If you had a variable electric contract (rare but possible), you were paid to use electricity during those hours. Got a battery at home? You can be paid to charge it during the day, and paid again to discharge it at night.
Imagine software that could run on EVs, Powerwall-type batteries, computers/tablets/smartphones, and so on, which would automatically charge and discharge for passive income. Essentially algorithmic trading, but with power instead of stock. You'd just have to configure any necessary time ranges and charge percentages, e.g. maybe your EV needs to be at 25% by 8am and again by 5pm on weekdays in order to make your daily commute.
Maybe some EVs will start to come with built-in crypto miners to burn negatively priced power when the battery is at capacity. Maybe Lyft/Uber and Waymo/Cruise will take advantage of it by increasing and lowering rates based on the price of power (if they don't already).
It’s easier to add a bunch of grid-scale storage, but more expensive.
I think both solutions will scale alongside solar/wind adoption.
If we need distributed batteries, dont look to the lightweight and highly specialized batteries of EVs. Oldschool lead acid batteries are far cheaper, last longer, and are easily recycled. That is the way to build out a distributed battery grid.
For the correct price, a great many would. Once the batteries are too degraded for mobility use, they’re still often usable for fixed storage.
I've never even managed to get my workplaces to provide a parking spot, you can absolutely forget about workplaces paying for EV charging for everyone. It'll never happen even with heavy subsidy.
But lots of businesses do provide parking spaces. If your space is reserved for you, and you drive an EV, it becomes an obvious feature to add though at minimal cost.
Clearly some will do this, its likely many already do, and if you becomes a trend then it will move the needle. Not enough by itself, but a fair bit.
Can totally be done. Asking is free, and if you don’t ask, the answer is always no.
Are there ways to try to ensure much of these subsidies end up reducing the price (and associated hurdle) of consumers rather than 80+% ending up as increased profits for HVAC companies?
I think it doesn’t work well in practice for a regulated/licensed trade (with enforced minimum apprenticeship times) when trying to do a temporary lump of conversion work (retiring working fuel boilers and replacing with heat pumps faster than would otherwise happen naturally).
As a mechanical engineer and hard-core DIYer, I can’t legally do it myself, nor get the local rebates if I do a pirate install, nor start a company to compete against the HVAC incumbents without hiring from the same limited pool of licensed HVAC techs those companies have.
Competition might work as an answer over a long period of time (with stable incentive programs).
Well, it's also being heavily subsidized, but not by the US. China has been leading the way there, and for a clear geostrategic reason: they have no access to natural gas or oil, and have to trade for it. If you want a "fortress economy" that can endure sanctions like the Russians have done, this is a weakness that must be addressed, and solar isn't a bad option.
Details matter. Thanks for the correction.
Where do we get enough renewable electricity on cloudy week in December? Synthetic gas/oil produced in summer? Anything more promising?
There are technologies on the horizon that could fill the long term storage needs for winter power. Lithium Ion, although great for mobile technologies, is not ideal for grid scale storage. It can’t store power for long. But other chemistries such as vanadium flow batteries and iron air batteries can discharge longer, and they can store power for far longer.
7. Set up virtual power plant policies, give property owners incentives to install storage for grid stabilization, this will enable demand shifting and reduce the need for distribution grid upgrades and enable more distributed energy sources to be installed at the neighborhood level.
8. Inter-regional transmission line upgrades. Build out transmission lines between regions. The sun may not always be shining, and the wind may not always blow. But the sun will always be shining somewhere and the wind will be blowing somewhere. This will let regions support each other.
9. Pass enabling legislation/regulation for community choice aggregation in all states. This will speed up adoption of renewables by leveraging climate action plans at the municipal level to procure more renewables and lead to the early retirement of fossil generation facilities.
Will those extra charging cycles shorten the lifetime of my EV? It's one thing to have household batteries, which can be replaced on their own and which are still pretty useful at 40% of their original capacity. But I can't economically replace just the battery on my EV (it'll cost more than the car is worth) and diminished range would really reduce the utility I get from the vehicle it powers.
(But thanks for getting me thinking with that list, regardless.)
EV batteries are anywhere from 40->120kWh in capacity. The average home consumed consumes around 20 to 30kWh a day. Assuming you pair your EV with a solar you aren't likely using a significant portion of the battery throughout the night.
This does depend on the chemistry. If your EV is using LFPs, you have about 10k cycles to play with. NMC has about 1000.
So, for an LFP vehicle it's practically a no brainer.
Within a handful of years, major home electricity-consuming appliances will come with built-in batteries used for both backup purposes but also for shifting load to the cleanest/cheapest electricity available. By this time commercial/industrial will have already transitioned to this.
However, seasonal storage is a completely different beast. In the winter there are months without a lot of solar. For my solar panels, total energy generated in December is are about 15% of that in June.
Seasonal storage is a lot more expensive than daily storage, because you can use your battery for only 30 cycles (30 years) rather than 1000-5000, depending on the technology used. That means that storing power generated in June and using it in December costs somewhere around 1$\kWh, simply to expensive. Do you have any ideas on how to solve that problem?
- Use 100 hour battery tech, which is almost (years not decades) at commercialization. This can bridge pretty big gaps.
- Dam and fill some big valleys in the low-solar areas with water and put generation and pumps on them, to store water all summer for winter use in generation.
- Wind works most of the year. Offshore is great for that.
- HVDC lines streching from sea to shining sea.
- The BIG one: You can save 30% or more on HVAC and other specific loads, if you let software control them better. The problem is retrofitting shitty old buildings with electronics to do it, and getting building managers to repair their HVAC systems instead of letting them languish.
Instead, we need to rely on the fact that it's not winter everywhere, at least to the same degree. My house has a similar seasonal profile to yours, but an industrial plant in the Mojave desert does not get shaded by hillsides, does not have atmospheric rivers come in, can move the panels to follow the sun's angle, is at a far more southern latitude, etc. And several generation technologies like hydro and wind actually produce more in the winter than the summer, because rainy and windy days benefit them.
This is probably the biggest argument I've seen for the continued existence of the grid. My home can run indefinitely on self-supplied energy during the summer, but I still need the grid to get through the winter.
(1) No power from renewables overnight? Sure, nuclear works
(2) (Planning for the eventuality where) Entire grid's demand is available from renewables during parts of the day? Either don't use the renewables, and keep the nuclear running, OR battery storage.
A decade ago I think (1) was the primary topic of armchair discussion, but (2) has become increasingly more common. It really doesn't feel like nuclear is demonstrating the ability to keep up (maybe in China though...); it's not getting built fast enough, and I don't recall the more modern designs that are in the permitting process/starting to build (in the US) toting highly variable power generation as a added capability.
I do pay less attention to the nuclear news since I finished my masters a decade ago and never worked nuclear after, so I could be unaware of some things.
Whenever I read about hydrogen power, there’s this sort of elephant in the room that producing it burns power, which is usually assumed to mean burning fossil fuels.
If we have excess solar during the daytime, couldn’t that be spent refining water to hydrogen and sticking that in a battery of sorts?
I feel like that would be especially useful for renewable flight and ocean travel, where the weight of actual batteries makes electric unviable.
Mass produced hydrogen comes from fossil fuels.
That said, I agree hydrogen might have a role in shipping and flight. Just not grid storage. LFPs and sodium chemistry are both cheap with a long life. That's what will more commonly be deployed.
There's a lot to be said for market pricing and letting smart startups find an optimum solution rather than politicians picking things to subsidise which is how you end up with corn subsidies and the like.
In this case for economic efficiency you need really a carbon tax, rather than subsidise this that or the other which may well be out of date by the time the politicians are done arguing.
At least if you actually want to reduce global co2 emissions that's the kind of stuff to do though you need global buy in. At the moment a lot of the actions are more feel good greenwashing and as a result global co2 emissions continue merrily upwards.
The bottleneck for continued electrification is going to become storage shortly. Solar can produce all the electricity we need, but it only does it during daylight hours, while we consume the most energy between 4-10 PM. Natural gas is currently bridging the gap, but utilities can't install more base-load solar than is consumed during peak daylight hours. So the key to letting solar replace more gas is time-shifting consumption from 4-10 PM to 9 AM - 3 PM. Here's my plan of inexpensive solutions for this:
1. Subsidize workplace EV charging, and create a standard that lets workplaces pass along energy costs from it to employees.
2. Invest in smart grid-aware EV & home battery charging technologies. Instead of charging whenever you first plug them in (which is usually ~6 PM), load from EV charging should be distributed to whenever the grid has excess power available, with a random factor so that not all EVs charge at once.
3. Subsidize insulation upgrades for homes. This turns them into thermal batteries where you can heat/cool them during the day and they will retain that temperature at night. Insulation materials are also really cheap for what you get now; it's installation that's the bottleneck in many cases.
4. Subsidize heat pumps, to make all heating/cooling electric.
5. Adopt V2H/V2G charging technology on all EVs, so that energy already stored in the car's battery can power home electronics at night.
6. Meet demand for EV batteries.
There, you're done, at least as far as residential consumers are concerned. Transportation + HVAC are by far the largest energy draws in the consumer sector. Timeshift them so that they happen during peak solar hours, and the problem of creating enough grid-scale energy storage to shift production from 9-3 to 4-10 reduces to the problem of creating enough batteries so that everyone can have an EV. A Ford F-150 Lightning has as much battery capacity as 7 PowerWalls; take HVAC out of the equation and you can easily power a home for weeks off it.