Comment by giantg2
2 days ago
"Right now, most EVs can't contribute power"
Nor should they. People don't want to be cycling their batteries and reducing their life. This use case would be better served by batteries that are designed for that purpose instead of being designed to be light for a vehicle.
EV can grid cooperate without adding charge/discharge cycles. You just intelligently schedule the charging.
This is how most Time-of-Use metering already works. The driver sets a minimum battery percentage to charge immediately (eg 40% range, enough to reach the local hospital), and then schedule a time when the car should be fully charged (eg 80% by 7AM). The software just Does The Right Thing, using the same prediction and bidding algorithms as stationary batteries.
The search term is "V1G" (a cheeky reference to unidirectional V2G).
Indeed. I live in The Netherlands and use the Jedlix app to schedule charging, which works in this way. The grid operator can use this to selectively create or shed load in a specific area, which helps to stabilize the grid. Really nifty.
> People don't want to be cycling their batteries and reducing their life.
More battery cycles just costs money. For the right price, I'd do it.
But more than that: I don't want to be stranded without power in my vehicle because someone in the electric grid made poor power management decisions and decided to offload that decision to consumers.
as with anything, it's not just money. Losing battery capacity in an EV is a hassle. A hassle because you charge more frequently, a hassle because you will eventually need a battery change, and so on. What is the price of all that hassle?
That said, most EV incentive programs use around 10% (often less) of an EV battery capacity so the actual effects are barely noticeable.
> What is the price of all that hassle?
A price that can be measured in money. How much more does it need to pay to be worth any extra hassle?
So in a sense it is just money. Money is hassle, fundamentally. It's a hassle to make it and you spend it to save other hassles.
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In general I agree with that, but I think it really would depend on the price. For at least some people it would surely be worthwhile for the right price.
If the price is high enough, EVs still lose out since you can make more profit creating battery farms with cheaper batteries that are cheaper to replace. You can't make it expensive enough to cover the replacement of a Tesla battery without making it attractive enough for someone else to use ea more efficient model.
That assumes that EV batteries are used to 100% and will reach end-of-life together with the rest of the car or before the rest of the car. That is increasingly untrue. If your EV battery would outlive your car then you can use some of those "extra" cycles at very low marginal costs (until there is an efficient market for used EV batteries for old cars).
Another factor is that not all charge/discharge cycles are the same. Going between 60% and 80% five times is a lot lighter on the battery than going between 0% and 100% once. Which pairs great with EV batteries, because their batteries are deliberately oversized compared to average use to account for uncommon events.
Future: Cycle the power when profitable, replace the batteries when depleted enough? Batteries in cars are many times the domestic demand of a given home, at least in temperate climates.
They are almost the same batteries. Different form factor but same thing. They are rolled from the same lines.
Grid level batteries use many different forms. You even have stuff like pumped hydro and controlled drop concrete. Even if the battery cells are exactly the same, the replacement cost is much higher in a vehicle due to the configuration.