car sits in the garage dithering between charge and discharge cycles every few seconds.
Protection engineers are already pulling their hair out.
Especially with wind. A 100 Mw wind park could be producing 100% one minute, and the whole thing comes to a crashing stop with a lull in the wind and somehow they have to make up that 100 Mw with something else immediately without losing frequency and a possible blackout, probably with coal, gas or hydro base load from some other source on another distant circuit. Or what many jurisdictions have had to do, install diesel back-up and have a back-up spinning reserve. At least solar doesn’t usually collapse to 0 in the middle of the day… you maybe still get 20%-25% of what you had even with a big cloud floating by. But I get why people are so angry with some of this, especially when their electricity bills have gone up 100%-200% in the last 5-10 years.
smart grids.
Blah blah blah, the energy first must be generated. As long as coal and gas are a primary source, electric cars won’t be that green.
the us pct of sustainable energy is rising year-by-year.
you seem to prefer that it not…….
This type of a setup will be ripe for a hacker to bring commuters to their knees.
Can’t wait to see the media commentary it would generate!
I can definitely see a super hack on Tesla someday, (maybe by a state actor like NK) where the EV is hacked big time, perhaps on the auto pilot whereby there is many accidents and cars quit in the middle of the roads. And all the time, the Norks have shorted Tesla stock big time, and make a tidy sum on the markets as the stock implodes. Better than counterfeiting foreign currencies and having to launder that.
and why can’t a grid from coal & nat gas be hacked?