[z-cam]

We think that leveraging electric vehicles as a storage device will help solve the duck curve problem.

Utilities are reluctant to invest billions of dollars in energy storage to smooth out their demand curve.

But consumers are already making this investment by switching en masse to EVs.

We're building software that will one day help utilities transact with individual or fleet vehicle owners to leverage their vehicles as energy storage.

[Reedx]

Or we could just stop kidding ourselves.

As Bill Gates and others who've done the math have repeatedly said[1], there is no storage solution anywhere on the horizon. Batteries are orders of magnitude too expensive.

You have to consider the problem holistically. Steel and concrete production. Places like Tokyo that go days without power. Countries like India that are not going to pay a premium.

If you're concerned about climate change, please take a serious look at nuclear energy[2][3][4].

1. https://youtu.be/d1EB1zsxW0k?t=520

2. https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Year-in-Review-2...

3. https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

4. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05...

[yorwba]

According to the U.S. Energy Information administration, nuclear is more expensive than battery storage: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2.p...

[acidburnNSA]

Nuclear builds in the west right now have been boondoggles; the nuclear industry must regain its ability to build effectively to play a role here. This has been done before through standardization of design and serialization of production. This could conceivably be scaled back up if we were serious about decarbonization, with high likelihood of success given previous successes (e.g. France decarbonized 80% of its electricity grid in 15 years by building 58 standardized nuclear plants).

Current prices for variable renewables and batteries are mostly on the current margin. Everyone agrees that costs of variable sources skyrocket as penetration increases due to curtailment and overbuilding. When you get 100% of your electricity on a sunny day (including from storage through the night) from solar, the next solar plant you build will have to be curtailed. Seasonal and crazy-weather variations are much harder and more expensive to fill with variable sources than the daily fluctuations.

These lowlow prices we see headlines about today are about building renewables in a world alongside hilariously cheap fracked natural gas plants that can pick up the slack.

There's good info along these lines in here: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy16osti/66970.pdf

Nuclear is unique in that it's the only low-carbon energy source that can run 24/7 for years at a time (followed by a month outage, then 2 more years, etc.). Hydro can kind of do this in certain geographies, but is very hard to scale to the point we need. Nuclear also uses far less land and raw materials than the variable renewables, especially when chemical battery storage is included.

But yeah unless nuclear folks can get costs back down soon, no one is going to be interested. If in the end variable stuff is indeed hard at massive scale (I strongly believe this will be the case), then if we don't have nuclear, fracked and high-carbon natural gas and oil (for transportation) will be around at 50% of our total energy for a long time.

[ZeroGravitas]

Interesting coincidence that France stopped at 80%. That's the same amount that widely touted as being straightforward with current renewable tech.

I'd guess it's for the same reason, after that you're dealing with seasonal variations that would leave nuclear or renewables unused for most of the year.

[Reedx]

Yet in practice let's take a look at France (nuclear) vs Germany (leading solar/wind):

"French electricity costs are just 59% of German electricity prices. As such, according to the prevailing economic wisdom, French electricity should be far more carbon intensive than German's. And yet the opposite is the case. France produces one-tenth the carbon pollution from electricity.

Why? Because France generates 72% of its electricity from nuclear, and just 6% from solar and wind."

France is cheaper and produces 2x more electricity from clean sources compared to Germany, where costs keep going up.

[ZeroGravitas]

And yet both France and Germany plan to move to mostly renewable. Which the French government thinks will save them money. Something that probably wouldn't have been possible without Germany's far sighted leadership on this issue.

I wonder how you could attribute the carbon saved by all the people choosing solar and wind as the current cheapest options to the people who put their money where their mouth was when that was just a projection.

[thrower123]

Right. Far sighted leadership of shutting down perfectly good, clean, nuclear power plants, and trying to replace them with intermittent renewables. That need to be backed up by more reliable alternatives, like strip mining old-growth forests for dirty brown coal to burn in steam generators, or importing electricity from France's nuke plants.

Just brilliant.

[ZeroGravitas]

You're thinking too small.

Climate change and deforestation are global problems, and Germany has helped fund a global solution.

Solar and wind are growing rapidly, they're currently passing the total yearly generation of nuclear but with 30% yearly growth will soon be adding the equivalent of the total nuclear fleet every year.

It is actually brilliant.

If Germany has sacrificed some of their own woodlands to make that happen then that's just more impressive.

[yorwba]

Most of the difference in prices is due to Germany having very high taxes: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

And those are still (non-household) consumer prices. That means they don't just reflect the cost of generation, but also what consumers are able and willing to pay. Unfortunately I didn't find any information on generation costs.

[imtringued]

The problem is that the cost of elecricity in germany is going down but industry is excempt from the EEG fee which is used to pay for the renewable energy plants. The end result is that households end up paying the electricity bills of industrial companies and so the retail price rises as the renewable share goes up.

[Beldin]

Germany (leading solar/wind):

Huh? Germany leading? Their fabled Energiewende was about moving away from nuclear. It had the unfortunate effect of moving to more coal plants to ensure base load is met.

One problem with wind power in Germany is that they don't have sufficient capacity for north-south power transmission. They've got wind in the north, they need it in the south... problem solved, you'd think. Alas! They need far, far more capacity over very long distances (1000km).

Anyway, I would not have called Germany leading in solar xor wind, but i didn't look into this. Perhaps the rest of the world is even worse? Seems unlikely though.

[imtringued]

Germany never added coal, the amount of power being generated by coal remained unchanged from 2010 to 2014. Of course one should asking oneself what the point of renewable energy is if it isn't being used to reduce dependence on fossil fuel but that is a different topic. The problem with the Energiewende is that the lazy government isn't deploying renewables fast enough. The renewable technologies that are available are more than sufficient until Germany hits 80% renewables.

[Gatsky]

I don’t know how they compare these costs, the document doesn’t say. Battery storage doesn’t generate power after all. Nuclear power’s great feature is that all the externalities tend to be included in the price. This is also makes it look more expensive than almost anything else. Do these wind/solar prices include decommissioning and full life cycle maintenance costs?

[choeger]

A short, back-of-the-envelope calculation gives a price of 600billion dollars for Germany's consumption over a whole year when the cost drops by just two orders of magnitude. So yes, it is still expensive, but the technology is still in its early years and it could plausibly work out at a truly grand scale.

[205guy]

Here's another link for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeness_Nuclear_Power_Statio...

Summary: Dungeness B reactors were scheduled to be complete in 1970, but finally cam online in 1983 and 1985 at 4 times the original budget, but now "have been non-operational since 2018 due to ongoing safety concerns."

[brandmeyer]

> Or we could just stop kidding ourselves.

Speaking of kidding ourselves,

> If you're concerned about climate change, please take a serious look at nuclear energy.

Please take a serious look at human political structures over the last decade. I don't believe that any nation in the world has sufficient stability to safely manage nuclear waste for the next few decades, let alone hundreds of years.

[z-cam]

Electric cars add storage at almost no cost to the utility.

Consumers in North America bought 260,000 battery electric vehicles in 2018. This is over 15 GWh of storage. And utilities paid $0 for it. As many others pointed out in this thread, EV penetration is minimal--so imagine how much storage potential will be added as adoption grows exponentially in the next 5 years.

There is no way for utilities to access this storage yet--but this is what we are building (at least the software part of the equation).

I agree that nuclear should be taken way more seriously.

But V2G is also game-changing since it lets utilities "rent" capacity instead of "owning" it.

[paulmd]

I'm not putting additional power cycles on my battery and necessitating early replacement unless you pay me for the privilege.

[AstralStorm]

Most importantly, where do you place the discharging posts? Definitely you do not want the cars discharged during night so you cannot use them in the morning, so you'd have to somehow predict how much the given car is driven. Plus it would have to be connected to the grid during the middle of the day to charge with solar. Which means reworking all parking spaces...

[_ea1k]

Lithium Ion battery cells right now cost ~$100USD/KWh and are good for approximately 1000 cycles. That works out to ~.10USD/KWh of provided capacity, which is too expensive, but not "orders of magnitude" too expensive. Obviously there are a lot of additional costs, but I don't think they add up to making them orders of magnitude too expensive either. For perspective, Natural gas comes in at ~.025USD/KWh here.

There is also some evidence that cycle count may improve on cells in the near future as prices fall. a 5x improvement in cell lifespan would make a huge difference.

[babuskov]

> But consumers are already making this investment by switching en masse to EVs

"En masse"? Maybe if you live in Norway or something like that.

According to the data I was able to find online, only about 2% of the new cars sold worldwide in 2018. are EVs. If we take the number of all cars currently on the roads worldwide, it's around 0.25%.

As for the "Vehicle-to-grid" thing in the United States, the Wikipedia page lists 3 experiments which are in progress and 2 claims with "citation needed" flag:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid

[z-cam]

I might be saying "en masse" 18 months prematurely. But at the speed utilities move, that's a blink of an eye.

I'm often reminded of Steve Balmer in 2007 laughing at the iPhone: "it's $500 and it doesn't even have a keyboard!?"

Less than 10 years later smartphones are ubiquitous. Not popular--ubiquitous.

That's where EVs are right now: "they cost more and they can't even go 250 miles!?"

EVs will be cheaper than gas cars by 2022, and a few years after that nobody will buy another gas car.

[brandmeyer]

$500 smartphones are only ubiquitous in the most wealthy parts of the most wealthy countries in the world.

[pedrosorio]

Smartphones are ubiquitous, not high-end iPhones.

EVs will be ubiquitous, not Tesla Model S.

[z-cam]

Agreed

[Tempest1981]

I know we're thinking focused on cars, but fwiw: "China has 99% of the world’s 250 million electric two-wheelers."

[_ea1k]

I'm not sure that I'd say "en masse" either, but the current numbers to understate the phenomenon by quite a bit. Just a year or two ago it was <1%, and I'd expect it to hit >4% by the end of next year with a continuing high growth rate for at least another couple of years after that.

I do not think it is at all obvious what will happen afterwards, but its going to start looking really rapid to people in another year or two.

[MiguelHudnandez]

Most homes have multiple cars.

A single high-end car could support multiple homes without the grid for over 24 hours.

So I think even at adoption rates under 5% you would see enough capacity to shave those peaks and make it easier to respond to changes in demand.

See Australia's tests with grid-smoothing batteries. Immensely successful and it has paid for itself.

https://www.sciencealert.com/remember-the-giant-tesla-batter...

[robocat]

Countries with significant lake hydroelectricity can "store" the solar power (no batteries needed) by reducing flow during the daytime (and increasing flow at nighttime if required).

This is because hydroelectric dams are essentially stores of electricity. No need for pumping or other expensive storage schemes, if you already have one!

This isn't mentioned in the Wikipedia article on the duck curve: I'm not sure why as it is a legitimate storage technology (just an existing one).

[acidburnNSA]

Largely true, in many places. Hydro has a few problems though when scaling: It takes lots of land, and hydro reservoirs become massive sources of biogenic methane, in some cases to the tune that building them is worse than building coal plants (!). Also, hydro is statistically far more dangerous than things like wind, solar, and nuclear. When a big dam fails, lots of people die.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321683340_Understan...

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/jo...

[objektif]

I dont think you can just say Hydro is far more dangerous than nuclear. When a nuclear accident happens not only a lot of people lose their lives but the effects are felt for centuries. Lands become inhabitable, generations of people carry the burden.

[acidburnNSA]

You might be surprised! Contrary to popular belief, nuclear energy is among the safest forms of energy production we know. Yes, this includes short and long-term deaths from Chernobyl (50/4000), Fukushima (0/<=1), and Three Mile Island (0/0).

The "Chernobyl" of hydro, of course, was the Banqiao Dam failure, which killed up to 230,000 people. For some reason, very few people know about it, and there are no HBO specials on it. Go figure.

https://www.businessinsider.com/dam-safety-statistics-risk-o...

https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

Considering that fossil fuel kills about 4 million people per year via air pollution, year after year, both hydro and nuclear are really safe. Nuclear net saved 1.8 million lives by 2013 (and counting). Hydro probably has a good number like that too.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197?source=cen

Graphical comparison of nuclear safety vs fossil (not hydro): https://twitter.com/EnergyJvd/status/1183663682552827904/pho...

[erentz]

Hydro plants are already going to be running at full output during the peak demand time when solar is not working. Just because you have solar during that day, which means you get to use less of the stored hydro water during the day, does nothing to increase the generating capacity of the hydro plant at peak time. The turbines and generators are already certain size and turn a certain speed. They don’t get bigger because you used less water at midday.

So to make hydro work as a storage solution you need to build more hydro than what you currently have already to replace fossil generation and make sure you can meet all your evening demand. That is absolutely not going to happen anymore, in developed countries hydro is well tapped and nobody wants more dams or lakes. In developing countries there may be some potential but it won’t meet all demand.

There needs to be another storage solution for solar to become viable in this way.

[robocat]

> Hydro plants are going to be running at full output during the peak demand time when solar is not working.

How do you know that?

During drought periods surely it's not true (if there's not enough water to run them).

The flow of rivers is controlled to some extent (which may prevent saving during the day and generating in evening).

And presumably it might be true in one country, but not another, depending on a raft of factors.

I'm guessing there is data somewhere showing utilisation of hydro during evening.

[erentz]

Part of it is based on previous experience working for the national grid in a hydro rich 80-90% clean generating country. I can’t speak specifically for the US but think about it like this. You need to have enough generating capacity on your grid to meet the peak demand. Which according to this duck graph is when solar is not generating. But we have not overbuilt capacity by some large margin. And hydro is only some portion of that total capacity today. The rest is coal, nuclear, increasingly gas, and some small amount of renewables. Therefore how can hydro alone meet the all of the demand when you remove the goal, gas, etc.

[robocat]

Can your reference some live data?

I had a look at https://www.transpower.co.nz/power-system-live-data

And that showed hydro was running at less than 50% of capacity for one relevant data point.

I am guessing the data series of hydro usage versus capacity is available for NZ. Finding out the constraints and understanding them is more difficult.

Your point of maximum capacity may be true, but we are talking usual daily usage (duck graph) and whether solar can use hydro for that.

In think you are arguing about occasional peak network capacity (e.g. heat wave) which is an outlier and you retain power stations with extremely low utilisations for those abnormal peaks (and ignore green issues).

[hn_throwaway_99]

Yeah, I'm curious if the number of "batteries" already connected to the grid could mitigate this quite a bit. For example, large industrial freezers (or perhaps even "smart" home freezers) could take their temp extra low during the day so they wouldn't need to use power during the evening.

Also, with the current discrepancy in electricity costs between the day and evening, seems like this could make something like Tesla's Powerwall much more price competitive if it meant you only had to use the grid during the cheapest times.

[VyperCard]

Yes they can. The company I work for does that using a few halls with industrial freezers.

[HALtheWise]

This seems like the sort of claim that can only be checked with math, not intuition. Without further ado: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1fcwuNd2XANIXmKGPRN_...

Basically, I got some raw data by tracing the graph in Wikipedia[0], as well as the current amount of hydroelectricity generated per day. I made the (highly pessimistic) assumption that aside from hydro, solar would be the sole energy supply for the grid by scaling the production numbers in the graph until the area under the solar curve matched the area under the total, minus the production of hydro. I don't actually know that anybody is seriously advocating for pure solar + hydro, but I wanted to run the numbers.

The result, assuming cars with 85kWh batteries that can be 70% available for grid balancing (leaving ~80-100 miles of range for driving and such) is that California would need 4.3 million cars acting as grid balancing.

For reference, that is just under 30% of the number of cars currently in California, where electrics made up 7% of new car sales last year.

Ultimately, I think the bigger problem is battery degradation, not battery capacity. Being used this heavily for grid balancing would at least double total battery usage on a car, and apart from Tesla with their million-mile drivetrain, no other manufacturer seems to be over-designing their batteries enough to support that. Perhaps that will change if the economics of feeding power back into the grid become compelling enough.

[0]: https://apps.automeris.io/wpd/

[dimitar]

Wouldn't EV increase electricity demand in the evenings when people get home and plug in their cars?

[Filligree]

Not if you program the cars to charge overnight. It requires more smarts, and grid interaction, but the cars could be made to obey instructions from the grid operator.

There would have to be compensation, of course.

[OliverJones]

Individual EV drjvers can set the start time for charging. It's polite to set it for sometime after midnight. This isn't fancy smart-grid stuff, just a new kind of basic common sense that will emerge as EVs get more popular.

[catalogia]

When pitting politeness against convenience (having the most charge in your car as is possible at any moment in time, in case you need to use it for something unanticipated), I don't have high hopes.

To really incentivize this behavior properly, economic incentives need to be strong.

[OliverJones]

I used the word "politeness" because my coal-age utility (National Grid Massachusetts) doesn't offer time-of-day pricing. They seem to have no interest in doing so beyond occasional small-scale government-funded trials. If they did offer TOD pricing you bet I'd be on it.

But don't underestimate the power of social pressures: "politeness". I don't throw my trash in the next street over, because to do so would be rude. The integrity of the entire Internet depends upon an altruistic TCP endpoint algorithm called "exponential backoff".

[usaar333]

The incentives are strong. My electricity is 50% more expensive before 9pm. So I set my timer (a one time setting) for then.

Problem solved.

[jcrben]

California has time of use rates (relatively new and uncommon). And we're beginning to see deep discounts in the middle of the day consistent with the solar. So people may strategically charge during the day. If it's a commuter car on a reasonable commute and you've got 300 miles of range, it's feasible to wait till midday.

You can see the power supply / consumption at http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx

[oh_sigh]

Let's I have an all electric car and sign up for your program. How would I calculate the cost to me of the shortened lifespan of my batteries? Would the manufacturer honor their warranty if I used the car for not only driving but also as part of a battery bank?

[robomartin]

> consumers are already making this investment by switching en masse to EVs

I don't think we are there yet. The US fleet of electrics is in the range of about one million units. Total cars on the road is about 300 million. In other words, electrics represent 0.3% of the total fleet. That is a very long way from "en masse".

Electrics, without a doubt, in some form, are the future. We all know this to be true. However, the adoption curve requires solving a bunch of problems and an expansion of the infrastructure that is also nowhere near being adequate.

This translates to a simple fact: We need far more competition and far more entrants into the segment. Not announcements, but rather real vehicles you can buy.

Car makers have been announcing and showing models that are vaporware for years now. I learned a long time ago that this is bad business. I used to do this kind of thing during my early days as an entrepreneur. It frustrates the customer base to no end and makes them lose trust in the company. It isn't quite lying, but it's close.

I believe the inflection point will come at the intersection of a new energy storage technology (let's call it "batteries" for now) as well as the infrastructure to support it.

The fires and power issues we are having in in California highlighted the weaknesses: You can't adequately charge your electrics during emergencies and range issues make them either inconvenient or just plain dangerous. I'll bet a lot of people have been made to reconsider electrics in CA precisely due to this experience.

Power self-sufficiency by means of a large enough solar array at home could mitigate some of this, however, this does nothing for the person caught in an emergency away from home. We had friends who had to endure three hour trips to go get their kids after forced evacuations due to fires. When you are concerned about the safety and well-being of your loved one's, particularly kids, having range and charging issues isn't a joke at all. In fact, it's a powerful deciding factor against electrics.

For context, as soon as the fires started we drove 5 minutes to the local gas station and filled-up our tanks. We got hundreds of miles of range pretty much instantly. Even better, we didn't have to think about extending that range at all, because the infrastructure is ubiquitous and available without issues outside the affected radius (and within a very small fraction of the vehicle's range).

I'm not down on electrics at all. Just being realistic. It will happen when all the conditions are met and there are a dozen companies offering real products, rather than three.

Lateral thought: My thinking is that the future of electric transportation will require an energy storage system based on LIQUID charging rather than plugging in. We need to be able to go into the equivalent of a gas station, pump out the spent portion of the electrolyte (or whatever) and pump in fresh "charged" electrolyte. It needs to be 5 minutes in and out for 0 to full range.

I realize this might not be as "green" as people would like it to be. Not that electric cars are green at all (just wait until we have 300 million battery packs to deal with as waste). Going from 0 to full range quickly by plugging --assuming a charge storage system that could handle this-- requires very dangerous voltages and currents. I am not sure what this would look like if we had 300 million vehicles on the road with a need for that kind of energy to be delivered that quickly. I think I can say that our electrical grid is likely not designed to deliver at this rate (I haven't researched this but I have a sense this statement is likely true).

Anyhow, not a simple problem. At a personal level, we were about to invest in one or two electrics by the end of the year. The fires and power outages have painted a real negative light on the practicality of these vehicles when things matter most. We'll have to rethink. No conclusion yet.