Please note on the Solar City Web site a curious photo. There are around 100 homes participating in a pilot project. They have PV (and maybe an EV as this is in SoCal) AND a battery pack labeled Tesla in the garage to use for when demand is high. Not exactly V2G but H2G (house to grid). The future has gone roaring past at an increasing red shift.
-------- Original message -------- From: Lee Hart <[email protected]> Date:12/31/2013 2:04 PM (GMT-05:00) To: Electric Vehicle Discussion List <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [EVDL] EVLN: V2G project pays plugin owners for eating their pack cycle-life Peri Hartman wrote: > There's been a number of times this topic - using EVs to buffer the grid - > but a fundamental question keeps lurking in my mind. With our current > technology, each charge-discharge cycle takes a nibble of battery life > away. Without some sort of compensation to the EV owner, I don't see him > agreeing to helping the grid. This is my concern as well. Nobody trusts the utilities. Building a peaking plant is very expensive. If they can trick consumers into buying the batteries for them, and then use them for little or nothing, they will do it! It's going to be just about impossible to prove that the utilities shortened (or didn't shorten) your EV's battery life. It won't get decided on an objective basis -- it will fall into the murky world of politics, lawyers, spin-doctors, lying-with-statistics, etc. Let's knock it down to the personal level. Would you rather buy a special generator, just to deal with blackouts that happen a few times a year? Or, would you rather be able to use the EV you've already got to power your home during a blackout? The EV option is clearly the most attractive: It's cleaner, cheaper, quieter, and more convenient. The utilities face the same situation; but they have a third option. Let your neighbor buy the generator, and then use *his* power! Maybe slip him $1 for gas, and ignore his cost for the generator and its maintenance, noise, and pollution. It's sad, because each side has something to gain. It could be a win-win situation for both the utilities *and* EV drivers. What if... the utilities got into the battery rental business. They buy the battery packs, and get a better deal than we can due to volume. It creates a "standard" battery pack/UPS, that carmakers as well as hobbyists can use. We rent the pack from the utilities. We get a cheaper pack, and they get the right to use it for peak power. If they use it too much and shorten its life, they pay the consequences. Since it is *their* battery pack, they could include safeguards against running it dead, overcharging it, etc. that the typical consumer would otherwise ignore. Your monthly electric bill could even include KWH usage from your EV. Note that nothing says this standard battery/UPS has to go in an EV. There are probably 1000 times more UPS out there than EVs. Even people that don't have an EV could have one in their garage, to provide peaking power or AC power during blackouts. -- We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. -- Carl Sagan -- Lee Hart -- See my Xmas projects at www.sunrise-ev.com/projects.htm _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20131231/fd7842dc/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
