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I don't see how utility scale batteries could ever be a good idea when you can get dual use out of EV batteries. Not only can you dispatch demand (smoothly scal

I don't see how utility scale batteries could ever be a good idea when you can get dual use out of EV batteries. Not only can you dispatch demand (smoothly scale up and down charging to suit the grid), you can use the cars as storage and inject power in to the grid. If the Model 3 battery is claimed to be good for 1 million miles, it is more than capable of fulfilling this role over the lifetime of the car. A high end Tesla contains enough energy to power the average US household for 40 hours last time I did the calculation. There's no question we have to transition to EVs, and battery capacity is by far the bottleneck in this transition. A grid powered by renewables is going to need a massive amount of storage. Any policy that artificially silos batteries to only be used for only one of the two requirements is a bad policy.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
Because batteries will get cheaper rapidly as we start making millions of EVs per year, negating the requirement (but not the capability) of using EVs as distributed storage (instead of simply as distributed load).
- reitzensteinm 8y ago
  Battery production is going to be a bottleneck for a very long time. There are 1.2 billion vehicles in the world. Renewables are already starting to produce enough power that storage is already a necessity - famously in the case of the Tesla SA battery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve Separately subsidizing EVs and grid storage in this circumstance is insane. You're only getting half the use out of the very expensive batteries you're purchasing today. At some point, batteries are cheap and plentiful enough that you don't have to attempt dual use, but at that point you're not subsidizing them any more, so that's not relevant to your original argument or my response to it. (Though my wording was poor; the "ever" was meant to refer specifically to subsidies on grid scale storage, which I believe will never make sense.)

toomuchtodo 8y ago

Because batteries will get cheaper rapidly as we start making millions of EVs per year, negating the requirement (but not the capability) of using EVs as distributed storage (instead of simply as distributed load).

reitzensteinm 8y ago
Battery production is going to be a bottleneck for a very long time. There are 1.2 billion vehicles in the world. Renewables are already starting to produce enough power that storage is already a necessity - famously in the case of the Tesla SA battery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve Separately subsidizing EVs and grid storage in this circumstance is insane. You're only getting half the use out of the very expensive batteries you're purchasing today. At some point, batteries are cheap and plentiful enough that you don't have to attempt dual use, but at that point you're not subsidizing them any more, so that's not relevant to your original argument or my response to it. (Though my wording was poor; the "ever" was meant to refer specifically to subsidies on grid scale storage, which I believe will never make sense.)