[jluxenberg]

Storage will be a solved problem once everyone has an electric vehicle with a 65kWh battery sitting in their garage. Power your home overnight from your car, then recharge during the day when the sun comes out.

If you have a large home or need to always have a fully charged car, spend $15k on a home battery.

We need to get out of this mindset that electric utilities will provide unlimited power at a fixed price. With some investment from individual homeowners we can reduce peak to average ratios for utilities and make it much cheaper and possible to use intermittent green energy sources like wind and solar.

[fooker]

> then recharge during the day when the sun comes out.

Unless you actually need the car during the day..

[Ma8ee]

Then you get a separate battery. But the vast majority only drives their car back and forth to work, so most of the day the cars are just standing there and could be charged.

[ThalesX]

If we’re speculating about the future, having cars sit by idly all day seems like a good target for disruption.

I’d like to believe we’ll get to the point where we share self driving vehicles or own some that go on about their day producing profit.

The cars could also charge themselves in the process.

[na85]

All it would take is one person smoking in their shared car to ruin it for the rest of us.

Once a vehicle (or a home) has been smoked in, you can never completely get the smell out.

It makes me nauseous to sit in that smell for any length of time.

[nitrogen]

The shared-everything vision of the future ignores the extent to which people's cars serve as extensions of their home and storage. Having a bunch of stuff always available when you need it, and knowing that nobody else will stink up the place, means that personally owned cars will remain popular for a very long time.

[ThalesX]

For around two years I’m constantly using shared cars via apps. I’ve had almost zero issues. If the car is dirty or smells you can review it and one would assume repeat offenders get booted off.

[Ma8ee]

Hotels have solved that problem by simply prohibiting smoking in most rooms, and if you get caught doing it anyway, they’ll charge you a high fee to sanitise the room.

[pkdpic]

Im all for having a more robust ecosystem of shared vehicles. But it does make me think of the rough physical state of shared scooters and bikes in my neighborhood...

[Valgrim]

Then you buy a home battery, as he said?

[prawn]

It feels that people can get a bit unimaginative when talking about the future of cars or solar or, in this case, a combination of both. "What if I drive the car to work? I guess this whole solar-battery scheme falls apart."

FWIW, the people I know with EVs have solar panels and a home battery.

[stephen_g]

I hope to get an electric car soon, and it would be great to be able to charge at work - even if I had a home battery. And I'm sure there will be programs to encourage businesses to get chargers into car parks around here in the next few years - and since cars are parked for a fair while, it can just be slow charging like 7 kW single phase (I guess it would make sense to also have two or so fast charging spaces for when people need it)

Charging at work would be ideal - it would all basically happen 100% in solar hours. My work has solar on its roof itself, I'm sure more and more places will, so it all really makes sense. And that way I could basically run my house 100% off a battery, whereas charging an electric car from a home battery would probably mean I'd still have to buy a fair bit of power from the grid.

But yeah, the story basically is that it's all possible and not that hard.

[Robotbeat]

The real idea is not using cars for storage but end of life car batteries AND simply using the same factories that make car batteries to make grid batteries. AND, since vehicles will be a significant source of our electricity demand, we can use them as "storage" simply by not charging them at some times.

I think most people don't realize that V2G tech is old (Chademo supported it, and older Leafs can already do it natively, and they're about a decade old), but it's expensive. You basically need a DC charger for every car that will be doing V2G. Look up how much a DC charger is, and you can get something like a dedicated Powerwall for the same price...

[nicoburns]

I think using the car batteries as storage also makes a lot of sense. Suppose technology improves so that cars have ~double the capacity they have now (~150kwh), then that’s super useful for long car journeys, but most people only do short journeys each day. So you could use the excess for storage. And they’d be plenty considering the average household in the uk only uses 10kwh a day (although admittedly that’s factoring in gas heating which will need to be replaced)

[toomuchtodo]

Hence why Tesla sells Powerwalls instead of supporting V2G. There are also subsidies for Powerwalls from a variety of entities, and they can be orchestrated in concert to create a virtual power plant. V2G for anything other than emergency power is unnecessary complexity.

[Brometheus]

Yet Tesla attempts to do it, too, with autobidder

[kwhitefoot]

> We need to get out of this mindset that electric utilities will provide unlimited power at a fixed price.

We already pay spot price here in Norway.

[DavidPeiffer]

How much variability do you see in spot prices? Are there any alternatives?

It looks like 90%+ of electricity produced in Norway is hydro, with fossil fuels only around 2% [1]. Hydroelectric plants are very quick to respond to changes in demand.

From what I can see, it probably isn't a huge surprise bill risk to the consumer compared to places like, say, Texas.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Norway

[Epa095]

It's fun you ask, because for the first time in many years we have seen quite a interest in the spot price, because it has reached the record high of 0.35usd/kWh (but mostly it stays around 0.12usd/kWh). This has been a record dry automn, combined with very high prices in the UK and Europe (and we export/import power, which affects prices here). You can get all other kind of pricing schemes as well, but as with insurance in general, on average you are going to be best off with spot price if you can stomach the ups and downs.

[reaperducer]

And large parts of Texas.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

>Storage will be a solved problem once everyone has an electric vehicle with a 65kWh battery sitting in their garage. Power your home overnight from your car, then recharge during the day when the sun comes out.

Too bad you'll be driving to the office on business days.

[Dylan16807]

When the issue is "how do we generate enough power" it doesn't really matter where the car is.

That just complicates distribution a little, but not a whole lot.

[cozzyd]

Not all of us have a garage or a car for that matter (nor a place to put a large battery).

[mikepurvis]

Those for whom that is the case probably live in a dense urban core which is surrounded by hundreds of thousands of detached single family homes for whom it is not.

In any case, it's not hard to imagine that XX kWh onsite battery reserves will end up as a standard condo feature in the future same as hot water or a weight room.

[tamaharbor]

How often will I need to replace my battery set?

[ac29]

Tesla Powerwall has a 10 year warranty. If thats based on actual expected life and not just a marketing thing, its not too unreasonable.

[epistasis]

And in 15-20 years when it's replaced, it's likely the replacement will cost a tenth of current prices. Batteries are getting so much cheaper every year that I'm delaying purchasing only because I don't want to lock in today's prices, and I'm hoping for an aggregated demand response solution that can start paying me for battery usage as well. Just being able to island my house and ride out a blackout isn't as much of an incentive at the moment.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> everyone has an electric vehicle with a 65kWh battery sitting in their garage.

That's a solution I hope that neither I nor my children live to see. It's a solution I hope never happens unless a new battery technology arrives that for a start eliminates our need to once again fuck over some very poor countries in order to get our hands on rare resources. Lithium battery tech is quite miraculous, but it's also not appropriate as the basis for the entire electrification of human civilization.

Also, lots of people will have neither cars nor garages.

[Anchor]

> unless a new battery technology arrives that for a start eliminates our need to once again fuck over some very poor countries

It is already here. Google LFP batteries.

[adamparsons]

I’m a big fan of LFP don’t get me wrong, but it still requires mining and refining lithium, which indeed does fuck over the environment quite badly

[epistasis]

Compared to, say, steel or aluminum, what is the increased damage? I've read every single documentary news article, read reports from governmental agencies, and I still don't know what's so bad about lithium. Particularly compared to standard extraction of other resources that nobody ever talks about.

Especially oil. Oil and coal and natural gas have horrifying consequences for local environments all the time, and nobody ever talks about that. From fly ash ponds to spills to destroyed drinking water. If there was anything remotely as bad as that, wouldn't any of these articles I have read pointed out the damage? Literally the worst lithium story is political, not environmental, in that indigenous people are not being given enough compensation for their land, or not given enough input.

Cobalt has stories of child labor at artisanal mines, but again that is political, not environmental damage, and the environmental damage is the same as from all the other parts that go into the grid, or a car, and they don't have the horrifying consequences of fossil fuel extraction.

If I'm wrong, and there is something I don't know,I will be forever grateful for a pointer to clear documentation of this environmental damage you speak of. But I have been asking this question for years, and searching for years, and nobody, literally nobody, has pointed me to anything concrete. Just vague assertions at best. Which is not what environmental damage looks like. Environmental damage is specific, horrifying, and all too often swept under the rug as long as its wealthy fossil fuel companies doing it.

[lanstin]

https://nbcpalmsprings.com/2021/04/29/salton-sea-lithium-gol...

I can’t vouch for this of my own knowledge but as lithium is such a light element it is sensible that it would be easy to find and use.

[hutzlibu]

Erm, have you heard of

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery

No technical recolution needed, no rare elements needed, no invasions nedded, just plain salt, iron and copper. They are just bigger in size.

And for some reasons not really known so this whole discussion feels a bit off.