Comment by thelastgallon
2 days ago
Just use EVs. EVs are primarily energy storage devices, some people get to drive them about 20 - 30 mins/day. The remaining 23 hours, it is a energy storage device. It can absorb excess power when price is negative, and can even supply power back to the grid when prices are high!
Sounds like deprecating a >10k battery pack on a >30k vehicle and reducing your max range with power cycles to earn pennies.
Its more than pennies[1]. By several orders of magnitude. Car batteries now last longer the rest of the car lifespan, it will be millions of miles soon.
Tesla Electric customers report making as much as $150 a day https://electrek.co/2023/07/05/tesla-electric-customers-repo...
Lol at 5$ per kWh.
In my country for home consumers the difference between day/night rates is 10-20c/kWh. With spot pricing I can see it working to cover the post commute power spike - but you're effectively doubling your commute discharge rate and pushing charge levels to suboptimal levels.
Batteries might work but at 80% capacity they are worth significantly less than new - both in terms of utility and resale value.
Maybe if battery range gets extended so far that even at 80% capacity it's an overkill - like 1000mile batteries - I could see myself doing something like this - but at current ranges and charging setups - I'll skip the few dozen euro a month.
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That is a great thought and there is a lot of research in using batteries of vehicles for grid stabilization as well as arbitrage trading.
The problem, however, is that a lot of plugged vehicles are required to guarantee a meaningful amount of firm power/energy capacity and owners typically do not want to sacrifice a lot of flexibility when they rent out their batteries to provide such services.
Furthermore, as you can see from the replies, many are scared about battery degradation. Because of this and due to the fact that reverse charging is not possible for most vehicles, this schemes are often restricted to delayed charging which further limits revenue potential.
However, using arrays of old car batteries as stationary batteries is a very viable idea that, in my estimation, will lead to a significant growth in installed BESS in a couple of years.
Yes, exactly this has been proposed with "smart car chargers," along with other things you can do if the grid operator has some control over a bunch of grid-connected equipment. It hasn't taken off as far as I know, probably because that means the car battery wears out more.
The "virtual power plants" are the closest thing to this idea that is actually done in practice. That's individuals who own batteries joining some collective that then sells to the grid the ability to reduce demand a bit. Tesla did a pilot program with its Powerwalls iirc.
This seems like building more batteries (just, with extra hardware).
An EV could be good for this sort of thing, but I guess it would have to sit around at less than 100% charge, to have the capacity.
We almost never charge our EV to 100%, to not degrade the battery faster.
But, if you are going to offer “absorbing energy from the grid as a service” the capacity you have to offer can only be
There definitely could be some gap there, but it does depend on the car sitting at less than “full” (however you define full).