289 comments on Photovoltaics: From Waste to Energy-maker
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High penetrations levels of intermittent renewable power sources are a challenge with most current grid systems. There are several non-exclusive ways to 'absorb' solar power generation: real-time pricing, demand side management, hydro/pneumatic storage, for starters.
Retail real-time pricing will lower the cost of power when the sun is shining (or wind blowing), and raise it when this is not the case. Reducing the risk to industrial customers from unscrupulous operators gaming the system would be necessary, of course.
Demand Side Management provides a means to reduce consumption when supplies are tight. For example, a customer signed up in a Demand Side Management agreement may have their electric hot water heater or air conditioner go on a reduced duty cycle (e.g., turned 10 minutes out of every 40) , having additional control elements installed that receive 'conserve mode' signals from the grid operator when peak generation conditions are close to being reached. In 2005, U.S. electricity providers reported total peak-load reductions of 25,710 megawatts resulting from demand-side management (DSM) programs, a 9.3 percent increase from the amount reported in 2004. See a DoE initiative at http://gridwise.pnl.gov/
Energy Storage can be accomplished in a number of ways, from hydro storage (e.g., even Virginia has 3 such facilities), compressed air storage in caverns, flywheels , , and thermal storage, and others
As energy prices rise and become less reliable, any business that depends heavily on energy will invest in security of supply, kinda like a large scale UPS system. In the UK about 2/3 of the cost of our energy comes from grid maintenance rather than the generation cost. We have started to see intensive energy users install CHP or wind turbines on their sites to help meet their energy needs, this is a very good way of reducing loads on the grid and also reducing operating costs, as the energy should cost less and reliability isnt so much of an issue as the grid is hopefully there if things go wrong.
Energy storage is the easiest way to reduce fossil fuel dependency, electric transport and grid scale storage are desperatly needed :)
No nothing like 2/3rds of electricity cost is grid.
Transmission and Distribution are c. 35% of final retail electric power prices, from memory.
For wholesale customers, T&D charges would be much less. Commercial and industrial customers are 60% of UK power demand.
Remember too a lot of UK generating capacity has been written off, this was done at privatisation. So the reported cost is just the O&M and Fuel cost, without a capital cost. The UK has very old generating plant: in fact last winter, they even fired up one of the old oil fired units.
The actual generating cost in the UK will be much higher, as we replace the old coal-fired and nuclear stations with something else.
Demand-side management (DSM) is going to be key. Ice-storage A/C is going to be a huge part of this; today's summer peaks are almost entirely due to A/C load, but ice storage can shift this to any time of day and (with a little more water, which is cheap) spread demand over a large part of a week. And when PV creates noontime peaks on sunny days, ice storage will be there to buffer it.
The other big part is the EV/PHEV segment. If every light-duty vehicle in the USA (roughly 200 million) had a 16 kWh traction battery that averaged 50% charged when plugged in, there would be 1.6 terawatt-hours of tappable demand. This could absorb almost 4 hours of average US electric generation... or possibly defer it until a more favorable time a few hours in the future. This is where we could be 20 years from now.
I think that fleet replacement could go a little faster than 20 years. Also, the batteries in vehicles are not likely to be worn out when replaced, they'll just be degraded below transportation grade. So, I would guess that much storage will be in these used batteries. PG&E is already making contracts to purchase these.
Chris
A fleet replacement of established technology (ICE) with a non-commercial idea-stage technology for 20 years?
People, get some life. It took 20 years for ordinary hybrids to go from development to what? 2% of the market? How long will it take for plug-ins? For V2G? If I need to make a bet - no earlier than 2050.
"A total of 187,000 hybrid vehicles were sold in the United States in the first six months of 2007, according to J.D. Power. Sales of hybrid vehicles are expected to decline slightly in the second half of the year but, nevertheless, J.D. Power expects a total of 345,000 to be sold over the whole year. That would compare to 256,000 sold in 2006."
CNN Money
PO will dramatically change the purchasing trends of automobiles. Toss old assumptions out the door.
Interesting that I saw a television add for the Volt already.
Chris
Did they mention the price? Which channel?
It was PR. The commercial showed a bunch of kids hugging the hood. It was a commercial channel but I don't know which. But, it is interesting that GM would spend on a commercial for a product they won't produce yet for a while. Maybe they want to boost their credit rating by generating a wait list the way that the Prius had a wait list.
Chris
Plug-ins are an excellent idea because they fit in our current infrastructure. I expect them to become quite common within a decade or two. Maybe predominant - but just maybe - it is still to be seen what will be their cost and if they are able to scale fast enough.
V2G is another thing, because it will require additional infrastructure plus fitting the current one in it. Hell we don't even know if it will work - so far it's just a nicely sounding idea, demonstrated by noone.
Personally I think V2G won't work very well - and here is why: when I park my car at work in the morning I want to be able to start it any time I want to, and drive home or to my errands. Unfortunately after I park my car at work in the morning, this will be the most likely time millions of others will be doing the same and crank up those factories, A/Cs, computers etc. Hence we've got a certain negative correlation between parking and electricity demand. If this is the case when I leave work I will most likely find my car LESS charged than when I left it in the morning. If I use the ICE to recharge it on my way back, then effectively I am using my on-board ICE as a 15% efficient electrical generator that feeds the grid - burning (very expensive at that time) gasoline as a fuel. No good deal for me, thanks.
The bottom line is that V2G maybe sound like a good idea and may help a little but don't count on it yet. Let's see how plug-ins perform before we count those chickens.
LevinK, how about if we exclude you from V2G, because you seem to phrase criticisms as if you represent the world's style of life. Things will change and you won't have whatever power you want whenever you want it. Go with the flow.
But, lets not let go of, say, electric school buses. Known and regular hours on the road. But critically, an underused asset through most of the summer.
Just sitting there, 50kWh+ storage, providing ancillary services, up and down regulation, adding to spinning reserves.
Centrally located at a charging park. Oh, BTW, in emergencies, when locals seek shelter from the storm at a school, buses may provide local backup power.
And for some new EV performance results: click me
I don't see the point of your snippy comment.
Whether an idea will work or not has to be investigated prior to spending billions in implementing it. Or you don't agree? You guys are counting the chickens before they hatch and I bet none of you is even an electrical engineer. I am also not an engineer but at least I don't tell engineers what works or not.
EP's essay may be a good idea of what may possibly work. But it has to be proven in practice and this is the tough part. We can fantasize all we want.
I agree that this may possibly work. However, the potential payoff is enormous. Seeing if it does work should therefore be one of our highest priorities.
Edit: My degree says "BSEE" on it.
Unlike you, I have read (and more importantly, understood) the V2G papers at AC Propulsion's site. V2G is not a major method of storing energy for return to the grid. Its major uses are:
I just saw your edit. Thank you very much for the clarification. And of course my non electrical engineering remark was not against you - you did not participate in this conversation at this point, so I still hold on my bet.
Now in the light of your clarification, would you go back to your original post and revise it? I'm sorry for this request, but the most critical point of your clarification is that V2G is NOT a significant source for grid energy storage. While in the original post you explicitly rely on it to store non-dispatchable solar energy. Considering the amounts of energy we're talking about you have to admit this is not a viable suggestion at all.
Of course I am at fault for not doing the research before posting, but to my credit the V2G faults I pointed out were leading to exactly the same conclusion - that V2G can not be a major source for grid storage. But it could be used to stabilize the grid - something which I did not think about and I thank you again for the fair clarification. I would be curious about the cost/benefit analysis for this, but for this one I promise I'll do my own research.
Now that we are back to lacking a viable way to store huge amounts of electric energy we are again in front of the classical problems what will provide the baseload power and what will be used as peaking power.
Clearly solar can be a part of both, but what exactly part remains to be seen. I see it doing relatively well combined with nuclear as a secure baseload and for the nights plus NG plus some DSM to handle the peaks. Like you pointed out V2G can be used both as DSM and to handle short-term shartfalls. 50% nuclear, 30% solar and 20% NG look pretty viable to me. With apologies to Alan, but if/when solar picks up I don't think wind will be referred to at all.
Yet again, Levin, You are wrong. See you don't bother to look up any references or educate yourself, so here is slide 15 of V2G Basics from a recent conference on plug-in vehicles sponsored by the IEEE:
Average car driven 1 hour/day --> time
parked is 23 hours/day
Daily average travel: 32 miles
Practical power draw from car: 10 - 20 kW
US power generation=811 GW; load=417 GW
US 191 million cars x 15 kW = 2,865 GW
Vehicle batteries in a converted nationwide fleet has some 7x the capacity of US load. That's non-negligible.
Let's go further. If each vehicle stores 10 kWh/day, that's 20% of US daily consumption of 10^10 kWh/day. With all-electric vehicles at 35 kWh, storage capacity is 70% of electricity consumed per day. So, for example, an electric fleet enables significantly more wind power to be productively used than without a storage method.
You know in Texas they have installed so much wind power that now at night they can't use it all. Storage would significantly grow their use of wind. But then, you have a history here of arguing against significant amounts of wind.
Don't you think there's a reason people get so snippy with you?
Is nobody building pumped storage? At (IIRC) ~$100/MWh capacity, I would've expected selling dirt-cheap nighttime wind power at daytime peak rates would be economic. I could certainly be missing something, though.
Pitt, the comment was made last month in a public forum in front of audience of engineers, policy makers, business people, and utility people, and was made by Mark Kapner, PE, Senior Strategy Planner for Austin Energy.
My guess is the resources for pumped storage are just not there regionally.
They are, apparently, adding load balancing by putting windmills on the coast (where the winds blow at different times of day, even if the Load Factors are much lower than on the Texas Plains).
Warren Buffett is investing up to $4bn in Texas windmills.
If I am wrong, this mean EP is also wrong, and this paper here (PDF) is also wrong. Note this is a detailed technical paper not a power point presentation. I think you confuse grid regulation with energy storage. Grid regulation is the service of having a stand-by power to meet short-lived variations in demand. Utilities use hydro power, battery packs and capacitor banks to do it.
But it can not be used to smooth longer-term variation like the day/night cycle of solar. For these you need to have a significant storage in terms of GWh - like pumped hydro for example.
V2G does not have a huge capacity in terms of GWh. Your presentation and your calculation is bogus. The utility can not rely on all of the 10kwh stored in the car battery! Figure more like 2-3% of it. Why? Because if you jump in your car you need to know it is as fully recharged as possible - otherwise you are effectively feeding the grid with your ICE. Or the same thing I've been trying to point out all the time.
Overall I agree that V2G will be very useful. It will definitely enable more wind, because currently the V2G service is mostly performed by fossil plants operating in a spinning reserve mode. With V2G these can safely be retired.
BTW I'm expecting EP's response, at least he seems to know what he is talking about.
"...Because if you jump in your car you need to know it is as fully recharged as possible - otherwise you are effectively feeding the grid with your ICE."
There you go again with that ICE thing, and expecting whatever you want whenever you want it. You just don't get it. There are multiple services v2g enables. Check my first post on this thread.
By the way, it's not my presentation. It's from a guy who's been working on this for 10 years, and is currently riding around in a 35 kWh pure EV, and is working with a major utility and grid operator in a pilot program. The concept has been worked out. The concept has been demonstrated, and continues to be studied in order to get real-life experience with successively larger fleets.
But as I have said, don't sign up.
As for your bet, I don't want your money.
I think it is obvious that V2G will provide some storage functions too. That may work nicely in the case with school buses which you pointed out.
This does not change that the 191mln.vehicles x 10kwh calculation was mildly said misleading. There will be real-world constraints on this number, with discharging limits depending on a number of factors. Even if we accept that the the on-demand user culture will have to change, I think the personal car will be the least useful part of V2G. Hopefully financial incentatives could address that somewhat.
I am not an expert in this, but the presentation quotes 10-20kw per vehicle. Is this viable? It seems to me typical households and neighborhood clusters are not calculated for charges like that... wouldn't it require some rewiring?
I am perfectly fine with all you've said, but I wasn't misleading, I simply pointed out order of magnitude values of certain quantities. Real-world constraints will of course limit what can be accomplished, but that is a discovery process that is underway.
The eBox in Willett's talk provides 120 kW. The U Delaware car gets taken out on 100+ mile trips around the Delaware valley with typically 30-40% of battery power left over before any recharging. Has cruised on I95 between Washington and Wilmington at 70+ mph without a problem.
As you know even better in local and stop and go traffic. EVs are amazing efficient due to additional regenerative braking for recharging the battery.
I just had a DOH! moment with all those things around V2G.
Tesla Roadster has a 53kWh battery pack. They claim it will last for 100,000 miles. They also assume energy efficiency of 110Wh/km or 177Wh/mile. So throughout the battery life they expect:
100,000 x 177Wh/mile = 17,700 kWh could be recycled though the battery.
Their battery pack consists of 6,800 18650 Li-Ion cells, currently selling for about $2.50/piece, wholesale. This is $17,000 just for the Li-Ion cells, and I'm assuming everything else could be reused after the cell is degraded (which is a very weak assumption).
So to cover only the degradation of my car battery, the utility will have to pay me:
17,000 / 17,700 = $0.96 / kWh!
Why in the world would they want to do it if the wholesale price of peaking power is more like $0.05 c/kWh? This is 19 times as expensive! And $0.96/kwth is just the beginning - we did not count the infrastructure and the original generation costs inside yet.
So, in order V2G to work we would need:
1) Batteries that don't degrade (ultracapacitors?) - the jury is still out on whether we'll see those
2) Either breakthrough on chemical battery life or on battery cost or a combination thereof. But what is the chance we could see breakthroughs that lower the cost 20 times!
The only thing I saw in the V2G papers about battery degradation is it will be a subject of later research. Isn't this way to convenient?
Please correct me if I'm missing something. If I don't then I'll consider this discussion to be over.
$0.96 cents / kWh!
I wouldn't settle for less than a $1/kWh!
See my links and comments to Robert below, but in summary:
You're making money by just being plugged into the grid, providing spinning reserves. For regulation services, you can make $2500/yr.
On the battery lifetime, altairnano's specs claims a 15,000 deep-cycle lifetime, 41 years at one cycle per day. V2G will mostly be a small fraction of full cycle charge/discharge, so you might cut that lifetime by half.
Any reduced battery life is balanced against any revenue stream for providing services to the grid.
You're making money by just being plugged into the grid, providing spinning reserves.
"Spinning reserve" is the ability to produce energy on demand - and the bottom line is that you have to be able to produce it when requested at the market price.
Actually the way it works is at the time power is requested the loads are bid up with the lowest cost marginally produced power engaged first. In such environment V2G will never be used! The highest marginal cost peaking electricity is Natural Gas - at some $0.10/kwth it is 10 times less than batteries.
The only way what you suggest to work is to mandate utilities to NOT maintain enough lower cost spinning reserve thus creating artificial shortage in the market! Aren't you stretching this a little bit? How do you expect consumers will react to a $1/kwth price on their bills? Utilities will not pay for standby they will NEVER EVER use. They will build up the lower cost peaking generation until there is a glut of it - which is the case everywhere in the developed world. They will simply choose to ignore anybody who tries to sell them 20 times more expensive electricity. Or do you suggest the government mandates them to accept the bitter pill?
I agree that if it delivers, Altairnano's battery may address the cost issue to some extent. Assuming it reaches the same cost as Li-Ion and it has 10x times the battery life, the cost of the power (from degradation only) would be $0.10/kwth. Add infrastructure and premium costs and it would go to $0.15/kwth - closer to competitiveness but still remains to be seen. Just like with Eestor the question remains open.
Even then the utilities will prefer buying Altarirnano/Eestor batteries themselves. Why all the trouble of building V2G infrastructure and paying premiums if they can be in a full control and take all the benefits for themselves? Are you going to force them not to do it? Moreover the goal of accommodating renewables will be more easily reached this way.
I think you should abandon the idea at this point of time, it's getting way too funky.
Tesla uses conventional li-ion batteries. At about $400/kwh, and perhaps 500 cycles, the cost per discharge is about $.80, far too high for utility storage. This is generally understood - no one would suggest using conventional li-ion batteries for utility storage.
First, you have to realize that V2G isn't the most important use of vehicle batteries for utility load leveling. Instead, the the most important use of vehicle batteries for utility load leveling is dynamically scheduled charging, which will make a dramatic difference.
V2G won't be needed for large-scale utility load-leveling until wind & solar reach more than 20% each of market share - that won't be for at least 10 years, and that would be under a crisis mode installation program.
2nd, 500 cycles is conservative for conventional li-ion in a vehicle with sophisticated charge & temp management.
3rd newer li-ion batteries, such as A123systems, or Altair, have much more than 10x the cycle life of conventional li-ion.
4th, li-ion costs will continue to drop by 7-10% per year - it's pure economy of scale & manufacturing experience.
By the time V2G is needed, it will be cost-effective.
Guys, this is getting surrealistic. V2G will NEVER be competitive, because there is an inherent much better deal - do it yourself battery to grid. The utilities have a century long experience in doing it and so far I don't see them complaining.
No matter how battery technology evolves, it will always be more profitable for the utility to buy it's own batteries and do it itself instead of building and enormous infrastructure for effectively renting mobile batteries.
In addition utility scale batteries will always have different requirements than vehicle batteries. Utility scale batteries would also benefit from economies of scale. BTW why is nobody suggesting renting our cell phone batteries? If you add them up they will form enormous unutilized capacity.
If the utility pays you for your battery it will have to cover the following:
- battery degradation
- V2G infrastructure, maintenance and profit margin
- premium to the car owners to cover his cost of frequently buying new batteries and making him interested in the whole schema
If the utility byus its own batteries it will have to pay for:
- battery degradation (depreciation)
- nothing else
The first option will ALWAYS be much more expensive. Something plus something is always more than something plus zero. I would expect V2G to put at least a $0.10/kwth charge over the battery degradation cost. It is ridiculous to think they would ever consider such a deal.
There is a caveat: if ultra capacitors come to life and degradation costs get close to zero then the game becomes different. In this case the V2G infrastructure + car owner premium will have to compete with the cost of capital for buying the ultracapacitor over its lifetime. I would not hold my breath though - complex schemas like V2G are never cheap. It will be many years of investing billions upfront before the costs are brought down to competitive level... in a competitive market nobody would do it if they have an easy, quickly deployable and scalable alternative at hand.
Have a good evening and sorry for spoiling this party.
I think E-P has answered most of your concerns, but I'm not sure you really absorbed what I or he was saying, so I'll try again:
1) Tesla's batteries are far more expensive than other chemistries, because Tesla wanted the maximum energy density, which the older, conventional li-ion's provide. Firefly or A123systems batteries would be far, far cheaper than the $1/KWH that you're using, more on the order of 10 cents per KWH.
2) The most important thing is not V2G, which is energy flowing from the car. The most important thing is utility managed charging, which will buffer wind & solar. That will suffice for at least 10 years. By that point the infrastructure for utility managed charging will have been in place for years - the utilities (PG&E, etc), car companies (Tesla, GM) and software companies are already planning for this to be in place when the cars are sold. That infrastructure will seamlessly handle V2G.
3) A123systems batteries, which appear likely to win the Volt contract, have sufficiently long cycle life that effectively there is no degradation cost to the car owner to reselling energy back to the utility.
4) vehicle owners will pay for batteries for their transportation utility, and utilities won't have to pay the full cost of the battery.
By the time V2G is needed, if it ever is, the batteries & infrastructure will be ready.
OTOH, V2G may not be needed. Geographical diversity, long distance transmission, PHEV dynamic charging, pumped storage, flow batteries, Firefly lead-acid in utility scale installations....all of these may do the job. I suspect it will have an important role at least for the small-scale services that have been discussed, but we'll see.
"Spinning reserve" is the ability to produce energy on demand - and the bottom line is that you have to be able to produce it when requested at the market price.
Actually the way it works is at the time power is requested the loads are bid up with the lowest cost marginally produced power engaged first. In such environment V2G will never be used! The highest marginal cost peaking electricity is Natural Gas - at some $0.10/kwth it is 10 times less than batteries.
Actually you are wrong. We're not addressing peak demand. Spinning reserves is a reserve when power is required quickly, within minutes, from 'spinning' generators and ready to go at a moments notice. It is paid for by (1)the amount of time it's reserve is ready to go and available, and (2) the $/kWh of actual energy delivered. Ignore (2) as insignificant for now, let's focus on (1) revenue for being 'available'. A 100 kW battery plugged in for an hour provides 0.1 MW-hour of reserve. Agregated in a fleet of ten cars provides 1 MW - hour. No power need be exchanged in this service unless the ISO requests it. PJM (the ISO or grid operator in the mid-atlantic region) pays for this reserve $14 per MW - hr. Stay plugged in 10 hrs, that's $14/car per day. Multiply by days available per year for annual revenue. How often is spinning reserves called on? In the PJM service area, all of 21 hours for all of 2005 (pg 36 from Ref).
And then there are regulation services, the revenue of which was discussed by me elsewhere in this thread and comes from this work.
I think you should abandon the idea at this point of time, it's getting way too funky.
Not for me.
You insist on looking at it from the POV of V2G vehicle owner. You imagine getting a fixed stream of income basically for having a battery.
Guess what? It won't happen. Anyone with cache on hand can buy a battery and in the case of utilities they have to be crazy to pay all those premiums to you, not keep them for themselves.
Like I explained - you can not make them accept V2G if its cost per kwth is higher than what they already can get from existing spinning reserve. Since installed spinning reserve is more than enough, you are basically suggesting that they will be paying for an insurance for event that will never happen. It's like buying a life insurance for dead person.
The utility can't justify the capital cost just to have spinning reserve. But if you're paying for the battery via the difference between the cost of energy from electricity and the cost of energy from gasoline, the extra revenue from services such as regulation and spinning reserve is worth the expense in control systems and the minor impact on durability.
(If that impact exists at all; recall that AC Propulsion's regulation test caused the measured capacity of the Panasonic lead-acid battery pack to increase.)
I don't think you even bother to read my posts.
Go for it man, I'm with you.
It's probably because you don't seem to get the whole spinning reserves, regulation, peak load thing.
If you do, you're not conveying it in a way that this argument/debate can move forward.
If you think it's not economic for utilities to invest in V2G, great. Repetition on your part doesn't improve your message.
And don't worry 'bout your tax dollars going for v2g. They're being well-spent wasting American and Iraqi lives as we quibble.
When you fill your posts with multiple egregious errors of fact, you are not going to get the kind of answer you want. You are going to have to straighten both your facts and your reasoning out first, THEN you will get the kind of response that you desire.
After some digging into it I admit you two are right and I don't/didn't quite understand the nature of the peak load, spinning reserve and regulation services. I'm sorry.
Now I'm back to square one: what would be the cost/benefit analysis of V2G? It looks the primary service V2G could provide is regulation, it should be less competitive as spinning reserve or peak load. For these two I'd also think discharge limitations will limit the actual resource base - I am at loss what happens after the storage is drained if peak load/spinning reserve mode is engaged - aren't those contracts supposed to be for continuous power? I need to do some more digging but I would suspect that the V2G contracts would be depending both on MWs and the GWh-s available.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5050/is_200504/ai_n18342790
$360mln. or even $500mln. yearly is too thin of a market IMO. I think it will all depend on the cost of implementing the V2G system itself vs the expected revenue. Solar and especially wind may increase this market, but this would increase their overall costs too.
I don't really think more wind and solar plus V2G will be enough to retire significant number of existing units. Obviously spinning reserve is avoided for coal power plants as much as possible, so I don't think many of those are or will be kept running just because of that. If I understand correctly ancillary services don't reduce the need for base load power.
P.S. Somehow you forget that the $0.03-0.05/kwth electricity spinning reserve generators provide ALREADY includes its capital costs inside. And a generator may work 60 years. How long on-grid battery would last? 2 years?
Not quite. It's the ability to make up the difference between immediate supply and immediate demand on command (response time of a few seconds). This has historically been done with generators on-line but idling, but it can be done just as easily and far more efficiently by varying a large controllable load. In the case of (PH)EVs, the available spinning reserve is equal to the full charging load (and that's without making demands on the batteries to feed back to the grid).
Spinning reserve has its own market price, quite different from e.g. a MW of base load generation. If you have 200 million vehicles connected to the grid at a minimum of 6.6 kW peak charging load apiece (220 V 30 A connection; some will have more), that's 1.32 TW of load available to manage the grid. If it's averaging 1 kW per vehicle, you've got 200 GW (roughly 45% of today's average generation in the US) to play with as spinning reserve.
You can do considerably more than that, of course. Spinning reserve is there to make up for a large generator going off-line. V2G would allow back-feeding the grid for a few critical minutes while slower-reacting plants were brought up to take up the slack (or other demand was taken off-line). It has to be there, but it gets used very infrequently. In this way, V2G would supply "spinning reserve" at zero cost in fuel, minimal cost in equipment and a very low cost in battery life.
Historically the generators you find obsolate now were providing spinning reserve at the cost of $0.02-0.05/kwth.
Your genial innovation is going to provide them with spinning reserve for $1/kwth. OK lets allow innovations etc. to bring this down to say $0.20/kwth. Just perfect!
Just to mix in the conversation a little is the Flow battery. I dont think I've seen anyone mention it in this long thread. http://www.vrbpower.com/
We are putting one of these in for UPS of a Telco site I am in the middle of engineering. It will be 100Kw.
I think these may be more what we will end up seeing at the power utility level as more wind and solar projects come on-line. They are already using them with ff electric plants now at the end of long transmission line runs. Charging at night and using them for peaking during the day.
I dont have the numbers in front of me, but I recall it being 2x cheaper than lead-acid for mass storage and battery life. High up-front costs but last longer than Lead acid that we use in DC plants of telcos.
Thoughts on NaS batteries? AEP recently prchased some MWs, and IIRC, price was $4-4.5 per Watt.
Snipped press release from AEP below. Sounds like they're also interested in flow.
What's most interesting is they want to get 1 GW of storage.
“We’re first movers on advanced storage among U.S. utilities, a position we’ve held on a wide number of technologies in our century of existence,” Morris said. “Our near-term goal is to have at least 25 megawatts of NAS battery capacity in place by the end of this decade. But this is just a start. Our longer-term goal is to add another 1,000 megawatts of advanced storage technology to our system in the next decade. We will look at the full spectrum of technologies – flow batteries, pumped hydro, plug-in hybrid vehicles and various other technologies in early stages of development today – to determine their feasibility and potential for commercial application.”
" This has historically been done with generators on-line but idling, but it can be done just as easily and far more efficiently by varying a large controllable load. "
You might want to clarify that "varying a large controllable load" is really not V2G, but demand management. This might be a source of confusion...
You do realize that the Tesla Roadster is a luxury toy (albeit a very "green" one), and that its battery chemistry is on the way out due to better technologies already on the market?
As you know this has nothing to do with the Tesla Roadster, it has everything to the with the properties of Li-Ion batteries.
Whether Li-Ion batteries are on their way out remains to be seen. With $1/kwth drawn it would have to be a total 100 fold improvement over battery life and cost to reach utility acceptable cost levels.
And as I argued above if this miracle battery appears, an utility would have to be crazy to consider YOU as a car owner as its battery provider. It will buy them and use them itself. Which will BTW be much better for the renewables integration than the overcomplexity and unreliability of V2G.
I can repeat this all I want but you guys seem to have an affection for this idea. Sleep it over.
You overgeneralize "lithium-ion batteries". For every salient property you could specify to support your case, someone here would likely supply a counterexample.
You have degenerated to fact-free ideological rants. Time to sit down, have a drink and relax.
You are indirectly implying that Tesla's engineers did not pick the lowest cost, longer lasting batteries. Which would translate to lowest cost / mile for their batteries.
I'm not at all expert in the various flavors of Li-Ion, but if I may rely on their authority - they picked the best which is available at the moment for a BEV. I would be happy to prove me wrong and to show me there are suitable BEV batteries, which will cost you much less than $1/kwth. I would not consider anything more than $0.10/kwth though.
Your phrase "lowest cost, longer lasting" says it all. It's an oxymoron. The longer-lasting cells are always going to cost more than those which sacrifice lifespan for cheapness.
TM is using laptop cells (cobalt oxide), which is why they need all the careful thermal management stuff. They could have purchased A123Systems LiFePO4 cells for vastly superior life and total immunity to thermal runaway, but they would have paid a penalty both in cost and in bulk (they would have required more cells). TM decided not to re-engineer the vehicle a second time (they already changed their selection of cells to achieve greater durability but sacrificed energy capacity).
This is about right. The value of a transportation grade battery is having its full capacity for as many charges as possible. Tesla expects 500 charges rather than 334, but you're close. So, when do you swap the battery pack? Let's say at 15% degradation. Now, say you are PG&E and you flog a power backup to a commercial building and you buy these batteries. You are OK with using them down to 80% degradation because you are not paying rent for the spot in the building where you park the batteries. Let's assume degradation is linear with cycling because of the management built into the battery packs. You buy at 20% of the original cost of the battery because hey, it ain't transporation grade anymore. You get about 2.6 times more battery use than in transportation mode. So now your cost is $0.07/kWh for using the battery pack less whatever fee you charge for providing the backup service. So, your price for arbitrage is about $0.104/kWh assuming $0.03/kWh cost of electricity to charge and 86% charging efficiency, not counting the fee you are getting for parking the storage on someone else's property. I assume this is why PG&E is signing contracts to buy used Tesla battery packs.
Since there is more storage available in used batteries than during their transportation life time, this will dominate the storage associates with batteries built for transportation. With fleet conversion, this amounts to about half a day of storage. At this level of storage, an entirely renewable grid delivering at $0.08/kWh seems quite feasable.
Chris
The paper is absolutely correct, given its assumptions.
You're reading it wrong. If there were 20 million Chevy Volts or equivalent in California, and they all arrived at work with their 16 kWh batteries 50% depleted as they plugged in, the utility can absolutely rely on a very large fraction of 160 GWh of demand that day (some will disconnect early). Average that over 10 hours, that's 16 GW of controllable load available as spinning reserve.
The AC Propulsion V2G study you cite shows that California's load peaked (past tense) at under 30 GW. If you postulate 50 GW of PV added in California, producing an average of 300 GWH/day, the PHEVs could make up for the other loads and generators on the grid by absorbing none of it (up to 50 GW surplus from the PV), all of it plus another 82 GW (assuming 220 V 30 A connections to the grid times 20 million vehicles), or anything in between. The vehicular load could be varied by that full 132 GW in seconds, without tapping into the back-feeding capability.
160 GWh is a very significant amount of storage, even if you can only get a small fraction of it back to the grid again. It gives you enormous flexibility in generation (and perhaps the difference between minimum requirements and full charge to play with). The major problem with RE is when the power is generated. The vehicle doesn't care if you charge it at home at night or at work during the day. If you can tailor-make your load curve to suit your generation, the problem is solved.
Perhaps I was being too nuanced, but the two points are not contradictory. Vehicles using V2G will store vast amounts of energy (that's what their batteries are for, after all), but they will not return large amounts of this to the grid. Further, the shift away from fossil-fired generation to PV (at least in the Sunbelt) will completely change the dynamics of the system:
The AC Propulsion study you cite is about regulation as a service, not spinning reserve.
Historic studies of the time-shifting effects of EVs on the grid are only valid given today's generation regime. Any large shift to PV will completely change that game and invalidate the assumptions regarding the daily load curve. You'll have to assume that the vehicles will charge when the power is available, which won't always be in the wee hours of the night any more.
Wind is available in places and at times that PV is not. There won't be any PV operating during a 3-day spell of horizontally blowing snow in western Minnesota, but a wind farm will be cranking. Even evenings in sun-rich areas are good for wind; your PHEV is going to be more useful if you can snag a fast charge while shopping or dining out after work, no?
I surrender. You guys rock. Go ahead and do it.
Sing me out though and forget about using my taxpayers money. Just give me your address so I can also send you my $1/kwth bill - I don't agree to pay this one either.
Whether an idea will work or not has to be investigated prior to spending billions in implementing it.
No no, they're spending bajillions on it. Hyperbole works for me too. Pass on a reference on the billions. Then I'll pass on mine for the bajillions figure.
Or you don't agree?
Do some homework. This has been extensively published on for over ten years. Start here: http://www.udel.edu/v2g
You guys are counting the chickens before they hatch
I give up on that one.
and I bet none of you is even an electrical engineer.
Hey now you're getting personal. Let's see, most of the effort on V2G is underway in collaboration with ... people who work at an electric utility! But who knows what kind of educational background they might have.
But let's argue as Rome burns.
I am an electrical engineer and nobody is going to do V2G except in an emergency. Vehicle fuel is more precious than electricity. If it were otherwise, we would all have an internal combustion engine in our basements generating our electricity.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
v2g is not about internal combustion engines....
It's about turning expensive fuel into cheap electricity at a profit.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
V2G is about using a charge taken at one time off the grid and sending it back to the grid when there is need. I think you are worried that the plug in hybrids will be charging off their engines and that will go to the grid. I expect that if V2G takes off, it will be used with EVs since they will have larger capacities. But, I doubt that cycling a transportation grade battery for grid storage will make much sense. Much better to use the degraded transportation batteries after they no longer give adequate range for transportation. They will still be good 99% efficient batteries and they can be treated more gently in their semi-retirement.
Chris
There is no such thing as 99% efficient batteries. Try 75-80% roundtrip efficiency (maybe ultracapacitors could get close to 99% efficiency but these are yet to be demonstrated).
You reminded me that full-scale V2G will degrade car batteries... just forget that idea people. On the other hand PHEVs and BEVs are good candidates for DSM.
I was surprised to read 99% efficiency for the Tesla batteries and now I agree that must have been an error. Their claimed charge efficiency is 86%. Thanks for making me recheck that. Nissan has included a super capacitor in a hybrid truck.
Chris
No it isn't. You don't know what you're talking about.
V2G is about storage of electricity via batteries. Batteries that also function for a second use: Transportation.
So by charging these batteries overnight when demand is low, then providing some of that stored energy back to the grid for times when demand is high, V2G can provide several benefits to the security of electricity supply and grid stability by providing ancillary services.
V2G provides a significant benefit for storing energy from intermittent solar and wind resoures. V2G helps to support plug-in vehicles, which have well-to-wheel CO2 emissions 33%-65% lower than conventional vehicles. And when chearged from primarily renewable or nuclear power, have no well-to-wheel emissions.
No, it isn't. V2G is about spinning reserve, regulation, and reactive power. These are all services that grid-connected battery vehicles can provide more cheaply than most of the generation plants now doing the job, so using V2G will make the total cost of running the grid go down.
Actually he is right.
If V2G was used only to recharge the battery when there is surplus electricity (from wind etc.) then it would make sense. But similar proposal is already in place - aka "smart grid" or DSM, in which certain schedulable loads (like A/C with thermal storage, refrigerators etc.) engage only when they are given a signal by the grid operator.
If V2G is used in its "full version" - that is to give off electricity and help meet peak demand, then the electricity that was given off will have to be recharged from the on-board ICE. Which is extremely inefficient idea - figure a 15% efficient electricity generator, that runs on fuel much more expensive than what utilities use.
Maybe it will turn out that DSM would work; V2G - I'm not so sure.
... you would only be burning motor fuel to make electricity if the net flow was to the grid, not the immediate flow.
I can produce several horsepower measured over a period of perhaps 0.5 seconds. Averages matter.
In a mostly stochastic environment you would end up with part of the fleet on negative and part on positive. Depending on the total installed capacity, on the peak demand, on the available surplus, on the non-dispatchable part of the generation, and on a bunch of other factors I'm not qualified enough to estimate.
In order V2G to be compatible with the primary goal of plug-ins (highly efficient electric transportation) you would have to limit the amount of "negatives" and the amount of not fully charged vehicles to minimum. Actually it is safe to assert that you would have to have NO "negatives" at all, for obvious reasons. Vehicles should give off only from the charge which has been accumulated after they were plugged in, no more than that.
These problems should pose a significant limit to the V2G potential as an utility storage. You can also forget V2G to work to solve the evening/night problem solar has - people will want their vehicles charged when they wake up. Add to this battery degradation (Li-Ion batteries are not good for grid storage for the same reason) and maybe it will not be that useful idea after all.
I know I'm doing a little hand-waving here and I better read some serious research on the subject first (which I don't have time right now), but these seem to be valid issues with the V2G concept.
Yes and no.
PHEVs can't solve a solar energy problem when there's no solar energy, but they can solve the other problem: how to generate the sunset-to-sunrise demand most efficiently. The PHEV fleet allows a large part of that demand to be scheduled to suit the grid, and the load curve could be set to suit the point (both in total GWh generated and immediate load) where the grid ops want things to be in the morning. This lets them do it with the cheapest, most efficient generators they have.
If V2G is used in its "full version" - that is to give off electricity and help meet peak demand, then the electricity that was given off will have to be recharged from the on-board ICE.
Where are you getting this from? Who defined "full version"? You. You created a strawman to then point to it as a stupid concept. No one is proposing running a FF-engine to charge their battery to feed the grid. Where do you get your information?
You won't get an answer from me unless you change your tone. I don't feed trolls.
Certainly. Let me offer you my apologies for my tone.
I'll be back in the morning. If you have the time, cite a reference to some work that proposes your "full version", as I know of none.
I am an electrical engineer
BFD
and nobody is going to do V2G except in an emergency
I'd call you an idiot but you don't know what you're talking about.
Think pure plug-in vehicles. Think storage. Think what are the challenges to grid stability, congestion relief, and peak load management.
It's not about distributed FF-fired generators. It's about distributed storage. Jeez.
Think car owner. With a PHEV. I can have a car all charged up ready to go at all times. Or I can get a nickel from the utility in exchange for allowing them to play games with my expensive battery with a finite lifetime. And have to burn gasoline if I want to drive off in my car. The utility has cheaper and more reliable methods of solving THEIR congestion relief, and peak load management problems. Batteries won't help stablize the grid. They can't react fast enough. What the utilities want to do that is an SMES. Not to mention the whole thing is a legal and billing nightmare.
Run some numbers. How much do batteries cost and how long do they last? And if it is worth it, why wouldn't the utilities buy their own batteries instead of paying to ruin mine. Why wouldn't the utilities buy cheap and durable lead acid batteries instead of ruining the expensive light weight batteries I have to have in my car.
If the utility want to have peak load management, they can charge time of day pricing. Then I'll charge up my car with cheap watts. No way in heck are they going to charge and discharge MY battery at THEIR convenience. My pain is more than their gain.
I used fossil fuel car as an example because ruining electric cars is worse.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
I would agree with this.
It would not matter to me what promises and safe guards that they put in place to assure me that no major draw down of the battery would or could ever occur.
Even if a system is designed to only make less then a second draw down, I would still put in a diode in the circuit to prevent the battery from being used.
If they require the battery to be online, I would just provide a cheep lead acid battery for such use.
DocScience
The utilities have about the same attitude about people dicking with their grid. Their legal department would go catatonic.
If we had supercapacitor cars, v2g might have something. Or flywheel cars or SMES cars or anything with a factor of a hundred better specific power than batteries, can be charged and discharged in five minutes, and has an effectively infinite cycles lifetime. We are invoking both the technology tooth fairy and the litigation tooth fairy. But not with batteries.
We are also assuming free WIFI to exchange billing information. There's an inverter and a electric meter in every car stall. A thousand bucks worth of equipment? A standardized electricity interface that all car makers follow. The utility has a database listing with 200 million cars in it of which 20 million are replaced every year and lord knows how many are bought and sold. How many data entry people and phone answerring people at $15 bucks an hour do they have to hire? Do they outsource this to India? What will vandalism cost? People hacking the WiFi network and only pretending to download electricty while getting credits? When somebody hits the stall while parking and talking on their cellphone at the same time, who sues who for a couple thousand dollars in damages? Or does everyone fix their equipment and life goes on. What happens when terrorists or teenagers attach the charger to their tesla coil? I hope nobody was planning on using the grid this afternoon.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
No Robert, let's just sink another couple a hundred billion into oil this year. And next. And next. That's a hecka investment in the future.
BTW, no one utility will have a database of 200 M cars. Think regions and ISOs.
Hitting the stall while parking and talking on the cell phones at the same time? Gosh, seems exactly the same thing could happen right now with a pump at the gas station. Generally people don't whip up to the pump at 60mph.
What happens when terrorists or teenagers attach the charger to their tesla coil? Gosh, putting terrorists and teenagers in the same sentence seems, I don't know, maybe not well thought out?
But I'll be happy to keep a list of your concerns for those working on v2g but not reading TOD.
I wonder what should be the number of recharging stations.
In US there must have at least 1 billion parking places... well let's say 80% of those are at shopping malls and other short term places and will be excluded. Of course this will reduce the number of "storage" reserve, but let's forget this for now.
This leaves us with 200 million of which let's say half are with a stall - 100 mln. Plus 100 million in each house garage. 200 mln. stalls multiplied by how much? Including all additional cabling (plus repavement?) I'd say no less than $1000 per piece. A neat $200 billion only for that!
How many nukes, CPPs, capacitors, batteries, pumped storages etc. would we build for $200 billion? At $2000/kW current prices we'd double our nuke capacity for this money! It starts to smell like scam.
Run some numbers.
Fortunately, that's been done, here for example, to adress your concerns on costs, revenues, and battery life.
No way in heck are they going to charge and discharge MY battery at THEIR convenience. My pain is more than their gain.
Not a problem. Don't sign up. Make economic decisions. Heck, have your A/C controlled by a utility. That can be your part to addressing carbon mgmt.
I used fossil fuel car as an example because ruining electric cars is worse
No one suggested using FF in a hybrid to feed power into the grid. Your example was a misrepresentation of what v2g is about. That's a disservice to those who read here, and also don't know about v2g. That's why I'm bothering to respond.
Is it just me or does your link not work.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Sorry. Its http://www.udel.edu/V2G/KempTom-V2G-Fundamentals05.PDF
The term “peak power” does not refer to a specific power
market. Rather, it is used to refer to the highest cost hours
of the year, when most or all generators are on-line and
additional power is costly. A full analysis of the value
of peak power requires stepping through hourly market
values, assuming sales of V2G whenever the market value
is above the cost of V2G and the vehicle is available, and
summing the annual revenue (see [14]). To provide a simpler
calculation here as an example, we use an industry rule of
thumb from central California [14], that there are 200 h in an
average year when additional generation costs $ 0.50/kWh.
Based on this and the data in Table 5, we give in Table 6
parameters for calculating the revenue and cost of a fuel cell
vehicle providing peak power.
Thus the net revenue, based on Table 6, is $ 1500–1210,
or $ 290, a positive annual net, but perhaps too small to justify
transaction costs. This calculation is given only as an
illustration. This result is highly dependent upon the cost of
hydrogen (a mid-range projection was used here), the actual
market prices for a representative year rather than the rule
of thumb used here, and the match of peak time to vehicle
availability. More complete analyses of V2G for peak power
have been performed by Nagata and Kubo [15] and Lipman
et al. [32].
The problem with using $.50 for peak electricity costs is that I can install PV panels for $.20. Solar thermal for maybe half that. Energy can be stored by making ice or compressing air in a salt dome but that isn't my field. Even if batteries were the best option, they would use a room full of stationary lead acid battery. Not an expensive EV lithium battery.
The transaction costs are huge. The article doesn't even want to go there. They are better off buying their own lithium battery then renting and ruining mine.
The fundamental assumption to V2G is that there will be spare automobile battery capacity out there. There really won't. I want all my charge/discharge cycles. And all the energy to run my car. The only reason the future is electric (and the present is not) is because gasoline is running out. And the alternative is stocking up on ammo and living off the land. I'd like to see electrified RoW, batteries suck so much. If I was in the psychic business, that's my prediction for the future.
Utilities have better solutions to their problems then V2G. They rather spend nothing and not solve them, but that doesn't make the alternative solutions go away.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Thanks but your cut-and-paste from the article was for Fuel Cells, not batteries. And since the thread is so deep, a reader can't tell you are quoting an article.
For batteries revenue is calculated for 15 kW battery to be $2554/yr for regulation services. The cost estimate includes capital expenses on infrastructure and lifecycle costs.
On the battery lifetime, altairnano's specs claims a 15,000 deep-cycle lifetime, 41 years. V2G will mostly be a small fraction of full cycle charge/discharge, so you might cut that lifetime by half. As I linked in my first post on this topic yesterday, here's some recent demonstrations on their battery in EVs.
Any reduced battery life is balanced against any revenue stream for providing services to the grid.
http://www.beiterbatteries.com/12v_700ah.htm
12 volt 70 amp hour battery. $150 for 840 watt hours. $6000 for 35 kilowatt hours. The utilities aren't going to pay you $2500 per year. They are going to buy their own batteries for $6000, run them for five years and then throw them out. And notice the lead acid solution sucks. They have better ways to generate or store peak power.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
The only reason the future is electric (and the present is not) is because gasoline is running out.
The past was electric circa 1910. Gas and ICE provided a very unique opportunity to screw ourselves royally.
The present isn't electric because even at $3/gal here and an installed base of 600 M vehicles worldwide, change won't come without force. One might think AGW might be that force, but it'll be peak oil. The mindset of 'I can have whatever I want whenever I want' will fondly be rememebered as our wild and crazy days, except for the lives wasted supporting our need to go shopping, and the lives to be wasted by the unintended consequences of our oil addiction.
http://www.acpropulsion.com/reports/V2G-Cal-ExecSum.pdf
The cost of electricity generated by each EDV type is estimated. Battery vehicles
can provide electricity to the grid at a cost of $0.23/kWh for current lead-acid batteries,
$0.45/kWh for the Honda EV Plus with nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries, and
$0.32/kWh for the Th!nk City car with nickel cadmium (NiCd) battery. The fuel cell
vehicle can generate electricity at a cost ranging between $0.09 – $0.38 kWh, the wide
range depending on the assumed cost of H2, with the lower figure based on the longerterm
assumption of a mature hydrogen market. A fuel cell vehicle with hydrogen
recharge through a garage reformer could generate electricity at $0.19/kWh from natural
gas (at $0.84/therm). The hybrid vehicles in motor-generator mode can generate
electricity at a cost of $0.21/kWh if fueled with gasoline (at $1.50 per gallon) and at
$0.19/kWh if fueled with natural gas. Based only on these simple costs per kWh, it
appears that in the near term the most attractive EDV types are the lead-acid battery
vehicle, a fuel cell vehicle recharged from a natural gas reformer, and the hybrid vehicle.
However, the simple cost per kWh comparison does not provide an adequate evaluative
framework.
The cost of electricity from the EDVs noted above is too high to be competitive
with baseload power, which typically has a range from $0.03–0.05/kWh. EDV power is
competitive in three other markets: "peak power" (during peak demand periods), spinning
reserves, and regulation services.
Since your link doesn't work, I found my own. This is the first hit when googling v2g. I'd like to know where to find $1.50 gasoline in California, I'd like to fill up there. Gas costs twice that. Anyways V2G is more expensive they grid power. Useless for replacing spinning reserve (too slow). And not competitive with PV solar power's current $.20/kWh for peak power. PV's are going to get cheaper a lot quicker than batteries will, and solar thermal is even cheaper.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
PV's are going to get cheaper a lot quicker than batteries will, and solar thermal is even cheaper.
Amen to that coming true ASAP. Note my graphs somewhere on this page for cost of electricity from solar PV. Without any subsidies, it's more like 35-45 cents per kWh, at least based on NJ data. I can't wait to see that drop 2-3 fold, and note DOE's SAI program targets 2015 for that to happen.
Thanks to Engineer-Poet for updating here and discussing the SRI method as a potential viable means to this end.
But the bulk of charging EVs must occur overnight, with wind ideally, until we've got a TW or so of solar power capacity.
You can make that price drop 2-3 fold today. Just move your panels to Arizona.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Absolutely.
So here's one trick up here in the mid-atlantic. 2-3x concentrators. A magnification low enough for course tracking of sun, and with little loss of diffuse non-direct light for those cloudy/overcast days. But sufficient to run the panels for sunny times at intensities like they were in Tucson AZ in Summer.
No special panels required (although FirstSolar have favorable temperature properties), as appropriate mirrors can be added on to existing products.
And until sea level rises to 3 meters, we've got something like 20-40 GWpeak of capacity between NJ, DE, MD, and PA. IT's maybe not obvious, but there a lot of land where solar make great sense.
When sea level rises 3 m, look for company in Tucson, where the hordes will then fight over water.
Between Arizona and the Mid-Atlantic the change in panel value owing to the solar resource is a factor of about 1.3, not 2--3. Concentrators also add to costs but in the current silicon price environment they can lead to savings. This system, which can be roof mounted, should give a factor of two reduction in cost. Some silicon applications will require concentrators. DARPA is pushing hard on high (greater than 40%) efficiency panels that use 20 times concentration. These will need some tracking to work I think. It is tough to figure how much this reduces costs at this point. But, if the $/W figure comes in at the same level as regular panels, it should make utility scale PV more competitive with home installation since $/W land cost will go down.
Chris
I'm sure it makes a huge difference to you if the utility charges you at full power from 3 AM to 7 AM, or half power from 11 PM to 7 AM.
So much better to burn gasoline all the time, eh? </sarcasm>
Selling spinning reserve just means being ready to add power to the grid (which includes cutting load; everything between your current load and zero represents reserve but costs nothing). Besides, the utility will pay handsomely for actual fast-response reserve generation. If you get paid $1.00/kWh for that power and your engine, alternator and battery system is 20% efficient, my calculations say they'd be paying you the equivalent of $6.73/gallon. I'd happily buy fuel at $4.50/gallon and sell at $6.73 on the one day of the year they needed it, and buy energy at 75¢/gallon equivalent the other 364 days.
Batteries can respond as fast as flicking a switch. I have been investigating some 165 A MOSFET switches which would allow me to put about 4 kW @ 24VDC onto a load in under 100 microseconds. A half-cycle of 60 Hz AC takes 8.3 milliseconds. In short, you are spouting ideological nonsense.
You can draw 165 amps from a lead acid battery. You can't draw 165 amps from a lithium battery. It will explode.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Try 120 A pulse discharge from a single 26650 cell (10 seconds). A battery with a significant amount of storage (say, cells paralleled to give 230 AH instead of 2.3 AH) would be able to supply 12,000 amps pulse. Put 4 strings in series to get a nominal 13.2 volts, and you've got about 150 kW peak out of cells massing only 28 kg.
What's the voltage drop of a 120A pulse discharge across the one ohm internal resistance of a lithium battery. I won't get a nominal 13.2 volts. I get -106.8V. Why does your link cite batteries that don't exist and aren't on the market? Is it because your thought experiment doesn't work with real batteries?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_ion_battery
The specific power for batteries you can actually buy is 1.8 kW/kg.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
"Why does your link cite batteries that don't exist and aren't on the market?"
A123systems batteries are indeed on the market. Take a look at DeWalt 36V tools.
It says right on the page I cited: "Internal impedance: (1kHz AC) 8 mΩ".
Your ability to read for content appears seriously impaired. Have you tried cognitive therapy?
Common saying among us sailors...
"There's no more efficient pump than a scared man with a bucket."
If we need to change out our cars in a hurry in order to keep driving, we will.
Hi Chris,
Your article just has a statement without attritubution that PG&E INTENDS to buy used lithium batteries. Most of the article is about a Norwegian who wants to lease them to PG&E (what do they need him for?).
The V2G people (Univ. of Delaware) assumes lithium phosphate batteries that don't actually exist yet. Current batteries are lithium cobalt or lithium plastic. So we are on the horns of a dilemma. If batteries don't get better ther won't be any EV market. But if they do, there won't be any used batteries the utilities can buy cheap.
Used batteries are just fine for what PG&E is said to want them for. Storing intermittent power from wind and solar. Used lithium has to be cheaper than shiny new lead acid or PG&E won't bother.
Used lithium is even worse for stabilizing the grid where a large amount of power is needed in a short period of time. The factor that limits power draw from a battery is its internal resistance, and lithium's internal resistance starts off bad and gets worse. The same reason they become unsuitable for transportation use.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
From my reading, PG&E is buying. The lease is for transportation use.
Chris