Car Science: positive energy
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Hey,
Don't say 'it's past 5pm, you clearly forgot it was Friday again didn't you,' say 'why are you sending this on a bank holiday anyway?'
Well there's some magic rock stuff going on here on dismal fascism island and something to do with gold and jewels but this isn't the news edition, I don't know anything about coronations because the last time this happened I was minus 23 years old and. Hoo, that err. That actually makes me feel quite elderly. Let's never think about that again.
Anyway, because it's Car Science here is a quick (a mere 800 words or so) Friday edition about something you could start a discussion about in the pub with your mates this weekend. If you want your mates to think you're really weird but it's what mine have to put up with.
One of the repeated themes of recent years is: oh whoops, we don't have enough energy. There's load of reasons for that, like 'we trusted an obviously terrorist, oppressive state (pick whichever one you like) to supply us with fossil fuels forever' or 'ah piss who could have foreseen that doing zero maintenance on a power grid would lead to problems?'
Anyway, totally impossible-to-forecast issues aside, there's also the introduction of renewables. Your most tedious right wing relative has probably at some point tried to tell you that the problem with solar panels is that the sun doesn't shine at night and that there's [insert random number here] percentage redundancy on wind farms because it's too still.
The way to balance that is by using energy generated at peak production times when there's peak consumption times, which means storing it somewhere in between. Contrary to your most right-wing relative's assumption, this has actually already been happening in a lot of places for ages.
From redox flow batteries (which work by charging a negative electrolyte and a positive electrolyte and then putting them back together; it's low density but great for storage) or gravity batteries (pumping water up somwhere high with when you have energy spare, then letting it drop to generate hydroelectric power when you need it) there are a bunch of large infrastructural projects that can work very well as storage.
Turns out there are a bunch of large infrastructural projects that are already being done, if we're going to convert to renewable energy production, though so there's a real amount of keenness to find some other way around it. Also to stop your most right-wing relative telling you that if everyone plugged their electric cars in at once they'd have to reset the National Grid.
Enter: the virtual power plant. That, I realise, sounds like a big load of toss or something that involves selling you NFTs but bear with me here because there is actually a real thing involved that, given the low likelihood anyone will actually otherwise invest in projects that could do this, could really work.
Over in the states the big car rivals-to-lovers plotline is between Ford and General Motors. So it might surprise you to find out that they were two of the founding partners of The VP3. Maybe this is the bit where the lovers arc kicks in. The VP3 is a project started by the Rocky Mountain Institute, which is a sustainability research group, to work on using electric vehicle batteries as grid storage.
Electric vehicles can deliver charge (with the right connection) as well as take it from the grid. Which is very convenient if you suddenly need some and there's a bunch of EVs plugged in. That's not a new concept, it's been being trialled by Nissan since 2016 and localised versions have run in France, under Nissan's increasingly estranged sister brand Renault.
Back then charging sucked anyway and you weren't packing many kWh of juice into a Leaf. But now if someone's going to kill a bunch of children with a GMC Hummer EV the least they can do is plug its enormous battery into the DC wall charger when they park it in their megagarage afterwards.
At the same time as all of this is happening the automotive industry is pumping billions and billions into trying to reform itself into a new and cuddly (?) bunch of cool guys who keep bees and make sustainable (??) SUVs (natch, that's a guaranteed) and totally need a whole bunch of government grants for all their good work.
This is mostly working because it turns out making batteries generates a bunch of jobs but we talked about that in a previous newsletter and I need to get this written in time to queue up for free tacos at Brick Brewery.
So let's cut to chase and a research paper that, unlike 99% of the things I link here, is actually written in language that even someone as stupid as me can understand without a chemical dictionary on hand. It even very much explains what it does in the title: Electric vehicle batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand by as early as 2030
I'll be honest it makes a break from googling CdSe-MoS2 and then trying to teach myself what a quantum semiconductor interface is and then lying down for 20 minutes. Anyway, that's next week.
What's interesting about this 2022 paper is that not only does it look at potential capacity in EVs but also second-life batteries from former EVs because once you've crashed your GMC Hummer EV pickup through someone's house or whatever the least it can do is some goddamned work.
It's also assuming a low participation rate. By it's projection there could be at least 32tWh storage by 2050 with only 12% of potential EV owners joining in. The upper end of its projections show potentially 62tWh which is such a vast amount of energy it could nearly power half of BitCoin for a year. Or Norway. Which happens to have quite a lot of EVs so this could probably be very relevant to them.
One way to offset depreciation on EVs would be if there was an incentive for drivers to trade their older batteries in for second-life usage, which there's been various theoretical trials of and Audi does seemingly quite a lot of thinking about but is still all in its early stages. Because most EVs are still using their batteries.
(it'd be interesting to find out what happened to all the Chevy Bolt ones that had to be replaced, someone like a journalist should ask GM - oh, damn)
Measuring theoretical capacity of future EV grid storage is difficult because we don't really know how people are going to behave about it. Which this study goes some way to trying to work out and also pays attention to the type of batteries that people might have in their cars. It's a good study and totally readable, which I actually recommend if you find yourself hanging around on the sofa or whatever.
Where it falls down is an assumption that lithium-ion will continue to be the dominant chemistry (in fact, the only chemistry) through to 2050. I don't blame the authors for this because honestly, they had to pick something and you can't model batteries that don't really exist yet.
But the hopeful note to end on is that it may well be hugely underestimating the potential life cycle of batteries, in cars and as second life. Assuming the batteries of 2030 would behave like the ones we had in 2020 isn't a problem (again, you have to use a dataset that exists) but does mean that the projections are probably a worst case scenario compared to technology we'll have in the next 5-10 years.
What's that? A positive end to Car Science? Don't get used to it. But let's take this one as a sign there might still be free tacos when I get to Brick.
Hazel
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Images:
The battery from an AMG hybrid powertrain; it's based on the Mercedes F1 one (prior to 2022 at least) - those are liquid cooled cylindrical cells. Tbh I just felt like I should add an image.