[HN Gopher] Which Electric Cars Have Bidirectional Charging (V2L...
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Which Electric Cars Have Bidirectional Charging (V2L, V2G, V2H)
Author : teleforce
Score : 44 points
Date : 2024-05-21 07:38 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zecar.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (zecar.com)
| Weryj wrote:
| Selfless promotion, since it's on topic. We're working to get V2G
| in the hands of everyone: https://www.jedlix.com/
| twarge wrote:
| It may be on topic, but I'm not sure how you get to selfless if
| you're promoting your venture.
| Spare_account wrote:
| They probably meant to write 'shameless self-promotion'
| user_7832 wrote:
| Interesting seeing V2X on HN, given that I'm currently
| researching V2G academically.
|
| One thing I've found in my studies is that services like
| frequency regulation are often described as very helpful or apt
| for EVs, but online discussion doesn't seem to talk much about
| the different electricity markets or services. I wonder if anyone
| here with experience either from an automotive or from an energy
| side as any views or opinions they'd like to share?
|
| (If anyone wants to ask anything about V2G feel free to ask,
| though I am not an expert I'll try my best.)
| schiffern wrote:
| I wish we had more _V1G_ , aka grid-interactive charging.
|
| It's extremely unsexy, but upon further inspection it's
| surprisingly great. It doesn't add costly cycles to the onboard
| traction battery, but it still can provide similar grid services
| (virtual spinning inertia, demand response, distribution network
| balancing, etc). Better yet it should be a software update for
| every existing electric car, even those without bidirectional
| hardware.
|
| Ideally I could tell my car, "always charge to [40]% immediately,
| then charge to [80]% by [8 AM] [Weekdays]." Then the car
| automatically participates in a fleet battery scheme, earning me
| money overnight by providing grid services.
|
| Bonus points if it also knows that I have TOU metering, and
| automatically optimizes for minimum cost.
| mavhc wrote:
| https://octopus.energy/smart/intelligent-octopus-go/ UK power
| company offering that, if you have a compatible car/charger
| they can control for you
| audunw wrote:
| Our power company ("Tibber") provides this as a service in
| their app for a bunch of different car models. Until recently
| this just let you avoid hours with more expensive electricity.
| But now you get an extra bonus on top of that since it lets the
| power company provide valuable grid balancing services.
|
| It's not sexy, but it's also not that hard to implement so I
| suspect this will become commonplace surprisingly quickly.
|
| > It doesn't add costly cycles to the onboard traction battery
|
| I guess for many people, NOT using V2G will be a net economic
| loss. For a big battery, and with 20%-80% limits, we are
| talking about extremely gentle cycles. The degradation is
| likely a drop in the bucket. Battery degrades with age as well
| as cycles. So after 20-30 years if you haven't used V2G you
| risk having an age-degraded battery that didn't deliver its
| full capability in terms of cycle life. Or the rest of your car
| has degraded before your battery did.
|
| For LFP it's even more likely that V2G will get you the most
| value out of the battery.
|
| If you go through a charge cycle every day or two on a Li-ion,
| I suspect V2G won't make sense since you're stressing the cycle
| life of your battery.
|
| The problem is we don't really know how long modern EV
| batteries will last, so it's impossible to know what the most
| rational choice is. We also don't know what the value of a
| degraded battery is in 15 years, and what the cost of a new one
| is. Since the economies of scale around battery recycling will
| be so massive in 15 years, it's possible that you get paid a
| fair sum for an old battery, and that getting a new battery
| will be fairly cheap. Or maybe not.
| wcoenen wrote:
| I have a time of use contract with hourly pricing, based on the
| day-ahead electricity market. So I also wanted to schedule
| charging, but I was somewhat disappointed that
|
| - my charging station has no scheduling feature built-in
|
| - my EV does have settings for this, but they act more as a
| suggestion. It would often charge when I didn't want it to.
|
| Fortunately the charging station does support being controlled
| over modbus tcp/ip, so I was able to write some code and run it
| on a Rasperry Pi to control it. My control system fetches the
| prices and enables charging whenever they are below the
| configured maximum.
|
| However, I now find that (because of my obsession with
| optimizing this) it is still very far from a hands-off
| solution. I find myself doing this:
|
| - check electricity prices manually
|
| - check car state of charge manually
|
| - if prices are going to dip very low, figure out how much time
| will be needed to charge to 80%
|
| - if prices are high, figure out whether I need to do a minimal
| top up anyway and how much, based on how much I think I'm going
| to drive
|
| - choose a maximum price such that charging will be enabled
| during a sufficient amount of hours, based on the above
|
| The main thing that's missing to properly automate this is a
| way to retrieve the EV's state of charge. But a charging
| station for home use will typically only support a simple PWM
| signal to tell the car how much current it can draw. No other
| communication is possible unless the charging station supports
| ISO 15118. Mine doesn't :-(
| thebruce87m wrote:
| I'm in the UK on octopus.
|
| They do exactly this. They charge in 30 minute chunks
| throughout the night - whenever suits them best. The reward is
| electricity at a quarter of the price during this period.
| RatchetWerks wrote:
| I feel that bidirectional charging is the EV feature that most
| consumers don't know that they want.
|
| My current vehicle is fine, but when I'm in the market.
|
| I want an EV/PHEV vehicle that has enough power output to
| entirely power up my home, and serve as energy storage for solar.
| It avoids the need for a IC generator, and a power wall.
|
| They are a powerwall on wheels. When then battery age out in 10
| years, you swap the vehicle.
|
| Gensets and in-home battery storage seem very redundant, when a
| bidirectional charging PHEV can do both.
|
| I've entertained the idea of picking up a Prius and hacking the
| electronics to act on this.
| czechdeveloper wrote:
| Vehicle by definition can't be connected to the house
| constantly. I can imagine this lowers need for house battery
| size, but not need for it's existence. House power consumption
| is very random.
| adrianN wrote:
| For many people, home power use its highest when they and
| their vehicle are at home.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Doesn't matter. Homes tend to need power when people are at
| home. The car is - by definition - at home when its driver is
| at home.
| unglaublich wrote:
| But when the vehicle is connected, the user is typically at
| home. So there's a convenient relation there.
|
| House power consumption is random because it's not designed
| to be predictable. It's trivial to have a washing machine and
| heating that prioritize energy consumption whenever the EV is
| connected, or grid energy is affordable.
| pwagland wrote:
| Unless you have more than one person in the house...
|
| But in general, yeah, when you _need_ the battery, maybe
| you just need to figure out that you don't need to drive
| that day/hour.
|
| The other advantage of a car, is that it would allow you to
| bring in power "from the outside", go to somewhere where
| the grid is still working, charge up, then come back. Of
| course, you'd hope to be back on power before this was
| needed!
| londons_explore wrote:
| There is typically good connectivity between houses. That
| means even if _your_ EV isn 't home, the other EV's in your
| street can send your house a lot of energy.
|
| Unfortunately _anti-islanding_ rules from power companies
| generally disallow you using the power lines between your
| house and a neighbours while the grid connection is
| disconnected elsewhere.
|
| These rules could be adjusted though - although it would take
| a lot of systems design work to ensure power system stability
| and re-synchronizability even with every possible combination
| of islands.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's more about safety than reconnection: when repairing
| lines, it's much more manageable to "lock and tag out" the
| upstream side than all the distributed generation,
| especially in emergencies.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > I've entertained the idea of picking up a Prius and hacking
| the electronics to act on this.
|
| All the NiMH prius' are unsuitable for this. Total energy
| storage is only about 1kWh and usable energy storage is more
| like 0.3 kWh (ie. it wouldn't even boil one kettle of water).
|
| The hybrid-ness is still useful because it lets you get a boost
| of acceleration to get up a hill or overtake some cars - and
| the battery is very _powerful_ - ie. it can get all that power
| out very fast - it just doesn 't store much _energy_.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| They probably meant a Prius Prime
| vegardx wrote:
| I don't really think consumers want or need this.
|
| The battery chemistry used in most EV batteries are not really
| optimized for a lot of cycles, and they're somewhat expensive
| to replace, so you're much better off just buying batteries
| that are made for the purpose. You also have fairly limited
| inverter capacity in most EVs, as the inverter installed is
| scaled to run the cars AC and infotainment system, which
| doesn't really need that much.
|
| You also have to deal with either having beefy automatic/manual
| transfer switch or separate isolated circuits to prevent back
| feeding the grid electricity in an outage or during
| maintenance.
|
| There's a lot of people repurposing used Nissan Leaf-batteries
| for what you're describing.
| OvbiousError wrote:
| The numbers in the post are 2.2 and 3.6 kW. Even 2.2kW would
| cover virtually all of my use.
|
| I don't want to buy a battery for the purpose because it
| doesn't make sense economically. If I could get a car with
| this functionality though for a similar price as cars without
| it, that would be a big bonus.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > They are a powerwall on wheels
|
| This feels like it'll be a problem when your car has less
| charge than you need one day because it's been powering the
| house.
| bluGill wrote:
| is this about backup in a power outage or earning money
| buying when pores is cheap and selling when it is more
| expensive? There is a big difference as in an outage you can
| conserve power and watch the meter to goeto a nearby charger
| as needed. In a money scheme you don' know when you are low,
| but it isn't hard to have normal range left but no long trips
| audunw wrote:
| > When then battery age out in 10 years, you swap the vehicle.
|
| For this use-case it'd probably be best to go with LFP so you
| get more lifetime out of the battery.
|
| Though even with Li-ion, I think a modern EV with a big battery
| will last much longer than 10 years. My old Soul EV with a tiny
| 27kWh (thus several charge cycles every month) is soon over 10
| years and has only gone through half of its cycles at most.
|
| And I would expect that the price of battery replacements for a
| car will be reasonable in 10-20 years, so should hopefully not
| be necessary to replace the whole car.
| robocat wrote:
| > powerwall on wheels
|
| Yeah, a portable battery: I've heard of people using an old
| Nissan Leaf to power their off-grid home (for low kWh needs).
|
| Drive to nearest town, charge up, drive home and use car
| battery to power home.
| iSnow wrote:
| Pretty sure this list is missing brands like VW who make cars
| that have V2H. I believe Polestar as well.
| jbellis wrote:
| Also missing Ford Lightning. Weird list.
| gruturo wrote:
| Especially as the Cupra Born (listed) is based on the same
| platform as ID.3 and ID.4 - maybe VW deliberately disabled this
| feature? Or is it just an omission?
| BurnGpuBurn wrote:
| Off topic, those prices omg, how the hell are we going to get to
| zero without 95% of the population just being too poor to own a
| car? No matter how great the tech is, this is one of those rare
| occasions where the price of advanced new tech goes up with time.
| I've been able to buy a new 150 euro laptop for decades now at
| about 10% the price of a decent one. Why isn't this happening
| with electric vehicles?
| lynx23 wrote:
| If I had to guess... Because EVs are still a luxury item. All
| the green-deal-EVs-are-the-future talk is basically hot air. At
| least in my circles, all the EV owners have medium-to-high
| income. Its a luxury. And therefore, prices are high, because,
| you know, customers can and should be squeezed to the max.
| user_7832 wrote:
| The annoying thing is that there's nothing inherent about EVs
| that make them expensive/luxury. A budget EV is just as
| possible as a budget car, sure, the range may suffer (unless
| it's a hybrid) but it's technically possible. It's companies
| and maybe consumer preferences driving this. I'd guess luxury
| EVs just have a fatter margin.
| throw383y8 wrote:
| You can buy EV for a few hundreds dollars (bike), cheapest
| Chinese cars are around $2k, European minis start at 10k EUR.
|
| EVs are actually very cheap as basic city car, but you have to
| leave out extra features like long range, bidicharging,
| heating...
|
| Zero emissions means much smaller car, not some monstrosity
| like 3 tons SUV ls for personal transport.
| pards wrote:
| The prices are in Australian dollars
|
| 1 USD = 1.5 AUD
|
| 1 AUD = 0.67 USD
|
| Converting the price of Nissan Leaf to USD would be about
| $34,163 which is close to the prices listed on the Nissan
| website [0]
|
| [0]: https://www.nissanusa.com/shopping-tools/build-
| price?models=...
| pjc50 wrote:
| Check out the BYD Dolphin.
|
| (the underlying politics seems to be that the existing Western
| manufacturers are lagging deliberately, while the Chinese
| manufacturers are concentrating on delivering working products
| cheaply to consumers)
| infecto wrote:
| Thats not entirely true. In the US at least I believe it has
| more to do with consumer demand. Small cars are not popular.
|
| On the EV front we had the Ford Bolt and the Nissan Leaf,
| neither of which sell very well.
|
| There have also been large supply issues, most of the battery
| refinement is happening in China.
| edent wrote:
| Your cheap laptop doesn't have to go through multiple rounds of
| destructive safety testing. It isn't recalled every time a
| hardware issue is found. It doesn't have to certify much of
| anything other than some basic electric and RF safety.
|
| But, nevertheless, the price of EVs _is_ coming down. You can
| buy a Renault AMI for 10% of the cost of a luxury EV.
|
| The other issue is that most people buy cars on finance.
| PS300/month gets you a decent car. Same as most people pay
| PS50/mo for their iPhone.
| cheschire wrote:
| I feel like I must be missing some obvious thing because I simply
| don't feel the need for a generator. Otherwise, why are whole-
| home generators so wildly popular, including so-called "solar
| generators" that are just batteries with crazy expensive solar
| panels and a convenient plug. And now this EV whole home
| generator concept taking off after the Ford F-150 Lightning made
| it well known.
|
| But I've survived multi-day power outages with nothing more than
| some flashlights, a camping stove and a camping heater. The cost
| of replacing my frozen foods is negligible compared to the cost
| of generators.
|
| What am I missing? Obviously some edge cases like CPAP, O2
| concentrators, and other health things. But I have to imagine
| that is a small portion of the population compared to who's
| buying these things.
| mrkurt wrote:
| 95 degrees, 100% humidity, and hurricane season.
| throw0101d wrote:
| Also:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_storm
| thfuran wrote:
| >But I've survived multi-day power outages with nothing more
| than some flashlights, a camping stove and a camping heater
|
| But why would you want to do that? Would you still want to do
| it that way if it were 0degF or 110degF outside?
| cheschire wrote:
| 0f isn't that hard in a house. Doors compartmentalize the
| place pretty good.
|
| 110f is something I would just drive away from. So the same
| question in return, why would you want to do that?
| maxerickson wrote:
| If you have plenty of resources, they aren't really all that
| expensive.
|
| I don't have one but give it a lot of consideration just
| because it would be the easy way to deal with an extended
| winter outage where I would otherwise have to drain pipes and
| hope for the best.
| semireg wrote:
| We have a wood burning fireplace insert (vs free standing
| stove) and a few days each winter we lose power. The blower on
| the fireplace uses about 100 watts and can help keep the house
| comfortable in sub-zero weather. That's why we have a small
| battery/inverter. We have a "generator switch" near our
| electrical panel that powers just the circuit that the
| fireplace blower is on. In normal mode the circuit is powered
| by mains.
| mbroncano wrote:
| A family with small kids?
| infecto wrote:
| Just because you can does not mean you have or should.
|
| Also just because YOU can, does not mean others can as easily.
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