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by ThunderSizzle 1255 days ago
Sounds similar to Uber using a contractor vehicle's hidden depreciation and maintenance to shift the real cost of their service.

I doubt the hourly price will ever truly be fair to individual car owners. Maybe we'll start to be asked whenever we plug in our phones to tip the owner of a car our electricity is coming from.
3 comments
cwkoss 1255 days ago
If there are consistent price cycles and a good API for reading price, it should be pretty easy for an EV owner to control how much they interact with the arbitrage opportunities with some simple rules. Ex. "only sell if it cost at least 15% less to charge", "always charge to X%", "charge to 70% if < $Y", charge to 100% if < $Z", "never sell below X%"

The aesthetic vibe of having an autonomous energy trading bot in my garage is attractive to me.

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rtkwe 1255 days ago
Part of the issue isn't the controls to do that it's that the prices to compensate wear on a battery are a) likely significantly higher than the base price and b) pretty hard to calculate.
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mhb 1255 days ago
That's what a market is for.
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cwkoss 1255 days ago
Yeah, I'd try to model the deprecation cost of the battery to some extent while tuning my magic numbers in the trading bot settings.

~1,500 cycles per $16k battery replacement. Shouldn't sell a full cycle for less than ~$15. Don't arbitrage a 1% point of battery life unless it yields at least $0.15. Might just set it at $0.20 per 1% for healthy margin/price-in hassle of battery replacement.

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rtkwe 1254 days ago
You're not actually getting the full 100% out of a cycle probably when the utility drains it though. They'll take a portion of your battery then it'll either charge up again using a partial cycle or your car will get charged at home like normal where the math you did is closer.

It's also not super clear how much wear small charge discharge cycles does on a normal battery if it's not in the bottom or top 20% of the battery.

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jahewson 1255 days ago
There is no market. I can only sell electricity to PG&E and only at a flat rate.
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mhb 1255 days ago
That is a market. You can decide to sell or not. Whether PG&E offers a market clearing price is a separate issue.
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rlpb 1255 days ago
> I doubt the hourly price will ever truly be fair to individual car owners.

If it's not fair to them, then they won't participate, and the market will adjust.

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micromacrofoot 1255 days ago
I already get paid by my utility for the electricity my solar panels generate, and it's 1:1 with what they charge me for their generation.
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