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Using EVs as home batteries sounds like a good idea but wouldn't the extra charging and discharging cycles results in loss of capacity and thus loss of range for the car?
I suspect it probably would. But shouldn't that be the user's choice to make?
Absolutely, I didn't want to sound like Apple
Depends.
If you have, say, a 75kWh battery, that's 3-4 days of average summer usage in a large house.
So if you use it to shave off peak usage costs from 4 to 9 pm and then you top it up off peak again from 1 am to 6 am, you cycle through about 10-20 percent of it's total capacity. If you kept doing this in the mid-range of your battery , like 55-75 percent, it would have a negligible effect on battery life.
Also consider a car probably sucks a lot more current from the cells than a house (while accelerating). Batteries are much happier about low current draw so it's probably much milder wear than driving the car for the same amount of energy
The article is talking about Tesla's home batteries, not their EVs.
In terms of EVs and vehicle to grid, I think people will have to crunch the numbers to see if it's worth it, and that will likely depend on how the future electric market is designed, whether they can tolerate reduced range, how often they replace their cars etc. In the short to medium term, some might decide that exposing themselves to the wholesale market through Amber Electric or similar may be worth it, although there is a lot of room for improvements on all fronts.
Although I suspect EVs will become so cheap that people will be willing to risk some amount of degradation, and if nothing else, people could use their old EVs exclusively as batteries, once they are no longer useful on the road.
Vehicle to grid would be great during short blackouts — no need for a permanent battery and you can keep the lights and fridge going.
Maybe not vehicle to grid, but vehicle to select critical circuits in your home until a certain level of charge. While I dont want my fridge warm, I can choose not to open it. I would hate to have a black out during some major incident and ALSO have a dead battery and not have any form of transportation either. Maybe a notification when it hits a certain discharge and you need to approve it to keep going.
I can see why they wouldn't want you to use your car as a battery for your solar on a permanent basis. Those cycles would be horrible for your car, but in an emergency, it would seem easy enough to set up.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Australian owners of Tesla batteries could miss out on lucrative revenue streams because the US energy giant restricts the devices’ ability to interact locally with third parties and authorities continue to dither over setting and enforcing standards.
An increasing number of products from air conditioners to hot water heaters and solar panels can be controlled remotely, and consumers can sign deals rewarding them for altering power usage during peak load periods, including supplying electricity to grid.
“Batteries that do not offer their full performance via an open standards-based, non-cloud control port are too easily locked into a particular business model to the detriment of their owners,” said Dean Spaccavento, the chief executive of Reposit Power.
Con Hristodoulidis, a policy director at Clean Energy Council, noted standards for the interoperability of consumer resources would hinge on a final report from the federal government.
“It is important that households are empowered to make the right choice of home batteries and have greater flexibility to select service providers without experiencing higher software and hardware costs in so doing,” he said.
A spokesperson for NSW’s energy department said it was engaging with industry stakeholders, including battery manufacturers, and “continuing to finalise the details of the peak demand reduction scheme to ensure it delivers the best possible outcomes for all participants”.
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