Nissan Sees Leaf As Home Energy Source, Says Tesla Big Battery 'Waste of Resources' (npr.org) 253
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Driven: Owning an electric car in Australia could become much more than just driving from A to B with a reduced carbon footprint, according to Nissan Australia which launched the new version of the Nissan Leaf electric vehicle in Melbourne on Wednesday. Nissan confirmed at the launch that the new Leaf, with a 40kWh battery, will be a V2H (vehicle-to-home) energy asset -- meaning that, unlike other electric vehicles, it will have the capability to charge your home (subject to further testing with Australia's network owners and operators). Called bidirectional charging, the 40kWh Leaf (and for that matter the 62kWh version which is not yet slated for an Australian release) essentially has the capability to become your personal, massive, mobile battery. This means it will be able to not only store energy by plugging into your home, workplace or other destinations such as shopping centers with free charging, or from DC fast-chargers -- it will be able to serve that energy back to your home. And it could be available to use in Australia within six months. Nissan's global head of electric vehicles, Nic Thomas, says that installations such as the grid connected Tesla big battery at Hornsdale in South Australia is a waste, despite the fact that its performance -- both for the grid and financially -- has been widely admired.
"It's a complete waste of resources because what we can do is have cars that are also batteries and those cars are parked most of the time," Thomas said.
"It's a complete waste of resources because what we can do is have cars that are also batteries and those cars are parked most of the time," Thomas said.
Logical (Score:5, Interesting)
I suggested this concept ages ago -- that EVs become an energy-storage extention of the power grid -- soaking up power at off-peak times and then delivering it at peak times.
This becomes especially valuable with the growing use of renewables. Your EV is parked for most of the day so it can soak up all that excess solar generation then at night, it can deliver power directly to your own home. This reduces the peak-loads on the grid and significantly evens out the demand -curve.
EVs may be more valuable (to the planet) as a mobile energy sink/source than as an actual means of transport.
Re:Logical (Score:5, Insightful)
While it's an attractive thought, not sure it makes sense for a bunch of reasons. Just off the top of my head, if someone buys a $45k 75kw electric car and someone else buys a $70k 75kw electric car (like say a model 3 LR vs model 3 perf). Should the $70k owner get paid almost twice as much for a full discharge? After all it's consuming the useful battery life of a car that's almost twice as expensive. What if it's 100F and the car is in the garage? The extra heat will be hard on the batteries and the more the car tries to cool the batteries the hotter the garage will get. How fast should it be discharged? Should cars get exotic cooling to minimize the impact of dumping significant power quickly with now airflow? Home chargers (and destination chargers) often charge at only 20-30 miles per hour (7.5 kwh or so). Fast charging (10x that or so) puts significant wear and tear on the battery. Sure a model 3 performance can dump an amazing amount of power when on a race track and in performance mode... but it has access to ambient temperature at track speeds (generally over 50 mph). Do you really want to start optimizing cars to dump the same power as quickly with no airflow? What if one in 5,000 cars catches fire and burns a house down under their weird zero airflow high discharge times?
Also cars are incredibly poor ways to handle grid level storage. Numerous technologies promise MUCH more efficient storage. Things like liquefied air, pumping water uphill, lowering huge weights into wells/mines, converting water to hydrogen, large flywheels, etc. Since they will be optimized for grid storage they are likely to handle the demands more efficiently.
Having a fleet of expensive cars using up their useful lives to help out the grid seems like a hugely expensive way to do things. Battery life in an electric car is not "free". Every full charge/discharge consumes the battery life, even more so if done quickly, and the worst case is quickly when it's too hot or cold.
Do you really want a worse car, a more expensive car, a car with a shorter total life... so you can occasionally contribute to the grid to help out some moron who set a pour energy policy so blatantly stupid that the grid runs out of power?
Re:Logical (Score:4, Insightful)
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Battery cycling can actually help preserve the battery. Leafs with little use or left sat idle for long periods are the ones that tend to show degradation.
These systems use a small part of the available capacity, say 10-20%. Consider that a Tesla Powerwall is only 13kHw, and these cars have 40-60kWh batteries. And the discharge/charge rate is quite gentle compared to driving. When driving even the original Leaf could pull 90kW at peak, and the new ones can do about 170kW IIRC. Your house will probably use 1
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It is a routine feature in EVs to schedule when they charge. That is, you might plug it in at 5:30 PM, but it you can program it to charge starting at midnight. This is to take advantage of differential pricing schemes that charge less for off-peak electricity consumption. It w
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Re:Logical (Score:4, Informative)
Should the $70k owner get paid almost twice as much for a full discharge? After all it's consuming the useful battery life of a car that's almost twice as expensive.
No. In a competitive, undifferentiated market where you have no monopoly, you face the same marginal cost as everyone else.
Also cars are incredibly poor ways to handle grid level storage. Numerous technologies promise MUCH more efficient storage. Things like liquefied air, pumping water uphill, lowering huge weights into wells/mines, converting water to hydrogen, large flywheels, etc.
Potential energy of water uphill is good, but it requires a high initial investment, a hill and a suitable source of water downhill, which isn't readily available. The rest of your examples don't sound very efficient or practical in the context where you can use a battery. Is storing energy in a phase transition really efficient for electricity generation, for example? Show us the math.
The benefit of a battery is that it can be produced in almost any size, can be deployed practically anywhere, be charged from local unreliable power sources smoothing out consumption peaks and production deficits, and is relatively compact, quiet, cheap and maintenance-free.
If it is the best option for your remote home, what's the problem using it as such?
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Potential energy of water uphill is good, but it requires a high initial investment, a hill and a suitable source of water downhill, which isn't readily available.
I've been thinking for a long time that the future should be using concentrated solar to evaporate (and thereby desalinate) seawater at coasts and blow the vapor through pipes uphill and inland to places where water is needed (with more concentrated solar along the route as needed to keep it as vapor), and then generating hydroelectric power as the water is used and flows downhill toward the sea again. Basically an artificially improved and directed version of the ordinary hydrological cycle of sunlight mak
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If you blow the vapor uphill through a pipe, you need to spend energy to move that mass. You get that "for free" if water vapor goes up by itself and then falls down, but not otherwise.
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The energy input of this system is solar. Gas phase transitions within a system serve only as energy storage or transfer. Further, gasses are compressible and liquids are not, and if you add enough pressure, the vapor will turn back to liquid. See the phase change diagram for water.
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I just thought about a cooling tower of a nuclear reactor... how much water mass comes out of those per day? Would it be possible to passively condensate that water and use the height difference to power a turbine?
How much additional energy would that bring?
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Just did a quick calculation.
The reactor Leibstadt produces about 900 MW, as far as I've read. It produces 720kg of watervapor per second and teh copoling tower is 144m high.
Unless I misunderstood the math, that amounts to 1017100 J/s So about 1 MW. Accounting for a turbine's loss, we're looking at 0.8 to 0.9 MW.
So one thousandth of what the reactor itself produces. I doubt that it makes economical sense to invest in the infrastructure to do this :D.
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You want to transport water VAPOR? You can use solar thermal heating to run a heat pipe to pump liquid water. (It may not be liquid in the heat pipe, but it will be in the transport pipe. And most of the heat pipe, too.) it makes no sense to transport water vapor once you have a pipe.
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The important point here is that people are buying cars anyway, and the prices are rapidly falling. So they have this asset, a big battery that will last way longer than the lifetime of the car. Might as well use it to reduce energy bills too.
Feed-in rates are getting slashed but covering peak demand could be quite lucrative. Also great if you have solar panels and want to time-shift that energy to the evening.
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"So they have this asset, a big battery that will last way longer than the lifetime of the car. Might as well use it to reduce energy bills too."
How about just increasing the life of the car? Only a few components need to be upgraded, mostly in the suspension.
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You could, but most cars end up scrapped before the 20 year mark for one reason or another. Accident that's not worth repairing, or bodywork/interior just deteriorates... I suppose at least with an EV it's less likely to have mechanical problems that are too expensive to be worth fixing.
Costs (Score:2)
No. In a competitive, undifferentiated market where you have no monopoly, you face the same marginal cost as everyone else.
The car market is decidedly NOT an undifferentiated market and the marginal cost [wikipedia.org] of producing a kWh from a Tesla Model S will be different than from a Nissan Leaf because the battery packs have different capacities, different price points, different lifespans, different construction, and the car they are attached to has a different price point as well. How close their marginal cost of production is will depend on how many charge cycles you can get out of them. With enough charge/discharge cycles the cost
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Batteries are crazy expensive and if cycled daily aren't going to last very long. Keep in mind grid power designs focus on lifetimes more on the order of decades than smart phone like lifetimes of 1000 full charger/discharge cycles.
I've long thought the concept of using lithium based batteries for grid storage was a tad dumb. Nickel-Iron Batteries are the neglected child of battery storage.
At first blush, they would seem to be about the worst storage battery going. Low specific energy, poor charge retention, and heavy.
But they are seriously tough as nails. They can handle constant charging, they can handle shorts, and banks of them sitting on concrete pads are no problem to handle the weight. Plus they are very long lived, use
Re:Logical (Score:4, Insightful)
Should the $70k owner get paid almost twice as much for a full discharge?
Of course not. They both sell power back to the grid at the price set by the market.
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Should the $70k owner get paid almost twice as much for a full discharge?
Of course not. They both sell power back to the grid at the price set by the market.
The other question is, where does the vehicle get the power it's selling back to the grid... Oh, that's right... the grid.
Now using electric cars as a backup to grid power in the home seems like a good idea as Nissan is suggesting in the article but it has two fatal flaws.
1. Li-ion and Li-po battery technology degrades based on charge cycles. The deeper the discharge of each cycle the faster the battery degrades. If you're discharging the battery by powering you home, you're really just depreciating t
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One can do it for twice as long so he can happily cash in on twice the money if it makes sense for him to do so. It doesn't make the GP's comment any less siller though.
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Things like liquefied air, pumping water uphill, lowering huge weights into wells/mines, converting water to hydrogen, large flywheels, etc.
I assume you mean compressed air. But that is a really crappy way to store power. Round trip efficiency is about 50-60%.
Pumping water and raising weights can be efficient, but require infrastructure or geography that most places don't have.
Water-to-hydrogen is every less efficient than compressed air.
Flywheels are great for balancing loads over seconds or minutes, not from day to night.
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Having worked on lithium-ion pack designs before, I can say that even the most rudimentary multi-cell pack has a lot of smarts built into it to protect the battery. If it is too hot to charge, it shuts off. If it is too hot to discharge (al
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How fast should it be discharged? Should cars get exotic cooling
Okay I stopped reading here. You are engaging in completely senseless whataboutism not even remotely technically relevant to the "problem" you're trying to convey. But I will correct you on this one:
We have batteries in homes already. We have had for 20+ years from varying technologies. Why would you imagine suddenly the batteries which are best equipped to hand the load (batteries fundamentally designed for sudden high discharge and built massively parallel and a good order of magnitude oversized for the s
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And if we are over-sizing the battery to support this use while also allowing the car to be a functional car, then why not take those extra cells, remove them from the car (red
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So, hook it up to your house at night, so it can soak up power at off-peak (recharging the battery), so it can be used as a source of power at peak times (say, afternoon)...when it's not plugged into your house, since you drove it to work....
Of course, it could be plugged in at work. In which case it's NOT going to be charging up much
And portable (Score:2)
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Use you employers' power to power your house?
Several companies near me are installing solar panels over employee parking lots.
This makes dual use of space, and provides shade for the cars.
So the sunshine powers your commute back home, and then powers your home for an hour or two once you get there.
The helps to cover the 5pm to 7pm peak in net power usage.
Then you charge up at 2am with baseload power (hopefully hydro, nuke, or wind) for the morning commute.
Re: Logical (Score:2)
Wishful thinking (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because the electric cars *could* be used as a temporary energy store, doesn't mean they should. The users of the cars don't know *individually*, if they need their particular car, even if, in aggregate, cars are usually parked at offices during the day.
If they don't know if they personally will need the car charged, you cannot use that charge on any individual car, and if you cannot use that charge on one, you cannot use it on all.
Sounds like wishful thinking from a CEO trying to sell an unwanted feature.
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It seems reasonable to me to give up 20% of my battery if it makes a real impact on my electric bill (especially if I can over ride it when I'll need the full charge).
The Tesla Big Battery is 2.4 GWh, so it's only 60 KWh leafs, 300 of them allowing 20% to be drawn into the grid replaces the storage capacity of the big battery.
But my understanding of the big battery's purpose is that it lets the power out very fast, I don't know how many cars distributed in what way would be needed for the grid to absorb tha
Not range sacrifice but faster battery aging (Score:3)
It seems reasonable to me to give up 20% of my battery if it makes a real impact on my electric bill (especially if I can over ride it when I'll need the full charge).
TL;DR: you'd be getting a tiny impact on your electric bill, but after two years, don't be surprised if the battery only has a fraction of its total capacity, as if you were driving 1000 km per day...
The problem is not the dent it could put into your range.
The problem is the wear and tear to which the battery will be subjected.
These things are lithium based, they have a limited number of charge-discharge cycles before the battery has been worn out to the point of not being usefull.
If you pay attention, Tesl
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but after two years, don't be surprised if the battery only has a fraction of its total capacity, as if you were driving 1000 km per day...
That makes zero sense. You can't drive 1000 km per day with 20% of the battery capacity.
By using an EV as a house's battery, you're subjecting the battery to a lot of wear and tear (lots of charge-discharge cycles) even on a vehicle that is parked. You will be causing the battery to age early and eventually fail early.
If I had a 50 kWh vehicle, it would be able to power me through two weeks worth of nights with no charging. Where's this issue you're talking about? The battery would last for decades with biweekly cycles.
Still want a dedicated home battery (Score:2)
It's great to be able to use an electric car for a home battery, awesome idea and I applaud them.
However many people will be gone during prime charging hours, so it's still a great idea to have an even larger home battery charge during the day while most people are gone, then be available to use during the evening... with a car as secondary battery. Or if someone is home they may well need to draw on a reserve, if your car is gone they have no battery.
The other concern is if you are using your car to help
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Two cars?
Re:Still want a dedicated home battery (Score:5, Funny)
C'mon, Beowulf cluster of cars.
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But how many cars (hint: lots) will spend their days parked in lots or buildings which could also be festooned with solar panels. As part of the parking fees you could get a charge that you then take home and power your house with in the evening. That puts far less strain on the grid (lower I2R losses) and enables the use of "free" renewable energy that would otherwise go to waste.
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But how many cars (hint: lots) will spend their days parked in lots or buildings which could also be festooned with solar panels.
Even if you are able to charge your car all day (increasingly harder as more cars go electric) you still use up a lot of energy going home.
Also I think if you do the math a whole roof of solar panels could maybe charge a handful of cars fully in a day [pickmysolar.com]. Certainly not a garage full.
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It's borderline profitable for Teslas - the battery depreciation is just a tad lower than the income from reselling the electricity. However, if Tesla produces a larger battery or a longer-living one then it'd be a no-brainer
P.S. (Score:2)
Also forgot to mention, that if you buy into Tesla's vision of the future your car is spending as much of the day (and evening) as possible making money from you as a robotaxi, instead of trapped at your home needing to act as a battery. :-)
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They are free as in they will pay for themselves over (on average) a 7 year period, in the form of reduced electric bills.
To claim your free solar panels, take out a loan from your bank, use it to buy the solar panels, then take the money you would have been paying to your electric company and use it to pay off the loan. After you've done that, you get free power for the remaining 18 years or so of the panels' lifespan.
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Step up, then (Score:3)
"It's a complete waste of resources because what we can do is have cars that are also batteries and those cars are parked most of the time," Thomas said.
It *is* a waste of resources, because of something we *can* do? You go ahead and get your project started, then.
Customers need to pay up first (Score:2)
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Limited understanding (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy from Nissan is struggling to understand things.
The Tesla battery in SA is not primarily for supply - it's a load balancer, designed for swift response to maintain voltage when demand and supply fluctuate unexpectedly, until generators can be brought online and up to speed - and it's better at that job than x thousand EVs ever could be. Imagine a generator going offline with a fault, causing a massive sudden draw on all those cars connected to the grid. What if there's an insufficient quantity of cars connected, e.g. during peak hour? And do the cars' own control mechanisms prevent too much of a down-draw on the cars' batteries? Fewer cars connected = greater demand on those that are connected.
Musk made good on his promise to have that battery in and running on time. Let's see Nissan make good on a promise to have all the charging infrastructure in place and operational within, say, 24 months. And post a bond against not having sufficient cars connected during an outage.
Re:Limited understanding (Score:4, Interesting)
Peak electricity hour is when people get home from work. You know, when they're quite literally NOT driving their cars...
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Peak electricity hour is when people get home from work. You know, when they're quite literally NOT driving their cars...
You are right, at that time instead of driving their cars they are recharging their cars because they just drove around all day.
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You are right, at that time instead of driving their cars they are recharging their cars because they just drove around all day
Or they (or the car) could wait a few hours for electricity to get cheaper.
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they should just be more like idealised capitalists and pay attention to every market in their proximity at all times in case a bargain appears
The car could do it for them. Have the grid operator tell the car the price for the coming hours, and let the car computer decide on the optimal time for charging so that battery reaches full (enough) charge in the morning. The owner doesn't have to pay attention at all.
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Many EV drivers charge overnight on the cheap rate. It's extremely easy to incentivise off-peak charging. V2G smart chargers actually negotiate with the power company to charge at the cheap rate.
Actual EV usage (Score:2)
You are right, at that time instead of driving their cars they are recharging their cars because they just drove around all day.
Generally no this isn't what happens. I own an EV - a Chevy Bolt - and my usage is fairly typical of EV owners. It's pretty uncommon for me to have less than 50% charge and that's after my wife and I use it for ~60 miles of commuting and travel most days. (we work different shifts and share the car for commuting) I would have more than enough charge in the vehicle most of the time to put off recharging until later in the night and have plenty of juice to power my home for typical evening activities.
Very
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You are right, at that time instead of driving their cars they are recharging their cars because they just drove around all day.
Why? They have all night to do that. You create some arbitrary restriction for an unreleased product. Charge your car at off peak times and rates like a normal person.
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Seriously, it's a moronic idea. The grid has surplus capacity at night, which is when EVs are typically charged. During the day, when solar panels are putting out power, the demand is highest. There is only a small window during late evening when solar power has dropped off but demand is still high.
All those extra cycles will dep
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I should have been clearer - I meant peak hour traffic, when EVs *aren't* connected to either charge themselves or supply the grid.
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Peak electricity hour is when people get home from work. You know, when they're quite literally NOT driving their cars...
In some Australian states, tariffs change based on the time of day to discourage excessive power use during peak times. This is easy enough to get around by fitting a A$10 timer between the plug and the socket.
EV's have many flaws and drawbacks, especially in Australia but charging at off-peak rates isn't one of them.
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And do the cars' own control mechanisms prevent too much of a down-draw on the cars' batteries?
You don't actually need to get energy out of cars. You simply need to stop charging them. Once there are enough charging stations you'll always have the required capacity for this.
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That's a solved problem Most EV charging happens at night, between midnight and 7am, because it's typically cheaper and more convenient.
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One easy way to combat this is to immediately shed load for a few minutes and EV charging is pretty much the best load for this.
But if most EV charging happens at night, then there is little load to shed.
Domestic A/C's can already be remotely turned off during peak loads and they probably represent a much larger load. Adding EV charging to this would be trivial.
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But if most EV charging happens at night, then there is little load to shed.
That's why some companies are pushing the vehicle-to-grid technology to incentivize charging during the day. This is not a bad idea, it can nicely complement the nightly charging.
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I was referring to the fact that daily load/demand is fairly predictable.
A power plant tripping is not so predictable. Sure, palms at generator plants get sweaty on a hot afternoon, the 5th or 6th in a row, but still......
If you're relying on EVs supplying energy to the grid at particular times, such as during the afternoon, when they've finished charging up from their morning commute, and can supply back to the grid for the afternoon demand on AC, and then they disconnect and start driving home - peak hour
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Got that wrong, a bit.
Peak evening load - everyone's AC is on, everyone's electric stove is cooking dinner, but the EVs *aren't* re-charging because they're waiting for the cheaper tariff later at night, or midnight-to-dawn tariff?
So, the EVs have not got a lot of stored energy to offer the grid at its peak load, when an over-worked generator can be expected to trip off?
if this catches on.. (Score:3, Insightful)
locks will go on any publicly-accessible outlet, EVERYWHERE. no more 'free' charging while out shopping, or at a park-and-ride, or work place, from car manufacturers' own stations, etc...
i don't think it will, but it's an interesting concept.. if for no other reason than it demands a larger capacity battery in the vehicle, which would translate into a driving range that can equal or exceed that of typical petrol engines.. and the fewer charging cycles per 100k km driven and longer battery lifespan that goes along with that.
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Not locks but coin slots (figuratively speaking).
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Not locks but coin slots (figuratively speaking).
Are you kidding... No self respecting EV driving hipster would ever be uncouth enough to be carrying something as sensible and out of fashion as cash. This will need to be tied to their Apple account, the same one they use to pay for their beard oil (which will be a brand you've never heard of, so don't bother asking).
Maybe I'd buy if it's a hybrid (Score:2, Troll)
I like the idea of a car that can provide usable electricity for the owner. I'm thinking for someone that wants to make a roadside stop for lunch and then have power to run a coffeepot, a microwave oven, or something like that to have a warm snack. Perhaps have an overnight stay somewhere and have electronics for entertainment. As a licensed Amateur radio operator I can envision someone using this energy to run a radio transmitter, perhaps for many hours or even days.
What concerns me though is that elect
Just what I need to charge my new 28" phablet! (Score:2)
And maybe my octo-core wristwatch, too...
Where is your car when the sun is shinning? (Score:3)
A battery at home is useful to store electricity you get for free at home (investisment aside). So mostly from solar panels for now.
Who uses a car the most often? People who are using it to go to work. Where is the car at the period when the sun is shinning? Not at your home but at your office.
So a battery in a car is not enough to benefit the most from solar panels.
Limited charge cycles - warranty? (Score:3)
It seems to me that it would make more sense to use custom batteries, outside the car to do this. Not to rely on your only mode of transport. Otherwise you might find that what you expected to be a fully charged EV, to take you somewhere, had a vastly reduced range due to unknown discharging into your home's power supply.
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It seems to me that it would make more sense to use custom batteries, outside the car to do this. Not to rely on your only mode of transport. Otherwise you might find that what you expected to be a fully charged EV, to take you somewhere, had a vastly reduced range due to unknown discharging into your home's power supply.
Honestly I find that's the easiest part, you define a range with a min/max range where it'll top up extra if power is super cheap and drain it a little if I can sell it super expensive. It all depends on the spread if it's worth it or not. But I suspect much like Uber it'll be full of people who don't realize the cost of wear and tear, thinking they're getting free money.
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Nissan's warranty does cover this use, yes.
It will probably *reduce* warranty claims. Leafs that sit idle and get little use see more degradation than those which are used regularly. Some people with 30k miles over 5 years are seeing more loss than taxi firms with 200k miles over the same period. So a bit of cycling via V2G may well actually improve battery health.
Absolutely! (Score:2)
We're building a house in a sunny area, and we plan to move to an EV at some point. It makes absolute sense to use that car battery to store household energy. Obviously, one wants a smart controller, so that your car isn't completely drained when you need it. But to smooth out the usage curve, and allow usage of some stored energy overnight? A complete no-brainer.
Unfortunately, we haven't come across any systems offering this kind of functionality yet. The whole EV market is apparently still too chaotic.
hmmm.. (Score:2)
Why haven't they done it then? (Score:2)
"It's a complete waste of resources because what we can do is have cars that are also batteries and those cars are parked most of the time," Thomas said.
If he thinks it is so easy then why haven't they done it already? Tesla built their big battery system in Australia in just a few months. Nissan has had YEARS to solve the problem and couldn't be bothered.
Yes I think using car batteries as a part of the grid is a pretty sensible idea but the simple fact is that the execution of it requires 1) a critical mass of EVs in the hands of customers, 2) customers willing to hook their EVs to the grid, and 3) EVs with the capability of doing so. None of those thin
Not really that "massive" (Score:3)
An EV is a battery on wheels (Score:2)
Nissan is just trying to flog the dead horse CHAdeMO in US or Europe where other formats are winning out. Assuming there was ever a need for this function I doubt it would be hard to integrate it into CCS either - car and charge handshake, agree they both support charging the other way and the car flips over to become a battery.
At some point Nissan will throw in the towel on CHAdeMO, at le
That's Only True If... (Score:2)
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True of most cars. Most people sleep 8 hours, work 8 hours at a desk and spend at least 4 hours in front of a smartphone. Even if they drive half the time they spend in front of the smartphone, that's at most 6 hours of driving, leaving the car parked for at least 18 hours.
For everyone else there is still Tesla model S, tesla truck and tesla UFO.
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Re: "and those cars are parked most of the time" (Score:2)
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That's not how it would work, I'm looking at price plans for electricity in Australia, it costs about half the cost at night time. You'd charge at night, drive during the day and plug in the car in the evening, and use any leftover power then.
Re:"and those cars are parked most of the time" (Score:4, Informative)
Nah, electricity is much cheaper at night due to off-peak pricing in Australia. You don't need much power when you're not at home, so the Leaf battery wouldn't be needed in work hours either. It would be useful to switch to the battery during the evening power use peak, then switch to storing energy once the price drops.
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not jump into a car with a dead battery
Do you habitually weld a bridge overnight?
Re: "and those cars are parked most of the time" (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a tangential issue. The main issue is that Nissan battery packs already degrade badly enough just from normal usage. Who wants them cycling in a V2G role on top of that? A car's battery should be rightfully designed to give it a lifespan typical of usage in that car - not "usage in that car plus taking on some side V2G role". Tesla Powerpacks (and soon to be Megapacks) are designed specifically for V2G, which means focusing on lifespan and cost over energy density. Additionally, you usually want battery buffers to be in specific locations, to buffer specific lines. Most EVs will be in densely populated areas, which doesn't necessarily correlate with battery needs.
If Nissan were talking about reusing old Leaf battery packs in the grid, as they have sometimes in the past, there's a better argument for that (although working with old packs can sometimes be a pain, they're few in number, and there's also an argument that they'd just be better off being recycled into new packs that can store more energy).
A caveat I'll add, however: V2G generally refers to two-way power flow. There's more of an argument for it with one-way power flow, e.g. "smart charging", which prioritizes charging at times of grid excess. In an ideal scenario, you tell it how much of a charge you want, and when you need it by, and it has to fully serve your request, but does so by charging only when power is cheapest during its available timeperiod. Powerwall basically works like this, but Tesla vehicles do not (if smart grids become more commonplace, however, I'm sure this would change).
I think one of the ultimate scenarios for making use of renewables power when it's in excess would be "green steel". That is, ore processed by hydrothermic reduction or electrolysis rather than carbothermic reduction. IMHO, most of the plans for generating hydrogen for grid buffering are pretty dumb (generating hydrogen, storing it, then converting it back to electricity is a really expensive, inefficient alternative to batteries), but since hydrothermic steel requires hydrogen as a reducing agent, making it with electricity during times of excess is a really obvious choice. Alumium smelters already generally adjust their power consumption based on grid needs, but steel is a much larger industry than alumium, so hydrothermic or electrolytic steel would make a much bigger difference. Electrolytic would be more efficient than hydrothermic, but is a larger jump from current steelmaking processes.
Re: (Score:2)
> It's a tangential issue. The main issue is that Nissan battery packs already degrade badly enough just from normal usage.
Define "badly enough." Nissan expects the batteries to outlive the car [autonews.com] in the average case.
Unfortunately there's no clarification on exactly what the criteria is, but they clearly expect the batteries to have a practical usability after 10 years of service in the average LEAF. How "bad" is that degradation?
=Smidge=
Re: (Score:2)
"Badly enough" as in "go shopping for a used Leaf some time and see what I mean".
Re: "and those cars are parked most of the time" (Score:5, Informative)
"Badly enough" as in "go shopping for a used Leaf some time and see what I mean".
I am the second owner of a 2013 Nissan Leaf that I bought used about 4 years ago. I have no significant capacity loss so far. You may be thinking of the 2011 and 2012 Nissan Leaf models, which had a different battery build with well-documented long-term problems. Batteries from 2013 and on are pretty solid.
FWIW, when I bought Leaf it had 11k miles and I bought it for $15K; it was $36k new. EV depreciation is awful, but the flip side is there are fantastic deals on used EVs.
Re: (Score:3)
Nissan expects the batteries to outlive the car [autonews.com] in the average case.
Yeah, that's really bad. "Outlives the car in the average case" very much sounds like planned obsolescence for a substantial portion of unlucky people. Also, what exactly do they mean by "outlive"? [pushevs.com]
Re: (Score:3)
>Define "badly enough." Nissan expects the batteries to outlive the car [autonews.com] in the average case.
Not so for the gen-1 leafs. There are plenty of worthless leafs out there with 20% battery capacity and are unsalable as a result.
My leaf is a 2015 and still has 'all the bars' but I expect them to start dropping soon. The gen-1 batteries are good for a decade, the car should be good for longer.
The new model leafs use a different battery technology and probably will outlast the car.
Re: (Score:2)
A car's battery should be rightfully designed to give it a lifespan typical of usage in that car
Like engine oil? Tires? Sparkplugs? Suspension?
Why do you arbitrarily list batteries, a manufacturer replaceable subcomponent of a vehicle as being so important?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Driverless vehicles may never happen. There is no indication that they will, despite the wishful thinking and hype of the tech companies.
Riderless motorcycles ... (Score:2)