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Power

Your Future Home Might Be Powered By Car Batteries (bloomberg.com) 319

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
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.
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Your Future Home Might Be Powered By Car Batteries More

Your Future Home Might Be Powered By Car Batteries

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  • Take the car away (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iTrawl ( 4142459 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2018 @05:05AM (#56410981)

    I thought they made a car specifically for this use pattern. And they took away the car and called what was left the "Powerwall". Sure, you stick it to a wall rather than ambulate it all over town, but I think it works out just fine.

    • Re:Take the car away (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2018 @05:18AM (#56410999)

      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.

      • The Powerwall costs extra money, but you will already have your car battery, so there is no additional capital cost other than an inverter.

        Not quite. You also have to factor in the cost of the additional cycles on the battery pack, the additional warranty and maintenance costs that may result, the depreciation on the vehicle from this additional use, and perhaps a few others I'm not thinking of before I've had my morning caffeine. Doesn't make using the car battery a bad idea but one should have a full accounting of all the costs. I think depreciation likely would be the biggest cost since inverters probably wouldn't be super expensive once

        • I don't have a powerwall, solar panels, or an electric car. But I could get on board if I had all of those things. Let's say I had a 200-mile range car. My commute is 10 miles. The vast majority of the time, I only need 20 miles of charge - let's double it for safety to 40 miles. That means I'm only using 20% of my battery's capacity. I could see telling the car to go ahead and try to make me some money with the remaining 60% most of the time, overriding this when I know I have a trip or something. The algo

        • The Powerwall costs extra money, but you will already have your car battery, so there is no additional capital cost other than an inverter.

          Not quite. You also have to factor in the cost of the additional cycles on the battery pack, the additional warranty and maintenance costs that may result, the depreciation on the vehicle from this additional use, and perhaps a few others I'm not thinking of before I've had my morning caffeine. Doesn't make using the car battery a bad idea but one should have a full accounting of all the costs. I think depreciation likely would be the biggest cost since inverters probably wouldn't be super expensive once they are produced at scale. I could easily see the added depreciation being a few thousand dollars though you obviously wouldn't be hit with that until you sell the vehicle.

          Personally I see car batteries as more of an emergency standby solution than a routine use. Not much use for powering the home if you have to take the car to work. Could be a nice little extra layer of security for power outages or to manage energy costs and usage though.

          Exactly! As I understand it, even the most advanced of the batteries that we have today are limited by the number of power-cycles. Using a car for this on a continual basis would quickly reduce the battery lifetime, range, etc. As a car owner, why would you do this unless there is some reward to offset the value loss?

          The owner/user is responsible for any liability resulting from issues when charging the battery pack as part of their insurance. Who accepts liability for any battery failures when the car

          • Exactly! As I understand it, even the most advanced of the batteries that we have today are limited by the number of power-cycles. Using a car for this on a continual basis would quickly reduce the battery lifetime, range, etc.

            The idea is not to discharge the car, because you wouldn't have anything left to drive on.

            And modest draws and charges don't count for a power cycle. That just happens every day.

            Regardless, I'm not keen on the idea, and since in home use, weight is not a factor, so the lead acid family of batteries would function very well for home storage. Take a bank of them and store them under a false floor in the garage or under the base of a patio if you want them outside. Then they are there all of the time.

            • so the lead acid family of batteries would function very well for home storage

              I suppose lead-acid car batteries would suffice if you didn't draw them down much each night... but what's the point if you can't use your full capacity without damaging 'em?? This calls for marine or deep cycle batteries that don't automatically become damaged when drained heavily.

              • I do see one advantage that a larger number of [presumably far cheaper] conventional car batteries could have over a smaller number or marine batteries (even if the effective capacity were the same): greater amps. However, that might be a solution to a largely non-existent problem; I'm not sure.

              • That's what a friend who lived off-grid used. Shed full of marine batteries. Cheap, durable, and easy to replace. About every 3 months he'd test all the batteries, replace any that were wearing out, close the door, and maintenance was done.

                Compared to a power wall, that was far cheaper, stored vastly more energy, and provided higher power draw. The only thing it didn't have was looks.

            • Regardless, I'm not keen on the idea, and since in home use, weight is not a factor, so the lead acid family of batteries would function very well for home storage

              The only big advantage of lead acid batteries over Li-Ion in most use cases is their price tag which is quite a lot lower than Li-Ion. But lead acid batteries are worse on energy density, can require more maintenance, usually have fewer fewer cycles, are more temperature sensitive, worse capacity vs discharge rate, are less environmentally friendly, etc. There are plenty of use cases where lead acid is a fine choice but Li-Ion is the clear performance winner in most use cases. Provided of course the cost

        • A fleet of Teslas out there it would represent an interesting amount of buffer capacity, and buffer capacity is very important. With a realtime market price driven mechanism the batteries could be charged when electricity is cheap and discharged when it is expensive(the cost of electricity fluctuates all day long and at peak moments it is very high) . This would be more than an emergency standby but the idea of the emergency buffer is certainly part of it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by haruchai ( 17472 )

        "The rest could be available for energy price arbitrage"

        Tesla has been very resistant to using the car battery for anything other than powering the car; I suspect the battery formulation is not suited for it. That said, Tesla hacker wk057@skie.net has a pretty nice off-grid setup with his 44 kW solar array backed up by 191 kWh of Tesla battery pack modules.
        https://twitter.com/wk057/stat... [twitter.com]
        https://skie.net/skynet/projec... [skie.net]

        • That's really cool, but:

          The cycle wear on my storage batteries comes out to the equivalent of about ~29,000 miles of driving in a Model S.

          Yikes! That battery isn't going to last long if that's the yearly cycle wear!

      • The Powerwall costs extra money, but you will already have your car battery, so there is no additional capital cost other than an inverter.

        Yep. It makes sense from a capex standpoint; not sure if it makes sense overall. Those batteries degrade with charge-discharge cycle, and the constant cycling could shift the expense of storage directly onto the consumer--a regressive tax when we have enough electric cars (i.e. they're just cars regular folks have), since rich people don't have N cars for N*x income where x is the income of a single-car family.

        Batteries are the wrong tech for city-grade storage; and distributed batteries are the kind o

      • The problem with this concept since I first heard about it 7-10 years ago is it requires a low (opportunity) cost of power from solar 11am-1pm and vehicles that are plugged in, plus the same stipulation from (solar) 5-7pm. The first window often has people out at lunch (and/or parked at work where the charging cost will be higher), and the second window is at the time people are driving home from work or picking up the kids.

        The only real opportunity I see is randomly when there is high wind energy nights an

    • We've seen this before. Early home appliances had interchangable motors, because motors were expensive. You'd buy a motor and plug it into different gadgets. And traction engines were used as jack-of-all-trades farm power sources. More recently there was an idea that a single computer would control the home.

      What actually happened was motors, motive power and CPUs got cheap enough that the benefits to having several motors, engines or computers outweighed the inconvenience, and in some cases are outsourced

    • I thought they made a car specifically for this use pattern. And they took away the car and called what was left the "Powerwall". Sure, you stick it to a wall rather than ambulate it all over town, but I think it works out just fine.

      Nah, you'll still drive the batteries powering your home around.

      In the future we're all going to be dead-ass broke and living out of our cars (which are all going to be electric so we can mooch power using an extension cord from Starbucks.

    • Re:Take the car away (Score:4)

      by rhsanborn ( 773855 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2018 @07:08AM (#56411329)
      Not to mention that, at the moment, batteries are very specific to a particular car, which happens to be one of the largest capital investments a family can make. What kind of life-cycle degradation can we expect from the car being a base-load for the house? I'd hate to be reducing the life-expectancy of the car because it was used floating the house. I have a feeling a pack dedicated to the purpose would be better suited to the task, and much less expensive to replace when it wears out (as opposed to taking apart the car). It also doesn't fit the use case for most families. The house-supporting battery pack will need to supply most of it's power at night, but that's when the family is expecting the car to be charging to the next day's commute. When the house or grid is at full renewable production, your car is most likely sitting in a lot at work somewhere.

      • Not to mention that, at the moment, batteries are very specific to a particular car, which happens to be one of the largest capital investments a family can make.

        If you are looking at a car as an investment, you're doing it wrong.

    • I thought they made a car specifically for this use pattern. And they took away the car and called what was left the "Powerwall". Sure, you stick it to a wall rather than ambulate it all over town, but I think it works out just fine.

      Certainly the technology is there to plug a car in and utilize it's battery to share power. Bu I'd much prefer the Powerwall concept, as almost all the time, I'd be wanting to charge my car, not send power to other people with it.

  • Batteries (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This is silly. Battery technology hasn't matured so workarounds like this aren't really solving any problems. By the time there was widespread adoption of this (my guess 5-10 years) technology will have moved on and the issues we think are a big deal will be different.

  • We're still far away from batteries reaching their peak performance. We develop more powerful batteries (ok, dear nitpickers, accumulators) that can store more power per kilogram of battery at a rather fast pace, and I guess discussing today what we'll do with them in 10 or 20 years when "everyone" has a battery powered car (if it ever gets to that, anyway, and the electric car isn't replaced by something completely different in the meantime) is a bit like gazing into the crystal ball.

    Let's first of all fin

    • Re:Build the base first, then expand (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2018 @05:46AM (#56411063)

      Let's first of all finish inventing the storage before we ponder spending the energy.

      Lets not. If we spend our lives waiting for perfection before starting anything then we will never get anything done.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Opportunist ( 166417 )

        I'm not talking about perfection, I'm talking about knowing whether we're putting our money on the right horse. Right now, energy driven cars seem to be the future, but we don't even know what kind of energy storage is the best. When it comes to energy density, the ICE and petrol are still superior to other forms on a pure power-per-kg level. We should first of all figure out how to replace this, and what to replace that with, before we start planning a whole house around it only to discover that eventually

        • Right now, energy driven cars seem to be the future, but we don't even know what kind of energy storage is the best.

          Best is what works and has the best combination of economic utility and environmental friendliness. It seems pretty clear that battery powered EVs are the most credible option moving forward. Lots of advantages not the least of which is that the fuel source is abstracted from the vehicle and that there is existing infrastructure for refueling. You can power a battery powered EV with gasoline or coal or nuclear or wind or solar or anything else you can make into electricity. The value of that abstraction

        • Right now, energy driven cars seem to be the future,

          The suggestion of a possible alternative is intriguing. Please elaborate!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by eth1 ( 94901 )

          ...before we start planning a whole house around it only to discover that eventually we'll start over from scratch.

          You don't need to plan whole houses around this. The internal house wiring isn't going to change, because any tech that requires that will never take off (because no one is going to spend that much to retro-fit existing houses).

          You only need to leave extra room in new-construction garages for the charging/storage/grid-tie equipment. If that never happens... well, I've never met a homeowner who has complained about having to MUCH space in the garage.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shilly ( 142940 )

      We didn't do that for smartphones, computers, screens, or virtually any other tech. Why would it be a sensible strategy here?

      • Because power, while critical for electronic devices, is pretty much a no-brainer. There is only one way to power your cellphone, with a rechargeable battery. You certainly won't put any kind of fuel cell into it, you won't power it with gas or an ICE. Size restraints and the mobility requirement dictate the form of power supply here.

        A house or even car is kinda different in that aspect.

        • There is only one way to power your cellphone, with a rechargeable battery. You certainly won't put any kind of fuel cell into it, you won't power it with gas or an ICE.

          Actually you might power your cell phone with gas, just not directly. The gas is turned into electricity at the power station instead of in the device. That is the advantage of batteries. You can use the most practical fuel source available. It becomes like using money instead of bartering. The fuel source gets abstracted from the device.

          A house or even car is kinda different in that aspect.

          A car is no different than a cell phone regarding power versus weight. It's bigger but there still is a power vs weight vs space budget to deal with. Any mobile devi

          • Do you really care how much the "power plant" of your home weighs? I mean, beyond the capabilities of the foundation you put it on, of course.

    • We're still far away from batteries reaching their peak performance.

      Probably true though I think we're pretty close to the limit for Li-Ion batteries. The question is how soon can the next battery technology get to market.

      We develop more powerful batteries (ok, dear nitpickers, accumulators) that can store more power per kilogram of battery at a rather fast pace,

      Define "fast pace". Energy density of batteries has been increasing at something like 5-8% per year. Nice but that means it takes 10-15 years to double. Not exactly Moore's law though with a long term perspective I suppose that's pretty decent progress. I don't know that I'd call it fast paced but it's good enough to be optimistic about the future of

  • Seems dubious (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gavagai80 ( 1275204 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2018 @05:46AM (#56411055) Homepage

    The average age of a car on the road in the USA is 11.5 years. Personally, I drive a 1998. If only 50% of new cars in 2040 will be electric, then we're looking at sometime between 2050 and 2060 for a slight majority of cars on the road to be electric. So this plan had better work with a fairly small percentage of cars being electric, or it'll come way too late to do any good.

    A better use of electric cars may be simply using their depleted otherwise-worthless batteries as part of the grid. That way you don't have to convince people to let their battery be worn down, either -- getting people to allow their car battery to be used to balance the grid will really require that they be getting free replacement batteries, because it can't be good for battery longevity.

  • Market (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Bongo ( 13261 )

    I love markets, but so often, clever people try to create markets for their products, rather than solving people's real problems.
    It turns into yet another, suck the life out of the little guy, for the profit of some new venture.
    The bottom line in business should be that what you are doing is genuinely worthwhile and creates genuine value for humanity.
    And people need the integrity to answer for themselves honestly whether what they are doing it of genuine value, or merely profiting off whatever "wonderful wo

  • Why? (Score:2, Funny)

    by DeathToBill ( 601486 )

    I can't believe people still think this is a good idea. These people still don't seem to have spotted that the reason you plug your car in is so that it's fully charged when you want to go somewhere. So in ten years' time, you'll hear this conversation:

    "Quick! My waters have broken! Get me to the hospital!"

    "Wait, no, sorry, can't go, it's been cloudy all week and the grid's left our car with only 30 miles range. Can you hold it for an hour until it's charged enough?"

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)

      by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2018 @06:18AM (#56411155)
      A car with ~200 mile range is going to have a ~50 kWh battery. My home uses ~2-3 kWh overnight. So by using the energy of a fully charged car overnight once, I am still at a 188-192 mile range. How's that a problem? Do you run a steel mill at home or something?

      • Your car would be connected to the grid, you would be powering your whole neighborhood and even the steel mill a couple miles down the road.

    • maybe you need to do more research to get a better idea of the proposal and how it works rather than creating scare stories of how it would work

    • These people still don't seem to have spotted that the reason you plug your car in is so that it's fully charged when you want to go somewhere

      Meh. You'll configure a minimum charge level for your car, and once it's drawn down to that level you'll stop selling power. The car will have 300+ miles per range, so for most people setting it to retain ~150 miles of charge will work just fine. Those who need a bit more will set it higher.

      Also, I expect that a huge part of home storage won't be the batter in your car, it will be a battery that used to be in a car. As car batteries degrade they'll get to a point where their storage capacity per weight is

    • Well, when missus is preg, disable the car being used as back up, or set minimum charge level, or call uber, or an ambulance ...

  • Fly in the ointment (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2018 @06:51AM (#56411281)

    have millions of drivers become mini electricity traders, charging up when rates are cheap and pumping energy back into the grid during peak hours

    Transportation accounts for about 70% as much energy consumption as electricity [wikimedia.org]. If you convert all those ICE cars into EVs, the electric rates won't be cheap during the night when they're charging. Overnight will become the new peak consumption hours, when electricity is most expensive.

    • On the other hand, if the infrastructure is currently underutilized at night, then this move to nighttime usage could be a good thing.

    • 12.5 cents per KwH here in Virginia as far as I know. Charge any time I want to. Get out of California and other such states that allow pricing on a time of day basis and improve your life.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by eth1 ( 94901 )

      have millions of drivers become mini electricity traders, charging up when rates are cheap and pumping energy back into the grid during peak hours

      Transportation accounts for about 70% as much energy consumption as electricity [wikimedia.org]. If you convert all those ICE cars into EVs, the electric rates won't be cheap during the night when they're charging. Overnight will become the new peak consumption hours, when electricity is most expensive.

      No... If the system is properly designed, with everyone trying to buy low/sell high, and large amounts of storage in cars, there won't BE any peaks/slumps in demand. Not under normal operation, anyway. There's still the "a hurricane's coming, so everyone sets their cars to charge to full and not discharge" type scenarios to deal with. Even then, though, the power prices would spike to the point where a lot of people would probably still want to sell to make a buck.

  • I recognize that in terms of how things are priced today that this seems like a great idea. However, the capacity of batteries is going to greatly increase while the price of them is going to drop like a rock. Effectively, things will get to the point where people would ask, "wait, why would you even do that?" leaving off the implication that batteries are dirt cheap.

    Solar and battery are going to power most every home in the future and might even have power left over to charge your car because it's going

  • Don't tell this to my employer. (Score:4, Funny)

    by LordHighExecutioner ( 4245243 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2018 @07:01AM (#56411307)
    Or from a "bring your own device" policy, it will rapidly switch to a "bring your own battery" policy to further lower infrastructure costs.

    • Hell, whole towns could do this. Why bother setting up energy distribution if you can just make people drive it in.

      Why not expand this to water? Make people haul it in with no support from the government. Works for Flint, right?

  • Battery wear (Score:5, Interesting)

    by orzetto ( 545509 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2018 @07:07AM (#56411327)

    (Disclaimer: EV owner, researcher in relevant field, and I was once asked to evaluate a research project on V2G in an European country)

    The idea is interesting, and may well have an impact in countries with a lot of non-controllable power (wind, sun, but to a degree nuclear and other baseloads too), if price oscillations are large enough. The article mentions a potential of USD 40 a month, which is just above a buck a day. Would you risk not having enough charge in your car to get home for such a pittance?

    More importantly, there is no mention of battery wear. Batteries are much more expensive than the energy they store through their lifetime. Teslas have actually a very limited lifetime of about 500 cycles (since the batteries are large, there is no need for more lifetime—it's actually smart to use short-lived, cheaper NCA batteries as Tesla does), which means that, if you assume USD 200 / kWh by 2030 [theccc.org.uk], each kWh will cost 40 cents only in battery depreciation: that's a lot more than what the energy costs, and will likely more than offset those 40 USD a month. (Yes, there are longer-lived batteries; they are also more expensive) (Yes, battery wear is not just a matter of cycling, it's also storing at high voltage, rate of charge/discharge at which temperature, and lots of other things)

    V2G is very interesting for grid companies as a solution to their energy storage problems, but they seem to intend to exploit the lack of consumer understanding of EV cost dynamics: the real cost of a kWh is the battery wear, not the actual energy. There is a reason why these companies are not buying the batteries directly.

    I believe V2G has more potential in "private grid" applications: e.g. if you have a cabin in the woods with no option of grid connection, you could drive to it with you EV and power it from your batteries while you are there (a home uses a lot less power than a car); or you could transfer some charge to a vehicle that ran out of it on the road (actually the Toyota Mirai has a similar feature, a ChaDeMo outlet).

    • Re:Battery wear (Score:5, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2018 @07:48AM (#56411517) Homepage Journal

      Teslas have actually a very limited lifetime of about 500 cycles

      Incorrect, Tesla use Panasonic cells rated for 3000 cycles.

      500 cycles at 250 miles per charge would only be 125,000 miles, which happens to also be the warranty on the packs. Lifetime being a bell curve approximately 50% of packs would qualify for warranty replacement if that was the case. But more over, lots of Tesla cars are up to 200k+, and Tesla tested up to 750k.

      Even the original Nissan Leaf has proven to be more durable than that, with taxi firms putting over 200k miles on the original pack without any problems. The newer 30 and 40kWh models might not last so long though.

  • Supercapacitors in cars instead of or in addition to batteries could be the hot setup:

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/... [engadget.com]

    The thing is, if your car is giving up its charge to the grid, and you suddenly want to go somewhere, that's not ideal. But if the car has a supercapcitor that can charge in 10 minutes, then it works much better. The power wall for storing charge could come into play by charging the car quickly, since drawing that kind of amperage through the grid wouldn't be possible - 200 amp service

    • Supercapacitors have 1/100 the energy density of modern batteries. They've got better power density. Charging the battery that fast might melt your cable, though: a 48kWh battery charging in 10 minutes draws 1,200 amps. That's enough to vaporize a 1cm-thick steel rod explosively (there would be an expanding fireball detonating in your face almost instantly).

      • The quoted article says 180 watt-hrs/Kg for the supercapacitor, as opposed to 100 -120 Wh/Kg for lithium, so its not a capacity problem.

        As for melting wires, yeah, that's something else to solve. Use 1000 batteries and wire them in series temporarily during the charge, so you connect up to 50,000 volts with smaller amps? Have to be real careful with that, of course. Or maybe just use huge charging cables... probably need a hydraulic arm to life and connect them!

        • The quoted article says 180 watt-hrs/Kg for the supercapacitor, as opposed to 100 -120 Wh/Kg for lithium

          That's the specific energy, not the energy density.

          Supercapacitors range around 0.05 MJ per liter of physical space, whereas lithium ion batteries range 0.9-2.63 MJ per liter, depending on chemistry. That means the 18kWh battery that takes up twice the volume of the rear seats in the Chevrolet Volt would be larger than the entire car if it were a supercapacitor, and weigh only about twice as much as the battery as-is.

          Yes, it would be about 40 times bigger. Think styrofoam versus iron.

          Use 1000 batteries and wire them in series temporarily during the charge, so you connect up to 50,000 volts with smaller amps?

          You'll need an

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • could be the hot setup in a world without physics

  • Great Solution / Battery Wear (Score:5, Interesting)

    by foxalopex ( 522681 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2018 @08:04AM (#56411593)

    A lot of pure EVs store significantly more power than the average home uses in a day so there's a good chance it can be used to store renewable energy. Even if people can't get renewable power, they're valuable for levelling power use. Part of what keeps electricity costs high is that our power use swings wildly during the day so power systems need to be designed to generate more power than will ever be used.

    Also most EV's use the much more reliable LIthium-Iron-Phosphate class batteries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery) which wear out at a much slower rate than most lithiums and rarely if ever catch on fire. Tesla I believe doesn't use these more reliable batteries but the trade-off is the ability to pack more power in a smaller space / weight which is why they have some of the smallest batteries for their incredible capacity on the market.

    • LiFePo batteries are the usual choice for electrical car conversions. I wish we could use SCiBs, but those aren't really available for general use,

  • Get solar panels with a battery buffer, rely on the grid as little as possible. Solar panels not enough for your "needs"? Reduce your consumption, switch to power-saving alternatives. It's good for everyone.

  • Even as battery prices have fallen, it still costs much more to store and recover a kilowatt-hour of power from a battery, than to produce it in the first place. The battery is still by far the most expensive component of an EV, and (since there are so few moving parts) the first to wear out. To make it cost-effective for EV owners to wear out their batteries by renting them for storage, they would have to be paid triple or quadruple standard power rates, at least. But if EV sales really do take off as p

  • 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.

    So they're pumping electrically-charged juice through the plumbing now? Why are they not using the same pipes as the internet?!

  • My current home has been powered by batteries for ten years

    • Well, presumably, the batteries don't charge themselves. So the thing powering the battery is powering your house. The battery is just storage so you get favorable rates.

  • Physical energy transfer (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nitehawk214 ( 222219 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2018 @10:19AM (#56412363)

    You could "fill up" your car in one location, drive home, and pump that power in to your local grid. If the local prices were high enough it could be affordable. You could get some sort of "energy truckers", hauling batteries across territory from grid to grid.

    That would make things interesting, though I can't imagine it would be terribly efficient. It would encourage companies and governments not to build out proper electrical grids.

  • " -- and it's a big if -- "

    Ah, Bloomberg "news", throwing shade on the idea that many cars could ever be electric. Mad, mad! I tell you! Gods and Monsters!
    Of course the idea will work. It can't not work. There ain't no "if" involved. Electric cars will lower our power bills, aid grid overload, and walk the dogs while powerwashing the sidewalks. Blackouts will lose their terror all over the world. The upsides of electric cars are now obvious and I can't wait for a VW Beetle cheapie version for the Rest of Us

  • This is NOT what power companies want. Your local power company, who you send your bill to, probably has zero say in the actual generation of power. They buy power from the grid (think of the guys in NY mining bitcoin) and the quantity of watts they purchase has been agreed upon far in advance. Otherwise how would the large plants know how to schedule for demand? And vice versa; when home users decide willy-nilly to "sell back" and there is too much power available, what happens then? You don't just spin do

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"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell

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