Comment by buu700
2 days ago
This sounds similar to something I suggested at one point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38669706
Imagine software that could run on EVs, Powerwall-type batteries, computers/tablets/smartphones, and so on, which would automatically charge and discharge for passive income. Essentially algorithmic trading, but with power instead of stock. You'd just have to configure any necessary time ranges and charge percentages, e.g. maybe your EV needs to be at 25% by 8am and again by 5pm on weekdays in order to make your daily commute.
Maybe some EVs will start to come with built-in crypto miners to burn negatively priced power when the battery is at capacity. Maybe Lyft/Uber and Waymo/Cruise will take advantage of it by increasing and lowering rates based on the price of power (if they don't already).
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this isn't novel and something that's been talked about for a long time. The industry term I've most heard is "prices to devices". You of course need retail to participate more in the wholesale markets, but there are a lot of barriers - some technological, some regulatory. Some companies did this in ERCOT, but there was a big backlash when customers got $20k bills after Winter Storm Uri as they didn't understand what they were signing up for.
The FERC passed Order 2222 which is a bigger step in that direction by forcing the regional wholesale markets to allow aggregators to aggregate up the smaller stuff that is normally considered noise.
> Some companies did this in ERCOT, but there was a big backlash when customers got $20k bills after Winter Storm Uri as they didn't understand what they were signing up for.
It would be a bit weird but you could have your home supply at a fixed-ish rate and your EV on a separate meter riding the raw market.
If you can prevent too much cheating.
And while not making money, there has been a lot of talk around Virtual Power Plants, that is unifying the larger demand devices to help stabilize the grid in times of peak demand.
Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) are essentially the same thing as the Distributed Energy Resource Aggregators (DERAs) I mentioned above. I guess a VPP is technically a more general term and could also refer to the same concept under different structures like in a micro grid.
The industry has a ton of jargon (literally thousands of acronyms amongst the US regional markets) and in many cases there are 8 terms that mean the exact same thing.
4 replies →
Interesting, thanks. That doesn't sound like bad news at all.
No I guess not. It can sometimes be a little sad though when you think you've come up with some grand new idea and it's been done.
This type of service is becoming increasingly prevalent among European energy suppliers for their residential customers. Beyond providing a revenue stream for consumers this model aggregates distributed energy resources (home batteries, EV's, PV systems) into a one virtual power plant. This enables the storage of surplus energy generated during solar peaks and dispatch back to the grid during periods of high demand. I find it a fascinating domain to work in!
I wrote a book on this in 2020 and was already somewhat late to the party, as people were running actual pilot programs a decade earlier!
Also large industrial consumers have been participating in similar approaches for decades. See the crazy clever trading schemes that Enron used to do fraud and drive up prices.
I run predbat (https://springfall2008.github.io/batpred/) to achieve something like this with my Home Assistant install to manage my home battery. It can also manage EV charging but I haven't needed to do that yet due to how my tariff works. (Very cheap fixed period overnight).
Thats what bi-directional charging is for and its already becoming political to force the industry to support this.
And we already have energy provider which provide a tarif for exactly this.
The only idea i hate is the mentioning of crypto. Not only is it waste, it converts the energy in heat which needs to get disipated and potentially wastes even more energy to get this heat away from the current location (ac).