Bowen says that agreement on new standards means that EV owners will be able to use vehicle to grid technology - effectively using their cars as batteries on wheels - by the end of the year.
This is purely a way to sell more electric cars.
It is also completely pointless.
Solar comes in during the day: cars are not parked/connected when the solar is coming in.
People would be better off buying an off-the-shelf home battery or having a professional Solar Installer build a battery array. Even a top-shelf $10,000 Tesla PowerWall is cheaper than the cheapest EV.
There is a pretty high percentage of cars parked at home during the day. I recall seeing something along the lines of 40-60%. Edit: ABS 2021 says 53% only drove. That number decreased from 62% in 2016.
I thought the idea was if you bought an EV, you used your EV as the battery storage so you didn’t need to have both EV and separate battery storage.
ie, it assumes you have/will have an EV to do car stuff, not that you buy the EV specifically for battery storage.
I was parked outside work, waiting to come inside :).
I will admit that there isn’t much reason for me to have a car, except for the fact that I take my vehicle off-road on weekends, it would be pretty pointless me having a car to myself.
I can carpool with colleagues or family to work and I can purchase groceries locally. I can also catch public transport.
I pay a large chunk of my income for the privilege of owning a car; registration, servicing, fuel and repayments add up quickly; the money would be much better spent on other things.
For the cost of my car, I could buy 4 PowerWalls and some solar panels; another for our house (which would reduce our grid-reliance to zero), a couple for my Sisters house (which would do the same for them) and one for my mother’s house.
My car is not a luxury car but is a luxury expense.
You would have an individual V2G charger for each parking spot. Future designs could potentially handle multiple spots per charger but I don’t think there are many such designs yet.
Bigger issue is getting strata committees to actually agree to install any at all
Yeah, for sure. There will no doubt be some serious anti-EV, and the usual anti-anything people to try and convince too.
Also, most apartment car parks are underground or covered, you would only be capable of using the car as a source of power, and not as a store of newly generated power. Unless an apartment block put solar on their roof, which opens up another can of worms about who gets how much power and when. Messy.
Your parked car could be used as a kind of day trader for power. Use power from your car at peak, charge at lowest?
If you haven’t got your own solar source of power (eg solar on roof), buy an electric car that has solar cells on it? The only one that I’m aware of that gives practical daily range is the Aptera, but you’re not looking for daily range in this case. Meh, I don’t think solar cells on a footprint the size of a car are efficient enough to power an apartment…
Lol, people will be fighting over car spots on the street where there are no trees or shade so they can charge up their cars while they go to work.
I’m still struggling to see benefits of V2G in an apartment. There’s only that ‘day trading’ thing I mentioned above, which idk if it’s significant enough to do.
The idea isn’t to use V2G just to store power for the building, but to act as storage for the entire grid. So instead of building large battery farms to store power, you use EVs are the batteries, which reduces infrastructure costs and can accelerate the transition.
Obviously you’d want to have other grid level energy storage too, and some incentive to get owners to allow their EVs to be such a storage device, but thats the idea.
Transferring energy into and out of an EV does result in non-negligible energy loss.
Having a dedicated, stationary battery is a much more space and resource efficient way to provide a grid buffer. Pb-Acid and Iron-air batteries are much better for the environment than Lithium, and much more stable. They are much heavier, but still lighter than a Lithium battery powered EV.
Common sense prevail? What is going on in the world?
The benefits for home owners are obvious, but I wonder if/how apartments etc would work?
This is purely a way to sell more electric cars. It is also completely pointless.
Solar comes in during the day: cars are not parked/connected when the solar is coming in.
People would be better off buying an off-the-shelf home battery or having a professional Solar Installer build a battery array. Even a top-shelf $10,000 Tesla PowerWall is cheaper than the cheapest EV.
There is a pretty high percentage of cars parked at home during the day. I recall seeing something along the lines of 40-60%. Edit: ABS 2021 says 53% only drove. That number decreased from 62% in 2016.
I thought the idea was if you bought an EV, you used your EV as the battery storage so you didn’t need to have both EV and separate battery storage.
ie, it assumes you have/will have an EV to do car stuff, not that you buy the EV specifically for battery storage.
If a car is not being driven, there is no point having a car.
I hope you’re not posting while driving your car!
Lol it’s only not used to drive while at work. What about having a car to drive for when you’re not working?
I was parked outside work, waiting to come inside :).
I will admit that there isn’t much reason for me to have a car, except for the fact that I take my vehicle off-road on weekends, it would be pretty pointless me having a car to myself.
I can carpool with colleagues or family to work and I can purchase groceries locally. I can also catch public transport.
I pay a large chunk of my income for the privilege of owning a car; registration, servicing, fuel and repayments add up quickly; the money would be much better spent on other things.
For the cost of my car, I could buy 4 PowerWalls and some solar panels; another for our house (which would reduce our grid-reliance to zero), a couple for my Sisters house (which would do the same for them) and one for my mother’s house.
My car is not a luxury car but is a luxury expense.
You would have an individual V2G charger for each parking spot. Future designs could potentially handle multiple spots per charger but I don’t think there are many such designs yet.
Bigger issue is getting strata committees to actually agree to install any at all
Yeah, for sure. There will no doubt be some serious anti-EV, and the usual anti-anything people to try and convince too.
Also, most apartment car parks are underground or covered, you would only be capable of using the car as a source of power, and not as a store of newly generated power. Unless an apartment block put solar on their roof, which opens up another can of worms about who gets how much power and when. Messy.
Your parked car could be used as a kind of day trader for power. Use power from your car at peak, charge at lowest?
If you haven’t got your own solar source of power (eg solar on roof), buy an electric car that has solar cells on it? The only one that I’m aware of that gives practical daily range is the Aptera, but you’re not looking for daily range in this case. Meh, I don’t think solar cells on a footprint the size of a car are efficient enough to power an apartment…
Lol, people will be fighting over car spots on the street where there are no trees or shade so they can charge up their cars while they go to work.
I’m still struggling to see benefits of V2G in an apartment. There’s only that ‘day trading’ thing I mentioned above, which idk if it’s significant enough to do.
The idea isn’t to use V2G just to store power for the building, but to act as storage for the entire grid. So instead of building large battery farms to store power, you use EVs are the batteries, which reduces infrastructure costs and can accelerate the transition.
Obviously you’d want to have other grid level energy storage too, and some incentive to get owners to allow their EVs to be such a storage device, but thats the idea.
Batteries are heavy, even lithium batteries.
Transferring energy into and out of an EV does result in non-negligible energy loss.
Having a dedicated, stationary battery is a much more space and resource efficient way to provide a grid buffer. Pb-Acid and Iron-air batteries are much better for the environment than Lithium, and much more stable. They are much heavier, but still lighter than a Lithium battery powered EV.
That makes sense, but those incentives better be good for you to be putting any wear and tear on my battery that has limited cycles.