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This is simple. Musk just needs to throw 1% of his AI talent at optimizing charging times via realtime grid negotiating and nobody will need to even think abou

This is simple. Musk just needs to throw 1% of his AI talent at optimizing charging times via realtime grid negotiating and nobody will need to even think about this. Cars will turn into one of our most valuable assets as they help stabalize the grid by being both sinks when energy is plentiful and sources when it's not. There are certain problems we all need to think about, but this is not one of them. It will effectively solve itself because all the incentives are aligned.

nightski 4y ago
So electric car owners need to just cover all the battery wear out of their own pockets? Wouldn't that make electric cars even more expensive since battery replacement will be needed more often?
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Batteries are lasting far longer than anticipated. Anecdotally, I have fast DC charged my 2018 Model S (100kw pack) for the majority of the 100k miles I’ve put on the car, and only have 7% battery degradation. Others are seeing similar longevity well into hundreds of thousands of miles. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32758881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32758881 https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/08/01/electric-car-batteries-lasting-longer-than-predicted-delays-recycling-programs/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/08/01/electric... https://cleantechnica.com/2022/03/29/tesla-founder-ex-cto-says-ev-batteries-will-last-15-years/ https://cleantechnica.com/2022/03/29/tesla-founder-ex-cto-sa...
  - nightski 4y ago
    That doesn't really matter. If you own a resource, and I utilize it, are you going to let me do so without compensating you in some fashion? If so I'll take you up on that offer. I have no problems with encouraging people to charge at certain times. Using personal batteries for energy storage and draw without any compensation however seems to cross a line. Your argument seems to me like justifying petty theft because in the end it doesn't really affect the store owner.
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      I think your position comes from a lack of understanding of energy markets and pricing mechanisms. Powerwall owners are paid roughly $2/kwh when called upon to support the grid in California. Compensation is absolutely available for discharging and charging at specific times. If you’ll charge me a fraction of the cost to charge off peak or when there are excess renewables on the grid, and you’ll pay a premium to pull that power back if the car is parked and I can set a minimum state of charge to maintain, yeah, I’ll take that deal any day. I’ll come out ahead in almost all cases based on EV battery longevity.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - nightski 4y ago
        If I am being compensated a premium $/kwh for each kwh drawn then we have no problem. Otherwise I'll just not offer my battery by disconnecting it when not charging.
        toomuchtodo 4y ago
        Of course! No one is forcing you to, these programs are voluntary.
- peter422 4y ago
  Presumably the cost savings from charging when rates are the cheapest and potential incentives for feeding into the grid when necessarily will make up for that.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  The Tesla Model 3 SR ships with a battery expected to last ~750,000 km. If you had that vehicle, how much would you need to get paid to compensate for reducing that range by 1km? I'd accept 0.1 cents, how about you?
  - kadoban 4y ago
    That seems low, that'd be $750 to reduce it to 0? But yeah there should be a way to choose a fair price or just let the market decide.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      But I'm never going to get 750,000 km out of a model 3, the suspension or other moving parts are going to give out first. So I can sell ~500,000 km worth of battery range without losing any actual range.
goethes_kind 4y ago
Yeah, except now each parking spot at work needs its own power outlet.
- function_seven 4y ago
  That would be the best part. Cover all that parking with solar panels, use those panels to partially or completely offset the charging demands of the cars parked under them. An average parking space has enough room for (napkin math...) 6kW of solar output. That's more than enough to offset a level 2 charger while the driver of that car is in the office. And it leaves the car cooler at the end of the say. Costs a bit upfront, sure. But I think we'll continue to see these costs come down, and the incentive to build out parking lot solar arrays will increase as the grid has to adapt to the demands we're placing on it.
  - drdec 4y ago
    >Cover all that parking with solar panels This would help in many cases, but parking garages are a thing, even in my relatively small city. We would need a solution for them as well.
    - kadoban 4y ago
      Putting solar on the roof (adding a roof if necessary) should help a lot. You'd run into issues where it won't scale with garage height of course, but most garages aren't that tall anyway (at least in my area).
- chipsa 4y ago
  Future is SAE J2954 (aka Witricity): you have a wireless charging pad under each parking spot. No screwing with power plugs, just park and go. This isn't ideal for fast charging, but for the slower charging you'd get from being somewhere for 6-8 hours, it's perfectly fine. You still need to run power to every parking spot, but now it's embedded in the ground, and you don't have to worry about someone just coming around with cable cutters and stealing it.
gpm 4y ago
Tesla already has a beta of this with their "powerpacks" (batteries for houses instead of cars): https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/powerwall/own/california-virtual-power-plant https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/powerwall/own/californi...
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
Musk does not control power utilities, nor what they charge, nor what power they have access to at a given time, nor the load of the rest of the grid outside of Telsa vehicles. > Cars will turn into one of our most valuable assets as they help stabalize the grid by being both sinks when energy is plentiful and sources when it's not. In fantasy land, sure. In reality there are a lot more players with a lot more variables and most of them don't give a shit about some grand unified solution through cars. Just because in theory there is one great universal solution to one problem (demand for power) doesn't mean everyone is going to work together to achieve it. We have more than enough agricultural land around the world to feed the entire planet every day, yet millions of people go hungry every day. Just because a solution is possible doesn't mean it happens. By the way: if we had fewer cars, we wouldn't have this huge demand for additional power. The simpler solution is to replace cars with public transit and micromobility. Then we would pollute less to make the cars, require fewer chips and rare earth metals, require less power generation and distribution, require fewer people to sink huge amounts of money into car ownership, free up cities for more pedestrian and bike traffic, provide easier access to jobs and education for poor rural areas, and have 30,000 fewer fatalies in the US every year. But instead let's just buy more cars and build more nuke plants to power them and expand the grid because I want my own zoom-zoom machine!
alexb_ 4y ago
If there's excess demand at night, you increase the price at night. If there's excess supply in the morning/afternoon, you lower the price. It's not complicated, and the problem fixes itself. You don't need AI to simulate what groups of people making rational, independent decisions do themselves. That's how you get cars that won't charge because "AI says so", similar to how all of these dogshit smart thermostats can be completely shut off from heating if "AI says so".
- gpm 4y ago
  The car needs to charge for 4 hours overnight (say, before 7am). It's currently 9pm and the price is currently 7c/kwh, should it charge or not? That question is obviously underspecified, you can only answer it by knowing whether or not the price will be below 7c/kwh for 4 of the remaining hours in the night. You answer the question with a predictive model of the price, and you build that predictive model with "AI" because that's how we build all our best predicitve models. AI doesn't get to say "you can't charge", you get to say "and I'll delegate the question of which 4 hours to charge during to the AI". > similar to how all of these dogshit smart thermostats can be completely shut off from heating if "AI says so". I assume you're referring to the instance where texas power companies remotely increased the temperature on peoples thermostats? That's not AI, or even remotely related to AI, that's humans controlling other peoples stuff without permission. That risk exists whether or not you use machine learning models to predict electricity prices. https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/texas/remote-thermostat-adjustment-texas-energy-shortage/285-5acf2bc5-54b7-4160-bffe-1f9a5ef4362a https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/texas/remote-thermos...
- 3pt14159 4y ago
  You don't get what I'm saying. I'm saying market dynamics (ie, setting the price lower when the grid needs less power) plus the inevitable AI that will game it to everyones advantage will solve this problem automatically. There is no reason to worry about this. This is trivial AI.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Tesla calls this "Virtual Power Plant" and there's a talk by a couple of the software devs online somewhere. Found it: https://youtu.be/ggdYts4muu0 https://youtu.be/ggdYts4muu0 Some other people have mentioned that you just need to vary the price, but the price is set by bids from providers. Code that can learn demand patterns and integrate weather forecasts will let Tesla bid lower and so earn more money in the market while also lowering energy costs for everyone.
sambeau 4y ago
This is not simple. The batteries in cars can be used to help load-balance but they cannot offer grid-scale storage. The following is back-of-napkin figures but there are close enough to make the point. Take a country the size of the UK. It currently uses 1600 TWh a year. Once fully-electric it should need around 1100 TWh a year, so 3 TWh a day. The UK, despite being a windy place, still has weeks without wind once or twice a year. We had a week without wind power in the middle of August this year and had to generate 60% of our power using gas. A windless week with a frost snap is something you often see in January and February. A cold week, with everyone using electric heating (when solar power does basically nothing) is why the UK might need TWh of stored energy to be secure without fossil fuels. 7 days at 3 TWh is 20 TWh. A big home Tesla Powerwall can store 14kWh and if run at full power it will be empty in 4 hrs. You'd need over a billion to store 20TWh. In the UK an average home currently uses around 10kW of electricity a day, but also has a car, a cooker and central heating, all using fossil fuels. Add those in and were looking at 40-50kWh: 20kWh for the heating, 10kWh for the cooking and another 10kWh for the cars. There are savings to be made of course, the electric versions of all of those items are way more efficient. There's insulation; there's heat pumps; there's electric cars. The average UK car sits idle for 23 hours of the day. An average-ish car is around 100kW. Even if that hour is slow and often stationary, it's not unreasonable to expect it to be another 10kWh. And the average UK home has more than one car. A mid-range electric car has a 50kWh battery, so has a bit more beef than a Tesla Powerwall battery. If they are being used for 1 hour a day they are probably going to need a top-up of around, say, 10kW. So let's say they have 40 kWh to spare. 20 TWh / 40 kWh = 500 million cars. There are only 33 million cars in the UK. You can, of course, quibble with these figures. There's subtleties everywhere here, but the orders of magnitude are plain. We need to be able to store renewable energy—desperately, and in enormous amounts. Car batteries will help—no doubt—but more in load-balancing and smoothing rather than long-term storage. We need something like grid-scale hydrogen storage to solve this. See here for 1100 TWh figure. This document has loads of other really interesting details too: https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/264421/download https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/264421/download

nightski 4y ago

So electric car owners need to just cover all the battery wear out of their own pockets? Wouldn't that make electric cars even more expensive since battery replacement will be needed more often?

toomuchtodo 4y ago
Batteries are lasting far longer than anticipated. Anecdotally, I have fast DC charged my 2018 Model S (100kw pack) for the majority of the 100k miles I’ve put on the car, and only have 7% battery degradation. Others are seeing similar longevity well into hundreds of thousands of miles. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32758881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32758881 https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/08/01/electric-car-batteries-lasting-longer-than-predicted-delays-recycling-programs/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/08/01/electric... https://cleantechnica.com/2022/03/29/tesla-founder-ex-cto-says-ev-batteries-will-last-15-years/ https://cleantechnica.com/2022/03/29/tesla-founder-ex-cto-sa...
- nightski 4y ago
  That doesn't really matter. If you own a resource, and I utilize it, are you going to let me do so without compensating you in some fashion? If so I'll take you up on that offer. I have no problems with encouraging people to charge at certain times. Using personal batteries for energy storage and draw without any compensation however seems to cross a line. Your argument seems to me like justifying petty theft because in the end it doesn't really affect the store owner.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    I think your position comes from a lack of understanding of energy markets and pricing mechanisms. Powerwall owners are paid roughly $2/kwh when called upon to support the grid in California. Compensation is absolutely available for discharging and charging at specific times. If you’ll charge me a fraction of the cost to charge off peak or when there are excess renewables on the grid, and you’ll pay a premium to pull that power back if the car is parked and I can set a minimum state of charge to maintain, yeah, I’ll take that deal any day. I’ll come out ahead in almost all cases based on EV battery longevity.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - nightski 4y ago
      If I am being compensated a premium $/kwh for each kwh drawn then we have no problem. Otherwise I'll just not offer my battery by disconnecting it when not charging.
      - toomuchtodo 4y ago
        Of course! No one is forcing you to, these programs are voluntary.
peter422 4y ago
Presumably the cost savings from charging when rates are the cheapest and potential incentives for feeding into the grid when necessarily will make up for that.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
The Tesla Model 3 SR ships with a battery expected to last ~750,000 km. If you had that vehicle, how much would you need to get paid to compensate for reducing that range by 1km? I'd accept 0.1 cents, how about you?
- kadoban 4y ago
  That seems low, that'd be $750 to reduce it to 0? But yeah there should be a way to choose a fair price or just let the market decide.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    But I'm never going to get 750,000 km out of a model 3, the suspension or other moving parts are going to give out first. So I can sell ~500,000 km worth of battery range without losing any actual range.

goethes_kind 4y ago

Yeah, except now each parking spot at work needs its own power outlet.

function_seven 4y ago
That would be the best part. Cover all that parking with solar panels, use those panels to partially or completely offset the charging demands of the cars parked under them. An average parking space has enough room for (napkin math...) 6kW of solar output. That's more than enough to offset a level 2 charger while the driver of that car is in the office. And it leaves the car cooler at the end of the say. Costs a bit upfront, sure. But I think we'll continue to see these costs come down, and the incentive to build out parking lot solar arrays will increase as the grid has to adapt to the demands we're placing on it.
- drdec 4y ago
  >Cover all that parking with solar panels This would help in many cases, but parking garages are a thing, even in my relatively small city. We would need a solution for them as well.
  - kadoban 4y ago
    Putting solar on the roof (adding a roof if necessary) should help a lot. You'd run into issues where it won't scale with garage height of course, but most garages aren't that tall anyway (at least in my area).
chipsa 4y ago
Future is SAE J2954 (aka Witricity): you have a wireless charging pad under each parking spot. No screwing with power plugs, just park and go. This isn't ideal for fast charging, but for the slower charging you'd get from being somewhere for 6-8 hours, it's perfectly fine. You still need to run power to every parking spot, but now it's embedded in the ground, and you don't have to worry about someone just coming around with cable cutters and stealing it.

gpm 4y ago

Tesla already has a beta of this with their "powerpacks" (batteries for houses instead of cars): https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/powerwall/own/california-virtual-power-plant https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/powerwall/own/californi...

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

Musk does not control power utilities, nor what they charge, nor what power they have access to at a given time, nor the load of the rest of the grid outside of Telsa vehicles. > Cars will turn into one of our most valuable assets as they help stabalize the grid by being both sinks when energy is plentiful and sources when it's not. In fantasy land, sure. In reality there are a lot more players with a lot more variables and most of them don't give a shit about some grand unified solution through cars. Just because in theory there is one great universal solution to one problem (demand for power) doesn't mean everyone is going to work together to achieve it. We have more than enough agricultural land around the world to feed the entire planet every day, yet millions of people go hungry every day. Just because a solution is possible doesn't mean it happens. By the way: if we had fewer cars, we wouldn't have this huge demand for additional power. The simpler solution is to replace cars with public transit and micromobility. Then we would pollute less to make the cars, require fewer chips and rare earth metals, require less power generation and distribution, require fewer people to sink huge amounts of money into car ownership, free up cities for more pedestrian and bike traffic, provide easier access to jobs and education for poor rural areas, and have 30,000 fewer fatalies in the US every year. But instead let's just buy more cars and build more nuke plants to power them and expand the grid because I want my own zoom-zoom machine!

alexb_ 4y ago

If there's excess demand at night, you increase the price at night. If there's excess supply in the morning/afternoon, you lower the price. It's not complicated, and the problem fixes itself. You don't need AI to simulate what groups of people making rational, independent decisions do themselves. That's how you get cars that won't charge because "AI says so", similar to how all of these dogshit smart thermostats can be completely shut off from heating if "AI says so".

gpm 4y ago
The car needs to charge for 4 hours overnight (say, before 7am). It's currently 9pm and the price is currently 7c/kwh, should it charge or not? That question is obviously underspecified, you can only answer it by knowing whether or not the price will be below 7c/kwh for 4 of the remaining hours in the night. You answer the question with a predictive model of the price, and you build that predictive model with "AI" because that's how we build all our best predicitve models. AI doesn't get to say "you can't charge", you get to say "and I'll delegate the question of which 4 hours to charge during to the AI". > similar to how all of these dogshit smart thermostats can be completely shut off from heating if "AI says so". I assume you're referring to the instance where texas power companies remotely increased the temperature on peoples thermostats? That's not AI, or even remotely related to AI, that's humans controlling other peoples stuff without permission. That risk exists whether or not you use machine learning models to predict electricity prices. https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/texas/remote-thermostat-adjustment-texas-energy-shortage/285-5acf2bc5-54b7-4160-bffe-1f9a5ef4362a https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/texas/remote-thermos...
3pt14159 4y ago
You don't get what I'm saying. I'm saying market dynamics (ie, setting the price lower when the grid needs less power) plus the inevitable AI that will game it to everyones advantage will solve this problem automatically. There is no reason to worry about this. This is trivial AI.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Tesla calls this "Virtual Power Plant" and there's a talk by a couple of the software devs online somewhere. Found it: https://youtu.be/ggdYts4muu0 https://youtu.be/ggdYts4muu0 Some other people have mentioned that you just need to vary the price, but the price is set by bids from providers. Code that can learn demand patterns and integrate weather forecasts will let Tesla bid lower and so earn more money in the market while also lowering energy costs for everyone.

sambeau 4y ago

This is not simple. The batteries in cars can be used to help load-balance but they cannot offer grid-scale storage. The following is back-of-napkin figures but there are close enough to make the point. Take a country the size of the UK. It currently uses 1600 TWh a year. Once fully-electric it should need around 1100 TWh a year, so 3 TWh a day. The UK, despite being a windy place, still has weeks without wind once or twice a year. We had a week without wind power in the middle of August this year and had to generate 60% of our power using gas. A windless week with a frost snap is something you often see in January and February. A cold week, with everyone using electric heating (when solar power does basically nothing) is why the UK might need TWh of stored energy to be secure without fossil fuels. 7 days at 3 TWh is 20 TWh. A big home Tesla Powerwall can store 14kWh and if run at full power it will be empty in 4 hrs. You'd need over a billion to store 20TWh. In the UK an average home currently uses around 10kW of electricity a day, but also has a car, a cooker and central heating, all using fossil fuels. Add those in and were looking at 40-50kWh: 20kWh for the heating, 10kWh for the cooking and another 10kWh for the cars. There are savings to be made of course, the electric versions of all of those items are way more efficient. There's insulation; there's heat pumps; there's electric cars. The average UK car sits idle for 23 hours of the day. An average-ish car is around 100kW. Even if that hour is slow and often stationary, it's not unreasonable to expect it to be another 10kWh. And the average UK home has more than one car. A mid-range electric car has a 50kWh battery, so has a bit more beef than a Tesla Powerwall battery. If they are being used for 1 hour a day they are probably going to need a top-up of around, say, 10kW. So let's say they have 40 kWh to spare. 20 TWh / 40 kWh = 500 million cars. There are only 33 million cars in the UK. You can, of course, quibble with these figures. There's subtleties everywhere here, but the orders of magnitude are plain. We need to be able to store renewable energy—desperately, and in enormous amounts. Car batteries will help—no doubt—but more in load-balancing and smoothing rather than long-term storage. We need something like grid-scale hydrogen storage to solve this. See here for 1100 TWh figure. This document has loads of other really interesting details too: https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/264421/download https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/264421/download