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by proee 74 days ago
EVs are essentially a giant battery on wheels. Seems there is a good opportunity to configure them as bidirectional power banks for your local grid. You could rewire all parking slots to have a plugin that acts as a bidirectional power station. Imaging how much power could be moved around with such a grid! This would require a major investment in power transmission layouts, but a city full of batteries on wheels.

California has registered around 1M Teslas alone. So this is like having a 1Mx80kwh = 80GWh battery at your service. As a reference, the largest solar + storage facility in California is around 3.2 GWh.

3 comments

It's nice for an emergency, and almost all EVs can do that already.

But people pay extra to put the batteries over wheels because they need to haul charged batteries around. It's not normally useful to discharge them locally.

Just charging your car when electricity is cheap and avoiding times when it is scarce would solve most of the issues, provided there is a dynamic pricing system in place.
No idea why this has been downvoted. There is a lot of demand for this, and at least one company actively working on orchestrating home and EV batteries with the grid: https://www.amber.com.au/amber-for-evs