Elecgric Vehicles - F250 Lightning - Event Date: 16 Mar 2022

In one sense the additional load on the grid from folks who have both EVs and solar might be thought of as zero but since renewables deployed to charge electric cars are not available to reduce existing grid fossil fuel use it is fair to ask whether that makes sense or not.

There are three reasons it does. First is because EVs are cleaner than ICEs even when operated on dirty grids.

The second is a bit more complicated. Our most common system for reimbursing residential and commercial (retail side) solar producers for the energy they are exporting to the grid limits them to produce no more energy than they consume. This is called net metering and has it's pros and cons compared to systems other countries have adopted. One con is that folks who might otherwise have the space and resources to install a larger system can't economically do so because they wont be compensated for excess production. By adding EVs to their load they can expand their system size significantly, which is a good thing for everyone.

The third is the soon to be available bidirectional charging feature allowing EVs to act as grid storage.

My 2010 Prius still has the original battery ands its shown no noticable signs of degradation. Hybrids have tiny batteries which charge and discharge constantly, so get far more cycles than an EV does. In reality we can expect EV batteries to last the life of the vehicle, after which they have a second life in stationary applications which aren't weight limited so don't need the batteries to have really high capacity. There is already an active market for batteries salvaged from wrecked Teslas. At one point I was considering buying some for my rpod.   

Dispatchable aggregated
energy storage is already being tested in several electricity markets. It currently uses home and commercial storage systems like Tesla's Powerwall systems, but the considerations are very similar to EVs. There are also large aggregated demand response programs in place in many areas, typically involving curtailment of air conditioning loads during preak periods. These programs have very similar considerations as well. In all cases the homeowner is compensated for making their power or demand reduction available to the grid operators and gets to establish limits on their access. In the case of home energy storage or EVs, a phone app or equivalent would be used to set these limits and you could change those limits based on your requirements, like say normally limiting grid discharge to say 50% or zero if you were leaving on a long trip.

Ford is marketing their system as off grid now with an export grid tie upgrade in future. There are several bidirectional grid tie inverters on the market now for home energy storage/solar systems, so it's not much of a step once the vehicle interface is capable. I'd guess there will be DIY grid tied systems operating within a few months of release of Fords basic package, if not available out of the gate via SunRun.

Ford's partner is SunRun, the largest solar installer in the US. Both SunRun and Tesla have business divisions dedicated to developing this. It will be a big market opportunity for them in future, so they are all over it.   

Stacked concrete storage works exactly like pumped hydro, except a motor/generator is used for the lift rather than a pump/turbine. Any heavy mass moved up and down a big height will work. We'll see which ones are economically successful.

Im pro nuke, just being realistic. The 60-80 months is construction/comissioning only and that's in France which is the most favorable country for nukes. It's planning/approvals that stretch things out to multiple decades, because nothing creates more NIMBY than nuclear power. The public is afraid of it, simple as that. Wishing that were different won't make it so. Investors know that and are unwilling to throw money at something that may never give them a return, and even if it did would take a very long time. Time is money.

In contrast solar can go in in a few months and there are few NIMBY complaints, if any.   Wind is in the middle but closer to solar.

No one understands how long it takes to make changes in our energy system than I do. It's been closing in on 50 years for me working in solar. It was a similar period to transition from water to coal and from coal to oil. But renewables are there now, so it's time to move forward.

Nickel and cobalt are both issues with the current generation of lithium batteries, but there are several different chemistries being tried to reduce or eliminate them.

You are missing they key point about batteries and EVs when you focus on those "breakthrough" announcement articles.

Batteries appear to be following Wrights law, as has photovoltaics and many many other products. That law, first postulated in the 1920s for aicraft, would tell us that the cost of batteries should decline by a fixed amount for every doubling of production. As the volume of EV and battery production is about to go through the roof, and we are getting near price parity now, the crossover point where EVs become cheaper than ICEs is highly likely to occur within the next couple of years. From there they will continue to drop as production volume increases.

ICEs have long since reached a plateau in production volume so their cost has nowhere to go but up. This is why the auto manufacturers are all switching over. If they don't they will die.

Where do these cost improvements come from? All kinds of small incremental things associated with increased economies of scale, production experience, and engineering tweaks.

Take PV for instance. If someone with a time machine had brought me back a current generation solar module to show my 1980 self I would have been very impressed but I also would have recognized it instantly. The cells in it are the same basic technology and made from the same materials, interconnected the same way, with the same kind of glass/polymer/aluminum frame encapsulation system as what we were making in 1980. Not one gee whiz "breakthrough" in there, even though there have been zillions of solar "breakthrough" announcements over the past 40 years.

But all the little improvements plus high volume automated manufacturing make the current product twice as efficient and about 100 times cheaper than it was in 1980 in inflation adjusted dollars. It's much more environmentally friendly to make as well.

My point is, don't be distracted by all the press about this or that "breakthrough" in battery technology. That's 99% fluff from startups trying to increase their valuations or researchers trying to get continued funding. Look instead for incremental improvements year by year in the stuff actually being made.

I know it's not sexy but that's how the real world of production engineering and manufacturing works. Just lots of hard work day in and day out by lots of engineers and production workers to get little bitty improvements.

Something America doesn't seem to want to do anymore. Everyone is more interested in the big breakthrough that gets you rich quick, so we ship our technology overseas and let the Chinese and others do the hard work so they wind up dominant in one key industry after another.

Currently China is at about 80% of total global production of solar, ditto for Li batteries. About 2/3 of all lcd display screens, and
the largest wind turbine producer. Can you think of any 4 more important technologies to dominate in the 21st century than those? I can't.

Sorry, end of rant.

If you have partial shade, it's also good to isolate panels such that they don't fight each other when some of them are shaded.