Energy price volatility will probably increase because natural sources are more volatile and other sources have spin up / down cycles. A car battery is like 3-4 days of continuous house usage. The car battery being used to top off the top 10% in short term pricing for energy would give a very nice ROI I expect. The rest is software? Don’t overcharge, don’t go under the limit I set for continuous availability as a mode of transport. And that’s all within reach in front of the meter, thus under my ownership. Heck, without self driving becoming common a family might even have 2 EVs on the driveway, giving a week of off grid potential.
Come to think of it - a harder part is how super local the grid is and energy pricing should become. In my somewhat affluent neighborhood in high summer the voltage rises too high and the supply of solar falls. And tragedy of the commons - we are still installing solar because it’s massively incentivized (2 years before investment returns itself). To solve this with EVs requires very granular prices. There might be clouds 50 km away. But again, those are software solvable issues. (I’m not holding my breath. It’s like IoT-superplus.)
Unless it's voluntary (which it darned well better be).
I envision a future where individual appliances (including EVs) can opt in to spot pricing for the electricity they consume (or produce). That would naturally incentivize charging during off-peak hours and discharging during peak hours, all without requiring any government incentives or coercion. It could also be useful for other major appliances which could benefit from the lower prices afforded by load shifting, such as hot water heaters.
>> I envision a future where individual appliances (including EVs) can opt in to spot pricing for the electricity they consume (or produce).
I remember when high speed internet was coming into being and there were a lot of pundits talking about how high speed bandwidth would be sold as a commodity on the NYSE. If someone needed say an hour of high bandwidth for a video conference, they could do what you're saying, buy an hour of high speed access. Of course, high speed internet eventually became so cheap and so readily available, those ideas faded pretty fast.
I might be remembering this wrong, but wasn't Enron doing what you're talking about?
>> I envision a future where individual appliances (including EVs) can opt in to spot pricing for the electricity they consume
When 1,000 devices jump on the grid the moment electricity hits $0.01/kWh, the demand spike will cause more generators to come back on line and increase the price back to $0.05/kWh -- thus causing the 1,000 devices to drop-off the grid.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
How do you compensate for the potential grid instability?
Generators aren't going to spin up just to cover a brief fluctuation like that. It would cause too much wear on the system, so most likely anyone selling electricity to the grid via generators would program their system to only turn on when it predicts the price change will last more than a few seconds.
Assuming instability does actually become a problem though, that sounds like a very straightforward technical problem with many possible solutions. Just off the top of my head, the simplest market-based solution would likely be futures trading. If all these appliances reserve their electricity usage 10 seconds in advance, then sellers can know exactly how much demand there'll be and adjust their production accordingly, maybe even bidding on that capacity so they know in advance exactly how much they'll need to produce. I imagine the high-frequency trading industry probably has tons of experience with this sort of thing.
>bryanlarsen, we noticed that your location is at home but your car isn’t plugged in. Please plug it in and drink a verification can within the next 10 minutes to avoid a noncompliance charge
Come to think of it - a harder part is how super local the grid is and energy pricing should become. In my somewhat affluent neighborhood in high summer the voltage rises too high and the supply of solar falls. And tragedy of the commons - we are still installing solar because it’s massively incentivized (2 years before investment returns itself). To solve this with EVs requires very granular prices. There might be clouds 50 km away. But again, those are software solvable issues. (I’m not holding my breath. It’s like IoT-superplus.)