Your Future Home Might Be Powered By Car Batteries (bloomberg.com)

Increasingly utilities and automakers are wondering if they could use the batteries inside electric cars as storage for the entire public power grid. An anonymous reader shares a report: The idea, known as "vehicle-to-grid," is to someday have millions of drivers become mini electricity traders, charging up when rates are cheap and pumping energy back into the grid during peak hours or when the sun simply isn't shining. If it works -- and it's a big if -- renewable energy could get much cheaper and more widely used. "We really, really need storage in order to make better use of wind and solar power, and electric cars could provide it," said Daniel Brenden, an analyst who studies the electricity market at BMI Research in London. "The potential is so huge." Today, fewer than one percent of the world's vehicles are electric, but by 2040 more than half of all new cars will run on the same juice as televisions, computers and hair dryers, according to estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Once cars and everything else are fed from the same source, they can share the same plumbing.

Comments

Re:Build the base first, then expand

[Opportunist]

I'm not talking about perfection, I'm talking about knowing whether we're putting our money on the right horse. Right now, energy driven cars seem to be the future, but we don't even know what kind of energy storage is the best. When it comes to energy density, the ICE and petrol are still superior to other forms on a pure power-per-kg level. We should first of all figure out how to replace this, and what to replace that with, before we start planning a whole house around it only to discover that eventually we'll start over from scratch.

Re:Too much hype...

[Mashiki]

400v isn't dangerous though, it's the amperage that's behind the 400v that's dangerous. You can go and get hit with 10,000-50,000v right now pull the wire off a spark plug on any car, it'll hurt but it won't kill you even if it's grounded through you to the earth. Low amp, high voltage. But, you can kill yourself off the starter motor which can draw upwards of 300-900amps from that 12v battery. Haven't even started with home 1ph-120v, or 3ph-208v used in industry.

Re:Why?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

A car with ~200 mile range is going to have a ~50 kWh battery. My home uses ~2-3 kWh overnight. So by using the energy of a fully charged car overnight once, I am still at a 188-192 mile range. How's that a problem? Do you run a steel mill at home or something?

Re:Battery wear

[AmiMoJo]

Teslas have actually a very limited lifetime of about 500 cycles

Incorrect, Tesla use Panasonic cells rated for 3000 cycles.

500 cycles at 250 miles per charge would only be 125,000 miles, which happens to also be the warranty on the packs. Lifetime being a bell curve approximately 50% of packs would qualify for warranty replacement if that was the case. But more over, lots of Tesla cars are up to 200k+, and Tesla tested up to 750k.

Even the original Nissan Leaf has proven to be more durable than that, with taxi firms putting over 200k miles on the original pack without any problems. The newer 30 and 40kWh models might not last so long though.