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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.
The Powerwall costs extra money, but you will already have your car battery, so there is no additional capital cost other than an inverter.
My wife has a Tesla with a 240 mile range, and on 95% of days she uses less than 20% of the capacity. The rest could be available for energy price arbitrage.
The car starts charging at 2 am, when electricity prices are lowest. The power companies need to fill the gap from 4pm to 7pm when power use peaks, but solar is fading.