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Battery production rates are creeping up to multiple twh/year now. This is accumulating to a lot of battery sitting around in vehicles, domestic storage, grid s

Battery production rates are creeping up to multiple twh/year now. This is accumulating to a lot of battery sitting around in vehicles, domestic storage, grid storage, etc. Mostly the goal of these batteries of course isn't supporting the grid but some other use case. But if it's plugged in, it could potentially be available for selling power. Right now, most EVs can't contribute power. But that's something that is starting to change. Small experiments with thousands or tens of thousands of vehicles have already been done and seem to work fine. Now imagine tens of millions of vehicles being part of the grid. That's a serious amount of stand by power for absorbing excess power or dispatching power when needed. Another interesting aspect is that as grid demand fluctuates, a lot of cables are under utilized at least some of the time. Which means there is plenty of capacity for charging batteries provided there is excess generation and cable capacity. A lot of that power currently gets discarded instead. Batteries allow better use of this excess power. And having a lot of local battery means that cable capacity can be freed up as well when needed and then recharged when demand reduces. And then finally battery prices are coming down. With sodium ion cell production ramping up in several places, things could get quite a bit cheaper. These don't depend on scarce metals or materials. And they last quite long as well (relative to NMC).

mschuster91 1y ago
> That's a serious amount of stand by power for absorbing excess power or dispatching power when needed. ... and a serious issue should one of the few large manufacturers or remote-control dispatcher/trader companies get hacked. The outage in Spain a few weeks ago was just a small warning, probably caused by a technical malfunction. But now imagine this being used as a side track in an act of war? The first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by the hack of Viasat satellites, which led to 5.800 wind turbines shutting down due to a lack of remote control capabilities [1]. Now imagine the large Chinese inverter and power bank controller vendors that often enough just white-label for other brands? That's a whole lot of a different game now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack
- toast0 1y ago
  > and a serious issue should one of the few large manufacturers or remote-control dispatcher/trader companies get hacked. The outage in Spain a few weeks ago was just a small warning, probably caused by a technical malfunction. If everyone agrees, you can use grid frequency/phase to coordinate, and not a separate realtime communication system. Grid interactive demand/response is a proven way to manage supply and load. When your section of the grid is stressed, supply power or abstain from charging; when your section of the grid is abundant, charge. Coordination is useful too, of course; predictive charging is helpful, and you wouldn't get that only by monitoring the grid; you also want to know somehow that a supply or load is scheduled to be added or removed at time X, or was unexpectedly removed and will not be reconnected for some time. And the system operator would want to know about capacity in many dimensions.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    It doesn't work that way. Maybe in the US where everyone seems to do their own shit, particularly in Texas, but here in Europe our grid literally spans the entire continent, from Portugal through into Ukraine's front lines, and from Norway even down towards Africa. It's a three phase grid that is in synchronized phase everywhere. Like, literally everywhere. Grid frequency cannot be used at scale to coordinate energy production as a result, because the grid elements themselves don't know why the frequency is going down on its own or where the cause is. For that you need to monitor the country or region crossing to see where energy is flowing and aggregate this. Drop a couple gigawatts from the production side, for example, all at once and the frequency will immediately drop, only not crashing due to the mechanical inertia of the large power plants. Immediately, electricity and physics will lead to current balances redistributing and automated systems will kick in (e.g. gas peaker plants ramp up in a matter of seconds, battery storage kicks in even faster). But when too much capacity gets dropped, the available spare capacity isn't enough and eventually the first lines will trip due to overcurrent or frequency deviation. That is what happened in Spain, made worse by the fact that inverters don't have mechanical inertia and so immediately more inverters dropped out for safety reasons as the frequency sagged too much for their protection circuits. The inverse, adding a couple of gigawatts of consumers, causes the same effect. That's also why very large consumers such as smelters must contact the local electricity distributor in advance before any load change - dispatch must know precisely when the consumer will drop or add load, so that other plants can be regulated up or down to avoid too much of a sag or hike in frequency.
HankB99 1y ago
> A lot of that power currently gets discarded instead. How is power discarded? I would expect peaking generation to be cut back or perhaps even base load plants can reduce output. (AFAIK "base load" means they are expected to be kept operating continuously whereas "peaking" is designed to start up when needed and shut down when not.)
- qeternity 1y ago
  > How is power discarded It isn’t, not at scale in any traditional sense.
- jillesvangurp 1y ago
  wind mills are weather vaned (i.e. not broken, but deliberately turned off), solar panels excess energy is curtailed (prevented from going into the grid) and usually transformed into heat on the panels or in inverters. As for baseload. It's one of those waffly terms that's rarely specified in GW that is needed. Which as it turns out is far less than we used to have given that much of it was replaced with wind and solar over the last decade or so. The real question is how low can we go with this stuff before we need some more solutions. Some would say all the way but the consensus is that the last 5-10% might get very hard and costly. Either way, having some peaker plants on stand by ready to spin up over the course of hours/days while batteries slowly deplete is probably a good short term compromise. Replacing spinning mass (fly wheels) with batteries seems a particularly popular and very cost effective use for batteries.
giantg2 1y ago
"Right now, most EVs can't contribute power" Nor should they. People don't want to be cycling their batteries and reducing their life. This use case would be better served by batteries that are designed for that purpose instead of being designed to be light for a vehicle.
- wjnc 1y ago
  Future: Cycle the power when profitable, replace the batteries when depleted enough? Batteries in cars are many times the domestic demand of a given home, at least in temperate climates.
- tomas789 1y ago
  They are almost the same batteries. Different form factor but same thing. They are rolled from the same lines.
  - giantg2 1y ago
    Grid level batteries use many different forms. You even have stuff like pumped hydro and controlled drop concrete. Even if the battery cells are exactly the same, the replacement cost is much higher in a vehicle due to the configuration.
- inetknght 1y ago
  > People don't want to be cycling their batteries and reducing their life. More battery cycles just costs money. For the right price, I'd do it. But more than that: I don't want to be stranded without power in my vehicle because someone in the electric grid made poor power management decisions and decided to offload that decision to consumers.
  - eldaisfish 1y ago
    as with anything, it's not just money. Losing battery capacity in an EV is a hassle. A hassle because you charge more frequently, a hassle because you will eventually need a battery change, and so on. What is the price of all that hassle? That said, most EV incentive programs use around 10% (often less) of an EV battery capacity so the actual effects are barely noticeable.
GuB-42 1y ago
Even without talking about batteries, I think a lot can be done using smart grids. For example, your A/C and heaters can run a little later or a little earlier, it won't have a significant effect on your room temperature, especially if your house is well insulated. It means a lot can be done just by remote controlling thermostats with minimal effect on confort. This can apply to other appliances that are not too time sensitive or can have a delayed start, like washing machines, refrigerators, dishwashers, etc... but thermostats are likely to be the biggest ones. As with batteries, it would require some work with the utility companies, so that they can signal the best times to power on/off, and offer the appropriate financial incentives to do so. We are already doing that in some way with peak/off-peak pricing, but it doesn't help with high frequency, unplanned variations.

mschuster91 1y ago

> That's a serious amount of stand by power for absorbing excess power or dispatching power when needed. ... and a serious issue should one of the few large manufacturers or remote-control dispatcher/trader companies get hacked. The outage in Spain a few weeks ago was just a small warning, probably caused by a technical malfunction. But now imagine this being used as a side track in an act of war? The first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by the hack of Viasat satellites, which led to 5.800 wind turbines shutting down due to a lack of remote control capabilities [1]. Now imagine the large Chinese inverter and power bank controller vendors that often enough just white-label for other brands? That's a whole lot of a different game now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack

toast0 1y ago
> and a serious issue should one of the few large manufacturers or remote-control dispatcher/trader companies get hacked. The outage in Spain a few weeks ago was just a small warning, probably caused by a technical malfunction. If everyone agrees, you can use grid frequency/phase to coordinate, and not a separate realtime communication system. Grid interactive demand/response is a proven way to manage supply and load. When your section of the grid is stressed, supply power or abstain from charging; when your section of the grid is abundant, charge. Coordination is useful too, of course; predictive charging is helpful, and you wouldn't get that only by monitoring the grid; you also want to know somehow that a supply or load is scheduled to be added or removed at time X, or was unexpectedly removed and will not be reconnected for some time. And the system operator would want to know about capacity in many dimensions.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  It doesn't work that way. Maybe in the US where everyone seems to do their own shit, particularly in Texas, but here in Europe our grid literally spans the entire continent, from Portugal through into Ukraine's front lines, and from Norway even down towards Africa. It's a three phase grid that is in synchronized phase everywhere. Like, literally everywhere. Grid frequency cannot be used at scale to coordinate energy production as a result, because the grid elements themselves don't know why the frequency is going down on its own or where the cause is. For that you need to monitor the country or region crossing to see where energy is flowing and aggregate this. Drop a couple gigawatts from the production side, for example, all at once and the frequency will immediately drop, only not crashing due to the mechanical inertia of the large power plants. Immediately, electricity and physics will lead to current balances redistributing and automated systems will kick in (e.g. gas peaker plants ramp up in a matter of seconds, battery storage kicks in even faster). But when too much capacity gets dropped, the available spare capacity isn't enough and eventually the first lines will trip due to overcurrent or frequency deviation. That is what happened in Spain, made worse by the fact that inverters don't have mechanical inertia and so immediately more inverters dropped out for safety reasons as the frequency sagged too much for their protection circuits. The inverse, adding a couple of gigawatts of consumers, causes the same effect. That's also why very large consumers such as smelters must contact the local electricity distributor in advance before any load change - dispatch must know precisely when the consumer will drop or add load, so that other plants can be regulated up or down to avoid too much of a sag or hike in frequency.

HankB99 1y ago

> A lot of that power currently gets discarded instead. How is power discarded? I would expect peaking generation to be cut back or perhaps even base load plants can reduce output. (AFAIK "base load" means they are expected to be kept operating continuously whereas "peaking" is designed to start up when needed and shut down when not.)

qeternity 1y ago
> How is power discarded It isn’t, not at scale in any traditional sense.
jillesvangurp 1y ago
wind mills are weather vaned (i.e. not broken, but deliberately turned off), solar panels excess energy is curtailed (prevented from going into the grid) and usually transformed into heat on the panels or in inverters. As for baseload. It's one of those waffly terms that's rarely specified in GW that is needed. Which as it turns out is far less than we used to have given that much of it was replaced with wind and solar over the last decade or so. The real question is how low can we go with this stuff before we need some more solutions. Some would say all the way but the consensus is that the last 5-10% might get very hard and costly. Either way, having some peaker plants on stand by ready to spin up over the course of hours/days while batteries slowly deplete is probably a good short term compromise. Replacing spinning mass (fly wheels) with batteries seems a particularly popular and very cost effective use for batteries.

giantg2 1y ago

"Right now, most EVs can't contribute power" Nor should they. People don't want to be cycling their batteries and reducing their life. This use case would be better served by batteries that are designed for that purpose instead of being designed to be light for a vehicle.

wjnc 1y ago
Future: Cycle the power when profitable, replace the batteries when depleted enough? Batteries in cars are many times the domestic demand of a given home, at least in temperate climates.
tomas789 1y ago
They are almost the same batteries. Different form factor but same thing. They are rolled from the same lines.
- giantg2 1y ago
  Grid level batteries use many different forms. You even have stuff like pumped hydro and controlled drop concrete. Even if the battery cells are exactly the same, the replacement cost is much higher in a vehicle due to the configuration.
inetknght 1y ago
> People don't want to be cycling their batteries and reducing their life. More battery cycles just costs money. For the right price, I'd do it. But more than that: I don't want to be stranded without power in my vehicle because someone in the electric grid made poor power management decisions and decided to offload that decision to consumers.
- eldaisfish 1y ago
  as with anything, it's not just money. Losing battery capacity in an EV is a hassle. A hassle because you charge more frequently, a hassle because you will eventually need a battery change, and so on. What is the price of all that hassle? That said, most EV incentive programs use around 10% (often less) of an EV battery capacity so the actual effects are barely noticeable.

GuB-42 1y ago

Even without talking about batteries, I think a lot can be done using smart grids. For example, your A/C and heaters can run a little later or a little earlier, it won't have a significant effect on your room temperature, especially if your house is well insulated. It means a lot can be done just by remote controlling thermostats with minimal effect on confort. This can apply to other appliances that are not too time sensitive or can have a delayed start, like washing machines, refrigerators, dishwashers, etc... but thermostats are likely to be the biggest ones. As with batteries, it would require some work with the utility companies, so that they can signal the best times to power on/off, and offer the appropriate financial incentives to do so. We are already doing that in some way with peak/off-peak pricing, but it doesn't help with high frequency, unplanned variations.