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Power Transportation United States

PG&E Will Pilot Bidirectional Electric Car Charging In California (arstechnica.com) 82

Posted by BeauHD from the give-and-take dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) will begin testing bidirectional charging in California with new pilot programs announced this week at General Motors and Ford. ["This will enable power to flow from a charged EV into a customer's home, automatically coordinating between the EV, home and PG&E's electric supply," explains InsideEVs.] [...] General Motors might be late to the EV pickup party, but on Wednesday, it was first to announce that it is working with PG&E on vehicle-to-home technology. This summer, the two companies will begin lab tests with different GM EVs before starting to test vehicle-to-home connections at some customer homes. The two companies say they plan to open up to a larger customer trial by the end of this year.

On Thursday, Ford and PG&E revealed similar plans at the CERAWeek conference in Houston. Few details have been made public so far, though we know that unlike in the GM pilot, PG&E will not be able to remotely operate the vehicle-to-home feature on demand. And unfortunately, neither the Ford Mustang Mach-E nor the e-Transit will be capable of bidirectional charging; it will just be the F-150 Lightning.
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PG&E Will Pilot Bidirectional Electric Car Charging In California More

PG&E Will Pilot Bidirectional Electric Car Charging In California

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  • Lul wut? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "This will enable power to flow from a charged EV into a customer's home, automatically coordinating between the EV, home and PG&E's electric supply,"

    No, you're not going to "coordinate" any "flow" out of my house. I pay you to deliver electricity, and what I do with it after that point is none of your business.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by suutar ( 1860506 )

      I'm not seeing any indication of power from your car leaving your premises, just that it can run your house if grid power is unavailable.

      • So why does PG&G need to be involved? A simple relay on the premises can handle that type of switchover.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by suutar ( 1860506 )

          Well, one of the gripes about solar power installations is that when the grid is down, the household power gets shut down to keep solar electricity from making "dead" lines live and endangering the folks repairing the grid. So apparently the current grid-household border is not set up to be one-way. If they want to allow folks to draw on their car battery when the grid's down that'll have to change, and PG&E owns that box.

    • More than that, I'm not putting extra wear and tear on my car battery to stabilize your shitty grid because you can't match supply with demand. Get your own batteries actually designed for grid attachment.

      • It'll be less stressful to your battery than actually driving your vehicle

    • I hope what they plan is AC based V2G.
      DC based V2G is economically worthless, only AC V2G is the future.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mspohr ( 589790 )

      You don't have to participate in this program. No one is forcing you sign up. Usually this type of program comes with some incentive such as lower rates which make it attractive.
      But, by all means, protect your freedumb!

  • Why would I want this "feature"? So that I can pay for charging my EV and my electricity supplier can steal the charge back into its grid, meanwhile screwing up the capacity of the battery in my EV due to repeated discharge/charge cycle?

    • Or so that you still have power during any of the notoriously frequent failures of the US grid?
      • I'm in the US, and in the last 10 years, I might have experienced two ~2 second brownouts (if!). The biggest inconvenience is a rebooted desktop and kitchen appliances that blink 12:00.

        This is not going to help you in a Texas-like power outage or a real natural disaster. This seems like a big Rube Goldberg machine that only someone in the "tech industry" could have dreamed up.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by lsllll ( 830002 )

          I have had more outages 60 miles outside Chicago. In the past 7 years at my current house, we've had 15-20 outages. One was 1 hours in 2015 and one was 3 hours (my server which hosts email and web site for my business lasted 1.5 hours only because the batteries were old). Outside of that, all outages have been less than 10 minutes, most under 2 minutes. I can easily live with the amount of outages I've had.

          I did buy a 12kw generator for emergencies and was going to wire it up, until I realized my well p

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by taustin ( 171655 )

          PG&E is a California utility. Brownouts and rolling blackouts are a fact of life here. And will get worse long before it gets better.

          • Last summer (2021) was yet another of wildfires sparked by PG&E high voltage transmission wires transiting the California forests, so PG&E instituted rolling blackouts across parts of the SF Bay counties, in order to allow de-energizing many of those wires. They posted announcements to all EV owners instructing them to refrain from charging their cars so as to conserve the little electricity remaining in the grid on those days.

            BTW - Pacific Gas & Electric is the name associated to that acronym.

        • I'm in the US, and in the last 10 years, I might have experienced two ~2 second brownouts (if!).

          Then you're probably lucky, since the average SAIDI for the US is on the order of ~300 minutes.

          This is not going to help you in a Texas-like power outage or a real natural disaster

          It absolutely will, why wouldn't it? Although admittedly what could power a European household for a week might only last two days in the United States.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Or so that you still have power during any of the notoriously frequent failures of the US grid?

        That is what generators are for.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ncc74656 ( 45571 ) *

        Don't confuse California's inability to competently manage its power grid (or anything else, for that matter) with the rest of the country. Over the past 20 years, I think I can still count residential power failures on the fingers of one hand, and some of them were beyond the utility's control (like when an idiot driver slammed his car into a transformer, knocking out power for a few hours until a replacement could be hauled in and installed).

        California != the United States. I'd argue they make a disjoi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Klaxton ( 609696 )

      Probably there will be incentives that motivate you to participate if you want to.

      For example you pay enough less for your electricity to make it worth your while. Or they pay you more for the electricity they get from you than it cost to buy it from them. And they won't drain your car down past a threshold that you set. Also the bonus that you still have power during a blackout.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by taustin ( 171655 )

        Or they convince the state to make it impossible to own a car that's not electric, and impossible to install a charger that doesn't do this.

    • Why would I want this "feature"?

      So that your car can make you money while you sleep.

      So that I can pay for charging my EV and my electricity supplier can steal the charge back into its grid, meanwhile screwing up the capacity of the battery in my EV due to repeated discharge/charge cycle?

      Your objections only suit if you are unable to control the charge and discharge levels. What's amusing is that this could actually improve your battery life. If your car slow-charges all night and then near morning (when demand rises, but the sun isn't yet shining so the solar plants can't contribute) it discharges at a higher rate for an hour then this can actually literally extend the life of your battery and improve the capacity by reconnecting islanded

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        What's amusing is that this could actually improve your battery life. If your car slow-charges all night and then near morning (when demand rises, but the sun isn't yet shining so the solar plants can't contribute) it discharges at a higher rate for an hour then this can actually literally extend the life of your battery and improve the capacity by reconnecting islanded lithium to the anodes.

        Under the right circumstances [electrek.co], maybe, but if I understand correctly, that's true only with a fairly short, extremely intense discharge period, and only occasionally, and only when the battery is approximately fully charged.

  • This is using an EV as a backup battery for your house, instead of buying and installing an actual backup battery or generator. The argument for this feature is that if I'm already spending a bunch of money on that new EV, I don't also need to buy a backup battery.

    But if the power is out, and I don't know how long it might be out, I need to conserve energy. I definitely would want to choose what gets connected to the backup power source, and I definitely wouldn't want the power company to choose for me, esp

    • It's California, what makes you think it would be voluntary? If you're complaining about this wait until the government forces you to start taking homeless people into your house.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lsllll ( 830002 )
      So a typical Tesla has about 100kwh (give or take 25 depending on options). Last July I used 3244kwh at my home. That's about 100kwh/day. There's not too much I can be selective of, except suffer without an AC, which is probably 1/3 of that. So if I had a fully-charged Tesla in my garage, I may get about 32 hours. Not bad, but if I had a Tesla, I wouldn't want to drain it, either, because I'll have to use it to make trips for food/etc.

    • This is using an EV as a backup battery for your house

      No, it is not. You can get that "already" (in a vehicle about to hit the market) with the F150 Lightning EV. If you get the big battery option, the truck comes with a fast charger that will also let you power your house. Don't know if the charger has the service disconnect or if you have to install that separately.

      This is using EVs as grid storage, which requires the same hardware on the vehicle, but more intelligence.

      But if the power is out, and I don't know how long it might be out, I need to conserve energy.

      This isn't for when the power is out. RTFS. This is for when the grid needs back a little

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        This isn't for when the power is out. RTFS. This is for when the grid needs back a little bit of the power that's been going into your battery. And as long as it doesn't take so much that you have to severely deplete your charge to get to work (you will be able to program in a limit) then this has zero drawbacks for you.

        Except, of course, that you don't necessarily use the same amount of battery every day, and you're also adding wear on the battery, which has a limited lifespan. The way I look at it, if PG&E wants this, they would need to discount electrical service by at least the cost of that wear, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of five to ten dollars per charge-discharge cycle.

        • The way I look at it, if PG&E wants this, they would need to discount electrical service by at least the cost of that wear, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of five to ten dollars per charge-discharge cycle.

          Well, there is the actual rub. Utilities in general tend to fight any kind of fair metering scheme. If they are both paying and charging fair rates then this really can be all win if it's done technically correctly.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by xalqor ( 6762950 )

        No, it is not

        Yes it is, and there are multiple references to that in both articles linked from the summary.

        This is using EVs as grid storage

        That's even worse, and isn't mutually exclusive with using it as a backup battery when the power is out, since as you pointed out the hardware is the same.

        Backup batteries are good. Having an extra backup battery in every home that can be used to help keep the grid stable is also good. What is not good is someone with a potential conflict of interest being able to tak

  • I think PG&E knows how to spell FIRE - hope this works out....

  • LOL (Score:2)

    by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

    Yea hit a cross wind the fuckin thing will start vomiting sparks and burning down entire communities, THAT's what we need fuckwits

  • I suppose quite a few people in CA are bidirectional

  • When there is a surge in power usage, power companies have to spool up a fast-acting power plant to keep up with demand. Power companies don't like doing that because the power they produce is pretty expensive, and also tends to be entire fossil fuel fuelled. There is already a scheme in New York and California where you can voluntarily reduce your usage during surge periods called 'OhmConnect' ( https://www.ohmconnect.com/how... [ohmconnect.com]). You can actually get paid for not using power during these periods, and if y

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tragedy ( 27079 )

      A quantity of ice slush massing about 1.5 tons should be able to replace the AC in a larger house for about 12 hours in a device that would be like a reverse water heater. You would just need to run some coils of tubing carrying water with a bit of antifreeze in it around the inside of the tank. There would probably need to be a screw to keep the slush from solidifying, although I suppose you could use a bunch of water-filled plastic spheres with a bubble in them to allow expansion and just float those in t

  • No thanks. One of the best parts of having an EV is having a “full tank” on standby sitting in my garage.

  • of having The Cloud drain my battery?

    This is one more thing gasoline cars are better at. Instead of all this coordinating energy flow nonsense and standardization of electrical hardware and communication protocols...I just send some goons around with a jerry can and a length of plastic tubing and they'll siphon off your gas tank while you sleep.

    No muss. No fuss. Backwards compatible with any gasoline car. If you don't mind a damaged gas cap door. And why would you mind? Are you some kind of selfish neandert

    • it'll only drain your battery if you are stupid enough to configure the car to allow them to take power until 0% is left.

  • This is a collateral effect from the attempt to move power generation to intermittent sources - wind and solar. In the end the policy is going to make two way flows a legal requirement. You can see this happening in the UK Net Zero proposals. It will be done by smart meters.

    Its essential to keeping the grid safe, because once you have installed big percentages of wind and solar, you can no longer provide constant power. The UK normally has dead calms two or three times a year, and in any case, the power

  • My insurance carrier dropped me because I have a net metering agreement for my solar panels. The solar panels were not the issue--the net metering was the issue.

  • More goodies for the rich, at the expense of the middle class, justified by climate, Putin, and the devil.

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