JRP3 wrote:Some clarification, shallow cycling of an EV battery will not noticeably degrade it's cycle life. V2G grid support for FR and occasional peak leveling would only take a very small amount from any individual pack, so even if the financial compensation were small the impact to your pack would be even smaller.
The makers of the EV cars cite battery degradation as a valid concern. If they are telling me increased cycling of my battery to maintain the grid is not a good idea, I would not be so cavalier about the degradation that can occur to the battery.
The Vehicle-to-grid potential of Honda’s full hybrid vehicles is unexplored, but Honda is doubtful of using them to power homes. "We would not like to see stresses on the battery pack caused by putting it through cycles it wasn’t designed for," said a Honda spokesman. "Instead, they should buy a Honda generator that was made for that purpose."
Why doesn't every electric car do that? "It adds cycles to the battery, which shortens its life," said John Clark, former CEO of V2Green and now a member of Gridpoint's corporate development group.
An Environmental Defense representative stated: "It’s hard to take seriously the promises made for plug-in hybrids with 30 miles (48 km) all-electric range or any serious V2G application any time soon. It’s still in the science project stage."
Also, shallow cycling a V2G system for occasional peak leveling is a far cry from a New Energy Paradigm that the OP was referring to. That would require orders of magnitude more energy storage capacity than that provided by a V2G system used for occasional peak leveling.
JRP3 wrote:On the other hand helping to keep the grid up that you are drawing from is in itself a form of payback. Grids usually collapse because of short term peak loading, V2G supporting those short term loads keeps the grid stable.
I'm sorry but the "take it for the team" argument is just not enough to justify what you are proposing. You are asking me to purchase an expensive electric vehicle, of which the battery is a large component of the price, and then to degrade it's battery life so the "team"(grid) works better. I am not altruistic enough to damage the expensive batteries in my EV so the utility has an easier time with load leveling. I am sure I am not alone in this view. It would probably be cheaper and more efficient for the utility to use a battery specifically scaled and designed for this task anyway.
JRP3 wrote:Regarding that article, you can't compare reserves of lithium to reserves of lead for a few reasons, there is in fact very little lithium in a lithium battery, lithium batteries are obviously lighter so comparing tons of resources is not accurate, and lithium batteries last far longer than lead acid, so the materials used are used more efficiently and at a potentially lower life cycle cost. The charge cycle is also more efficient with lithium, and the usable capacity is greater.
The author chose lead as an example because it is the cheapest, most abundant of the 3 battery technologies mentioned. If he had done the comparison with lithium instead, the figures would be even more outlandish. Besides, lithium is not the greatest fit for grid storage anyway. One of lithium's main strengths is it's incredible power density. But power density is irrelevant for grid storage. Cost is a much more important consideration. You can use a battery the size of a building as long as it was cheap to build and maintain. Still, I would have preferred the article looked at other battery technologies as well such as a vandium flow battery, sodium-sulfur battery, etc. Although I imagine similar challenges would have been encountered when those technologies were scaled up as well.
Thus far, utilities have actually gone a different route: building backup gas fired power plants to operate during power sags from renewable resources. I guess at this point it is actually cheaper to build a fossil fueled power plant than it is to build a battery with enough capacity to store energy to last for long periods of power sags from renewable resources.
The oil barrel is half-full.