Use EVs as energy storage. Millions of EVs form an energy reservoir. 20% of solar is curtailed now and q lot more in future, instead charge EVs. Pay the EV owners because they are creating a storage layer with their capital and power prices go negative hundreds of millions of times every year. No need of home batteries.
In Australia people do both. We don't have V2G yet, but EVs plugged in at home overnight with L1 charging can get charged by the home battery that was charged up during the day by the PV on the roof.
The solar PV and now storage rollouts in Australia have been one of the best government investments in public infrastructure in my lifetime here.
The more we electrify, the less reliant we are on the crude -> foreign refineries -> imported/distributed fuel risk.
Harvesting solar power is an awesome thing to do both at home and utility level.
PV and wind utility installations are being built with storage co-located, there are companies building synthetic condensers to maintain the grid stability and the job of frequency support is now done mostly by batteries, not gas.
We need to make electricity basically "too cheap to meter" and electrify our primary industries, mining and agriculture.
When I looked into it it didn't make sense to use an EV as a solar battery, the chemistry isn't made for high cycle counts compared to regular home/solar batteries.
You looked wrong. These batteries can do 100,000 charge-discharge cycles while retaining 80% of their capacity.
It really depends on the battery chemistry of the specific EV, how many watts you charge at, and deep cycle vs. shallow cycle. Not all EV batteries will hold up to that many charge-discharge cycles.
Even at that, 100,000 cycles is an exaggeration. From what I can tell, you can expect up to 3000 cycles from Nickel Manganese Cobalt batteries before they hit 80% of original capacity. Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries can last for 10,000 cycles before dropping to 80% of original capacity.
https://bslbatt.com/blogs/lfp-vs-nmc-lithium-battery-compari...
1. A couple orders of magnitude more people own homes than EVs; 2. EVs already are used as energy storage, but the thing about EVs is people want to use that energy to yknow, drive them.
That's why paying EV owners is th right incentive. All new cars will be EVs. In 20 years, all cars are EVs.
Agreed. V2G is actually one of the best DER strats out there. The EVs are already purchased, the batteries and PCS are already configured for bidirectional flow in most brands. Coordination/visibility problem remains at Dx level, but actually worth the investment.
The issue here is that EVs tend to be charged when the sun is down. When sun is up you tend to be at work or driving. The surplus power is coming from solar.
EVs are parked 95% of the time. If it's parked, it can be charged. Work places also have electricity.
>Work places also have electricity.
Only households can access the free electricity window. If you're not on a free plan you can get reduced rates during the solar peak window but business accounts aren't allowed to access those either.
but you're assuming that work provides parking. Its not a given, plus whats in it for the drivers?
plug my car in, it might be full, it might be empty, either way its racking up the charge cycles for no direct benefit for me.
Batteries on a house makes a better sell for customers, and also targets the problem of both over supply and over consumption at source.
Workplaces (and other locations) could offer free/reduced-cost charging, with the caveat that V2L is required. They could guarantee that the vehicle will be at a certain charge level at a designated time, and that the vehicle will never go below a threshold (in case an unanticipated trip is required).
The boss may get a free charge, but no one else will…
Depends. residential fleets v commercial fleets. different behaviours.
Even most residential batts that get plugged in when they get home typically have SOC >40% (depending on jurisidiction).
surely its possible to invent a "plug in road" system, then cars could charge (at least on highways etc) even when driving. I had this thought ages back when EVs first came out, to tackle the problem of long charge times when doing cross country road trips.
We could call it: Train!
You could run a line overhead on pylons and put a pick up on a pole on the cars.
A smaller version of these things: https://sandtoft.org/wp/
You could combine the best of dodgem cars with drone nets by encasing all the highways in electrified wiring.
Some people drive as if they're in dodgem cars as it is.
On today's episode of "HNer's totally realistic and not deluded idea"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trolleybus_systems_in_...
It already exists and works so, not that crazy
It's much more difficult when the ownership of the vehicles isn't centralized.
I imagine this would make road repair even more common, intensive, and disruptive than it already is?