The US government hasn’t even figured out how to regulate cryptocurrency nor otherwise lead the conversation on any particular technological standardization. They just let the companies make it up as they go and, it seems, hope to scare them into mildly better than atrocious behavior by threat of being forced to answer silly question in open session once every few years.
The EU is doing some reasonable work along those lines - e.g., mandating USB-C for phones.
But, in the US at least, I’m not seeing any likelihood that we’ll figure out how to go from a system like Powerwall where you buy one for yourself and enable it just for yourself, to a standardized system that’s consistent across car manufacturers and implemented into all vehicles, anytime in the next few decades, without a significant change to the ability of our politicians to do real, learned and rational, uninfluenced decision making. The best hope would be that the EU does it and we’re able to piggy-back.
Policy recommendations are not mandates, if someone can do it better then that is welcome news.
IMHO the current position of many conservatives is leading to what in their eyes will be worse solutions, when in reality they will be solutions that will be deployed at a higher cost thanks to the delays that they thought were a good idea or economical.
Yeah, that’s a possibility that’s being talked about - using car batteries to smooth out supply and provide load-following.
It’s the dryer that kills you. A Tesla Powerwall is about 14 kWh. Depending on the dryer, you’re looking at 2-5 kWh for a load of laundry.
The Powerwall is really designed to be a load-shifter, so during the day when there is cheap power you can use your own solar to charge the powerwall while running your hoise off the grid. Then at night when power is expensive you can take your home off the grid and power it with the Powerwall when rates are high.
The average family uses about 15-30 kWh per day. The Powerwall is sized to give you an evening’s worth of power, or a day or so of backup power. For larger homes, two Powerwalls may be installed.
On the other hand you can donthe same thing with an EV, which has a much larger battery. A tesla battery is around 87 kWh, while a Ford F-150 Lightning has either 113 kWh or 133 kWh. With a pro power charger and a transfer switch, a Lightning essentially becomes equivalent to almost 10 Powerwalls. It can run your home for days.
Again though, scale is the issue. Only about 3% of passenger cars sold last year were EVs, and at that we are almost maxxed out in production capacity. Currently it is almost imposdible to find a new EV, and the most popular ones are now on 2-3 year waiting lists.
If anyone is wondering why storage is often referred to by power rather than energy, it’s because lithium ion battery grid storage is used primarily for short-duration services such as daily arbitrage, firm capacity, frequency response, power regulation, etc. 4 hours has been the number I see tossed around for the max duration where lithium ion batteries make sense, but I don’t have math supporting it (or a recent analysis.)
The longer the duration, the more solutions like chemical storage make sense, despite their poor round trip efficiency. More so if you need to move the energy.
Definitions here are fuzzy. You’ll see “long duration” slapped on >4h and 10 h. Sometimes “diurnal” and “seasonal” for 10h and >100h, respectively.