9 ms·

I think EV owners would need to find some level of compensation for the additional cycles they would incur. Electric vehicles are expensive because of the batte

by lja 4y ago

I think EV owners would need to find some level of compensation for the additional cycles they would incur. Electric vehicles are expensive because of the battery so deteriorating the life of one of the most costly parts of the car doesn't feel like a great solution.

prottog 4y ago
I agree. This further degrades the meaning of owning private property.
- wjnc 4y ago
  Energy price volatility will probably increase because natural sources are more volatile and other sources have spin up / down cycles. A car battery is like 3-4 days of continuous house usage. The car battery being used to top off the top 10% in short term pricing for energy would give a very nice ROI I expect. The rest is software? Don’t overcharge, don’t go under the limit I set for continuous availability as a mode of transport. And that’s all within reach in front of the meter, thus under my ownership. Heck, without self driving becoming common a family might even have 2 EVs on the driveway, giving a week of off grid potential. Come to think of it - a harder part is how super local the grid is and energy pricing should become. In my somewhat affluent neighborhood in high summer the voltage rises too high and the supply of solar falls. And tragedy of the commons - we are still installing solar because it’s massively incentivized (2 years before investment returns itself). To solve this with EVs requires very granular prices. There might be clouds 50 km away. But again, those are software solvable issues. (I’m not holding my breath. It’s like IoT-superplus.)
- Ajedi32 4y ago
  Unless it's voluntary (which it darned well better be). I envision a future where individual appliances (including EVs) can opt in to spot pricing for the electricity they consume (or produce). That would naturally incentivize charging during off-peak hours and discharging during peak hours, all without requiring any government incentives or coercion. It could also be useful for other major appliances which could benefit from the lower prices afforded by load shifting, such as hot water heaters.
  - NotYourLawyer 4y ago
    Lots of now-compulsory things started out as voluntary.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      Pretty hard to make it compulsory if you can avoid it by (at worst) unplugging your car.
      - NotYourLawyer 4y ago
        >bryanlarsen, we noticed that your location is at home but your car isn’t plugged in. Please plug it in and drink a verification can within the next 10 minutes to avoid a noncompliance charge
  - at-fates-hands 4y ago
    >> I envision a future where individual appliances (including EVs) can opt in to spot pricing for the electricity they consume (or produce). I remember when high speed internet was coming into being and there were a lot of pundits talking about how high speed bandwidth would be sold as a commodity on the NYSE. If someone needed say an hour of high bandwidth for a video conference, they could do what you're saying, buy an hour of high speed access. Of course, high speed internet eventually became so cheap and so readily available, those ideas faded pretty fast. I might be remembering this wrong, but wasn't Enron doing what you're talking about?
  - tguvot 4y ago
    a bunch of appliances already can be aware of TOU pricing and run when it's atlowest. Many thermostats can be "auto-adjusted" based on grid load
  - powerbroker 4y ago
    >> I envision a future where individual appliances (including EVs) can opt in to spot pricing for the electricity they consume When 1,000 devices jump on the grid the moment electricity hits $0.01/kWh, the demand spike will cause more generators to come back on line and increase the price back to $0.05/kWh -- thus causing the 1,000 devices to drop-off the grid. Rinse, lather, repeat. How do you compensate for the potential grid instability?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
phkahler 4y ago
Did you know that the standard DC chargers communicate with the vehicle using PLC (Powerline communication) chips even though that communication is not over the high power conductors? I've always had the feeling the grid operators got that included because they thought they were going to communicate directly with the battery management system to control it as they wish. It never happened and now the standard is stupidly complex and they're still trying to use cars as storage without much consideration for what vehicle owners want. Sure, offer variable rates. Offer interruptabke service. But stop wanting V2G, nobody actually wants it.
- jackinloadup 4y ago
  Assuming V2G means Vehicle to Ground, this is something I would like to see for the following use-case. I would like to use my car battery as a temporary home battery in the inevitable case of a grid outage. This opens the option to bring energy home from another location. Reduce or eliminates the need for a battery in a grid-tied house. Am I crazy? Edit: Granted that doesn't mean the energy company can use my car's battery at it's whim. I think compensation would be required and would actually make a lot of sense. It isn't like the electric company could build out a battery system for cheaper. It would need to be a higher compensation than to PV though. Batteries are more expensive and should be compensated as such.
  - Reason077 4y ago
    V2G = vehicle to grid. It’s quite possible for this to operate as a backup battery, but like a Powerwall it requires extra “gateway” hardware to ensure that your house is isolated from the grid when the battery is discharging. V2L (vehicle to load) is a simpler form that lets you power 115/230V appliances directly from the vehicle. Quite a few EVs (Hyundai, Ford, etc) already support V2L.
  - toast0 4y ago
    That's not crazy, it's actually a publicized optional feature on the F-150 Lightning, and the F-150 hybrid has an optional 240V 30A output that can be used as a home backup as well (although that'd be a bit more manual).
whazor 4y ago
Selling electricity is compensation, like with solar panels. You only need hourly energy prices to make it profitable. Plus an app that does the profitability calculation and discharging.
- ThunderSizzle 4y ago
  Sounds similar to Uber using a contractor vehicle's hidden depreciation and maintenance to shift the real cost of their service. I doubt the hourly price will ever truly be fair to individual car owners. Maybe we'll start to be asked whenever we plug in our phones to tip the owner of a car our electricity is coming from.
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    If there are consistent price cycles and a good API for reading price, it should be pretty easy for an EV owner to control how much they interact with the arbitrage opportunities with some simple rules. Ex. "only sell if it cost at least 15% less to charge", "always charge to X%", "charge to 70% if < $Y", charge to 100% if < $Z", "never sell below X%" The aesthetic vibe of having an autonomous energy trading bot in my garage is attractive to me.
    - rtkwe 4y ago
      Part of the issue isn't the controls to do that it's that the prices to compensate wear on a battery are a) likely significantly higher than the base price and b) pretty hard to calculate.
      - mhb 4y ago
        That's what a market is for.
        jahewson 4y ago
        There is no market. I can only sell electricity to PG&E and only at a flat rate.
0cVlTeIATBs 4y ago
1. Core charge when recycling 2. Time-of-use electricity rates. Up to the customer to choose to install load shifting equipment
nkingsy 4y ago
This makes much more sense with large lifepo4 chemistry batteries that are expected to outlive the car by a wide margin. Lifepo4 batteries > 50kwh should easily handle 500,000 miles. Higher performance lithium ion will degrade at a rate faster than any expected return from a scheme like this. At least in Northern California it’s now cheaper for me to run solar+battery off grid than to pay pge. Lifepo4 pushes it over the edge into profitability. If off-grid is competitive, selling at peak prices is a no brainer.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  I have 100k miles on my 2018 Model S having Supercharged it the majority of the time the last four years. It has only 6% battery degradation of the 100kw pack. Tesla warranties their powerwalls for 15 years when configured as part of their aggregated virtual power plants. The batteries are demonstrated to be durable. New LFP chemistries that are heavier but more stable are ideal for stationary storage and high cycle counts, but the evidence shows in general that these packs are built for longevity (with very occasional early failures). You could probably do well buying a salvage Tesla and shucking the pack for working modules and coming out ahead economically (safety warning, do at your own risk, etc) if you don’t want or can’t get dedicated stationary storage (although it comes with generous federal, state, and utility subsidies in California).
  - danans 4y ago
    > if you don’t want or can’t get dedicated stationary storage (although it comes with generous federal, state, and utility subsidies in California). I installed stationary LFP batteries (from Enphase) on my house in CA 1.5 years ago, but I then discovered that the state and utility subsidies [1] only apply if you are in a very low income (for CA) bracket, have a health condition that requires backup power, or live in a high fire risk zone. I don't qualify for the first 2 categories, and my luck is that the high fire risk zone starts about a mile away from my house, so good from the fire risk perspective, but not for the subsidy. Still got the 26% federal tax credit (with IRA, it's now back up to 30%). 1. SGIP: https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/electrical-energy/demand-side-management/self-generation-incentive-program https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/electrical-ene...
_yb2s 4y ago
We also need EV designs where the batteries are modular and easy to swap out. I wouldn't be interested in a deal where I was compensated financially for quickly wearing my non-replaceable car battery out, because the battery wear alters the usability of the car, e.g. I might find I can only take my family on shorter trips than planned, if my battery is now 80% of what it would have been. I also wouldn't want the battery level timed around the grid vs my own transportation needs. What if there is suddenly a heavy demand on the grid, and now I can't take my sick family member to the hospital, because the charge was sold to the grid?
- tuatoru 4y ago
  > We also need EV designs where the batteries are modular and easy to swap out. Battery swapping is already a thing. In China. Nio[1] sells luxury cars and there are lots of more utilitarian vehicles that use battswap, but get no press outside China. In the west, Ample[2] is working with manufacturers to modularize batteries and make them swappable between vehicle brands, so a "gas station" business/industry model will work. Edit: I believe that EV manufacturers that don't offer battswap will confine themselves to the luxury niche of the market. The mass market wants low sticker prices on its vehicles. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nio_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nio_Inc. 2. https://ample.com/ https://ample.com/
  - _yb2s 4y ago
    This is really cool! Battery swap is the 'killer feature' for me that would allow an EV to replace an ICE vehicle.
  - timidiceball 4y ago
    NIOs are very much for sale in Europe and Oslo, Norway has two battery changing stations (more coming supposedly). Very interesting what happens to car depreciation when decoupled from any particular battery pack.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
Assuming Tesla prices and full cycling of battery (aka from 100->0), draining a kWh puts about 2cents wear on your battery, so compensation would need to be above that price. In practice you'd never allow your operator to drain you to 0, so 2 cents is very much on the high side. In the California Tesla VPP trial, they pay 50 cents per kWh. (correction: 20cents wear, not 2cents)
- georgeg23 4y ago
  I calculate about $12 per Model Y full battery cycle, how did you get 2 cents? $12,000 (Model Y bat replace cost) * 300(miles for full drain)/300,000(total miles per pack) = $12 per cycle Edit: or 18 cents per kWh
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    Using your numbers: 300000 miles / 320 miles/cycle = 938 cycles. 938 cycles * 72kWh = 67500 kWh. $12000 / 67500 = 18 cents. Dunno where I got my 2 cents from, that calculation was done 2 months ago.
    - georgeg23 4y ago
      I agree with your 18 cents/kWh. That's slightly more than the average cost of electricity in the US?.. That is interesting, that means for home-charging your electric cost (per mile) is about equal to the battery degradation cost. Thats 2x cost than most think.
      - bryanlarsen 4y ago
        They'll only want to buy back electricity at times when demand exceeds supply. In Texas the price of electricity is $9/kWh during those times.
        elihu 4y ago
        Presumably as we use more renewable energy, we'll need more temporary storage. Buffering out day/night cycles from solar generation, for instance, would be a daily occurrence not a rare event. $9/kwh might be reasonable in an emergency, but even 18 cents/kwh seems pretty high for daily use.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
The distributor should just pay the generation fee to the car owners just like they would a power plant.
jackmott 4y ago
cycles hurt a lot less than just time does, but of course there would need to be some incentive!
jvanderbot 4y ago
Deferred cost is enough, just let the Tesla power the house once in a while, like the Ford Lightning can. The extra regulatory and technological stuff to make the Tesla power the neighbors house through the city grid is just overkill.
cyanydeez 4y ago
Considering the market is moving towards pertual licensing, by the time this is a thing, you probably won't be an owner and it won't matter to anyone except some bean counters when they update lease rules.
manmal 4y ago
LFP batteries can do 3k-10k cycles. Assuming a range of 500km per cycle out of an 100 kWh pack, that's 1.5 million km of total range (assuming 3k cycles). Only a small number of people will ever get that much out of a car - maybe 40% that, if maintained very very well. But we're talking Prius/Mercedes level endurance here, most cars won't make it that long. So in most cases, 70+% of the usable cycles in an LFP pack won't be done by the EV it was first installed in. Knowing that, selling cycles is actually a great way to offset purchase costs.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  Your range figures seem pretty crazy high. Pretty sure most EV batteries are smaller than 100k--my Model Y is only 75k for instance, and I'm not getting anywhere close to 500km per cycle because (1) my Model Y doesn't actually get 500km on a full charge and more importantly (2) like most EV owners, I don't charge to 100% and run my battery down to 0% but rather something closer to 80%/20%. So for my Model Y scenario, it's closer to half of your total range figure. Also, I'm not sure what components would wear out in an EV before the battery such that it would total the car out. If the EV batteries in totaled cars can be repurposed for grid use, then great, but I would expect them to get recycled and put back into cars unless strapping them to the grid is cheaper than recycling (seems maybe plausible?).
  - coryrc 4y ago
    When speaking of battery cycles and lifetime, people almost always mean "full cycle equivalent". So when you say "I only go 80%->20%" then that would be considered 0.6 cycles counted against the lifetime.
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      Is that how it works? Can I just charge every night, even if I've only driven a few miles, with no more wear on my battery than if I did full cycle charges? My vague impression is "no", but I really have no idea.
zeristor 4y ago
Surely just going between 80% to 20% would still be worthwhile, I understand this is for more amenable to a battery than a full fast discharge cycle. Indeed as this becomes more of an option I trust that car producers could look at engineering their batteries with this in mind.
mozman 4y ago
Not to mention a bug that could drain batteries overnight and put vehicle owners at risk!
Teknoman117 4y ago
As a semi-related side question, does anyone have good numbers on how plug-in hybrid batteries deteriorate over time? I bought a (2022) last March and I do a full charge/discharge cycle on it nearly every other day. I've averaged half my miles on electric since buying it... I haven't noticed any range loss ... yet. I know on mine the physical capacity is 14.4 kWh but it'll only let me use a band in the middle (?) of ~11 kWh (it eats 12 kWh charging and I'm assuming a 90% charging efficiency) (I also don't know if the chargepoint chargers report delivered or stored energy). This is all what I'm presuming to be enforcing no full charge/discharge cycles to lengthen the battery life.
- abracadaniel 4y ago
  I've read that nearly all range reduction occurs in the first year. If you're seeing ~80% usable energy out of it, then it's probably keeping you between 10% to 90% which is probably fine. Another major factor is battery cooling. Some only air cool the batteries, and in a hot climate they will die much quicker that way. It would be nice if the details were made available as not all manufacturers will use the same limits. Even better would be if it were configurable to some degree.
- jungturk 4y ago
  Not a plug-in hybrid, and not data, but I'm down 5-10% total range after 80k miles over 6 years in a plug-in (full) electric vehicle.
  - vondur 4y ago
    What car do you own? I’ve wondered about the Nissan leaf which apparently has no active cooling on the batteries vs others which do.
    - coryrc 4y ago
      Only the early model years lack active cooling.
- kbuck 4y ago

by lja 4y ago

prottog 4y ago

I agree. This further degrades the meaning of owning private property.

wjnc 4y ago
Energy price volatility will probably increase because natural sources are more volatile and other sources have spin up / down cycles. A car battery is like 3-4 days of continuous house usage. The car battery being used to top off the top 10% in short term pricing for energy would give a very nice ROI I expect. The rest is software? Don’t overcharge, don’t go under the limit I set for continuous availability as a mode of transport. And that’s all within reach in front of the meter, thus under my ownership. Heck, without self driving becoming common a family might even have 2 EVs on the driveway, giving a week of off grid potential. Come to think of it - a harder part is how super local the grid is and energy pricing should become. In my somewhat affluent neighborhood in high summer the voltage rises too high and the supply of solar falls. And tragedy of the commons - we are still installing solar because it’s massively incentivized (2 years before investment returns itself). To solve this with EVs requires very granular prices. There might be clouds 50 km away. But again, those are software solvable issues. (I’m not holding my breath. It’s like IoT-superplus.)
Ajedi32 4y ago
Unless it's voluntary (which it darned well better be). I envision a future where individual appliances (including EVs) can opt in to spot pricing for the electricity they consume (or produce). That would naturally incentivize charging during off-peak hours and discharging during peak hours, all without requiring any government incentives or coercion. It could also be useful for other major appliances which could benefit from the lower prices afforded by load shifting, such as hot water heaters.
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago
  Lots of now-compulsory things started out as voluntary.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    Pretty hard to make it compulsory if you can avoid it by (at worst) unplugging your car.
    - NotYourLawyer 4y ago
      >bryanlarsen, we noticed that your location is at home but your car isn’t plugged in. Please plug it in and drink a verification can within the next 10 minutes to avoid a noncompliance charge
- at-fates-hands 4y ago
  >> I envision a future where individual appliances (including EVs) can opt in to spot pricing for the electricity they consume (or produce). I remember when high speed internet was coming into being and there were a lot of pundits talking about how high speed bandwidth would be sold as a commodity on the NYSE. If someone needed say an hour of high bandwidth for a video conference, they could do what you're saying, buy an hour of high speed access. Of course, high speed internet eventually became so cheap and so readily available, those ideas faded pretty fast. I might be remembering this wrong, but wasn't Enron doing what you're talking about?
- tguvot 4y ago
  a bunch of appliances already can be aware of TOU pricing and run when it's atlowest. Many thermostats can be "auto-adjusted" based on grid load
- powerbroker 4y ago
  >> I envision a future where individual appliances (including EVs) can opt in to spot pricing for the electricity they consume When 1,000 devices jump on the grid the moment electricity hits $0.01/kWh, the demand spike will cause more generators to come back on line and increase the price back to $0.05/kWh -- thus causing the 1,000 devices to drop-off the grid. Rinse, lather, repeat. How do you compensate for the potential grid instability?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

phkahler 4y ago

Did you know that the standard DC chargers communicate with the vehicle using PLC (Powerline communication) chips even though that communication is not over the high power conductors? I've always had the feeling the grid operators got that included because they thought they were going to communicate directly with the battery management system to control it as they wish. It never happened and now the standard is stupidly complex and they're still trying to use cars as storage without much consideration for what vehicle owners want. Sure, offer variable rates. Offer interruptabke service. But stop wanting V2G, nobody actually wants it.

jackinloadup 4y ago
Assuming V2G means Vehicle to Ground, this is something I would like to see for the following use-case. I would like to use my car battery as a temporary home battery in the inevitable case of a grid outage. This opens the option to bring energy home from another location. Reduce or eliminates the need for a battery in a grid-tied house. Am I crazy? Edit: Granted that doesn't mean the energy company can use my car's battery at it's whim. I think compensation would be required and would actually make a lot of sense. It isn't like the electric company could build out a battery system for cheaper. It would need to be a higher compensation than to PV though. Batteries are more expensive and should be compensated as such.
- Reason077 4y ago
  V2G = vehicle to grid. It’s quite possible for this to operate as a backup battery, but like a Powerwall it requires extra “gateway” hardware to ensure that your house is isolated from the grid when the battery is discharging. V2L (vehicle to load) is a simpler form that lets you power 115/230V appliances directly from the vehicle. Quite a few EVs (Hyundai, Ford, etc) already support V2L.
- toast0 4y ago
  That's not crazy, it's actually a publicized optional feature on the F-150 Lightning, and the F-150 hybrid has an optional 240V 30A output that can be used as a home backup as well (although that'd be a bit more manual).

whazor 4y ago

Selling electricity is compensation, like with solar panels. You only need hourly energy prices to make it profitable. Plus an app that does the profitability calculation and discharging.

ThunderSizzle 4y ago
Sounds similar to Uber using a contractor vehicle's hidden depreciation and maintenance to shift the real cost of their service. I doubt the hourly price will ever truly be fair to individual car owners. Maybe we'll start to be asked whenever we plug in our phones to tip the owner of a car our electricity is coming from.
- cwkoss 4y ago
  If there are consistent price cycles and a good API for reading price, it should be pretty easy for an EV owner to control how much they interact with the arbitrage opportunities with some simple rules. Ex. "only sell if it cost at least 15% less to charge", "always charge to X%", "charge to 70% if < $Y", charge to 100% if < $Z", "never sell below X%" The aesthetic vibe of having an autonomous energy trading bot in my garage is attractive to me.
  - rtkwe 4y ago
    Part of the issue isn't the controls to do that it's that the prices to compensate wear on a battery are a) likely significantly higher than the base price and b) pretty hard to calculate.
    - mhb 4y ago
      That's what a market is for.
      - jahewson 4y ago
        There is no market. I can only sell electricity to PG&E and only at a flat rate.

0cVlTeIATBs 4y ago

1. Core charge when recycling 2. Time-of-use electricity rates. Up to the customer to choose to install load shifting equipment

nkingsy 4y ago

This makes much more sense with large lifepo4 chemistry batteries that are expected to outlive the car by a wide margin. Lifepo4 batteries > 50kwh should easily handle 500,000 miles. Higher performance lithium ion will degrade at a rate faster than any expected return from a scheme like this. At least in Northern California it’s now cheaper for me to run solar+battery off grid than to pay pge. Lifepo4 pushes it over the edge into profitability. If off-grid is competitive, selling at peak prices is a no brainer.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
I have 100k miles on my 2018 Model S having Supercharged it the majority of the time the last four years. It has only 6% battery degradation of the 100kw pack. Tesla warranties their powerwalls for 15 years when configured as part of their aggregated virtual power plants. The batteries are demonstrated to be durable. New LFP chemistries that are heavier but more stable are ideal for stationary storage and high cycle counts, but the evidence shows in general that these packs are built for longevity (with very occasional early failures). You could probably do well buying a salvage Tesla and shucking the pack for working modules and coming out ahead economically (safety warning, do at your own risk, etc) if you don’t want or can’t get dedicated stationary storage (although it comes with generous federal, state, and utility subsidies in California).
- danans 4y ago
  > if you don’t want or can’t get dedicated stationary storage (although it comes with generous federal, state, and utility subsidies in California). I installed stationary LFP batteries (from Enphase) on my house in CA 1.5 years ago, but I then discovered that the state and utility subsidies [1] only apply if you are in a very low income (for CA) bracket, have a health condition that requires backup power, or live in a high fire risk zone. I don't qualify for the first 2 categories, and my luck is that the high fire risk zone starts about a mile away from my house, so good from the fire risk perspective, but not for the subsidy. Still got the 26% federal tax credit (with IRA, it's now back up to 30%). 1. SGIP: https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/electrical-energy/demand-side-management/self-generation-incentive-program https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/electrical-ene...

_yb2s 4y ago

We also need EV designs where the batteries are modular and easy to swap out. I wouldn't be interested in a deal where I was compensated financially for quickly wearing my non-replaceable car battery out, because the battery wear alters the usability of the car, e.g. I might find I can only take my family on shorter trips than planned, if my battery is now 80% of what it would have been. I also wouldn't want the battery level timed around the grid vs my own transportation needs. What if there is suddenly a heavy demand on the grid, and now I can't take my sick family member to the hospital, because the charge was sold to the grid?

tuatoru 4y ago
> We also need EV designs where the batteries are modular and easy to swap out. Battery swapping is already a thing. In China. Nio[1] sells luxury cars and there are lots of more utilitarian vehicles that use battswap, but get no press outside China. In the west, Ample[2] is working with manufacturers to modularize batteries and make them swappable between vehicle brands, so a "gas station" business/industry model will work. Edit: I believe that EV manufacturers that don't offer battswap will confine themselves to the luxury niche of the market. The mass market wants low sticker prices on its vehicles. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nio_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nio_Inc. 2. https://ample.com/ https://ample.com/
- _yb2s 4y ago
  This is really cool! Battery swap is the 'killer feature' for me that would allow an EV to replace an ICE vehicle.
- timidiceball 4y ago
  NIOs are very much for sale in Europe and Oslo, Norway has two battery changing stations (more coming supposedly). Very interesting what happens to car depreciation when decoupled from any particular battery pack.

bryanlarsen 4y ago

Assuming Tesla prices and full cycling of battery (aka from 100->0), draining a kWh puts about 2cents wear on your battery, so compensation would need to be above that price. In practice you'd never allow your operator to drain you to 0, so 2 cents is very much on the high side. In the California Tesla VPP trial, they pay 50 cents per kWh. (correction: 20cents wear, not 2cents)

georgeg23 4y ago
I calculate about $12 per Model Y full battery cycle, how did you get 2 cents? $12,000 (Model Y bat replace cost) * 300(miles for full drain)/300,000(total miles per pack) = $12 per cycle Edit: or 18 cents per kWh
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Using your numbers: 300000 miles / 320 miles/cycle = 938 cycles. 938 cycles * 72kWh = 67500 kWh. $12000 / 67500 = 18 cents. Dunno where I got my 2 cents from, that calculation was done 2 months ago.
  - georgeg23 4y ago
    I agree with your 18 cents/kWh. That's slightly more than the average cost of electricity in the US?.. That is interesting, that means for home-charging your electric cost (per mile) is about equal to the battery degradation cost. Thats 2x cost than most think.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      They'll only want to buy back electricity at times when demand exceeds supply. In Texas the price of electricity is $9/kWh during those times.
      - elihu 4y ago
        Presumably as we use more renewable energy, we'll need more temporary storage. Buffering out day/night cycles from solar generation, for instance, would be a daily occurrence not a rare event. $9/kwh might be reasonable in an emergency, but even 18 cents/kwh seems pretty high for daily use.

micromacrofoot 4y ago

The distributor should just pay the generation fee to the car owners just like they would a power plant.

jackmott 4y ago

cycles hurt a lot less than just time does, but of course there would need to be some incentive!

jvanderbot 4y ago

Deferred cost is enough, just let the Tesla power the house once in a while, like the Ford Lightning can. The extra regulatory and technological stuff to make the Tesla power the neighbors house through the city grid is just overkill.

cyanydeez 4y ago

Considering the market is moving towards pertual licensing, by the time this is a thing, you probably won't be an owner and it won't matter to anyone except some bean counters when they update lease rules.

manmal 4y ago

LFP batteries can do 3k-10k cycles. Assuming a range of 500km per cycle out of an 100 kWh pack, that's 1.5 million km of total range (assuming 3k cycles). Only a small number of people will ever get that much out of a car - maybe 40% that, if maintained very very well. But we're talking Prius/Mercedes level endurance here, most cars won't make it that long. So in most cases, 70+% of the usable cycles in an LFP pack won't be done by the EV it was first installed in. Knowing that, selling cycles is actually a great way to offset purchase costs.

throwaway894345 4y ago
Your range figures seem pretty crazy high. Pretty sure most EV batteries are smaller than 100k--my Model Y is only 75k for instance, and I'm not getting anywhere close to 500km per cycle because (1) my Model Y doesn't actually get 500km on a full charge and more importantly (2) like most EV owners, I don't charge to 100% and run my battery down to 0% but rather something closer to 80%/20%. So for my Model Y scenario, it's closer to half of your total range figure. Also, I'm not sure what components would wear out in an EV before the battery such that it would total the car out. If the EV batteries in totaled cars can be repurposed for grid use, then great, but I would expect them to get recycled and put back into cars unless strapping them to the grid is cheaper than recycling (seems maybe plausible?).
- coryrc 4y ago
  When speaking of battery cycles and lifetime, people almost always mean "full cycle equivalent". So when you say "I only go 80%->20%" then that would be considered 0.6 cycles counted against the lifetime.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    Is that how it works? Can I just charge every night, even if I've only driven a few miles, with no more wear on my battery than if I did full cycle charges? My vague impression is "no", but I really have no idea.

zeristor 4y ago

Surely just going between 80% to 20% would still be worthwhile, I understand this is for more amenable to a battery than a full fast discharge cycle. Indeed as this becomes more of an option I trust that car producers could look at engineering their batteries with this in mind.

mozman 4y ago

Not to mention a bug that could drain batteries overnight and put vehicle owners at risk!

Teknoman117 4y ago

As a semi-related side question, does anyone have good numbers on how plug-in hybrid batteries deteriorate over time? I bought a (2022) last March and I do a full charge/discharge cycle on it nearly every other day. I've averaged half my miles on electric since buying it... I haven't noticed any range loss ... yet. I know on mine the physical capacity is 14.4 kWh but it'll only let me use a band in the middle (?) of ~11 kWh (it eats 12 kWh charging and I'm assuming a 90% charging efficiency) (I also don't know if the chargepoint chargers report delivered or stored energy). This is all what I'm presuming to be enforcing no full charge/discharge cycles to lengthen the battery life.

abracadaniel 4y ago
I've read that nearly all range reduction occurs in the first year. If you're seeing ~80% usable energy out of it, then it's probably keeping you between 10% to 90% which is probably fine. Another major factor is battery cooling. Some only air cool the batteries, and in a hot climate they will die much quicker that way. It would be nice if the details were made available as not all manufacturers will use the same limits. Even better would be if it were configurable to some degree.
jungturk 4y ago
Not a plug-in hybrid, and not data, but I'm down 5-10% total range after 80k miles over 6 years in a plug-in (full) electric vehicle.
- vondur 4y ago
  What car do you own? I’ve wondered about the Nissan leaf which apparently has no active cooling on the batteries vs others which do.
  - coryrc 4y ago
    Only the early model years lack active cooling.
kbuck 4y ago