Tesla adds bidirectional charging capability
electrek.co
electrek.co
Beyond that, electric cars could of course have a huge contribution to the grid, especially with high percentages of solar and wind power. The first step would be to charge the cars dependent on the power supply situation. Loading during peak production and not loading in times with low production or pausing it in times of demand peaks.
The final step would be using them to feed power back to the grid, though this needs to be done carefully, as this would increase the wear on the battery.
Meanwhile, you can buy a generator for as little as $400.
A generator would be ideal but if you already have the car it'll do in a pinch.
You can buy a generator for even less, and it makes for a more robust emergency plan.
But... most people don't. The tool you have is always better than the one you don't. That's why phone cameras (and apps generally) are such a game changer.
If you own a tesla, you own a big battery and it goes where you go.
It would be quite nice to know I had quick, reliable power on tap that is regularly tested just in the normal course of my life.
Failing that, buying aviation gasoline (whether 92UL or 100LL) or using gasoline unpolluted with ethanol, a gasoline stabilizer, and exercising the generator for 2 minutes every half-year is probably time and money savings over cleaning the carb.
Cleaning the carb is also an easy sub-15 minute task from tool drawer open to tool drawer shut the second time you've done it. Give yourself an hour the first time maybe. A bottle of spray carb cleaner will last you a decade in all likelihood. I go through this every other year or so with seasonal equipment (lawnmower and snowblower) and it's easier to clean the carb when needed than to chase down and keep avgas on hand.
Riding mower is the only gas engine I have to mess with. Counting down the years until a more competitive battery riding mower is sold.
I recently got the Ryobi riding mower, which is a glorified golf cart (lead-acid batteries) but works really well as a rough cut. When the blades are in action, it makes the sound of a box fan, and when the blades are off, it's totally quiet.
For the tools that I haven't electrified (my Mantis tiller and Trucut reel mower), I stick with Honda engines. They are a marvel of reliability compared to the others. Only exception is my shredder which has a Kholer engine and does seem to be good too. All these start on first pull after a winter in storage.
* The battery is the same as my drills, giving me added battery capacity for the whole Dewalt system. Vendor lock-in...but they're a solid system. My dad's Dewalt batteries from 2012 finally just hit an unacceptably low battery capacity.
* I clean it after use but have had no other maintenance required.
* It's better for the environment
* It's silent when I'm moving across the yard. Having no idle sound is so nice. I actually value this very highly and am seriously considering buying all electric going forward. Last week I saw a guy mowing the yard with an electric mower. You could hardly hear it from 50 feet away.
As for riding, the deep cycle variants are getting competitive with gas powered but lithium is a ways off. fortunately with most deep cycle models batteries can be purchased in many places.
I have kept an old push gas mower around for high grass and light brush clearing a common area that is not regularly maintained. they still have more oomph than electric mowers.
The surprising win for plug-in electric is a small, cheap single-stage snow blower. For snows in the 1-4” range at under 25°F, it’s hard to beat the speed and convenience. I bought it just as a cleanup tool behind my “real” snowblower (a 2-stage can’t clear down to clean pavement), but I find I’ll often use it as the only blower I use for a light, fluffy snow.
If you think don't think a portable deal is a PITA, try something 10x the size.
My last encounter with it was discovering it was sucking down 1kw of power continuously (for at least 3 months, costing $200+) while trying to keep the coolant heated ... in the middle of the summer ... only to discover it had little-to-no coolant.
I found a family of snakes living in it.
I have no idea on the state of the battery, except for that it has one, so I suspect I'll be replacing that if I ever want to use it.
This is all stuff I don't mind doing, but that cuts into my free time that I'd rather be spending with my family.
All of this will cost you significantly more than a portable gas generator, but with yearly maintenance and monitoring, most generators perform just fine.
I work for an electrical contractor that is a General dealer, we do lots and lots of these.
In any case, it would be an additional option for power failure, whether that is the right approach for a certain situation, depends on that situation.
Mind sharing a company name or two? I do live rather close to the border.
My house in the UK is normally ~150 watts. 20 watts for a laptop, 20 watts for a light, 40 watts for the fridge, and the other 60 goes somewhere I haven't been able to trace.
For example, a fridge-freezer might need only 600 watts to run but will also need up to 2000~2500 watts to start. You'll struggle to find a $400 generator at 2K+ watts capacity, even if that load is only for ten seconds. Maybe "own-brand" generators from e.g. Harbor Freight, but would you trust it?
And that's just for a single appliance, large space heating/cooling systems are even more problematic/spikey. Buying generators for your home is actually more expensive and complicated than many people realize.
You'll quickly find yourself looking at $5K Honda inverter generators w/7K watt capacity even if that seemed overkill at the outset.
It was a small household, no AC, but well pumps, fridges etc and it ran just fine.
But I have a Champion portable 3500 watt continuous (4000 watt starting) that was $397 that has no problem running my refrigerator, a few lights, fans, and a small window AC unit. I run extension cords to the specific appliances I need to power during an outage.
Wait 10 mins for any heat/pressure inside the fridge to even out. Hook the fridge up to the (stopped) generator. Hold your finger on the breaker to force it to engage, even though the generator isn't running yet. then start the generator with the pullcord. It'll be very hard to pull, so you need both hands...
As the generator splutters to life and accelerates, so will the fridge motor. Since both are accelerating slowly, the starting current is far far lower than would happen if the generator was already running when he fridge was connected.
Also works for escalators, vacuum cleaners, blenders, angle grinders, etc.
If the generator doesn't get up to operating speed within ~15 seconds, stop and give up or the generator coils will burn.
You’ve got to also invest effort in taking care of the thing. Oil changes, don’t leave fuel in it, run it every two weeks.
1. You use ethanol free gas. This is more expensive, but it's also the same gas I run in all my lawn equipment so I generally have some around during the summer months. 2. If you plan on letting it sit for awhile use a fuel stabilizer in it.
But yea, a safe thing to do is to run it out of fuel, especially if you have ethanol in it, because that shit will kill the plastic parts in the carburetor if it sits. Once it's out of fuel, run it every month for awhile with some new gas in it just to keep it running and active. You'll want to run it long enough that you burn out any potential water in the oil, so let it get to normal operating temperature and run it for a bit longer and you should be good.
This is also good for electric start models which have a battery or capacitor that will need a regular recharge.
Even running everything as normal probably uses less than a kw on average so electricity outrages would have to last multiple days to be a problem.
Ya, and that's pretty rare in most areas so it seems like a reasonable plan.
I wonder if it's worthwhile doing a small "emergency" scale solar installation or if you may as well just do a full scale system once you've installed the rest of the infrastructure. Looking for opinions...
And this could depend on the user as well. I live in the middle of the city, I really couldn't care less if my car ran out of miles in terms of an emergency situation, perhaps I'd configure it to 10%. My nearest supermarket is a 5 minute walk. There's 1 thousand neighbours, a hundred different stores, 3 police stations and a hospital within a 10 minute walk. Yes I can't drive to work but the power outage isn't likely to have a significant impact. There may be some edge case scenarios. Say I need to pick up kids from school on the other side of the city during a long-lasting power outage, no taxis, friends, teachers, public transport, bicycles etc available to help in these rare situations... but we're really not in the realm of everyday occurrences anymore at this point.
And we shouldn't exaggerate either. A Tesla has 100 kWh. Average household uses about 30kWh per day. And that's not an emergency situation where you ration energy (e.g. not doing a big chunk of laundry once a week). Lighting a room for 10 non-daylight hours a day is about 1 kWh. A full iPhone charge is something like 0.02 kWh? You can charge about 5000 iPhones on a single Tesla charge. Stuff like this, connectivity, refrigeration, lighting, are probably key in an emergency situation. Power outages are not likely a big deal.
Of course there are people who live in a rural area etc and need to be more self-sufficient. Very different story. But for 90% of tesla owners this probably will never be a big deal if capped at some minimum battery level.
Just don't buy it at the last minute (all stores run out in widespread power loss) and expect it to sit for years.
Vandebron (company I worked for) has been doing this since around 2017 or so. https://vandebron.nl/elektrisch-rijden
I'm pretty sure a lot of other companies are offering it by now too.
So I excused myself, ran out into the street, and vigorously flipped it off as I always do, then went back to my table, sat down, and apologized to the waiter for the interruption.
He said that was no problem, he totally understood, he wanted to do that himself, and he scoffed that they all hated the damn eyesore driving and polluting and parking around the neighborhood's narrow streets, and he thought it was ridiculous and asinine that anybody would drive such a terrible car around the city.
Better Call Saul really captured the kind of proud clueless idiotic Hummer owner who had absolutely no idea what people actually thought of him, believed it made him look cool and well hung, and always loved to talk incessantly about his Hummer, as if anybody cared:
Have you ever heard the term "Rolling Coal"? It's an actual "thing" done by the same kind of people who think Hummers make them look cool.
Rolling Coal On Protesters Compilation (BlackLivesMatter, Trump Haters, Tree Huggers):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYPMbLO4pAY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
>Rolling coal is the illegal practice of modifying a diesel engine to increase the amount of fuel entering the engine in order to emit large amounts of black or grey sooty exhaust fumes into the air. Rolling coal is sometimes used as a form of anti-environmentalism. Such modifications may include the intentional removal of the particulate filter. Practitioners often additionally modify their vehicles by installing smoke switches and smoke stacks. Modifications to a vehicle to enable rolling coal may cost from US$200 to US$5,000.
In case of an emergency it's definitely usable but not ideal to call it a mainstream use case.
This is pretty much standard already. It is required that the charger be "smart" in order to qualify for the OLEV grant scheme in the UK. There are also vehicle to grid trials already happening:
https://www.ovoenergy.com/electric-cars/vehicle-to-grid-char...
Only available in the top trim, unfortunately.
Inverters that do this kind of thing are available as third party adapters for most EVs. I can get one for my Volt that runs off the 12v accessory battery hookup in the back.
All it would require is a firmware update and someone to splice a socket onto the end of the charging lead.
The inverters are designed for power and cost efficiency, so I'd say it is unlikely that are capable at outputting anything other than the high-voltage, high-frequency power intended for the electric motor.
The electric motors in most EVs are 3-phase, 400V motors. I expect them to operate at quite high frequencies for efficiency (I'm not sure about that though).
So I expect that 115V/50Hz or 230V/60Hz is just way outside of the design envelope of car inverters.
Third party adapters that do this usually run off the 12v DC accessory battery, which already is hooked up to a DC to DC converter from the car's LiOn battery. Going from 12v DC to 120V AC is obviously already a very solved problem.
So, since it requires retrofitting anyway, it would make much more sense to have an inverter running directly of the high voltage battery.
I guess this all comes back to my original statement: Currently available EVs certainly do not have suitable electronics for 115V or 230V output. It will require hardware retrofit, not just a magical software update to make it work.
that's not how it works; the current is provided by the 12v battery, not the charging inverter.
Now, obviously the charging inverter isn't going to keep up for long, but as far as high current is concerned as 12v car battery can usually provide around 400-700 amps if given the proper leads, with a capacity of (typically) at least 45aH.
that's a lot of juice. even with the inverter inefficiency you should be able to get some fairly major work done if the inverter can supply the amperage -- especially if the EV systems are working alongside to maintain the battery.
>That would be very inefficient
absolutely.
>So, since it requires retrofitting anyway, it would make much more sense to have an inverter running directly of the high voltage battery.
that'd be nice, but I think EV groups would rather you wear out the cheaper replaceable battery with the erroneous usage. Sure, the loads still load the EV battery, but those charge/discharge rates can be more closely monitored or denied all together -- something that'd be harder to implement if the inverter had straight access to the ev primary battery.
Thanks for pointing that out!
It's super handy for boosting other vehicles.
You could use the motor inverters for this, if only they weren't already connected to the motors. You can't have your wheels spinning just because you want to hook up an AC device.
Instead you'd use the charging inverter. Large modern chargers are combinations of MOSFETs, capacitors, and inductors, which are all components where the power flow is reversible. There is also an isolation transformer which the motor drive inverters don't have, and is important for detecting potentially dangerous faults.
This isn't true with say your laptop charger, since it's input stage typically uses diodes rather than MOSFETs for the initial rectification, which means you couldn't run the whole thing in reverse to make AC off your laptop battery, even with new firmware.
For this level of power, you can get a 12V DC to 120V AC adapter that works on pretty much any car.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka9XNNu2uZ4
(Ad shows 220v, as most Outlander's sold have been overseas)
Sounds a lot like the feature set of the hybrid Sierra that GM made for a few years back in the '00s.
> I can bring my table saw etc. out into my field and run it off the car.
And this is more or less the sales pitch they made for it.
It's been a handy feature for me
https://electricrevs.com/2019/11/21/tesla-plans-to-innovate-...
Given that utility scale solar is much cheaper than residential solar, I wouldn’t be surprised if utility scale energy storage is also cheaper than vehicle storage.
Lithium ion is optimized to be light, which is not an requirement for grid storage, which could make use of molten salt, pumped hydro, compressed air, or hydrogen electrolysis.
> “This new research into the potentials of V2G shows that it could actually improve vehicle battery life by around ten percent over a year.”
This requires intelligent usage where the battery state of charge is kept within a limited window, not fully charged or drained.
[1] https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/clean_ener...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421...
For most people, if they really need to drive hundreds of miles unexpectedly, I doubt spending 15 minutes at a high-speed charger to top up the batteries will be an issue.
I live in Norway so not a huge issue, and I expect it to get better. Circle K for example is pushing hard to build high-speed chargers at their stations.
Plus it could be a setting, where people can tell the car to top it up overnight instead of optimize for battery life.
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03605442173068...
[1] https://www.indra.co.uk/v2g, https://www.ovoenergy.com/electric-cars/vehicle-to-grid-char... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
Surely it have to be there but restricted to business, no? I remember seeing laundries and restaurant in small towns
Also, all buildings in the US/Canada have split phase power, not just businesses like laundromats and restaurants. Split phase is one of the three 240 V phases split into two 120 V lines. Electric ranges, dryers, and baseboard heaters in residential buildings commonly use 240 V by utlizing both 120 V lines.
Nearly all transmission and most distribution in the US is done with three phases. Commercial and industrial access to three phase is very common, though this will vary by region/utility.
Residential access is less common, but not that unusual. In some places, you just call up the utility, tell them what equipment you'll be using (i.e. what amperage you'll require) and provided it's enough demand to justify it, they'll run the lines at no or minimal cost.
Residential split phase is usually based on pole-mounted transformers that serve a limited number of customers. They are, themselves, operated off the three-phase distribution.
The USA has literally hundreds if not thousands of power companies. So the answer is "it depends". But it's not very popular for residential. If for no other reason than it gives you 120V/208V, whereas most high power appliances prefer/need 240V.
In my experience you can get three-phase even in small towns for commercial/industrial. For example, I've seen it for water heaters in on-premises laundry rooms in apartment buildings.
Up until "recently", you could even get DC power in NYC. Here's an article about its demise: https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,1541316
HN loves to talk about "technical debt", but software problems pale in comparison to supporting power distribution decisions made 141 years ago. Harder to "refactor" copper cables than it is to rearrange lines of code. Still, they seem to have done a good job updating things while maintaining "backward compatibility".
That likely isn’t given! I haven’t looked into it thoroughly but apparently most of the cost of utility solar is transmission and billing. Australian residential solar is really booming right now because it’s 6-7 cents / kwh. See Saul Griffith of Otherlab’s article: https://medium.com/otherlab-news/green-new-deal-how-much-doe...
Very frustrating that a putatively semi-technical publication like Electra doesn't even attempt this, or ask their interviewees estimates.
Being able, and even encouraged, to fix minor things myself instead of going to a shop for everything would be more than welcome.
But I don't get their "solar panel in every body panel" approach. They say it provides 1.2KW peak but at any point in time only half (or none, in indoor parking) of the car is getting any sun. A thin layer of dust or light scratches will lower the efficiency further. And it also means any side scrape or fender bender would not just scratch the paint but damage the panels, especially on the doors. This makes repairs far more expensive and lowers the charge capability even more. And it looks like it only works with black paint which increases cooling requirements.
I take it more as an emergency option. I'm not sure if the electricity they provide outweighs the added cost, complexity, weight, and perhaps increased consumption.
The repair policy, small battery, large cargo space, and added solar panels might make it a good fit for professionals like plumbers or electricians only driving through the city for interventions and perhaps even leaving the car on the street.
Now that I think of it, what's the MO if you run out of juice in a tesla.. tow?
In one part of it they explain that how the batteries that went to stabilize the grid in Austrailia (and saved them a lot of money immediately, their investment/cost paid back in a few months from my understanding) can be decentralized to all cities around the world with using vehicles as the storage for energy at non-peak hours and source of energy during peak hours - arguably when you've driven your vehicle to the city and where production and office space, businesses serving the area, will be needing more energy.
Electricity costs by me since I switched to time of use are 4x as much on peak vs off. My Tesla costs about $6 for a full charge off peak. It seems like its easy to make (4-1)* 6 = $18 a day off of this the car as it home. Let's say $10 after conversion loss and battery wear, etc.
Once you buy any other hardware needed (I think they are $2k-4k now), this seems like free money. Worst case, car is home during peak 2 days a week and $10/day gain, $4k system: 2.5 year payback period and then $223/month income Best case, car is home during peak 5 days a week and $15/day gain $2k system: 26 week payback period and then $322/month income.
The best case over 10 years is worth $38,700.
However the biggest opportunity here is probably for Tesla to lease the battery to consumers. The car will be discounted significantly if you can plug in 3 days a week near peak usage.
Apparently the capability is already there!
I guess this can be useful for a lot of things.
https://en.xiaopeng.com/p7/configuration.html
(Also a great looking car imho)
Otherwise this "technology" could indeed be quite useful to lessen load. I would have thought that maybe providing local power to your home instead of buffering the whole network would maybe be more practical.
And feeding power to the "grid" is actually quite straightforward, at least for the customer's equipment. In effect, you can think of the 60Hz oscillations of AC voltage as being like an enormous rotating crankshaft that each customer is tightly coupled to. Correctly applying a "torque" to that system automatically distributes the energy where it's needed.
In contrast, de-coupling and re-coupling one house with the grid on demand is a lot more complex: you lose the stabilizing effect of the grid's enormous "inertia", and you have to carefully synchronize the phases when reestablishing the connection.
This is critical for when I take a long road trip, and I expect that I have a full charge when I leave.
What I think makes sense is temporally stopping charging for the 10 seconds it takes for a generator to spin up. But these kind of events should be so infrequent that they have no noticeable impact to my ability to start a road trip with a full charge.
Then don't buy a Tesla, because the default factory setting is to charge to 90% to reduce battery degradation.
(Personally I like that feature, I wish I could configure my phone to make the battery last a year longer.)
I'm referring to the electric company discharging my battery without my knowledge.
Just think of what will happen the first time someone plugs in their car overnight and then the battery isn't full in the morning.