Yeah, this is the other thing that kills winter range. In a combustion engine you warm the cabin through waste heat from the engines. EVs do not produce enough waste heat to do this, and the motors only produce waste heat when being driven anyways. So you sacrifice some battery charge to warm up your cabin.
1 Like
Haha. To repeat the advice one guy teaching me energy stuff said
Find the paper. Read the abstract and the intro. Read the results/conclusion. Skip the rest.
The intro often has good summaries of other people’s results as well in plain language.
For additional context, I was reading about using car batteries as vehicle to grid services to operate as large fleets of grid batteries.
There’s been a LOT of work trying to understand whether this degrades the batteries to any meaningful extent, and from what I could see, it was a big “we can’t tell. It’s too complicated”
Whether that can extrapolate to full vs 80% charging I don’t know.
Yeah. It’ll be interesting to see what the disposition of EV batteries looks like long term. I’m not sure how practical recycling of them is. There’s still lots of good lithium in that pack even if the battery is 70% of it’s initial capacity. Can it be recycled out for cheaper than it is to mine it from the ground? I’m not sure. The latest buzz is around using retired car batteries as grid storage. Stock up that solar and wind power for when it’s needed most. A degraded battery is better than no battery.
I think vehicle to grid is mostly dead if I had to guess. It was a neat idea but the implementation of it was always going to be very complex, both in the technical side of having two way energy transfer at charging points, and in the context of “I paid for that juice fuck you don’t take it, even if it’s only 3%” The grid has other possibly more efficient means of handling peak demand, one of which may be the aforementioned retired EV batteries.
Hmm. I’m more bullish. When you look at total size of all the EVs charging, it’s too significant for a heavy renewables grid to be ignored. So there will be big money in making it work and paying customers to do so.
Of course, customers not getting all the smart stuff that the energy nerds try and force on them is par for the course,.
We write software that controls distributed energy resources, treating them as virtual power plants and using it to supplement load for utility companies. Pretty cool stuff.
1 Like
I don’t remember the city, but there is a city in California that has a lot of electric busses which we’re going to use as a battery to put energy back in the grid when needed. I should have paid more attention during the all hands, but come on, who does that?
1 Like
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s San Luis Obispo