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

Take the car away

[iTrawl]

I thought they made a car specifically for this use pattern. And they took away the car and called what was left the "Powerwall". Sure, you stick it to a wall rather than ambulate it all over town, but I think it works out just fine.

Re: Take the car away

[rmdingler]

A powerwall designed specifically to store and discharge energy to offset peak usage is also going to be more practical to market, since electric car owners would understandably be concerned about the number of charge/discharge cycles their batteries could sustain before needing replacement.

Re: Take the car away

[AmiMoJo]

The other big issue with V2G is that it needs to use much more complex charging hardware. The current offerings in Norway only work on CHAdeMO, for example.

I think it's more likely that people will use recycled car batteries in a PowerWall type product. There won't be a shortage of them from cars written off for other issues, and most of those packs will have a huge amount of life left in them.

Batteries

[Anonymous Coward]

This is silly. Battery technology hasn't matured so workarounds like this aren't really solving any problems. By the time there was widespread adoption of this (my guess 5-10 years) technology will have moved on and the issues we think are a big deal will be different.

Seems dubious

[Gavagai80]

The average age of a car on the road in the USA is 11.5 years. Personally, I drive a 1998. If only 50% of new cars in 2040 will be electric, then we're looking at sometime between 2050 and 2060 for a slight majority of cars on the road to be electric. So this plan had better work with a fairly small percentage of cars being electric, or it'll come way too late to do any good.

A better use of electric cars may be simply using their depleted otherwise-worthless batteries as part of the grid. That way you don't have to convince people to let their battery be worn down, either -- getting people to allow their car battery to be used to balance the grid will really require that they be getting free replacement batteries, because it can't be good for battery longevity.

Re:Build the base first, then expand

[thegarbz]

Let's first of all finish inventing the storage before we ponder spending the energy.

Lets not. If we spend our lives waiting for perfection before starting anything then we will never get anything done.

Fly in the ointment

[Solandri]

have millions of drivers become mini electricity traders, charging up when rates are cheap and pumping energy back into the grid during peak hours

Transportation accounts for about 70% as much energy consumption as electricity. If you convert all those ICE cars into EVs, the electric rates won't be cheap during the night when they're charging. Overnight will become the new peak consumption hours, when electricity is most expensive.