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There's lots of talk about grid-scale batteries to shift cheap electricity from solar panels into the night time. But batteries at the periphery can also help a

There's lots of talk about grid-scale batteries to shift cheap electricity from solar panels into the night time. But batteries at the periphery can also help a lot because they can just stop charging (like the example in this article) or even feed energy back into the grid. Electric cars mostly don't have the circuitry to do this yet, but they're becoming a huge resource that will be tappable this way. Most of them are massively over-provisioned for the way that they're used 350 days out of the year.

t_tsonev 2y ago
On-demand charging is very much happening today. All chargers communicate the available charging current with the vehicle and some can adjust it dynamically. As for control, there are proprietary and OSS solutions (shout out to https://evcc.io/en/ https://evcc.io/en/) that allow you to control the charging process based on price, grid load, local PV generation, etc.
- ckdarby 2y ago
  I see the basic version of this already with the Tesla vehicles where if you plug in another appliance on the same breaker the car will decrease its draw to prevent triggering the breaker.
  - cesarb 2y ago
    > where if you plug in another appliance on the same breaker the car will decrease its draw to prevent triggering the breaker. That's alarming. There's no way the car can know that there's another appliance on the same breaker. The only way it can know it should decrease its power draw, is by detecting that the voltage decreased on the circuit, but that voltage decrease will only be noticeable if the wiring is undersized for the load (in fact, that feature is probably designed to protect against overheating undersized wiring on the circuit feeding the car). That circuit is probably severely overloaded, which can be a fire risk.
    - jeffbee 2y ago
      This feature doesn't exist. The Tesla home charger can share current with other Tesla chargers on the same branch. It can't share current with an electric water heater or some other non-Tesla load
      - Retric 2y ago
        I think the OP was just confusing a feature used by someone with a Tesla from a Tesla specific feature. They might be using one of these: https://www.chargedfuture.com/240v-outlet-smart-splitter/ https://www.chargedfuture.com/240v-outlet-smart-splitter/ There’s also smart breaker boxes that again have nothing to do with Tesla specifically. The breaker box will preferentially shed EV charging first when someone would otherwise trip their whole homes’s connection to the grid. It’s not a perfect solution, but sometimes your local utility doesn’t want to upgrade your connection to the grid because their substation is fully provisioned or whatnot.
rthomas6 2y ago
I wish it were standard practice to have some kind of house battery (what Tesla calls "Powerwall") for new construction homes. They could smooth out peak usage in this exact way, in addition to making individual homes more resilient to occasional power outages.
- practicemaths 2y ago
  It might happen! There's a fair bit of active research into repurposing batteries from cars into such a purpose or similar. This both extends the usefulness of the manufactured good (the battery) while also hopefully lowering the upfront costs of new electric cars.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
  IMO this isn't the direction we're going. I'd bet that in 20 years, there will be some form of grid-scale specific battery that is 2-3x cheaper than lithium iron (per joule), but with much worse energy density. Many of the batteries of this type are unsuitable for home installation (because they get more efficient with scale). Some of the potential options for this are things like iron sulfur batteries which require pretty high temps, or some designs for batteries that basically involve physical pumps to pump liquid anodes and cathodes around.
  - szvsw 2y ago
    > some designs for batteries that basically involve physical pumps to pump liquid anodes and cathodes around Yeah in addition to flow batteries there are also grid scale thermal batteries, though these are targeted more towards long duration energy storage: run electricity through a large carbon block in a shipping container form factor to heat it up, then use infrared photovoltaics to convert back to electricity when desired.
    - Teever 2y ago
      I'd be interested in learning more about this carbon block battery that you're describing. I'm also curious how it compares in cost effectiveness to this battery that's based on sand. https://tambaynews.blogspot.com/2022/07/worlds-first-commercial-sand-battery.html https://tambaynews.blogspot.com/2022/07/worlds-first-commerc...
mauvehaus 2y ago
Green Mountain Power does exactly this in Vermont: they have a program that'll install a pair of powerwall batteries at customer homes and charge them off peak to draw on them on peak, particularly to avoid GMP having to buy peak-rate power from their upstream suppliers. In return, they leave the batteries charges when the weather is turning bad and the customer has battery backup. The deal is structured as a 10 year lease, and the total cost is vastly less than that of owning the batteries outright. Their installation allowance is pretty good too; it didn't cover splitting our panel, but it covered everything else. Not affiliated other than being a very happy GMP customer.
- onionisafruit 2y ago
  You say they leave the batteries charged when the power is turning bad. Do you have a benefit of hosting the batteries at other times? For instance if the power goes out when the weather isn’t bad, do you typically have enough charge to make it through the outage? I’m also curious if your neighbors benefit from your battery during outages.
  - mauvehaus 2y ago
    De jure, I think they're pretty free to do with them what they want. De facto they leave the batteries pretty fully charged most of the time. AIUI, they'd have to have a disconnect somewhere upstream of us to let us back feed the grid during an outage, otherwise they couldn't safely work on the lines. And they'd need a way to enable and disable back feeding remotely[0] to allow them to work on anything between that hypothetical disconnect and us. At the moment, none of that exists, so only we benefit from the powerwalls. It's also 34kwh in the pair of batteries. That wouldn't add up to too many household-days if you started adding households. You'd have to do some fancy switching to not overwhelm the relatively few powerwalls in an outage. For context, based on our usage, we're at about three days of backup just for us [1]. It doesn't take much imagination to come up with a scenario where that happens where we are. We are the very last pole. [0] Which in turn requires connectivity. The cell network here is sparse, to put it mildly. We just got fiber, but that's hanging on the same poles as the power. The fail-safe mode for no grid and no connectivity is to not backfeed, but at that point, you're back where you are today. [1] It's the fridge, mostly.
pfdietz 2y ago
Even lower hanging fruit would be increasing the dispatchability of demand in homes. Simply allowing heating and cooling to be dispatched would be very helpful. In the past this was done with bespoke add-ons to furnaces and AC compressors, but now it's done with smart thermostats.
- smileysteve 2y ago
  Dispatched versus random dither are similar; For most smart thermostats, one of the lesser known quality improvements is the 5 minute + dither time for startup. This is designed for compressor health - but prevents repeat cascading brownouts - where programmable thermostats or manual thermostats would have either a strict 5 minute wait time or none at all. Other features like time of use, humidity correction, and fan circulation also drastically reduce energy usage.
  - hedora 2y ago
    Our thermostat seems to apply the delay even when you manually turn it on. It drives me nuts. (After a power failure or during scheduled transitions make sense; after I push the button: not so much.)
- immibis 2y ago
  ISTR they did this somewhere (getting a discount on power in return for letting them decrease your cooling remotely at peak times) and the political right threw a national hissyfit.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    I signed up for this in Illinois and never heard a single peep of complaint about it (nor did I ever notice it when it kicked in.)
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  If you don't have a smart thermostat, check whoever your utility is for discounts. I got a 50% discount buying it through them.
cogman10 2y ago
> Electric cars mostly don't have the circuitry to do this yet Electric cars do have the circuitry to do this. It's built into the CCS protocol which nearly every EV speaks (US and EU). And it's not hard to imagine how this would work. Two big connectors on EVs can ultimately be hooked pretty much directly to the battery. When you plug in, you'll hear a giant "cachunck" which is the relay switching to DC charging. If you want to turn that into a vehicle providing power, the action is exactly the same, "cachunk" the relay which completes the circuit and have the charging station convert that DC power to AC. That's where the actual equipment gap exists. AFAIK, it's basically only ford that's producing a V2H charger. Enphase has one announced since last year, but I've not really seen anything about it since the announcement.
- shiftpgdn 2y ago
  Tesla has a V2H/V2G (Powershare is the name Tesla uses) available for Cybertruck owners included as part of the vehicle purchase. I am still waiting on mine, despite receiving my Cybertruck almost 6 months ago. I also have the Ford equipment from when I got my Lightning, however finding a competent installer has been impossible. Right now it's collecting spiders in the corner of my garage.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    Do you have anyone that does home battery installations? It should be pretty much the exact same process to install one of these. It may be somewhat new tech, but ultimately it should look identical to battery controller install.
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Don’t forget about airplanes, you can fly in competent installers, some may enjoy the trip :)
  - tnel77 2y ago
    A Lightning and a CyberTruck? Have either touched dirt? :)
jogjayr 2y ago
Wouldn't you want to reduce the number of charge/discharge cycles on your EV battery? Using it for household needs outside of an emergency seems wasteful.
- moooo99 2y ago
  A modern battery far outlives the rest of the vehicle when you look at the charging cycles. So you can afford to use some of it for home electricity storage. AFAIK some cells types easily last 3,000 cycles at >80% capacity. Assume 400km/charge you’d be looking at 1.2mil kilometers of driving just based on the battery. Also, there is a a natural limit to how much you’re using, considering you also want to use your vehicle for driving as well.
- neallindsay 2y ago
  Not every charge/discharge wears on the battery the same. Staying at 0% or 100% is worse than staying around the middle. Charging and discharging extremely quickly wears more than slow charges/discharges. And high temperatures are bad for battery health in general. Electric car batteries are tuned much more conservatively than phone batteries and are massively over-provisioned because US consumers are nervous about exactly the thing you're talking about. That's not too surprising because to a large degree the car IS the battery, but battery wear is generally very well mitigated (with the exception of the Nissan Leaf).
  - hedora 2y ago
    Early Nissan Leafs. At this point, the newer used ones include battery health management, and should be similar to other used EVs. Note that getting an old one with a dead battery makes even less sense than you'd guess: It'll burn out any replacement battery just as fast, assuming you can actually get one.
- MostlyStable 2y ago
  If I was able to use my EV as an external battery for my home, I could potentially save ~$100 per month on my power bill, and that would represent <1/2 additional charge cycle per day. I'm pretty sure that would be worth it. This is going to depend on the power rates in ones particular area though.
jeffbee 2y ago
I think it's appealing to nerds to believe that a long-tail disaggregated phenomenon like EV V2G is going to save the grid, but the apparent truth is that the grid will be saved by central planning and top-down command and control. We see this in California. We have a million EVs registered in the state, but our grid-scale, CPUC-regulated battery stations are still larger in terms of energy storage, and unlike the EV fleet the availability and responsiveness of battery energy storage stations is assured. Load shedding like that in the article is a vanilla feature of electric grids everywhere. Large consumers get discounted power in exchange for agreeing to disconnect during grid emergencies. Because the number of such customers is small, that feature is easy to regulate and you can ignore the game theoretic shenanigans that would emerge from widespread V2G with millions of individual participants.
- applied_heat 2y ago
  Tesla will come to the utility and say we can offer you 3000 MW of demand response in any granularity you want for $x/hr. $x is usually not very big since the modus operandi for the bulk electric system in North America has been everyone can use as much power as they want whenever they want, so we have had lots of supply. But a couple of times per year $x could be thousands of dollars per MW per hour, for a few hours. So not worth the effort really. Maybe Tesla will offer the demand response more geographically so distribution utilities can also use it for peak shaving on their substations. But that is pretty brave area to be operating in for a utility, depending on Tesla to avoid overloading transformers or risk a localized black out. There would have to be a serious penalty for bidding in the demand response but then not performing as well. I agree it does seem far fetched at this time. Edit: price signals to consumers is probably a better mechanism
- szvsw 2y ago
  > appealing to nerds to believe that a long-tail disaggregated phenomenon like EV V2G is going to save the grid, but the apparent truth is that the grid will be saved by central planning and top-down command and control. I think this sentiment applies to a lot of facets of the energy transition/preventing climate collapse - perhaps sadly? A lot of the cooler distributed solutions and demand-side solutions could have been our saviors had we started on them in earnest 10-15 years ago. They should still be pursued as part of a robust and resilient system (everything from re-insulating homes to V2G to cutting out dairy and meat from diets to dispatchable home heating/cooling-appliances etc etc) but the truth is that we are spiraling towards climate collapse and those sorts of solutions are simply put more difficult to implement and maintain, especially because they often involve massive social buy in; at the same time, those solutions don’t tend to address the source energy question in any meaningful way (besides rooftop PV which is not enough even for low energy homes in many climates), so supply-side solutions will always still be needed, and like you said, there are economies of scale in both thermodynamic/physics efficiencies and in management and planning. It would be awesome if everyone stopped eating steak, but the realist in me knows that expecting that to happen at a scale which moves the needle just does not seem realistic. It’s sad to me in that the “distributed” solutions tend to actually address root causes of climate catastrophe - addiction to energy consumption, “capitalism” writ large, being good denizens of the planet, etc etc in one way or another - and would entail a real improvement to how we understand the fabric of society and modern civilization (I’m speaking broadly here of course, but I think it holds water), whereas the centralized solutions feel in some sense like bandaids that obfuscate our collective responsibility and engagement with the issue (besides tax dollars and utility rates going towards the solutions I guess), but at the timescale of the crisis we are dealing with the size of that lever and its effectiveness is kind of unarguable I think. Build big solar and wind farms, lots of batteries, start using cleaner steel and cement manufacturing processes, hope that super deep geothermal or micro-reactors progress, hope that we find a better way to sequester carbon coming from either direct air capture or post-combustion carbon capture. Everything else is just (important) gravy. And I say this as someone mostly focused on the demand side, not supply side! (I’m a building scientist)
rtkwe 2y ago
There are a number of industries that also do this where they'll be voluntarily shut off or pulled back during times where the grid nears brownout/blackout because their processes are interruptible with minimal cost which for battery charging stations is pretty true unless they're entire stock is at a very low charge.
adrianmonk 2y ago
I wouldn't want to participate during emergencies, though. If a hurricane or a winter storm is coming, I want my car at 100% in case I need to evacuate, drive around to get food, etc. On top of that, who knows when I'll be able to charge the car again. If we rely on cars to help stabilize the grid, it's not ideal that people will opt out just when it's needed the most.

t_tsonev 2y ago

On-demand charging is very much happening today. All chargers communicate the available charging current with the vehicle and some can adjust it dynamically. As for control, there are proprietary and OSS solutions (shout out to https://evcc.io/en/ https://evcc.io/en/) that allow you to control the charging process based on price, grid load, local PV generation, etc.

ckdarby 2y ago
I see the basic version of this already with the Tesla vehicles where if you plug in another appliance on the same breaker the car will decrease its draw to prevent triggering the breaker.
- cesarb 2y ago
  > where if you plug in another appliance on the same breaker the car will decrease its draw to prevent triggering the breaker. That's alarming. There's no way the car can know that there's another appliance on the same breaker. The only way it can know it should decrease its power draw, is by detecting that the voltage decreased on the circuit, but that voltage decrease will only be noticeable if the wiring is undersized for the load (in fact, that feature is probably designed to protect against overheating undersized wiring on the circuit feeding the car). That circuit is probably severely overloaded, which can be a fire risk.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    This feature doesn't exist. The Tesla home charger can share current with other Tesla chargers on the same branch. It can't share current with an electric water heater or some other non-Tesla load
    - Retric 2y ago
      I think the OP was just confusing a feature used by someone with a Tesla from a Tesla specific feature. They might be using one of these: https://www.chargedfuture.com/240v-outlet-smart-splitter/ https://www.chargedfuture.com/240v-outlet-smart-splitter/ There’s also smart breaker boxes that again have nothing to do with Tesla specifically. The breaker box will preferentially shed EV charging first when someone would otherwise trip their whole homes’s connection to the grid. It’s not a perfect solution, but sometimes your local utility doesn’t want to upgrade your connection to the grid because their substation is fully provisioned or whatnot.

rthomas6 2y ago

I wish it were standard practice to have some kind of house battery (what Tesla calls "Powerwall") for new construction homes. They could smooth out peak usage in this exact way, in addition to making individual homes more resilient to occasional power outages.

practicemaths 2y ago
It might happen! There's a fair bit of active research into repurposing batteries from cars into such a purpose or similar. This both extends the usefulness of the manufactured good (the battery) while also hopefully lowering the upfront costs of new electric cars.
adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
IMO this isn't the direction we're going. I'd bet that in 20 years, there will be some form of grid-scale specific battery that is 2-3x cheaper than lithium iron (per joule), but with much worse energy density. Many of the batteries of this type are unsuitable for home installation (because they get more efficient with scale). Some of the potential options for this are things like iron sulfur batteries which require pretty high temps, or some designs for batteries that basically involve physical pumps to pump liquid anodes and cathodes around.
- szvsw 2y ago
  > some designs for batteries that basically involve physical pumps to pump liquid anodes and cathodes around Yeah in addition to flow batteries there are also grid scale thermal batteries, though these are targeted more towards long duration energy storage: run electricity through a large carbon block in a shipping container form factor to heat it up, then use infrared photovoltaics to convert back to electricity when desired.
  - Teever 2y ago
    I'd be interested in learning more about this carbon block battery that you're describing. I'm also curious how it compares in cost effectiveness to this battery that's based on sand. https://tambaynews.blogspot.com/2022/07/worlds-first-commercial-sand-battery.html https://tambaynews.blogspot.com/2022/07/worlds-first-commerc...

mauvehaus 2y ago

Green Mountain Power does exactly this in Vermont: they have a program that'll install a pair of powerwall batteries at customer homes and charge them off peak to draw on them on peak, particularly to avoid GMP having to buy peak-rate power from their upstream suppliers. In return, they leave the batteries charges when the weather is turning bad and the customer has battery backup. The deal is structured as a 10 year lease, and the total cost is vastly less than that of owning the batteries outright. Their installation allowance is pretty good too; it didn't cover splitting our panel, but it covered everything else. Not affiliated other than being a very happy GMP customer.

onionisafruit 2y ago
You say they leave the batteries charged when the power is turning bad. Do you have a benefit of hosting the batteries at other times? For instance if the power goes out when the weather isn’t bad, do you typically have enough charge to make it through the outage? I’m also curious if your neighbors benefit from your battery during outages.
- mauvehaus 2y ago
  De jure, I think they're pretty free to do with them what they want. De facto they leave the batteries pretty fully charged most of the time. AIUI, they'd have to have a disconnect somewhere upstream of us to let us back feed the grid during an outage, otherwise they couldn't safely work on the lines. And they'd need a way to enable and disable back feeding remotely[0] to allow them to work on anything between that hypothetical disconnect and us. At the moment, none of that exists, so only we benefit from the powerwalls. It's also 34kwh in the pair of batteries. That wouldn't add up to too many household-days if you started adding households. You'd have to do some fancy switching to not overwhelm the relatively few powerwalls in an outage. For context, based on our usage, we're at about three days of backup just for us [1]. It doesn't take much imagination to come up with a scenario where that happens where we are. We are the very last pole. [0] Which in turn requires connectivity. The cell network here is sparse, to put it mildly. We just got fiber, but that's hanging on the same poles as the power. The fail-safe mode for no grid and no connectivity is to not backfeed, but at that point, you're back where you are today. [1] It's the fridge, mostly.

pfdietz 2y ago

Even lower hanging fruit would be increasing the dispatchability of demand in homes. Simply allowing heating and cooling to be dispatched would be very helpful. In the past this was done with bespoke add-ons to furnaces and AC compressors, but now it's done with smart thermostats.

smileysteve 2y ago
Dispatched versus random dither are similar; For most smart thermostats, one of the lesser known quality improvements is the 5 minute + dither time for startup. This is designed for compressor health - but prevents repeat cascading brownouts - where programmable thermostats or manual thermostats would have either a strict 5 minute wait time or none at all. Other features like time of use, humidity correction, and fan circulation also drastically reduce energy usage.
- hedora 2y ago
  Our thermostat seems to apply the delay even when you manually turn it on. It drives me nuts. (After a power failure or during scheduled transitions make sense; after I push the button: not so much.)
immibis 2y ago
ISTR they did this somewhere (getting a discount on power in return for letting them decrease your cooling remotely at peak times) and the political right threw a national hissyfit.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  I signed up for this in Illinois and never heard a single peep of complaint about it (nor did I ever notice it when it kicked in.)
Workaccount2 2y ago
If you don't have a smart thermostat, check whoever your utility is for discounts. I got a 50% discount buying it through them.

cogman10 2y ago

> Electric cars mostly don't have the circuitry to do this yet Electric cars do have the circuitry to do this. It's built into the CCS protocol which nearly every EV speaks (US and EU). And it's not hard to imagine how this would work. Two big connectors on EVs can ultimately be hooked pretty much directly to the battery. When you plug in, you'll hear a giant "cachunck" which is the relay switching to DC charging. If you want to turn that into a vehicle providing power, the action is exactly the same, "cachunk" the relay which completes the circuit and have the charging station convert that DC power to AC. That's where the actual equipment gap exists. AFAIK, it's basically only ford that's producing a V2H charger. Enphase has one announced since last year, but I've not really seen anything about it since the announcement.

shiftpgdn 2y ago
Tesla has a V2H/V2G (Powershare is the name Tesla uses) available for Cybertruck owners included as part of the vehicle purchase. I am still waiting on mine, despite receiving my Cybertruck almost 6 months ago. I also have the Ford equipment from when I got my Lightning, however finding a competent installer has been impossible. Right now it's collecting spiders in the corner of my garage.
- cogman10 2y ago
  Do you have anyone that does home battery installations? It should be pretty much the exact same process to install one of these. It may be somewhat new tech, but ultimately it should look identical to battery controller install.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Don’t forget about airplanes, you can fly in competent installers, some may enjoy the trip :)
- tnel77 2y ago
  A Lightning and a CyberTruck? Have either touched dirt? :)

jogjayr 2y ago

Wouldn't you want to reduce the number of charge/discharge cycles on your EV battery? Using it for household needs outside of an emergency seems wasteful.

moooo99 2y ago
A modern battery far outlives the rest of the vehicle when you look at the charging cycles. So you can afford to use some of it for home electricity storage. AFAIK some cells types easily last 3,000 cycles at >80% capacity. Assume 400km/charge you’d be looking at 1.2mil kilometers of driving just based on the battery. Also, there is a a natural limit to how much you’re using, considering you also want to use your vehicle for driving as well.
neallindsay 2y ago
Not every charge/discharge wears on the battery the same. Staying at 0% or 100% is worse than staying around the middle. Charging and discharging extremely quickly wears more than slow charges/discharges. And high temperatures are bad for battery health in general. Electric car batteries are tuned much more conservatively than phone batteries and are massively over-provisioned because US consumers are nervous about exactly the thing you're talking about. That's not too surprising because to a large degree the car IS the battery, but battery wear is generally very well mitigated (with the exception of the Nissan Leaf).
- hedora 2y ago
  Early Nissan Leafs. At this point, the newer used ones include battery health management, and should be similar to other used EVs. Note that getting an old one with a dead battery makes even less sense than you'd guess: It'll burn out any replacement battery just as fast, assuming you can actually get one.
MostlyStable 2y ago
If I was able to use my EV as an external battery for my home, I could potentially save ~$100 per month on my power bill, and that would represent <1/2 additional charge cycle per day. I'm pretty sure that would be worth it. This is going to depend on the power rates in ones particular area though.

jeffbee 2y ago

I think it's appealing to nerds to believe that a long-tail disaggregated phenomenon like EV V2G is going to save the grid, but the apparent truth is that the grid will be saved by central planning and top-down command and control. We see this in California. We have a million EVs registered in the state, but our grid-scale, CPUC-regulated battery stations are still larger in terms of energy storage, and unlike the EV fleet the availability and responsiveness of battery energy storage stations is assured. Load shedding like that in the article is a vanilla feature of electric grids everywhere. Large consumers get discounted power in exchange for agreeing to disconnect during grid emergencies. Because the number of such customers is small, that feature is easy to regulate and you can ignore the game theoretic shenanigans that would emerge from widespread V2G with millions of individual participants.

applied_heat 2y ago
Tesla will come to the utility and say we can offer you 3000 MW of demand response in any granularity you want for $x/hr. $x is usually not very big since the modus operandi for the bulk electric system in North America has been everyone can use as much power as they want whenever they want, so we have had lots of supply. But a couple of times per year $x could be thousands of dollars per MW per hour, for a few hours. So not worth the effort really. Maybe Tesla will offer the demand response more geographically so distribution utilities can also use it for peak shaving on their substations. But that is pretty brave area to be operating in for a utility, depending on Tesla to avoid overloading transformers or risk a localized black out. There would have to be a serious penalty for bidding in the demand response but then not performing as well. I agree it does seem far fetched at this time. Edit: price signals to consumers is probably a better mechanism
szvsw 2y ago
> appealing to nerds to believe that a long-tail disaggregated phenomenon like EV V2G is going to save the grid, but the apparent truth is that the grid will be saved by central planning and top-down command and control. I think this sentiment applies to a lot of facets of the energy transition/preventing climate collapse - perhaps sadly? A lot of the cooler distributed solutions and demand-side solutions could have been our saviors had we started on them in earnest 10-15 years ago. They should still be pursued as part of a robust and resilient system (everything from re-insulating homes to V2G to cutting out dairy and meat from diets to dispatchable home heating/cooling-appliances etc etc) but the truth is that we are spiraling towards climate collapse and those sorts of solutions are simply put more difficult to implement and maintain, especially because they often involve massive social buy in; at the same time, those solutions don’t tend to address the source energy question in any meaningful way (besides rooftop PV which is not enough even for low energy homes in many climates), so supply-side solutions will always still be needed, and like you said, there are economies of scale in both thermodynamic/physics efficiencies and in management and planning. It would be awesome if everyone stopped eating steak, but the realist in me knows that expecting that to happen at a scale which moves the needle just does not seem realistic. It’s sad to me in that the “distributed” solutions tend to actually address root causes of climate catastrophe - addiction to energy consumption, “capitalism” writ large, being good denizens of the planet, etc etc in one way or another - and would entail a real improvement to how we understand the fabric of society and modern civilization (I’m speaking broadly here of course, but I think it holds water), whereas the centralized solutions feel in some sense like bandaids that obfuscate our collective responsibility and engagement with the issue (besides tax dollars and utility rates going towards the solutions I guess), but at the timescale of the crisis we are dealing with the size of that lever and its effectiveness is kind of unarguable I think. Build big solar and wind farms, lots of batteries, start using cleaner steel and cement manufacturing processes, hope that super deep geothermal or micro-reactors progress, hope that we find a better way to sequester carbon coming from either direct air capture or post-combustion carbon capture. Everything else is just (important) gravy. And I say this as someone mostly focused on the demand side, not supply side! (I’m a building scientist)

rtkwe 2y ago

There are a number of industries that also do this where they'll be voluntarily shut off or pulled back during times where the grid nears brownout/blackout because their processes are interruptible with minimal cost which for battery charging stations is pretty true unless they're entire stock is at a very low charge.

adrianmonk 2y ago

I wouldn't want to participate during emergencies, though. If a hurricane or a winter storm is coming, I want my car at 100% in case I need to evacuate, drive around to get food, etc. On top of that, who knows when I'll be able to charge the car again. If we rely on cars to help stabilize the grid, it's not ideal that people will opt out just when it's needed the most.