Bidirectional Charging May Be Required On EVs Soon Due To New California Law (electrek.co) 291
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law giving the California Energy Commission the authority to require bidirectional charging in electric vehicles (EVs) in the future -- although no timeline is set. Bidirectional charging allows EVs to not only charge from the grid but also supply electricity back to the grid, potentially enhancing grid resiliency, supporting renewable energy, and reducing peak electricity demand. Electrek reports: The idea started in 2023 when state Senator Nancy Skinner introduced a bill which would require EVs to have bidirectional charging by 2027. As this bill made its way through the legislative process, it got watered down from that ambitious timeline. So the current form of the bill, which is now called SB 59, took away that timeline and instead gave the California Energy Commission (CEC) the go-ahead to issue a requirement whenever they see it fit. The bill directs the CEC, the California Air Resources Board, and the California Public Utilities Commission to examine the use cases of bidirectional charging and give them the power to require specific weight classes of EVs to be bidirectional-capable if a compelling use case exists.
The state already estimates that integrating EVs into the grid could save $1 billion in costs annually, so there's definitely a use case there, but the question is the cost and immediacy of building those vehicles into the grid. The reason this can't be done immediately is that cars take time to design, and while adding bidirectional charging to an EV isn't the most difficult process, it also only really becomes useful with a whole ecosystem of services around the vehicle.
And that ecosystem has been a bit of a hard sell so far. It's all well and good to tell someone they can make $500/year by selling energy to the grid, but then you have to convince them to buy a more expensive charging unit and keep their car plugged in all the time, with someone else managing its energy storage. Some consumers might push back against that, so part of CEC's job is to wait to pull the trigger until it becomes apparent that people are actually interested in the end-user use case for V2G -- otherwise, no sense in requiring a feature that nobody is going to use.
The state already estimates that integrating EVs into the grid could save $1 billion in costs annually, so there's definitely a use case there, but the question is the cost and immediacy of building those vehicles into the grid. The reason this can't be done immediately is that cars take time to design, and while adding bidirectional charging to an EV isn't the most difficult process, it also only really becomes useful with a whole ecosystem of services around the vehicle.
And that ecosystem has been a bit of a hard sell so far. It's all well and good to tell someone they can make $500/year by selling energy to the grid, but then you have to convince them to buy a more expensive charging unit and keep their car plugged in all the time, with someone else managing its energy storage. Some consumers might push back against that, so part of CEC's job is to wait to pull the trigger until it becomes apparent that people are actually interested in the end-user use case for V2G -- otherwise, no sense in requiring a feature that nobody is going to use.
Fantastic (Score:3, Informative)
EV batteries are proving to outlast cars; this is an excellent additional use for them.
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Good lord, how many crashes are you in that don't damage the battery to get there?
Or are you using cars that rust through in less than ten years or something?
Re:Fantastic (Score:5, Informative)
Good lord, how many crashes are you in that don't damage the battery to get there?
Or are you using cars that rust through in less than ten years or something?
Electic cars use far smaller quantities of steel than ICE vehicles and it's the same kind of steel as ICE vehicles are made of so it will rust at the same rate in both types of motor vehicle. Data suggest that EV batteries could last 20 years or more at their current average degradation rate, so, quite a lot more than the 'less than ten years' you are insinuating. Meanwhile, the average lifespan of an ICE engine motor vehicle is 12-15 years which is roughly the the same as the realistic service life of an EV.
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Re: Fantastic (Score:2)
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That is a lot of "but, but, but..." that ends up expressing an agreement.
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My central claim isn't that market is slowing down. That's just one of the observed side effects of the main "what". Battery wear and damage. That is why I list several observations on battery wear and battery damage and its impact on owning said EV.
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A friend got a reasonable replacement for their Leaf. In that case it was to expand the battery capacity with the old battery being repurposed to be a home battery. A more complicated form of V2G.
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"Reasonable" is usually measured in upper four and lower five digits when it comes to batteries. Compared to low resale value of these cars, I doubt a lot of people would find "reasonable" to be an applicable term here.
Re:Fantastic (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that battery packs are typically *warrantied* for 8 years, exactly where did you get in your mind that the mean time to failure is 10 years? That would be a massive warranty expense, having the mean time to failure only 2 years longer than the warranty period, given the hugely varied ways people use their cars (percentage fast charging, type of fast charging, annual mileage, daily charging limit, climate, etc).
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Re:Fantastic (Score:5, Informative)
> Weasel word: typically. Invalidates everything that comes after it.
Tesla, Hyundai, Ford & GM are all 8 years. I'm sure most of the others are as well, but since we're already over 75% of all US sales it's enough to include that "typically" was too weak a word in the original post.
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>Data suggest that EV batteries could last 20 years or more at their current average degradation rate
I'm sure there's "some" data that "suggests" that batteries last that long.
In real world on the other hand, observations so far is that batteries need significant refurbishing or total replacement after a decade and a half at the latest. Most require it much earlier that that because of hits to battery from road surface, or a single module failure in a battery that cannot be reasonably serviced to exchange failed module. A single look at the massive market for the oldest EVs on the roads, Nissan Leafs tells you a very cruel story about the "data suggests" vs reality. Where people who foolishly believed "data suggests" claims faced costs to replace battery ten years into car's life that was more than car itself was worth at that time.
To be fair Leafs are very bad at battery management compared to today. But even today, battery replacements are not looking pretty, to the point where EV market itself has slowed down massively as old ones just aren't reselling because of their battery woes. Even before 10 year mark.
Old EVs have horrible resale value because battery tech is currently evolving really quickly. This is normal in emerging tech, you mentioned the Nissan Leaf which lacked thermal management, it is a poster child for this effect. Eventually the tech will mature as it always does, batteries will gain capacities that get you ranges you can't even dream of with an ICE and the ICE engine will go where all obsolete tech goes to die. Furthermore, a whole lot of EV batteries that were entirely repairable have been s
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That's a pretty niche use case for driving an ICE vehicle...
But for the many of folks out there like me with normal driving use cases...my points still stand...why should I deal with the inconvenience of refueling (Like many, many folks I cannot charge at h
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>Data suggest that EV batteries could last 20 years or more at their current average degradation rate
I'm sure there's "some" data that "suggests" that batteries last that long. In real world on the other hand, observations so far is that batteries need significant refurbishing or total replacement after a decade and a half at the latest.
Original post was accurate. In the real world, data is showing EV batteries are lasting longer than predicted.
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EV batteries are proving to outlast cars;
[citation needed].
I question if that is true. I have cars 20-30 years old that still run good, lithiums don't last that long on paper. This site explains some of chemistry and characteristics related to lifespan. http://web.archive.org/web/201... [archive.org]
Lithiums have a limited lifespan based on # of cycles, with it decreased by many factors including temperature (too hot or too low), depth of discharge, charging rate, and end voltage. The batteries are also only useful until they can only produce 80% of origina
Re:Fantastic (Score:5, Informative)
> I have cars 20-30 years old that still run good
Generally speaking, how long a car lasts is determined by miles driven rather than age. For a light passenger vehicle the lifespan is typically 150K-200K miles.
So if we use that metric EV batteries are already there. 200K miles divided by a modest 250 miles per charge cycle is only 800 cycles, and since NCM cells used in most vehicles on the road today are good for over 1000 that easily puts them above the typical lifespan of the vehicle. LFP cells in newer vehicles should last at least 3x as long (which is flirting with the "million mile battery"), and if you believe the press releases EVs with solid state batteries will be hitting the market next year that are even more durable.
> This site explains some of chemistry and characteristics related to lifespan
The fact you had to use the Wayback Machine to pull an article from six years ago should give you pause for thought.
=Smidge=
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The EV battery myth (Score:2)
Here in Asia we have EV cars that have been running around for 10 years.
Batteries are down to 20~30%, even with all that smart battery management.
So in practice, EV's don't last for 20-30 years, especially if you are planning to fill and drain them every day.
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I have a 9 year old EV - a 2015 Renault Zoe. Runs great. Original battery. Same range as when it was new.
Re: The EV battery myth (Score:2)
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Here in Asia we have EV cars that have been running around for 10 years.
Batteries are down to 20~30%, even with all that smart battery management.
So in practice, EV's don't last for 20-30 years, especially if you are planning to fill and drain them every day.
That's quite interesting. There is a definite reason for the price difference between European and Asian EVs. Lots of stuff over here tends to be quite over-engineered. 20% after 10 years sounds too low. 95% like many European EVs seems too high. I guess that in 10 years time we'll have worked out how to get batteries which end up around 80-90% at 10 years for median usage which seems much more reasonable.
Re:Fantastic (Score:4, Interesting)
I was curious when I made this comment to see how many negative comments it would attract. It is interesting how any story or comment that is positive about EVs will attract negative responses. Primarily by people who clearly don't know what they're talking about,
Kinda hoped /. would be better, but sadly it doesn't seem to be.
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I think your story is quite neutral and it has some bad implications, for example an increase in EV cost that might put people off buying one. That might not be a problem if, for example the power companies were happy to finance those extra up front costs in return for people promising to plug in for a certain number of hours a week. It means, though, that taking this as a positive requires more than 5 seconds of thinking.
Which means the first people to answer are always going to be the kneejerk "government
Pay me for it. (Score:5, Insightful)
If anyone wants to use my batteries to supply the grid, they should be paying me for it. After all, it's my equipment. I paid for it and I need to maintain it. Increased charging and discharging cycles will wear the battery down quicker than it otherwise would and you should compensate me for it accordingly. What is it that if I'm using the grid I'm required to pay standing charges but when you want to use my "grid", you intend to pay me nothing?
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Isn't that basically how it works, at least if you are getting charged by the spot rate. In my country, price of electricity changes every hour. Fill your batter on the cheap, and sell back to grid at profit.
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Re:Pay me for it. (Score:5, Informative)
That's not entirely true.
The rates for solar are different, because with so many people (and grid scale providers) having solar, all that power is available when it's least needed. So yes, the net billing tariff for pure solar is lower because the power straight from the solar panels is simply worth less due to oversupply.
However, the net billing tariff is HIGHER for power provided later in the evening, when solar tapers off and demand increases. This incentivizes battery storage and REDUCES the ROI on systems that incorporate it.
And that's the whole point; they want people to roll out battery storage so renewable energy is better utilized. Seems like allowing their electric vehicles to fill that niche is a smart way to do it...
=Smidge=
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However, the net billing tariff is HIGHER for power provided later in the evening, when solar tapers off and demand increases. This incentivizes battery storage and REDUCES the ROI on systems that incorporate it.
No, that is false. The latest NEM feed-in credits are based on a mythical "avoided cost": the cost of electricity at the output of an investor-owned utility, ignoring all the infrastructure required to deliver that electricity to a consumer. There is no time when the feed-in rates are higher than they were previously.
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> There is no time when the feed-in rates are higher than they were previously.
Except for the times where they are.
"In fact, those selling electricity during peak times in the summer can earn an average of $0.52 per kilowatt hour, which is nearly double the payout with NEM 2.0." [sunrun.com]
=Smidge=
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> There is no way the pennies they pay you will cover the battery wear, shorter range, hassle of not having the charge you need when you need it, and so on
That sounds like a subjective thing to me. If I can earn two or three bucks per day doing basically nothing, while having absolutely minimal wear on the battery or overall usability of my EV because that's less than a ~15% swing in total capacity (~45 miles of range in my case), then that more than covers the cost of my daily driving... almost by an or
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He/She stated that, "EVs are already a hard enough sell to the rest of the population who hasn't bought one." which is clearly a true statement because everyone is not beating down dealership doors to buy EV's, and you argue, "Not really when you can take most of your maintenance costs and multiply them by zero, higher mileage and for short range towing have better torque than a diesel."
Which in no way addresses his argumen
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In my country, electricity price is flat. Well, OK, tiered, based on monthly consumption, but for each tier the price is flat no matter the time of day.
Also, as a prosumer, you sell electricity back to the grid at exactly the same price you buy it, therefore the net gain/loss is zero.
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That merely means that someone else is taking on the cost of volatility and and getting paid premium for taking on said volatility.
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I mean, that alone makes me think that while this idea may be reasonable from the Utilities standpoint (they don't need to actually buy storage, they can use mine for free), but f
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Fill your batter on the cheap, and sell back to grid at profit.
You'd probably never make enough profit to offset the additional wear on the battery. If you really want to sell power back to the grid, a PV system would offer a much better ROI, with the added benefit that you wouldn't ever have to worry about getting in your car and discovering that some of your range has been unexpectedly sucked up.
TBH, bidirectional charging isn't even a feature I'd care much about for my own use. As the topic has come up since it's hurricane season on the east coast, I've joked with
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You'd probably never make enough profit to offset the additional wear on the battery. If you really want to sell power back to the grid, a PV system would offer a much better ROI, with the added benefit that you wouldn't ever have to worry about getting in your car and discovering that some of your range has been unexpectedly sucked up.
You can set the maximum discharge for V2G/V2H in the car settings ("e.g. do not discharge below 60%").
As for actually reaping the costs, if you can spend the electricity at h
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How is that ever enforced? I mean, if I have a resistive load (water heater) and turn it on when it's not "allowed", and someone contacts you and tells you you are breaking rules, can't you just say you are running a space heater or AC or $heavy_resistive_load?
What happens if you plug your EV to an adjacent socket instead of the one designated for V2G if you do not wish to participate? Or just configure your car not to give anything back?
Also the hardware costs are comparable to getting a PV installation. Y
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But that's not this. The battery is storage. This in essence means using your car to store excess energy, then using your car to draw excess energy back to the grid. There's no rate for that.
Re: Pay me for it. (Score:5, Informative)
They do. When they need to pull power off of home batteries you get paid ~4-5x the peak rate that you would pay to run off the grid during peak hours (~$0.67/kwh for me), which is much better than the usual ~$0.05/kwh generation I get with NEM2.0
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It's a useful feature to have even if you don't feed energy back into the grid too. You can run all sorts of equipment off your car's battery, from camping/picnic gear to power tools to your fridge during a power outage.
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This is just another fee for the privilege of living in California. PAY UP!
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Literally everyone will pay you for this. That is how it works.
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They didn't think this one through (Score:2)
Peak electrical demand is usually during the hottest part of the day when there's the biggest need for air conditioning, which also happens to be when most people are at work. So, who are all these people that just leave their EVs plugged in at home all day and never go anywhere?
Will work same for cars plugged at work... (Score:2)
They are at work and their car is plugged there so it can work the same way...
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That's also peak solar output as well.
Google "California duck curve"
5pm - 9pm is the peak
Midday there is excessive generation, risking grid instability.
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Peak electrical demand is usually during the hottest part of the day when there's the biggest need for air conditioning, which also happens to be when most people are at work. So, who are all these people that just leave their EVs plugged in at home all day and never go anywhere?
The people who drove to work and left the EV plugged in to recharge? Presumably the charging spots will also have an average occupancy rate, even over the hottest time of the day which would make that fleet of charging cars useful for grid storage? Personally I'm not completely sold on this idea but I suppose it could work.
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I just looked out the window, it's peak time now. There are a *LOT* of cars in driveways. Why isn't every single person somewhere else? How could it be that some people are still home! I guess we'll never know. We won't know about shift workers, we won't know about multiple family cars. We won't know about days off, we certainly don't know about work from home. And there's absolutely no chance that any EV owner would have have the ability to plug their car in at work. Oh except for me, I'm special. But we'l
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All of these things are good measures. Of course, the biggest gains are in efficiency. But improving insulation and appliances takes up-front c
Not Only the Grid (Score:3)
If the car is rigged to allow feedback to the grid, then it should also be able to act in place of an emergency generator. Generators to power the whole house are usually 4 cylinder driven and mounted on a concrete pad, coming in at about $10K or so. Having your EV do that as a bonus to owning it could elevate your living situation more toward "upper middle class" since few people actually buy such generators due to this expense. Having the house set up to accept such power could also allow the delivery of charged batteries such as Tesla Powerwalls to rent so you can drive your EV to work and have the refrigerator powered while your car sits in the company parking lot, probably on a company charger. The Ford Lightning is known to power a house for 3 days under full normal loads including heating and air conditioning, so while the solution for 2 weeks of "grid down" might not be an EV, overnight is. Long outages are rare, so there's a silver lining to bidirectional charging.
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Generators to power the whole house are usually 4 cylinder driven and mounted on a concrete pad, coming in at about $10K or so.
Whole-house generators are a luxury because you really don't need something that big just to run the essentials (fridge, lights, phone chargers, etc.).
While it's possible to install an inverter in the EV I own (a Chevy Bolt), I'd rather run my portable generator and still have my car to use as a car rather than tethered to my house in the event of an outage. Yeah, I'll probably get some silly looks driving it to the gas station to get fuel for the generator, but such is life.
Certainly, for people where the
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I got one of those inverter kits because I needed to use my generator so infrequently that every time it would've been useful it was busted.
The inverter's less convenient but also less likely to Just Not Work.
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Predictability (Score:2)
Does this mean that you could think you've left your car to charge, only to get to it and the battery is all but flat instead? That doesn't sound like a very good selling point.
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California voted themselves more water... (Score:2)
Sensible idea (Score:3)
An EV stores enough energy that it could power a small house or split the load with the house, or cycle between charge / discharge based on usage. It doesn't mean someone is compelled to use it that way though I bet many people would if the feature were there to do it. It would be especially useful if there were an issue with the grid, power cuts or a natural disaster. Maybe they'd plug the car in and charge from solar in the day and discharge at night. Some batteries like LFP have very good charge / discharge cycles so it probably wouldn't have any significant impact on the battery if it were used that way.
Capable is fine (Score:2)
Capable is fine as long as I can turn that sh*t off in a setting onboard.
I'm confused (Score:2)
Aren't electric cars still in need of the power themselves? Such a functionality would imply abundance of power when increasing battery storage is still one of the top problems as far as I know.
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure what the confusion is.
If my car has a 64kwh battery, and my personal habit is to not go below 30% unless I have to, then on any given night I can easily sell 10-15kwh to the grid in the early evening during peak demand and recover that and more between 11PM and 6AM (my current recharge window) no problem. I probably wouldn't even notice until I got my utility bill and saw the line item for how many kwh I sold back to the grid.
If the setup also lets me power the house from the car that's also a huge win. My block is typically the last to get power restored after a major storm so I'd have no problems going to work as normal and charging there, or stopping somewhere for 15-20 minutes, and bringing home some extra electrons. Can't possibly be worse than waiting an hour in line for gasoline to keep a generator running.
=Smidge=
Re: I'm confused (Score:2)
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What's it like, living in constant fear as you do?
If a "personal or natural emergency" crops up, I'll find a way to deal with it. I can not imagine anything both so urgent AND unexpected that it would require me to drive 200+ miles without 30 minutes to spare. If such an insane situation arises I doubt having an ICEV vs an EV would make any meaningful difference.
=Smidge=
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> if they did same to our grid with cruise missile as they did to Ukraine, we'd be utterly fucked if we were dependent on electric cars
It would be a lot harder to take out the entire country's electrical grid than, say, blow up their fuel depots/pipelines and deprive the entire nation of fuel.
Electricity generation is generally diverse and distributed, which makes it naturally more robust. If anything, over-reliance on nuclear power is what did Ukraine in the most since that reduces the number of targets
You'll own nothing and be happy (Score:4, Interesting)
Would be great IFF it's implemented properly (Score:3)
If this kind of system is set up properly, it would be awesome, but there are a few features it must have:
- I have to be able to turn it off, or set a limit below which they can't take power out of the battery
- I have to be able to set my own price WITHOUT limits, based on charge level (like between 90-100%, I'll sell for $0.50/kWh, between 40-50%, I'll sell for $100/kWh)
- Same as above for charging
- We'd need a reliable, automatic, and ubiquitous way to grid-tie cars in almost every parking space. For sure we'd need laws at some level that require apartments to provide infrastructure for this, or it will be useless in many of the the places it's needed most.
- The entire electric grid would need massive intelligence and operational/management upgrades to actually take advantage of it
Unfortunately, I don't see any of that happening in the next few decades.
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No, government mandates do not work that way in consumer items. At best they can simply remove consumer protections related to these sorts of items, i.e. mandate that judicial arm of the government will not pursue any remedies in case of such fires.
Re: increased fire risk? (Score:2)
Executive seeks remedies, judicial interprets.
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Poor phraseology on my part. I didn't mean executive not pursuing cases, but legislative not taking up cases brought by consumers themselves. I.e. civil cases executive is not a party to.
Re: increased fire risk? (Score:2)
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They mandate airbags, seat belts, and emissions controls.
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If the government mandates this, will they be paying for the replacement of the EV battery and charging circuits?
Cause EV's have limited life spans (heck ultimately the battery packs for EV's resemble hundreds of AA-sized Lithum cells instead of larger "Lantern battery" sized cells (6V lantern batteries are basically just 4 1.5v cells in a longer length than D batteries.)
But I'll give the government mandate a chance. Tell EV manufacturers they MUST standardize on ONE replaceable EV battery type. Then you on
Re:increased fire risk? (Score:5, Informative)
If the government mandates this, will they be paying for the replacement of the EV battery and charging circuits?
No, but they won't be forcing you to use this. People will use the feature because they get paid to use the feature. My guess is that it isn't a good long term requirement. In 100 years time there will be much more cheaper storage on the grid with things like advanced flow batteries and solid mass based gravity batteries.
What this does is allows power companies to counteract the heavy increase in electric vehicles having to be used to charge quickly by using other electric vehicles to deliver power to them. If you have no EVs in an area and you add 100 in the next 5 years, you will occasionally need to suddenly charge 20 of them at a time, for example just after everyone gets home from work, which can be more electricity than that area has ever used before. Now if there are 30 of them available to store and deliver charge, you are able to spread that sudden charging load over a much longer time, bring it down to something much closer to the existing grid usage and delay the moment you upgrade the incoming grid to that area whilst you upgrade the grid elsewhere that needs it more.
Power companies should be willing to pay people lots of money for that, which can make it honestly worthwhile.
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They're the wrong batteries for the job.
Perfect is the enemy of good, blah blah blah... I get it. We have these here, and we don't have the perfect batteries for the job distributed perfectly. To borrow an idiom, I just don't think the juice is worth the squeeze. This will require up front increased cost and complexity for the charger and car. The batteries will incur additional duty cycles, shortening their lifetime - already a hot commodity as when the battery inevitably requires replacement, it's hella e
Re:increased fire risk? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ask people in NC if they'd like an alternative power source to the grid right about now.
The scale of EV batteries will *dwarf* grid scale batteries. The F150 EV can run an entire normal sized US house, with AC, for 4 days. A 'regular' EV would be a full day or 2. EVs can be a huge resource to greening the grid and thus greening themselves in the process - even if we only use 10% of an EV charge it could eliminate the need for peaker gas plants entirely.
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Why would there be increased fire risk from bi-directional charging as opposed to normal charging which you are already doing if you have an EV? Do electrons flow differently the other direction?
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The paths and actual devices in the way used in charging and discharging are wildly different, and of course charging versus discharging a large, powerful battery are different, but even ignoring these asymmetries there would more risk even only from the extra charging and discharging that one wouldn't do otherwise.
It's like going to the office and then going back home and to the office a couple times more and asking why it's riskier, they way back isn't the same? First, technically no, and second of course
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Why would there be increased fire risk from bi-directional charging as opposed to normal charging which you are already doing if you have an EV? Do electrons flow differently the other direction?
Charging and discharging are both normal use of the battery; there will be little increase over normal use of the car. However it will happen more often and at home. That's completely fine and very rarely is going to cause a problem but rarely doesn't mean never. Any lithium battery charging should happen away from fire escape routes in a house. Preferably even, charge your car on the driveway or in a garage that's a separate building, not in an internal garage or underground.
There have been a number of nas
Diode (Score:2)
Some may be willing if compensated properly... (Score:2)
It all depends how much they pay and how much your battery costs...
You may even go for it just in the last year before you buy a new car...
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now why would you think you aren't in control for this / being compensated for the use of it? Literally everywhere where such a system has been trialled it has been quite lucrative.
And even if you don't want to opt in to use it you should be happy for the bi-directional charging requirement since it's a minimum requirement to be able to actually use your house off the grid. Imagine sitting in the dark without power knowing you've got a battery big enough to keep your lights on and your meat from spoiling right next to you and can't use it.
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I can't speak to "being compensated for it", but control over these things isn't a given.
a) I'd have to look it up, but I've seen legislation in UK [yes, I'm not in UK but I've seen it fly by anyway] that suggested/required cloud control of car charging, if for good cause [thundering herd turning on charging at midnight et al]
b) in the US my father has an enphase solar power system. Batteries are able to be added, but the enphase system controls the charge/discharge. I've read various forum posts wherein ow
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Water is practically non-compressible so your ballast theory makes little sense to me. Most big water pumps have air ballasts, mainly so they last longer but I've rarely seen them in homes. Cut a house water supply line in two and no water will come out from the house. With a gas line, some gas will come out of the house line because gas is compressible, not water.
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Unless you're closing your main every time you're done using water, they can and do use the residual pressure in your system as a 'ballast' of sorts to balance pressure on your street.
What BS. Unless you have a compressed air reserviour connected to your system that generally won't happen. In fact my water company is very touchy about the possibility of water from properties flowing back into their system (in case it has been contaminated) and require non-return valves on cetain features.
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Re: Hardware hack to bypass this illegal law (Score:2)
Re: Hardware hack to bypass this illegal law (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Hardware hack to bypass this illegal law (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I just don't see how this is supposed to work - I plug my car in because I want it charged in case I need it, full stop. If it should be charged and it's not, that's unacceptable.
Re: (Score:2)
It'll still be charged by the morning. Peak time is the evening, when most people arrive home. So, only a half full battery will be up for grabs then anyway.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Hardware hack to bypass this illegal law (Score:2)