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greendwarf

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In today's Metro - a free daily newspaper for our foreign readers:-

"Nissan Leaf to supply energy to national grid

Owners of the Nissan Leaf electric car will be able to sell energy stored in their cars' batteries back to the National Grid. From October, using Nissan's new XStorage system, Leaf owners could earn up to £600 per year. A fully charged Leaf could power an average home for two days."

You won't be able to get into IKEA for the long line of Nissans stocking up for free and then driving home to upload it back to the Grid. :lol: Perhaps it's just a late April Fool?
 
Nope - it is about balancing the grid. The idea is to enable feeding surplus electricity back into the system at times of high load, low sustainable production and high price after charging the vehicles at times of low load, high sustainable production and low price.
There is a pilot running in a cooperation between The New Motion and Essent.
Studies show that as the number of electric vehicles grows it will be a quite effective contribution to sustainable energy.

There is nothing new about the idea. A company like the main Shell refinery next to my practice can either produce quite a bit of electricity or, when starting up a series of 100 KW compressors, pull a considerable load. So they will adjust their production schedule against predicted load by other heavy industry in the country, predicted domestic load, power production planning and wind predictions, etc.
Sometimes it does go wrong. Last week a power surge tripped all my surge protectors, and yet killed off a computer screen, a mouse, an expensive keyboard, a laptop and a couple of network switches and hubs. :evil:


Don't forget that the UK is one of the very few countries where free charging is widespread. And it won't last.
 
Nope still bonkers. You charge up your Nissan overnight and leave it plugged in to drain during the day when you might want to use the car? The only time I can see this working is when you are away from home, say on holiday, or you only use the car weekends.

I can't believe this is cheaper than pushing water uphill :mrgreen:
 
No - it does not work that way. You charge up at times that electricity is cheap (not necessarily at night, depending on grid load and power generating) and you can choose whether to feed some electricity back or not depending on your intended use and on the price differential of the moment. Charge cheaply, sell expensively. With one car it is totally marginal, with a large number of cars it would make a huge difference in load distribution.
Your example of away at holiday or weekend use is a good one. It is efficient enough for large companies to invest in pilots. It is most interesting for countries like Germany, which can produce over 100% of the needed energy by wind and solar alone at certain times,making storage an acute problem and this scheme will be one of the viable ones, increasingly so as the number of electric vehicles mounts.
 
One thing they never seem to mention in these discussions is the cost of the additional wear and tear on the batteries, they have a finite number of charge-discharge cycles in their life, so extra cycles to earn a little bit of cash is costing you in other ways. no free lunch.
 
Hmmm.. given the number of people that use ChaDeMo chargers it appears that virtually nobody gives that any thought. The number of cycles that Mitsubishi's batteries can sustain is unknown anyway. It is sure to be far more than your cellphone.
 
If you haven't come across it before, I would recommend reading Dave MacKay's 'Sustainable Energy without the hot air'. It's available free online.

http://www.withouthotair.com/

Although several years old now, it's worth looking at if you're interested in where our energy might come from in the future. He is quite perceptive on this subject (i.e. using EV batteries as storage to cope with the problem of the 'intermittency' of renewables...)
 
Here in beautiful, sunny South Australia (where we have lots of wind power and solar PV) the electricity distributer (not the retailers) is offering to subsidise home solar/home battery power systems to defer a three million dollar network upgrade.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-19/subsidised-power-storage-batteries-in-adelaide-trial/7426634

There are already a few homes with home battery storage, who sell to the grid when the prices are high (all handled by software in the battery management system).

I expect to buy more panels and buy batteries in the near future (say next five years) too...

So, no, no lunacy about it.

Andy
 
AndyInOz said:
Here in beautiful, sunny South Australia (where we have lots of wind power and solar PV) the electricity distributer (not the retailers) is offering to subsidise home solar/home battery power systems to defer a three million dollar network upgrade.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-19/subsidised-power-storage-batteries-in-adelaide-trial/7426634

There are already a few homes with home battery storage, who sell to the grid when the prices are high (all handled by software in the battery management system).

I expect to buy more panels and buy batteries in the near future (say next five years) too...

So, no, no lunacy about it.

Andy
Click to expand...

No doubt, but this is a battery on wheels scheme in the UK - so comparisons with well organised Germans or Down Under are irrelevant.
 
Well, you guys will have to catch up with the rest of world at one point, especially if you want to go solo. :lol: :twisted:
 
Adelaide is closer to the equator than any point in Europe, so photovoltaic makes good sense there - the insolation is greater and peak sun coincides with peak domestic demand (for aircon), similar to Texas and Southern California. Here in Northern Europe photovoltaic serves only two purposes - virtue signalling and government subsidy mining.
 
Not true. The efficiency of photovoltaic cells has increased to the point that they are quite effective in our latitudes, also because we have more daylight hours.

https://www.uswitch.com/solar-panels/guides/solar-panel-myths/
 
We have more daylight hours in summer, when we don't need the electricity for heating or lighting. When we do need it it ain't there. PV has its place, and that place is in a big array in the Sahara, not on a roof in Leeds.

You do realise that web site is from people who want to sell you a solar panel?
 
ChrisMiller said:
We have more daylight hours in summer, when we don't need the electricity for heating or lighting. When we do need it it ain't there. PV has its place, and that place is in a big array in the Sahara, not on a roof in Leeds.

You do realise that web site is from people who want to sell you a solar panel?
Click to expand...

Er, I charge my car + do my washing / drying / dishwasher / run my home office and heat my hot water with my solar system.

Future plans are another 6kW of panels and a home battery.

I live in Hampshire, England, Europe, you know the cloudy place :lol:
 
ChrisMiller said:
We have more daylight hours in summer, when we don't need the electricity for heating or lighting. When we do need it it ain't there. PV has its place, and that place is in a big array in the Sahara, not on a roof in Leeds.

You do realise that web site is from people who want to sell you a solar panel?
Click to expand...
Do you realize I have solar panels since 15 years that have earned their unsubsidized cost many times over by now? And that Germany has many hectares of commercially run solar farms, far more than the Sahara, where you would run into transport problems?? And that this whole thing is exactly about storage and grid balancing, which is far more about industrial use than about domestic load?
 
In my first 12 months of solar panel ownership they generated 4 MWh and reduced my household use by around 900 KWh. I too utilised them when possible for washing, cooking, ironing and now for charging my PHEV. Wherever they are installed, whether it is the Sahara desert or Leeds, they are not THE answer, they should be part of an integrated power supply and management system which includes the option of using battery powered vehicles to supplement the grid during peak demand periods.
 
Easy way to find out who's right - remove all government subsidies. My guess is that no PV installation would ever take place outside +/- 45 degrees of the equator, since it makes no economic or environmental sense. Of course, too many people are making too much money from subsidies for this ever to happen.
 
"Orville - nobody but a lunatic will ever get into one of these machines"...
Sorry mate, you are limping a decade behind technology. Subsidies over here are marginal - and there is hardly a house without solar panels. Solar panels don't need sun to generate electricity, although obviously output will increase with intensity, but, a I pointed out, also with time.
There are Europe's largest three off-shore wind turbine parks to be built over the next few years - companies are scrambling to get on board.
 

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