Used EV Batteries Could Power Tomorrow's Solar Farms
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
But even when they are still in the car they can be off use to the grid and provide many GW of on demand buffers for both energy shortages and over supply.
There recently have been negative energy rates where electricity producers preferred to not shut down expensive to restart plants and instead ended up incentivizing people to charge their car batteries.
This doesn't even have to be a huge amount of energy per car. Even a single kwh of capacity per day would quickly add up if there's millions of vehicles plugged into the grid.
The same technology can allow the same users to power their house for several days using just a single car and allow them to leverage their own solar panels, get payed to soak up excess grid energy (e.g. at night when wind mills continue producing), deal with grid outages, resell their own solar excess when demand is high, etc.
With million mile batteries, people'll be less concerned about breaking their batteries; especially if they get to spend less on electricity. With leased battery business models, this could be simply part of the deal.
Basically high wind production with sunlight results in negative pricing. The difference between the 4-8pm "peak" is very high between the rest of the day too.
There is an enormous business opportunity here. Prices are going from -3p/kWh to 25p in the same 24 hours nearly weekly.
It's 2020, I wish there was a way for me to somehow schedule my washing machines and dishwasher to run easily other the internet at times of negative energy. Heck why isn't this possibility grid controlled yet? Having a large surplus of consumer appliances controlled by the grid could be a greener easier solution than relying on batteries.
Alas, I still can't even control my washing machine over the internet. If I could, the appliance is expensive and using proprietary 'dumb' apps.
Certain events such a sport games or TV shows could drive the price up. That could be predicted but requires more than a timer.
For a heat pump from air the efficiency depends a lot on the outside temperature. So the best time to run it might not be when electricity is cheapest.
However, high prices are unbounded, and I think that it's easier to respond to those signals than to respond to a signal from low selectivity prices.
In California (and maybe other places?), companies like OhmConnect are facilitating demand response. A third party bundles together lots of homes' potential drops in demand, then sells that drop in demand back to the utility when they would otherwise use expensive and highly polluting leaker plants.
This gets around several market challenges: 1) consumers don't trust utilities and won't believe that they are acting in their best interest. 2) OhmConnect can advertise the environmental benefits to consumers, something that utilities are loathe to do, and 3) it lessens management load on the utilities, who are not used to dealing with data challenges like that, 4) a third party is much more likely to be able to experiment with UX (eg gamificaion) than a staid, highly-regulated utility company.
The contract looks something like "You pay 10% less per kWh, but in return we get to turn off the power to this part of your warehouse for up to one hour per day". It works for places that have, say, big industrial freezers - set the thermostat half a degree lower and the outages aren't a problem.
Let me present a counter case: Latvia. Quite a few people choosing a dynamic hourly rate for their electricity with pricing set based on spot market rates. Lots of ordinary people living hand to mouth on tiny wages. They do care about a few euros difference at the end of the month. It makes a real difference to them.
My dishwasher can control me over the internet. I can give it access to my Wifi. Then it will talk to https://www.home-connect.com/ . I can then install an app so it can tell me to buy more dishwasher tabs for it. Not going to happen.
I would like to root my dishwasher.
I see a lot of useful tools on van and boat sites, around managing non traditional batteries and interfacing them with solar panels + engine alternators. Off to a cleaner and decoupled from grid future! Micro grids everywhere.
And it's not even a matter of air vs water, is between being actively thermal managed or not.
I plan to add a cheap 360 camera system from aliexpress and run it off the aux battery mainly for security monitoring around the vehicle, the standard backup cams on any 2017+ vans are decent. If I get to it, it'd be interesting to get a Pi in there with OBD breakout to read in car data / gimmick.
And allegedly LFP is improving density further based on some chinese rumors about CATL's advances in LFP for next year's batteries.
But there's so many rumors...
Downsides are lower energy density and higher internal resistance, so it's probably not the battery they would want in one of those super fast Roadsters with the huge range.
https://www.johancruijffarena.nl/default-showon-page/amsterd...
So we can use them in the car to charge when there is excess renewables, and then use the second-life batteries in large stationary storage installations to do the same. Tying into the different grid systems is a bit of a nightmare with everyone having their own standards unfortunately, otherwise it would be easier to roll these out more often.
(I am speaking for myself, not Mobility House).
Think of batteries like hard drives in a hyperscale datacenter.
It's for inverting electricity at grid-scale, not referring to a household "inverter". Still quite interesting.
The IQ inverter is for household and small commercial scale. For example, I would happily team with a few neighbors to cache, say 85kWHr at each home.
Compare lead-acid recycling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxCFDWMPu38
To lithium recycling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxCFDWMPu38
Ideally, you'd be able to 'refresh' the electrode material inexpensively. This involves removing lithium plating from the anode, and oxidized electrolyte from the cathode. This isn't a mature process, and it won't be until battery chemistries and manufacturing get more standardized and scale up. But there aren't strong theoretical reasons why this should be uneconomical. These issues take place at the surface of the electrode grains, and can likely be solved with bulk treatment. It's still going to require a fair amount of work to harvest the electrode material, but materials cost is a large percentage of battery production.
Once the industry figures out the problem of scaling, this could be very impactful.
Sure SLA batteries are a mess environmentally, but if you can keep them out of the landfill for a few years this way, why not?
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/06/tesla-cto-jb-straubel-redwoo...
If memory serves, you have to charge a battery to measure this, which takes time and therefore space.
So to get the cost to be cheaper than just building a new pack (possibly using binned new packs), this all has to be pretty automated. If they bin new cells (if they don't maybe they should!), then most of this hardware would already exist. Which would mean you only need to talk about how to make a robot to desolder battery packs. Given how crap my soldering skills are this feels like a potentially hard or at least expensive problem.
Look at the Battery Recycling section.
That is very cool, and that was done during the Ghosn pump/dump era no less; as a long time Nissan enthusiast, which then turned being a technician for Nissan for a period I knew Nissan was involved in tons of new tech: Radar based Cruise control was available back in 2002, CVT transmissions, they were one of the first to adopt throttle by wire, and if you've even been in a GTR its more video game than it was car, especially when it first came out.
So these battery's being up-cycled is not so much a surprise, either.
I only recently, like a year ago or so, found out they had Aerospace division since 1953 and even had a facility in Mountain View.
To think this the same company that was insolvent in the crash of the Japanese Bubble era of the 90s, they really did try to expand into to so many sectors, much like Yamaha, but didn't really get the same notoriety because of it. In fact most non car people, especially in Japan, will recall their real estate holdings collapse alongside the Nikkei index, which was really their core business.
It's dark days for Nissan right now, and as a die-hard Nissan fan boy I hope they separate from Renault and make it out of this as their transition to a more EV lineup manufacturer is looking promising, as does their I2V technology but it shows how first-mover advantage can be destroyed from within by short-sighted crooks like Carlos Ghosn (that is a wanted fugitive in Japan after fleeing in some crazy movie-like scenario with ex green berets [1]) and the complicate delivery systems and dealerships that created horrible incentives.
1: https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2020/06/09/former-g...
Nissan planned the project well in advance of Tesla's PowerWall, but Tesla beat them to market (and brand/name recognition advantage) by building PowerWalls with new stock batteries, whereas Nissan waited for enough car batteries to return second hand from the market before starting their XStorage brand and so far as they have admitted have never sold a new battery in an XStorage.
(It's an interesting factor to consider that Nissan had to wait so long to start their second hand battery use systems. As much, sometimes warranted, flak as Leafs get for battery degradation, the batteries overall have lasted generally longer in "first use" directly in cars than Nissan at first projected, even despite higher sales than Nissan projected for the Leaf. It fits other statistics that EVs are kept by first owners for longer than average compared to other cars, and in general are lasting longer as cars than early EV skeptics predicted.)
I am the tech team lead at Mobility House (the company behind taking the batteries and doing the real time control in that setup) for that particular project. https://www.mobilityhouse.com/int_en/magazine/press-releases...
It's actually a really cool setup that allows us to take in excess solar (that isn't used onsite) to charge the batteries, the batteries actually act as backup power for the event days (that AFC Ajax plays). When not needed they provide frequency containment (grid stabilization to prevent brownouts+blackouts) for the European electrical grid at large (on days where it is financially viable to do so).
If you have any questions I would be more than happy to discuss more :)
Also, is the system also charging up when there's negative electricity prices like there were recently? And get payed to take in power?
I find myself thinking of lead acid battery recycling: https://www.energy-storage.news/news/lead-acid-batteries-are...
Chances are the battery is available because the car was written off in an accident, rather than because the batteries are dead.
Metals such as nickel, cobalt, aluminium and copper make up nearly half of the bill of materials in a li-ion cell.
The idea with better batteries is that solar stations could provide their own excess capacity storage.
But battery tech is still not good enough for large scale storage. The break down chemically and are not easy to refurbish. The only real "battery" that sorta works is the Racoon Mountain hydro station, which uses extra electricity to pump water into a resistor and then drains it for power during high peaks.
We should be building these all over the country, but they don't really provide that much capacity; plus you kinda destroy the environment around an entire hill and have to build it back up afterwards (Racoon Mtn does have really good mountain biking trails now).
But this is just more fluff to green wash technology that really cannot ever truly replace hydrocarbons. We really need to minimize and reduce energy consumption. That's probably never going to happen.
It might not be literal truth, but it’s close enough to be understood — like saying “this food comes from a supermarket” even though the food actually comes from five different farms in different countries.