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Comment by bluefirebrand | Hacker News Reader

Love subsidizing public infrastructure directly as well as paying taxes!

I too love living in a society.

It's possible for market forces to drive batteries out of consumer reach, and then you'll own the car and rent the battery. Is that better?

Not even a little bit!

Renting sucks!

I'm all for battery rental because I think battery-swaps instead of recharging is the future. The model already works in a number of other vehicle sectors.

30 minute quick charges are not the future

It'll be interesting to see the progress of Nio over the next few years. In China they have gone all in on battery swapping. Currently (mid 2022 youtube video) swaps take around 10 minutes. Nio claims gen 2 (or 3?) swap stations will cut that to about 3 minutes.

In Europe (mainly Norway atm) Nio offers the choice of owning or leasing/swapping the battery, and an overwhelming majority of customers choose to lease. This in luxury cars. (Naturally they call it Baas, battery as a service.)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nio_Inc.

Battery rentals sounds awful without standardization. Imagine having the power source of your own car being managed and controlled by the original manufacture without any alternatives, and having to buy electricity only from them. Or being unable to get batteries rented to you anymore because the companies decides not to for whatever reason, and with no option to buy a battery pack outright. Like what Tesla is doing with supercharging right now.

Destination charging and At-home charging is going to be the future, not driving to a station to get a fresh battery. Newer cars like the EV6 can also do 10-to-80 in under 20 minutes nowadays.

IMO the right answer is to make energy companies into cooperatives or not-for-profits.

As this gets more popular, I guess net metering will be offered less and less. But you should still get some credit for supplying electricity to the grid.

On the contrary, I would expect to be paid higher rates for the energy I'm supplying to the grid than those I paid to charge it in the first place. Otherwise, what's the point? I'm not going to buy a kilowatt-hour high, then sell it low.

Only way these grid balancing schemes work is if the pricing is real-time, and I have an opportunity to supply marginal peak demand at rates that are higher than what I paid to charge (while still being lower than what peaker plants would cost)

It's worth pointing out that Tesla's Virtual Power Plant in California -- which is used primarily in emergency events -- compensates owners $2/kWh. [1]

Obviously, that rate is not going to be sustainable for routine energy storage, but PG&E is already compensating EV owners a substantial amount for peak electricity needs.

[1] https://electrek.co/2022/09/02/tesla-virtual-power-plant-gro...

> I would expect to be paid higher rates for the energy I'm supplying to the grid than those I paid to charge it in the first place

The Tesla VPP[1] model was 1$ KWH to send it back, better than Net Metering which should have paid only 42c.

However, this was coordinated with PGE to match the lack of production (in advance, which is its own miracle) and unlike a car, the battery doesn't change locations or need to be unplugged at random.

[1] - https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/powerwall/own/tesla-pge...

Gotta make sure those giant energy companies keep making more profit than ever before!

This is the future, like it or not. There’s a lot of energy tied up in batteries, or at least their can be. And until we solve the problem of harnessing intermittent energy sources for when they aren’t generating energy, we aren’t going zero emissions.

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