I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but when you have a gasoline-powered car, it’s kind of wasting a lot of its energy just sitting there parked all day, you know? Energy created when gasoline is burned in a non-hybrid car can only go one way—into the drivetrain to create motion. But in theory, electric cars are different. As essentially batteries on wheels, one much-touted benefit to EVs is that they can receive and deliver energy, namely back into the electric grid itself. But how, exactly?
That’s what a new team-up from three somewhat unlikely partners—BMW, Honda and Ford—apparently aims to do. Ahead of this week’s Detroit Auto Show, the three automakers today announced the creation of ChargeScape: a new open platform that connects EVs and their automakers with electric utilities to help manage energy use and supply power to the grids when needed.
“ChargeScape’s platform will give electric utilities access to EV battery energy across a wide pool of EVs,” the three automakers said in a news release. “Participating EV customers will have the potential to earn financial benefits by charging at ‘grid-friendly’ times through flexible and managed schedules. Electric vehicle customers will also eventually have the opportunity for even more significant impact by sharing the energy stored in their EV batteries with the grid during times of peak demand through vehicle-to-grid (V2G) applications.”
In more plain English, ChargeScape seems to be a software platform—probably an app—that lets you monitor your energy use and coordinate how your EV puts energy back into the grid, provided both your car and your power utility are capable of that. More and more automakers are moving to V2G and other levels of bi-directional charging in the coming years; the Ford F-150 Lightning can power your house with the right equipment and General Motors’ upcoming EVs will be capable of the same, too. All three of these automakers also say they’re open to more automakers participating here.
Among other benefits, the automakers say ChargeScape will “eliminate the need for individual integrations between each automotive brand and each electric utility”—in other words, one app to do it all, whereas before this might’ve been a nightmare of different apps and software integrations. The latter is one reason non-Tesla charging is such a mess; not all of these EVs and charging networks can talk to each other effectively, while Tesla’s systems are all done in-house.
Beyond just making the not-stellar user experience with EVs better, adding V2G is a pretty crucial step for all involved with the electric transition. Right now, there’s a lot of fear that adding EVs to our transportation mix will overload our already taxed electric grids by asking them to do something they were never designed to do—power our cars. Concerns over blackouts, more powerplant emissions and depleted EVs in a power crisis are just a few reasons people are skeptical about what this means long-term.
But if EVs are able to put juice back into the grid—and schedule their home charging away from those peak afternoon hours when the day is hottest and everyone’s at home from work and school running a lot of electricity—they can help support the grid by acting as mobile energy storage units. Moreover, there’s a financial benefit for EV owners willing to do this: “Participating EV customers will have the potential to earn financial benefits by charging at ‘grid-friendly; times through flexible and managed schedules,” the three automakers say.
To get even nerdier, ChargeScape is meant to work through your vehicle’s connected telematics system, meaning it’s usable for people who don’t have WiFi-connected “smart” chargers in their homes.
It’s a clever system, and I think there’s one other big trend worth noting here: this is another example of automakers doing this sort of thing themselves for a change.
For years, the car companies just wanted to make cars as they’ve done for a century now and let someone else, anyone else handle the the other stuff—EV charging, grid management and so on. And it didn’t work out. The non-Tesla charging companies are generally terrible and so bad at what they do, they’re hindering wider EV adoption. (I should note the automakers themselves haven’t been angels here, either; Electrify America is a Volkswagen jam, and look how that’s turned out.) ChargeScape is one example of automakers taking things into their own hands, just like the as-yet-unnamed charging consortium several companies (including BMW and Honda) are building out.
Either way, ChargeScape will be one to watch, and it’s quite reasonable to expect other automakers to join forces with it too. I just hope we get more details soon how, exactly, it works from a consumer perspective. But I’m glad someone’s taking V2G seriously beyond the theoretical stage.
Will the tow truck be battery operated too? Just asking because the last storm we had, our power was out for 7 days…and you could see the tow trucks dropping off teslas at the charging point next to the gas station. I’ll stick to my generator (us country folk like it simple)
I don’t think this will be a situation where anyone’s battery is going to be sapped by 50 or 60%. I think these auto companies are thinking more at a larger scale and if they have thousands or tens of thousands of cars potentially plugged in they may have to use a very small percentage or fraction of percentage of available battery power from any individual car.
“adding V2G is a pretty crucial step for all involved with the electric transition. “
I completely disagree with that. All that is needed is more powerwall-type products built into the grid to act as buffers to lessen demand peaks and for storing surplus energy during low-demand times.
Tied in with that, the grid should be augmented with lots of rooftop solar and wind generation where it makes sense.
You know what I don’t want? I don’t want the electricity grid to DRAIN my battery when I plug in my BEV.
V2G is a stupid idea in practice. It would make more sense to just install a standard 120V/15A outlet in a BEV that you can use in the event of a power outage.
The big problem with V2G is that the high demand times are not the times vehicles are plugged in. The idea of the vehicle adding energy during high demand and pulling it when demand is lower sounds good until you realize that you’re mostly parked during times of lower demand.
That said, I could see a benefit for a certain sort of person. You get home, car still mostly charged because your commute hardly uses any of the range. The electricity is still at a higher day rate. Your car begins adding electricity to the mix while you’re cooking, watching TV, etc. You head to bed and your car starts charging at the lower night rate.
Of course, that same person would be better served with solar panels and batteries, but maybe their HOA doesn’t allow solar? But, yeah, not a really compelling use case for most, probably not worth trying to push for it universally.
and/or they don’t have the money to invest in solar
I agree completely. I have been EV exclusively for over 4 years and I cannot think of one time where I wanted to kill my car’s battery to power my home. What happens if the power outage lasts? I end up with no power in the house AND a dead car.
I just don’t get the use case.
That reasoning fails to take into account that we’re already strapped for lithium in said batteries.
Having a topped up powerwall all the time and an EV that doesn’t act as a buffer for the grid is just wasting ressource (and your budget).
It may sound annoying from the individual perspective, but for the overall grid stability and eco-friendliness (additional power plants required during spikes are often CO2 intensive), V2G is just fucking awesome.
We aren’t “already” strapped for lithium. We will be eventually, but not now.
Also, a vehicle is one of the largest cost purchases a typical person makes. Why the fuck would a consumer want to “waste” part of the lifespan of a major component of it because power companies have been so resistant to residential solar and other forms of bolstering the grid. Certainly doesn’t seem very cost effective to use up some of the life of your $35k car so your neighbors can blast their AC…
You can manage the lifespan of the battery if you charge and discharge in a smart way. That’s why some people put their summer car on a smart charger in the winter: it saves the battery life.
We aren’t strapped for lithium now, true, but we also know we will be. Just saying ‘yolo’ regarding resources isn’t smart.
Regardless of electricity providers investments, you will ALWAYS have baseline production powerplants (nuclear and the likes) and ancillary ones (dams, gas, coal). The more storage you have on the grid, the less you need the latter.
You could have the provider invest on a storage capacity but you will pay for it somehow, it’s pretty much just like asking everyone to buy a powerball.
Now to be frank I don’t now how your energy market works. All I’m giving you is a technical point of view. I don’t see why you wouldn’t make money if you were to have your car doing V2G. If that offsets the cost of the battery degradation I really fail to see the downside to it.
“Having a topped up powerwall all the time and an EV that doesn’t act as a buffer for the grid is just wasting ressource (and your budget).”
That’s not how those things work. In the case of the Tesla powerwall, these can be set up to top up when electricity rates are low at night and draw down power during the day.
Or they can be programed to work with solar panels.
“V2G is just fucking awesome.”
Not for consumers. It’s only awesome for utilities who are too cheap to invest in their own infrastructure.
You car can do exactly what you are describing with a powerwall.
I’d be interested in this if I weren’t so convinced it is going to be another Uber-like boondoggle taking advantage of people’s lack of math skills when it comes to the cost of depreciation. This will shorten your battery’s lifespan and the compensation had better not only more than cover the cost of a new one, but also the very expensive labor to replace an increasingly integrated part of your car.
Of note is the fact that energy is lost through charging and discharging the battery, and that loss increases with the square of the charge current. Seems like a good way to keep from building more power plants but there is an energy/environmental cost. The price arbitrage bit is nice, especially if you have a solar array.
The one problem I don’t see discussed very often is – how do generating entities figure this sort of thing into their plans? This type of peaking power supply would seem to be very unreliable and subject to the whims of people (who are irrational and unpredictable). Generation companies need to cover power demands 100% of the time so they can’t reasonably rely on this. They’ll still need to build peaking power plants that will (at best) sit idle and unused.
People are very predictable when one has access to data covering every aspect of their lives.
sort of true, when you take a large population in aggregate. The issue is that even large sample sizes have deviations. For example, I’m willing to bet that Christmas day the number of people plugged in will plummet. So they will still need to cover with excess generation capacity (peaking units). These units will just sit more when batteries are available… which may be a benefit, but reduces the perceived advantage of this whole thing
Plugging an EV is adding a buffer into the system, it’s not like solar panels that will send current in the grid when the clouds part away. It helps with grid management.
Every time the energy is transferred, some of it it lost – other than for emergencies, why would I want to be bouncing the electricity back and forth? And as others have mentioned, this will wear down the batteries faster.
If the total cost of doing it (including those losses) is less than the cost to run peaking power plants for the same unit of energy then it could be beneficial. I’m skeptical for other reasons but I think the losses are offset by the typically inefficient generation methods used for peaking power plants.
I think the battery drain question is a good one and I don’t have an answer for it, so I am asking around about that. Will report back if I get anything useful.
Standard Li-Ion packs would not do well with this (NCA, NMC..) LiFePO4 is literally made for this. Driving cycles will not kill the battery, age degradation will. So maximizing the use and value over the 10-15 year usable lifespan would be ideal.
The round trip efficiency of battery storage is unusually high compared to other storage technologies like pumped hydro. The utilities I talk with in my line of work would use V2G as gas peaker replacement, but only if they were interested. Their interest seems limited right now thanks to the difficulty inherent to coordinating that many batteries.
The battery degradation problem is concerning. A typical EV uses around 9.5 kWh per day (~35mi) and is plugged in for around 9 hours, so you could charge in 2 hours and spend the next 7ish hours charging and discharging in service to the grid. In that worst-case scenario, a 7.2kW grid tie could multiply your cyclic degradation by 2.65x.
Battery degradation is based on a lot of factors (cycles, temperature, vibration, calendar age), so I can’t give an empirical answer, but I’d estimate a fully overused grid tie like this could cut your battery lifespan to 2/3rds.
Let’s flip the script. What if the car manufacturers and Big Oil suddenly announced a cool program to make the country more energy independent by siphoning gasoline out of your car whenever the infrastructure needed it. Do you think we’d have any takers for that “good deal”? As I see it, they’re only doing this because they can. I’m just not seeing a compelling case for this being a good idea overall, but I’d be happy to have someone smarter than me convince me that it is.
Community level gas arbitrage is a great idea. All you need is a van and a couple garbage cans.
Also someone to be the wild card of the group, always need a wild card
I’m the brains and the looks.
Did you cut the brakes again?
Yeeee-haw!
WILD CARD, BITCHES!
So excited to see this.
If I could buy gas at $1.00 a gallon at midnight (while I’m sleeping) and sell it back at $3.00 a gallon while I’m working, I’d be happy to sign up.
No problem as long as they buy high, sell low and always leave enough to get me where I’m going.
But you know they won’t actually do that. They would only do this for their benefit, not yours.
Not if they can help it no. They will if forced to do so.
There would have to be a significant financial benefit for me to be interested at all as I would basically be selling battery cycles. And battery cycles are going to be a thing that determines car value when I sell it (same as mileage).
Yeah I wouldn’t want to do that either, unless I have a car with LFP batteries
Another excellent point. Charge cycles have a significant value/health impact on an EV and this model just increases the number of charge cycles. Even with LFP batteries, that could be a significant issue.
I think this is the key, what does a battery cycle (or partial cycle) cost the owner? It’s pretty straight forward to figure out the price difference between on-peak and off-peak electricity, and with that and the knowledge of how much of your battery you are willing to dedicate to this you can come up with an “income” number, but not knowing the wear and tear on the battery makes the whole thing kind of a guess.
The real difficulty is determining the value of a cycle, because not all cycles are created equal. Temperature, amperage, max/min SoC, etc, all affect the wear and tear caused by a single cycle.
It’s possible, just not super easy.
When you buy a used EV, you want to look for a SoH% topline, which is the measured capacity compared to the OEM specified net capacity. Perform that test and you don’t need to know the history of the car.
Charge$cape
Interesting. I get the utility of V2G in an emergency situation, to provide power to my house or my neighbor’s house, etc. if a storm knocks out the grid. But I’m not sure I see a benefit to the consumer for freely flowing energy back into the grid in non-emergency situations, as they seem to be indicating here with Chargescape. It’s not mentioned, but I’ll go ahead and assume that flowing electrons back into the grid in such a situation would allow the car owner to be compensated from the Utility (selling the electricity back at a competitive rate) rather than the user freely donating out of the goodness of their heart. But even in such a situation, that might work at cross purposes. Here’s the scenario I have in mind: I’ve got my EV plugged into my smart charger in my garage. In the middle of the night, the grid needs help and starts sucking electrons out of my battery to load-balance, etc. Next morning, I get in the car to drive to work and find out that I’ve got 20% battery remaining – WTF?? Anyway, perhaps I’m not understanding the end goal here, but I’m extremely suspicious of the concept at the moment.
I’d expect you’d be able limit how much power the utility can take and how quickly they can take it. I’d also expect the power to automatically be replenished when cheaper surplus power comes available so you might never be the wiser except for a slightly fatter wallet.
Except that replenishment isn’t instantaneous. In the scenario I outlined, if the grid is pulling from my battery until 6 AM and I need to leave at 7, I’m hosed. I guess setting a limit might work if I could keep my battery from being depleted past what I need to get out and back the next day. We’ll see but I’m still not sold on the idea.
Oh, and if you think the consumer’s wallet will get fatter in this exchange, I’ve got a bridge to sell you…
I was thinking more along the lines of drawing a few kWh from 5-8PM when power is most expensive, then replenishing overnight when it’s cheapest.
Peak hours (when they could use the capacity) are typically during the day and it varies based on the season. They are never at night.
But I think you could have pose a similar question if say they decide to use some battery as you charge at work and then when you go to leave for the day you only have half a battery.
Good point. But I think most people aren’t charging during the day, either. Let’s say I have a 30 mile commute to work, so 60 miles a day. With any reasonably capable EV, I’d never need to charge at work. And that’s assuming my place of work even has chargers.
Right, which makes me wonder how useful this really is. Unless you assume a significant number of people will be plugged in at work or just staying home it seems like the use cases don’t fit together.
“And that’s assuming my place of work even has chargers.”
Companies may not have dedicated chargers but they might have extension cables and a 110V or 220V socket. Over a workday that may enough to get you home.
Right, but that wouldn’t play into the Chargscape use case because that sort of charging wouldn’t work with the V2G model. As Mr/Ms Goat stated below – the use cases don’t seem to work well together.
In my scenario you would charge at work and use chargescape at home.
Someone tried that where I work, and got fired and threatened with charges for “theft of government property”. They did install some EV chargers, but the way the program is administered is inefficient, wasteful, and expensive. Basically, you have to enter a lottery to get a spot at a charger, and you pay a fixed (fairly high) cost per year if you “win” a spot. If you don’t win a spot, you can’t use the chargers.
I’m guessing there was a lot more to that story. The hassle of termination and replacement would have cost the company far more than the joules. Corporate electric rates are typically $0.10-0.15/kWh so even charging a fully depleted 100kWh Tesla S would cost $10-$15/day, basically a light lunch. A smaller EVs like a Leaf would be a cup of coffee, hardly worth bothering about especially against the potential bad PR of such a stingy employer. They would also have given numerous warnings and company wide memos outlining the policy before beginning termination proceedings.
The accusation of theft was more likely bullshit leverage to intimidate against a wrongful termination lawsuit and/or severance package from someone they were looking to get rid of anyway.
The Federal Government does not do “reasonable”. They really don’t care about the cost, it’s the “you did that without permission” aspect that they hate. And contractors can get canned with hardly any fuss. If it were a Fed, there might have been more of a process, but as it was a contractor…
Well there you go.
I have some related questions; what is the rate of wear on the battery if it’s being depleted and recharged more often?
And in your various scenarios, you could easily have an emergency requiring the vehicle at any time. It would be my hope this system would leave a minimum amount of battery charge to the owner. Say 50% charge or less and the system looks for another car to draw from perhaps.
I think the power demands of even an entire household is trivial compared to the demands of even leisurely driving so I expect the hit on battery lifetime won’t be too bad.
On the hottest days of the year, my home uses ~28-32 kWh. On a less hot day, that falls to around 20. During the brief periods of spring and fall, when I don’t need AC, it’s around 11. When you compare that to a 70-90 kWh EV battery, that’s not a lot. I also have solar panels, so during the hottest part of the day, I’m fully offsetting my electric use with what I generate, so I’m already feeding into the grid.
What I want is to be able to automatically use an EV plugged into a charger as a house battery during our not-infrequent power outages.
I was thinking more about the instantaneous load. Quick charging and discharging is what kills batteries the most. Accelerating a 4000 lb EV up to freeway speed and putting as much of that back into the battery quickly is a lot harder than starting a home A/C unit or an electric oven.
“But I’m glad someone’s taking V2G seriously beyond the theoretical stage.”
As am I. Soon I will execute my nefarious 3 step plan:
1). Buy a pair of identical MASSIVE batteried EVs. The biggest I can get.
2) Drive the nearly depleted one to work and charge it on my bosses dime while using the other to power my home and sell any surplus power back to PG&E at top dollar. Rinse, repeat.
3) Profit!
Buuuahhhaaa!!!!!
Name checks out. 😉
Obligatory
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G6ozHscfyfY
Not really related to this article, but the IMAX screen in that image from Ford is just beyond stupid. If the screen can show a full size image of a small child it’s too fucking big.
Don’t worry, I saw that image and asked myself, Self, WTF is that? Self said it was an abomination.