The best thing is that EV owners can be paid during the day for providing demand and paid again in the evening and at night for supplying.
On the home side, the hardware is largely there. The charger I'm buying and many others support it - though many need a future software update. On the vehicle side though, it's very inconsistent; there are only a few vehicles that support it and even for those, what my installer told me is that the manufacturer warranties typically either void the warranty entirely if V2(G/H) is used or harshly limit the amount of energy that can be used. They're concerned that it will lead to excess wear on the battery, the main component of an EV.
And I think I agree with them. With current battery technology, I don't think using EVs as a grid-scale storage system for renewables is viable. For grid-scale or residential storage, you want a battery that can be as heavy and physically large as it needs to be but it needs to deal with a lot of charge/discharge cycles. Your best option here right now is LiFePO. For the kind of EV people are generally willing to buy right now, you need to cram as much range into the car as you can, which means the battery needs to be as energy-dense as possible and charge/discharge cycles are less of a concern. That means LiPo.
I think the most realistic use of EVs for grid-scale integration is what they're calling "virtual plant", where they're treated like a separate source of energy that the grid can tap into in exceptional situations.
IIRC the most popular EV battery technology today is LFP.
But for EVs, the vast majority in EU/US is NCM/NCA. China is about 6 to 4 LFP to NCM, but China's EV market is about 2/3+ of the global EV share.
They’d wear out roads less, use less resources to make, be safer to others in crashes, etc. I dislike the trend of increasingly larger vehicles just to move a single person around 87% of the time.
I'm not so sure about less resources as the majority of the car is still required only smaller battery.
It allows distributing load across more cells. It allows using cells with a lower C-rating, which typically have better energy density, and longer lifespan.
Distributing load reduces energy loss during charging, makes cooling less demanding, while allowing higher total charging power, which means adding more range per minute.
The excess capacity makes it easier to avoid fully changing and discharging cells. This prolongs life of NMC cells.
(but I agree that cars are an inefficient mode of transport in general)
Seems a bit early to come to this conclusion, but I would also suspect, that the value of a parking garage full of EVs is not in providing energy to the grid but as a large scale consumer for load shaping.
How would this work? Who is then paying for the solar?
Wholesale prices went negative about 200 million times: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-30/trapped-r... (https://archive.is/nFsOk)
Regional clusters emerged, for example, in the Permian Basin in western Texas, and in Kansas and western Oklahoma in the Southwest Power Pool (SPP), negative prices accounted for more than 25% of all hours. Negative electricity prices result either from local congestion of the transmission system leading supply to exceed demand locally or due to system-wide oversupply. :https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/plentiful-electricity-turns...
Edit: This is called curtailment. It is now ~20% and increasing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtailment_(electricity)
I agree though, if the typical case is negative pricing, during solar peak, it doesn't make sense to build more solar capacity. One trend is to have solar panels oriented toward morning or evening sun rather than midday sun, less kWh generated overall, but possibly more valuable kWh due to time of day.
If you get enough grid accessible battery capacity, during normal conditions, the price ceiling falls and the floor raises. Of course, when all the batteries are full or empty, the price can go negative again.
I’m down about 18% capacity after 4 years of owning my current EV. It’s still plenty for my needs but I would be very disappointed if I saw this capacity drop much sooner or if it drops much more.
A replacement would be ~$15k and the cost of replacing the car would be a lot greater.
I’m very much digging the current strategy of grid-tied batteries and the myriad of companies working to re-use battery packs for grid batteries.
0. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/07/heres-one-way-we-know-t...
And if you do replace that battery, and you can't get a huge discount from selling the old one, then slap on a $500 inverter and install it at your house to keep using for the next 20 years.
Basically you would haul (hopefully cheap) electricity form your work, to your home to use it in the evening.
I’ll believe that when I see it.