The back of the envelope math is beautiful here. EV production is really ramping up now. Tesla expects to put out around 2 million cars per year by the end of the year. If we round the kwh of their batteries down a little to 50kwh, we get some nice round number to work with. 2 million cars is 2 x1000 x 1000 times 50 kwh is 100 gwh. So Tesla alone is adding 100gwh of battery per year (well a bit more but you get my point). Other manufacturers are also producing cars. and we'll soon hit 20 million EVS per year. Or about 1 twh / year of battery production.
Those batteries have long lives in the car and then typically a second life in storage solutions. Some cars now come with vehicle to grid technology and when they are plugged in, they could be used to provide power to the home, or the grid.
So we have a fleet of car batteries that is currently growing by the hundreds of gwh per year and soon twh per year that can be plugged into the grid. Even just using a tiny amount of that represents an enormous amount of power.
That's a huge buffer to dump excess power in during the day (from e.g. solar panels) and withdraw from during peak hours. The current Tesla virtual power plant is tiny in comparison. If you then consider that batteries have a fixed number of cycle times (around 1500 or so), you basically get to pwh scale in terms of amounts of energy that flow through that buffer every year. A lot of that power is cheap renewable power. Just with car batteries. Other storage solutions are available. The world currently produces a bit over 25 pwh per year currently.
I've been wondering why Tesla doesn't just do this. IIRC from the public Model 3 and Y teardowns, the cars already have the hardware to do this, so it's just a question of a software update and policy. Would love to know why it isn't in production yet; it seems like a no-brainer so there must be something impeding it.
I don't think they have the hardware to do it. And I think the house themselves would also need extra hardware and integration, and its also different from state to state and country to country as far as I understand. But I don't know the details.
If Tesla rolls this out, it's probably a program that they want to spearhead and manage, and my guess is that this is an absolute monolith of a problem to tackle and requires participation from notoriously super shitty power companies.
Those batteries have long lives in the car and then typically a second life in storage solutions. Some cars now come with vehicle to grid technology and when they are plugged in, they could be used to provide power to the home, or the grid.
So we have a fleet of car batteries that is currently growing by the hundreds of gwh per year and soon twh per year that can be plugged into the grid. Even just using a tiny amount of that represents an enormous amount of power.
That's a huge buffer to dump excess power in during the day (from e.g. solar panels) and withdraw from during peak hours. The current Tesla virtual power plant is tiny in comparison. If you then consider that batteries have a fixed number of cycle times (around 1500 or so), you basically get to pwh scale in terms of amounts of energy that flow through that buffer every year. A lot of that power is cheap renewable power. Just with car batteries. Other storage solutions are available. The world currently produces a bit over 25 pwh per year currently.