Slashdot Mirror
Returning Power From Electric Cars To the Grid
First time accepted submitter icensnow writes "NRG is patenting a means of returning electric power from charged but inactive electric cars to the grid, essentially turning parked electric cars into an energy storage system for the grid. I'm having a hard time deciding if this is genius or silly."
OK, next question.
(fp?)
Now smaller energy companies have a way to transmit their electricity to customers by-passing the big company owned power lines.
This idea is kicked around a lot, and there are some pros and cons.
The intention is obvious: use stored energy in parked vehicles to help smooth spikes in demand and evenly distribute the load on the grid. But the difficulty is that people will want their cars to be charged when they leave work or the train station to head home, and peak demand is usually during those hours. Not only will a lot of cars be getting unplugged right when you need them, but few people will be willing to part with charge they might need to get home.
=Smidge=
It makes sense. With the right algorithms and knowledge about auto usage and owner participation, this could work great with intermittent renewable sources (PV, wind, etc). The biggest issue I currently see is premature wear on the batteries. Sucking just a little from many would likely have minimal impact, but draining half the charge from a battery repeatedly will shorten the battery's effective life.
It's genius in that it allows load levelling without much investment by the power company, it's silly because the investment will just be moved to the user: Adding one charge cycle per day means that battery life is halved.
The only way this will take off is for users to have a financial incentive to allow the power company to do this, ie the power price during peak demand must be so high that it's cheaper to deplete your EV battery rather than draw from the grid.
It seems like the energy loss of moving energy from the grid to the cars, then back to the grid, could potentially be too great to justify the investment. I would think large arrays of dedicated stationary batteries might be a better choice.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
When did they file the patent application? I heard people at universities and related research projects proposals about it 4 years ago. Granted that that was only talk and rumors, but from people who I might assume had something going on in it. And no, they were not from NRG nor the University of Delaware.
The constant charging and releasing of said charge has to be hell on the batteries in the car. Its expensive to get those replaced.
Considering how much rechargeable batteries "leak" energy when they sit, does anyone take this into account when they're touting all these great energy savings that electric cars are supposed to provide? I mean, I drive very little. Most of the time my car is just sitting around. But with a gas-powered car, it's not like I'm losing gallons of gas letting it sit for a few days (or even a week). With an electric car, even with one of the newest batteries, I would be losing power even if I'm not driving it, right? Yet I never hear any of these green types addressing that. Just think of all the power that would be wasted just in long-term airport parking.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I've heard a lot that the number one concern over electric (and even hybrid) cars is the life of the battery system. It's extraordinarily expensive to replace, so I'm just not sure that repeatedly charging and draining it during the day a little bit at a time would be worth the possible wear and tear on the battery to justify such a thing. I know there has been a lot of progress towards reducing battery "memory," but still, I couldn't help but think that such a thing would cost me a lot of money a lot sooner than it normally would. Maybe it's just perception and not truth, but if so, I'd think it's a common perception they'd have to work very hard to overcome.
As it is likely for people to expect their car to be charged to a level at least equal to what it was before they left their car in the parking lot. So unless there is some part where the `users' parking their car get to say at which moment they expect their car to be (re-)charged and ready it will turn out very silly indeed.
If there would be such an option I guess this could work on long-term parking areas, short term parking is most likely too much in scheduling effort to be profitable
Silly as hell for now.
I can't count how many times I parked my car with my battery being "full". I mean, if surplus energy were such a huge issue then why is Toyota releasing models now you can plug in for extra "fuel efficiency". For hybrids there can't be that much of a demand. I mean, this means I would need to use more gas to charge my car more to get my good fuel efficiency, partially defeating the purpose of the car.
This seems even sillier for pure electric cars. You might as well argue that each home should have a pipeline to gas stations to siphon off their gas, in exchange for money, which you can buy back at the gas stations.
That hybrid and electric car batteries may need tapped enough to use in this system is a more worrying scenario for me. What the bleep is wrong with the local grid that we are that pinched for energy? There are fluke events that make this impractical, or it happens enough which means to me there is something wrong with the regional system that needs fixed. Not my car drained of "fuel".
Now, solar cars (maybe even cars with mini wind turbines?) I can see being part of this if you leave your vehicles outside. Once, if, your battery fills up you can sell surplus energy back as your car could be generating power during non-use unlike current electrics or hybrids.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
As long as I get paid for giving electricity back to the power company. Maybe then I could make back the cost of the car by charging it at night at my house, and then plugging it in at work and selling it back at a high cost per kwh.
There are much more efficient means of "storing" electrical power than using inactive electric cars. Sounds like a "solution" looking for a "problem"
Electric cars are consumers of electricity. It's not meant to be a power storage device, it's a power consuming device. If you want power storage, capacitor banks do the job nicely, thank you very much.
The thought to having to modify the electric grid and cars to turn them into power storage devices for use by other 'grid' connected devices is absurd. I'm just thinking in terms of technical challenges like mods to car systems (battery, power couplings, etc.) and power coupling systems on the grid, and all the associated costs that would be passed on to the consumer.
Ugh, my head hurts just thinking about all the complications this can cause.
I'm going to call it silly for battery powered cars but genius for fuel cell cars.
Since the current batteries uses lithium-ion or lithium polymer technology, we have the problem of battery life.
These batteries have a fixed number of recharge cycles before needing being recycled. With this idea, some of these recharge cycles will be consumed by the electrical grid. Who pays for it?
Even more, recharging batteries consumes electricity on its own. So, using the car batteries' energy is wasting the energy already used during the battery charging, what is IMHO a waste of resources.
This can be a good idea on emergency situations, however.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
How do you maintain availability of power for the car owner?
Yes, sure, you might be able to harness some from, say, a haulage company at the end of the day when they shut up shop but in general you can't just steal charge from people's electric cars (because the first new-father in the middle of the night that can't drive his wife to hospital is going to create a ton of bad press for you).
So you're basically looking for places that leave stored-charge cars alone, for a significant period of time (enough that they will have a FULL charge by the next time they are needed even after you've discharged them), will never use them in that time, have electric fleets large enough, have the time, money and effort to implement that sort of infrastructure at all the necessary sites (pumping back to the grid requires yet-another meter and converters, surely?) and are willing to let you do so (i.e. you pay them an incentive).
Seems like a business plan from hell, trying to find the profit in that scenario. Seems to me you'll be spending more money on providing the infrastructure to get them back to "fully charged" in time for the morning start than you'll ever gain by using them even at their scheduled downtimes.
So the utility company sells you 10 kW of power to charge your car, 2 kW is lost in the conversion process from grid to car (assuming 80% efficiency). You sell back your 8 kW from the car to grid and 1.6 kW is lost (assuming 80% efficiency). You just paid for 5.1 kW that was lost. So the utility company is getting paid to generate more power, they don't need to build bigger facilities to offset peak demand, and they don't need to pay for loses in the storage if that energy? No wonder NRG jumped on board.
The power company will pay you a lot less that it costs you to charge the car.
Are you new here?
The return pipe to the central steam plant that heated my building broke and due to the terrain it could not be fixed in winter time. So instead the plant engineers had a tanker truck collect the condescend steam outflow from the building and they trucked it back everyday to the steam plant. I was never sure if was genius or absurd but I lean towards absurd. Trucking steam is just one step short of trying to land on the sun at night.
In many cities there is a commute from the suburbs bedroom communities and back everyday, So the place where you charge your car and the place where you sell the electricity back may be geographically different. You are in effect trucking electricity. You might even been trucking it across major grid boundaries. If you live near a border you might even be exporting it. Genius or silly?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
As a Prius driver, obviously this is not relevant to you, because you do not drive an electric car. You drive a gasoline car.
(Unless you've got one of the very latest Priuses, or you've modded your car.)
If I know I won't need my car, I probably will not have charged it (so that it doesn't leak energy). I will usually only have energy to spare if I mistakenly suspected I would need the car.
Also, we will have more electric cars, and therefore probably more choice in electric cars. Batteries will remain quite expensive. Consequently, people will on average by batteries that are just large enough.
So we have a expensive capital good laying around doing nothing most of the time – car batteries.
We have a variable energy source (wind or solar, take your pick) which do not necessary correlate to peak energy usage. If one were to run solely off of these 2, energy companies would have to invest in a lot of batteries, unless
Also, one could delay additional investments into the power grid by levering out the usage, where the energy Is coming from, etc. This assumes you don’t lose too much energy by taking electricity out of the battery again.
Many parts of the country have different rates for electricity at different points in time.
You could for instance, charge your car over night at a cheap rate, and then on a day when you aren't traveling, use the juice from the car during the day when the rate is higher, or when the power goes out.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
This was discussed on slashdot in 2007:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/07/07/27/2312257/toyota-unveils-plug-in-hybrid-prius#comments
And it's not a very good idea:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/automobiles/02POWER.html
"The V2G potential of Honda’s full hybrid vehicles is unexplored, but the company is doubtful of using them to power homes. “We would not like to see stresses on the battery pack caused by putting it through cycles it wasn’t designed for,” said Chris Naughton, a Honda spokesman. “Instead, they should buy a Honda generator that was made for that purpose.”
I really wonder if they live in an Ivory Tower or whether the US patent sysem is indeed that retarded.
After all research projects regarding this are up to 20 years old and working examples exist since far over 10 years.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Maybe this will clear up the confusion.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
there is a common misconception that it's necessary to have a large ultra-expensive highly-polluting rare-earth-metal battery pack. you don't. the conditions for not needing a $25,000 battery pack (worth stealing) are as follows:
* the vehicle weight must be under 550kg (400kg EU Category L7E is perfect)
* low-rolling resistance tyres are essential
* you must be happy with a top speed of 60mph and a top cruising speed of about 55mph
* the frontal area of the vehicle must be no more than 1.5 sqm
* the drag coefficient must be 0.30 or less
* the full drivetrain efficiency must be no less than 80%
under these circumstances, which are perfectly reasonable for most peoples "commuting" needs, you can get away with putting in an off-the-shelf 240/120V AC 5kW or 6kW Diesel Generator and a "Fast Charger" with about 50 Amp output, and that is enough to keep the batteries continuously "topped up" or in fact just to directly drive the Electric Vehicle.
if you try to go BEYOND these circumstances (even putting in a 700kg vehicle) then you get into trouble, because the "Range Extender" now has to be an 8-10kW Diesel Generator, which now weighs 250kg not 100kg, doesn't pull the same level of fuel economy as a 5-6kW Generator (which work out at about 1 Litre per hour), and the exercise is a complete waste. so you have to stick to those conditions, and the maths works out very very well. almost... "too well", to the point where it's hard to believe the MPG figures.
the maths, principle and links to various sites is here: http://lkcl.net/hybrid_electric_vehicle/design_principle.html
and there's a discussion here:
http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showthread.php/why-there-no-board-generatorsi-p261099.html
which if you look back about a week, you'll find a link to a LibreOffice spreadsheet where you can play and plug in your own "vehicle" line and confirm the maths i did, above.
the point is: *if* you do this sort of thing, then yes, large battery packs become irrelevant: you can treat that $500 lead-acid battery pack as a disposable (recyclable) item, and yes, you could even consider running the diesel generator to plug back into the National Grid. personally i think that'd be a bit of a waste of perfectly good Diesel, i'd say, but you could do it.
Sure. Let's go ahead and return the power of a charged battery to the grid and when the owner gets in to drive to work and sees there's no juice, he'll love how he's returned it to the grid.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
I thought the point of having an electric car was to avoid using gasoline? If I have a drained battery at the end of the day and you assume that I have a combustion engine as a standby, I'd have to use petroleum to get home. FAIL. If the car is electric only and relies on the grid to charge, I'd end up walking home. FAIL.
Now if we were talking about some sort of super capacitor that can drain and then be quickly replenished this may have a useful effect to normalize daytime power usage, but only for short durations. An extended drain would be unacceptable. I don't think the monetary reimbursement would entice folks at all because vehicular range is king.
Overall I think this wouldn't work well.
Okay, so here's the deal. The power grid has to be built to support peak load, not average. If there are three days out of an entire year where the customers of a power company use more power than the whole rest of the year, then that power company has to build out their infrastructure to support the demand of those three days. There are some exceptions to this, based on energy trading from neighboring sections of the grid, but since peak demand is usually driven by time of day and current weather, you can't count on the exceptions to save you. (If it's a heat wave where you are in San Antonio at 3 PM and everyone is cranking their AC, it's probably also a heat wave in Houston, where it is also 3PM and everyone is cranking their AC as well...so if you're at peak capacity, so are they in all likelihood.) Additionally, many sources of "load" (aka power consumption) come on without warning, like factories with large units like smelters, furnaces, and so on. Power generation plants have a degree of inertia; they don't just instantly go from operating at 50% of capacity to a higher level...it takes time for them to get there. Think of it as being like throttle response in a car, only a bit slower. Some plants spin up faster than others, but the faster ones are smaller (on-demand gas turbine generators are a perfect example), and more expensive in terms of cost per KWh. And finally, if you look at the distribution of load over the course of a 24-hour day, you'll see that the load is OVERWHELMINGLY concentrated during daylight hours...which makes the "build for peak" challenge all the harder on the power companies.
So, what is being talked about here is one of many technologies intended to help with "demand response," which is the term for the methods by which a power company can deal with sudden increases in load, or alternatively ways to help smooth out the 24-hour cycle of load/demand, so that they don't have to spend quite so much on generation capacity that goes unused 50% or more of the time. People aren't looking at these cars as a fundamental power source to run the grid; it's more like a shock absorber for the grid, so that when that plant with the furnace turns the damned thing on at 3PM on an August afternoon in Texas when it's already 105 degrees in the shade, it won't result in a brownout...or require that the power company spend half a billion dollars on another demand generator just in case.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I've heard this over and over again and usually from utility company representatives and it's a waste of time, money and effort. I think it's more of a public relations thing than anything else since there are not enough electric cars on the market or projected to make a difference.
Why do you never read or hear anyone mention the number if vehicles required to have enough capacity to be meaningful? It's a waste of time and if anything just another way Utility companies to get funding from Public Utility Commissions, etc.
In the mean time, all they have to do is make sure the charge plug allows power flow in both directions. Everything else can be added to the grid tied inverter so nothing has to be done to the car system at all.
a big waste of money and effort IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
It's genius if they manage to get the patent, but it's silly because lots of people have prototype systems already, like Nissan/Renault.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
doh! cart BEFORE the horse
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Assuming this is voluntary or fairly priced, this can alleviate several problems that the grid faces. First there's no need to drain the battery completely and the rate at which power is to be fed back to the grid is adjustable. If the utility uses a bid-and-offer system, you can decide at what price to sell; if the offer isn't worth what you think for the fairly minor reduction in battery life, then don't sell.
All of this can be automated and the benefits for absorption / mitigation of intermittent sources and peak-shaving are tremendous.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I think it is time to really rethink the grid...
We are starting to have technology of cheap and less environmental impact technologies that can power a few houses. Perhaps the grid should be cut back and in favor to small community power sources.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
wasn't this news ten years ago? The point isn't as an energy SOURCE, but as energy storage for a buffer. If you recall the periodic demand cycle for power, you'll quickly see why this is beneficial. You get energy storage right where it's needed without having to transmit it over miles of overloaded grid.
If the charging point is at my home, it's (probably) my car that's plugged in. But a public point at the railway station or the office?
Are all the charging points now going to have to recognise my car or take a swipe card if I want to be paid? (Cue the 1984 posts.)
if the battery was provided by the power company (or rented, like hot water tank) that way they can charge/uncharge your battery at peak hour, if the battery doesn't keep the charge anything they could exchange it with a new one.
just a though
If a car is, say, irreparably damaged or even just in storage for the winter, I can see a point to this - using it purely as storage. But you have to wonder how much extra storage this would really amount to (every little bit helps, I suppose) and how much of the battery's lifetime is killed.
Consider long-term parking lots, used car lots, occasional-use cars etc. etc. Distributed computing has proven its value. So, Why not distributed power storage? Currently, this proposal does seem silly. But, given a much wider use of plug-in cars as well as improvements in battery technology -- combined, perhaps, with some interactive mobile apps -- it is not hard to envision scenarios wherein, by participating in the power co's storage program, one could amortize one's energy costs.
Also future cars might have some active recharging technology such as a solar-power-generating coating. Or perhaps small retractable wind turbines, like the one I designed to wear on my beanie, will add to the available capacity.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Bad idea. Little generators and engines are much less efficient than big ones, so using hybrids as peaking plants is a desperation move. For pure electrics, the general idea is to keep the battery charged up in case the user wants to go somewhere.
The whole "smart grid" thing is mostly a marketing move to collect information about consumers and get rid of meter readers. All that's really needed for peak management is a system that broadcasts how much the grid needs power right now and the current power price, plus receivers on big loads which respond to that data.
It seems very silly as a means to generate power for peak loads. More wear and tear on the battery that really isn't needed. What I would like to see designed is a system for Hybrids to power a home in times of emergency. A storm takes out your power, just turn on your car. Wasteful yes, but if you loose power for a day+ its cheaper to pay for a tank of gas, then replacing a full fridge/freezers worth or food.
I bet it doesn't make sense when you factor in the cost of wear and tear on the very expensive batteries (that have a finite life of useful charge/discharge cycles).
Isn't back feeding the grid dangerous?
In addition to people causing fires when using a generator to backfeed their home, I have read that this can harm electrical workers who are trying to fix the wires.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Just wanted to point out that this has been talked about a lot before and i think has even been implemented so any new patent of it is bogus.
At some point, new cathodes, anodes and electrolytes, or moving entirely to something like supercapacitors may allow you to fully charge your car in 30 seconds (the electric grid will need beefing up too).
That'll take years and years and years but at that point it may be useful. And then they can pull out this patent.
If i had an electric car, I wouldn't want the battery to be any less than 100% full at any time. Who knows, maybe I want to take it out on a max range trip. Therefore, there is no "spare capacity" on active car batteries that you can use.
However, in about 10 years tens of thousands of EV car batteries will be leaving warranty. They may not have the storage density necessary for vehicles, but they will still have functional storage capacity.
I can very easily see that those batteries then will be used to capture "green" energy, either at the industrial or the residential level. The consumer will already own the batteries, or recycle them and recapture some value. Base load problem solved. It'll just take 10 years until the warranties expire.
--
$tar -xvf
Utilities must build generation, or rely upon competitors to meet their daily or seasonal peak demand. If storage capability was distributed throughout the grid we could get by with fewer power plants. Plants purpose-built to help meet demand peaks tend to be combustion turbines (which have the highest fuel costs, and deplete a non-replenishable fossil fuel). Also, intermittent sources of power (solar, wind, etc.) really becomes more useful when storage is available.
The article is vague. But this is an old and excellent idea for hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles.
The basic idea is that good fuel cells are expensive. If a car is powered by a fuel cell, that is a significant capital investment that could be plugged in to the power grid. So, yes, the car owner could be "renting" his car to the power company, thereby providing electricity to the grid exactly in the vicinity where it is probably needed -- saving the cost of long distance power transmission.
Note that a hydrogen fuel cell is not restricted by the usual thermodynamic limit for power plants. Extremely high efficiencies are possible, provided there is a reasonable source of hydrogen, of course.
Hey man, somebody stole my my hubcaps and electrons. Uncool
Rofl, so you go to the Hydrogen fuelling station, fill up, go home, and then wake up and find that your system sold 30% of your fuel overnight? If it's cheaper to do that, then the utilities would buy the hydrogen direct or something.
If this system is going to pay the electric vehicle owners more than the cost of the electricity and wear on the battery, wouldn't it be more cost-effective to buy a few batteries, and stick them in a corner of your basement? No impact on your vehicle, and free income...
The real problem with electric cars is the limited lifetime of the battery. Modern lithium-ion batteries degrade, and are good for maybe 700 charge/discharge cycles. (The initial Hybrids extend this somewhat, IIRC, by avoiding charging above %70 or so (and beneath %30 or so) of design capacity), but the electrodes only have so much 'flux' of absorption/dissipation they can handle, before they begin degrading significantly in performance.
This is one of the real issues with electric cars that's going to bite people in their shiny-metal a**ses sooner than most of them expect. Especially the people who hardhack their hybrids to run fully electric. Replacing those batteries after 4 or 5 years of normal driving is going to be extremely expensive.
Heck, I have the replace the Li batteries in my phone every two years years or so because of this. I'm sure you've noticed it with laptops too... when it was brand new it'd run for four hours on battery, now you're lucky to get two and a half or three. These cars have a -lot- more battery.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
I'm sure they can come up with a way to make both parties incentivized to use the charging stations. If the providers let you charge for free and you are guaranteed to have a certain charge level, then I would do it. For the people building the charge station, they can get paid by the utility companies for utility smoothing. As more renewables are coming online, utility companies will need to provide some storage and they will need to pay for it. Not sure if the economics works out.
(1) The fuel cells that make this efficient conversion are expensive, so the power company may happily buy the hydrogen but that does not solve the bigger problem.
(2) When you drive to work, your car is probably near a location that will require more electricity -- not transmitting power long distances is an absolute gain.
(3) No one said you would be required to sell power to the grid, only that the option would be available and that appropriate mutual economic incentives could exist such that both you and the power company would be happy about the arrangement.
(4) The main advantage of distributed power comes from handling peak usage -- more than have the physical investment of the power company is for purposes of handling intermittent peaks; distributing power generation could mean cheaper power for everyone. Thus, realistically, the power company would rent your vehicle for 2-3 hours during the middle of the day, if you want to sign up for that. And it does not take a sophisticated system to know to opt out when your tank gets below a preferred minimum level.
Seriously, Think about it for a second. Electricity isn't free. Charging a battery takes more electricity than it contains. This is one of the most problematic aspect of using batteries as power sources for large consumption unit.
There is no way you can cut even. If you did, there would be more efficient ways to do it using something else than a car.
The basic principle behind this technology requires that the car user is not given the choice. ( As in build in feature in public chargers. )
N'nuff said.
The only reasonable source of hydrogen is fossil fuels.
404: sig not found.
Spoken like a true engineer (I'm an EE too), with only attitudes towards the technicalities and not accounting for real world externalities. The reason we are getting so antitechnology is simple. This technology is being used against us, the consumer, more and more everyday. We have given power companies tons of direct monies and subsidies to upgrade infrastructure over the past decades. What are they doing now? Complaining we don't have the money to upgrade infrastructure like the grids. They want US to handle the burden of load balancing their grids. They want us to waste our battery lifetimes, let them remotely control A/C thermostats, force us to eat the costs of their wastefulness but STILL take our money. It's getting old. How about they design for a realistic base powerload and then all this extra green power they have nowhere to dump in off peak times they reroute to some creative storage uses? Raccoon Mtn & Ocoee TN power plants are a basic example of this. They pump water up a mountain into a tank and then dump it on peak demand. They could do the same elsewhere. Or maybe take those wind turbines and compress some air into a tank. The one thing that escapes alot of engineers is how about you just TURN THEM OFF? Uncouple the generators from the turbine shafts, rotate blades to a neutral pitch, and lock the damned hubs so they don't spin. You could also just uselessly boil some water with the extra power. It wasn't like you paid for the sun, the wind, or the river flowing out to the sea. It was gonna do that anyway. This is "free" energy (not the overunity kind either). So what if you don't make a penny off of every BTU you collect? Greedy ass corporations.
The American way of business is screwing each and everyone of us everyday and it only keeps getting worse. Everyone from power companies, cable companies, cell companies, security systems, the police, etc etc etc are all taking this cheap technology and doing things with it that our founding fathers would have went to war over. I'm surprised the power companies haven't wound stators around the founding fathers coffins to get that free power from them spinning in their graves. They'd charge us for that free power too.
The idea of selling EV battery energy back to the grid is silly given the high depreciation costs of current EV batteries, but a closely related idea makes a lot of sense: allowing the grid operators to control the power level of EV chargers in exchange for lower rates. Even during the day there's almost always unused generation that's much cheaper than the depreciation cost of EV batteries. Problem is, it takes time to fire up in response to an unexpected load increase. Usually the extra load is temporarily met with quickly dispatched (but more costly) spinning reserves until the more economical generators are online. Temporarily reducing EV charging powers could be an alternative to those expensive reserves, and it only needs to last until the extra generation is online. The temporary power reductions could be rotated among different EV drivers so no one user has his cranked down too often or for long.
Hasn't this idea been around for years? I know Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air (http://www.withouthotair.com/) covered this back in 2008, and it wasn't new then.
,,, if:
1. The 'full' capacity of my electrocar is a multiple of my normal commute. E.g. My normal town trip is 260 km. If I can be guaranteed 260 km range left in my vehicle, I'd consider this.
2. We have some battery that doesn't wear out after 500 charge/discharge cycles. I'd love it if EEStor had a real product.
In a rural setting I've got 40-50 power failures a year. Most of these are under 5 seconds long -- just enough to reset the microwave, stove, alarm clock. We get a 12 hour one once a year, and a 1 hour one 3-4 times a year. I would love to have a house wide backup system to keep the sump pump running when we are away on holiday.
Even at 5%, this is a useful feature for the grid. Right now the coal plants have to run a 2% surplus of steam power so they can ramp up to meet increased demand. We have a local hydro dam, only 60 MW, that dumps 80% of it's flow during ramp up times. If you are in the turbine room, the turbine gates change from idle to an appreciable fraction of full several times a minute.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Stop consuming so much.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
That's why it's "optional"..
Take a breath and say it with me.. "They are not stealing my electricity, they are willing to pay me for access to my batteries and I have complete control on when and how they access my batteries, if I even allow it"
The real question, can you make an actual profit once you include battery wear/tear. We'll have to wait a few years to see what kind of batteries we have then and run the math.
If this actually works out, I would be tempted to purchase a large battery bank for my home. The batteries can help cover their own costs by doing what they want your car to do. And if the power goes out, I still have a large battery back-up to run my house.