The most important metrics are cost and speed of co2 reduction. An 80% renewable grid may achieve that more effectively than nuclear. It may be optimal to burn gas for a couple of weeks per year. Or to build massive pumped storage and nuclear stations.
But trying to hit some purity target of 100% is irrelevant. There are lower hanging fruit for decarbonisation than the last few percent of power generation.
We need a battery that is safe and mandate every home to have one. Or provide incentive for it to be installed. We shouldn't wait for super battery to be install in a central place, instead every home could afford one an provide high quality electrical power.
Surely instead of a giant Water boiler in a lot of homes we could have a giant battery instead.
We probably cannot shop our way out of climate change. The intense climate damage you'd do installing hundreds of millions of batteries (of any kind) would likely offset dozens of years of use.
why would you want to share your EV battery capacity with the grid? I don't understand this. Range is entirely dictated by your EV capacity and you're going to "rent" back the capacity (and battery cycles) for night time hours? I don't understand how this would work at scale.
> why would you want to share your EV battery capacity with the grid?
Because you'd get paid for it, and you like free money.
And it should be pretty trivial to set an option to ensure you always have the necessary range for your daily commute by a little bit before you leave your home.
if services like Uber have shown anything, its that you can sell your vehicle's intrinsic value, depreciating it's value in the process. But will you be net positive after depreciated value?
Obviously almost nobody would do it if it weren't net positive.
And why wouldn't it be? The whole point here is for power companies to avoid buying as many batteries themselves, and their own batteries depreciate too.
This isn't hard -- the power company adjusts the price it pays minute per minute, and you set the threshold at which it is profitable for you, taking battery cycles into account. And it becomes a classic supply and demand curve -- it's Econ 101.
Uber drivers earn roughly $0.70/mile[1]. Gas at $3/gal and MPGs at 25mpg mean it costs $0.12/mi in fuel. a $30k vehicle driven to 150k miles costs roughly $0.20/mi in depreciation. Without additional maintenance costs, its roughly $0.32/mi to drive a car. Approximating tires, oil changes, brakes, and other maintenance of roughly $0.15/mi, you're looking at total cost to drive at $0.45-0.50/mi.
Do you think most Uber drivers drive for the $0.7-$0.12 = $0.58/mile or the actual cost of $0.70-$0.50=$0.20/mile? Sustainable Supply/Demand doesn't work until all costs are measured.
A Rivian battery is roughly $17k. Estimating 1500 charge cycles [2], that's roughly $11/charge. If you "give back" half a cycle, there's only $1.50 worth of electricity sold back, but its $5.50 worth of battery. Are you expecting to get paid $1.50+profit or $7+profit?
Because a battery will become a lot cheaper and replacing it sooner will still have huge benefits for you financially.
I have a 100kWh battery and can drive with this 3 weeks around without charging at all.
Why would i not want to leverage this?
And results from storage systems show that you can charge and discarge car batteries a lot more often without real degeneration when you do this a lot more stable than when driving.
Also it reduces the overall straine to the power grid. If you fill your cars battery with local solar, you are transporting less energy across the whole grid. If you discharge it locally, again less overall energy which needs to be transfered across the whole grid.
How this would work at scale? easy: in my city for example there is one local power company and they offer a charging solution for my EV. They have a few powerplants locally here too. They have everything they need.
Also overall solar energy prediction for the next day is very good. You can easily save a lot of money by leveraging this up front.
Sadly, also for a fraction of the time.
Until storage is solved in a satisfactory way, solar and wind will remain auxiliary. And the capacity should be in gigawatt-days.