The Death of King Coal

[scotia]

The problem with pumped storage is where would you put it in the UK.
Regards,

It would have to be a mountainous country with large Lakes or Lochs - Wales or Scotland. Wales is nearest the load, Scotland has the higher mountains and larger lochs - but there are significant transmission costs. I suspect the go-ahead by SSE to build the Great Glen scheme (Coire Glas) will be dependent on some alleviation in the existing transmission charging regime for pumped storage.

[Alaric]

If one uses BEV then one has a distributed electrical system paid for by the buyers of the vehicles. If you have 1 million BEV each providing 1 kWh then you have a 1 GWh facility for very little additional capital cost. If, as I believe is extremely likely, BEV become the predominant vehicles used in the UK, the numbers become large, so that e.g. with 10 million BEV the same 1 kWh per vehicle becomes a 10 GWh distributed power station.

How would that work in practice though? Would it be passive in that at times of power shortage, BEVs would not be charged? Would it be active that the power stored in BEVs would be stripped to supply needs elsewhere. Neither option is very good for the user of a BEV wishing or needing to make a long journey.

We've seen with petrol and diesel powered vehicles that when confidence in the ability to refill disappears, that users attempt to keep their vehicles fully fuelled, so there's a spike in demand, leading to shortages.

[odysseus2000]

If one uses BEV then one has a distributed electrical system paid for by the buyers of the vehicles. If you have 1 million BEV each providing 1 kWh then you have a 1 GWh facility for very little additional capital cost. If, as I believe is extremely likely, BEV become the predominant vehicles used in the UK, the numbers become large, so that e.g. with 10 million BEV the same 1 kWh per vehicle becomes a 10 GWh distributed power station.

How would that work in practice though? Would it be passive in that at times of power shortage, BEVs would not be charged? Would it be active that the power stored in BEVs would be stripped to supply needs elsewhere. Neither option is very good for the user of a BEV wishing or needing to make a long journey.

We've seen with petrol and diesel powered vehicles that when confidence in the ability to refill disappears, that users attempt to keep their vehicles fully fuelled, so there's a spike in demand, leading to shortages.

I think it would have to be some kind of optional system, where BEV owners who would be happy to see 1 kWh or more taken from their car as needed getting some kind of carrot payment for the energy the car supplies, whereas someone who needs every Watt of power for a journey could opt out. For much of the day most cars are parked doing nothing, so if connected to a grid there would not be much hardship in selling a few kWh at say mid day in summer for A/C demand or similarly in winter for heating demand at night as needed and depending on what the renewables were supplying etc. Given the advances in the internet and switching technology this all seems currently practical.

For it to work it would have to be simple and near invisible to the BEV owner, sort of like the over night operating system upgrades to my iPhone, MacBook are now like.

If robotic driving takes off, that would change the picture as many more cars would be earning when now they are just depreciating on the driveway, car park etc and one would likely need more power walls or similar storage to provide renewable backup etc and probably much larger GW scale battery or pumped storage. Musk estimated that all of China could be powered by solar and that the space for storage would be much smaller than the area taken by the solar panels and a similar calculation was done for the US showing an almost negligible land area used in Texas if everything was place at one spot. Something like 100x100 miles for the solar and 1x1 miles for storage for batteries:

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/01/al ... lar-alone/

Somewhere on the Musk endeavours board the calculation was checked and seemed fine.

Regards,

[dspp]

If one uses BEV then one has a distributed electrical system paid for by the buyers of the vehicles. If you have 1 million BEV each providing 1 kWh then you have a 1 GWh facility for very little additional capital cost. If, as I believe is extremely likely, BEV become the predominant vehicles used in the UK, the numbers become large, so that e.g. with 10 million BEV the same 1 kWh per vehicle becomes a 10 GWh distributed power station.

How would that work in practice though? Would it be passive in that at times of power shortage, BEVs would not be charged? Would it be active that the power stored in BEVs would be stripped to supply needs elsewhere. Neither option is very good for the user of a BEV wishing or needing to make a long journey.

We've seen with petrol and diesel powered vehicles that when confidence in the ability to refill disappears, that users attempt to keep their vehicles fully fuelled, so there's a spike in demand, leading to shortages.

Alaric,
This software & hardware functionality already exists and is in use and/or beta testing. Typically in the domestic scale fixed storage one can reserve a 'bottom' chunk of the battery for powercuts only (i.e. never sell, only access in a powercut for self-consumption); one can reserve a 'top' chunk for trading (sell whenever profitable, sliding curves); and the middle chunk is for normal self-consumption. Other chunks can be allocated for other purposes. It is up to the householder to set the fractions etc. This is not just Tesla, you can get similar from LG Chem etc. One of my younger engineers is now full time on this sort of thing, as she puts it "if nothing else I'll be good at agent code in python". There are far more sophisticated algos in commercial products. The Tesla Virtual Powerplant goes to the logical next step of using the commercial algos to glom together the domestic ones (https://arena.gov.au/assets/2020/03/aem ... port-1.pdf) . The next step, already in beta but which has been the industry holy grail for decades is to go bi-directional using a fraction of the car battery in the same way (https://electrek.co/2020/05/19/tesla-bi ... -features/). Everybody is at it, not just Tesla, or if they are not they will become roadkill.
regards,
dspp

[dspp]

Sorry, should have included some links for the Tesla VPP software

https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/support/autobidder

https://electrek.co/2020/05/03/tesla-au ... c-utility/

Other brands are available.

regards, dspp