Back in 2011 when the very first brave pioneers took delivery of the newly launched Nissan Leaf
and attempted to explain to their friends and neighbours why there was nowhere on the vehicle
where they could insert the nozzle of a petrol diesel pump the average cost of the batteries
that provided the alternative automotive propulsion for those vehicles was just over
a thousand dollars per kilowatt hour. That meant that roughly two-thirds of the cost of the entire
vehicle was taken up by the battery pack that was bolted to its chassis. Fast forward to today
and despite a 2022 price blip caused by supply chain issues with lithium, nickel and cobalt,
the average cost of EV batteries in 2023 is 138 dollars per kilowatt hour.
That means that even though modern battery packs are often more than twice the size of
that original Nissan, prices for new electric vehicles are getting very close to parity with
their internal combustion engine counterparts. And the rapid adoption of lithium-ion phosphate
batteries that don't contain any nickel or cobalt, and other promising chemistries like sodium-ion,
sodium-sulphur and lithium-air, many of which we've featured on this channel,
will most likely keep that cost curve moving in a generally downward direction for some time yet.
So according to many market analysts we really are now at the tipping point of mass adoption
for this historically disruptive technology, just as was predicted more than 10 years ago by
visionaries like Tony Seba in the U.S and our very own Robert Llewellyn here in the UK. And
that opens up a whole new set of challenges and opportunities, not least of which is how to make
best use of millions of powerful battery packs that statistically speaking will spend 90 percent
of their existence sitting doing nothing at all at the side of the road or in driveways and garages.
So, should these otherwise underutilised sources of energy be hooked up to our national electricity
networks to provide some much needed extra demand response as consumption continues to rise in the
coming years, or is that just a cunning plan to get electric vehicle owners to subsidize grid
stability costs at the expense of the operational lifetime of their own cars battery pack?
Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think. According to the United States Environmental Protection
Agency or EPA the average American household consumes 29 kilowatt hours of electricity per day,
which by the way is almost three times the average consumption here in the UK,
but anyway the point is a typical modern electric vehicle battery pack now has a
capacity of more than 40 kilowatt hours which means there are enough electrons
in there to run even an American household for almost a day and a half. In fact the recently
launched Ford F-150 Lightning which has a base model with a battery pack size of 98
kilowatt hours boasts the ability to fully run your home for up to three days if necessary,
which is a feature that makes it an attractive proposition to anyone who's had to endure an
extended power cut like the one that closed down much of Texas during the winter of 2021.
And with future electricity grids incorporating an ever greater proportion of intermittent renewables
like wind and solar it's not difficult to see why grid operators are viewing the advent of electric
vehicles as an opportunity to smooth out the peaks and troughs of supply and demand by using
available electrons from EV batteries when demand is high and then sending electrons back into those
batteries during off-peak hours or when supply from wind and solar is higher than required.
Quite how effective that strategy might be has been the topic of hot debate for some time but
in January 2023 a new research paper was published that analysed the issue in almost forensic detail.
The study looked at the world's largest EV regions - China, India the US and Europe,
with a fifth category accounting for everywhere else. Combining their own research with data
from previously published analysis by major organizations including the International Energy
Agency, the International Renewable Energy Agency, the U.S Department of Energy and the U.S National
Renewable Energy Laboratory, the research team produced a bang-up-to-date assessment,
not just of vehicle to grid opportunities, but also the potential for what's known as end-of-life
repurposing of vehicle batteries into stationary utility scale energy storage. That's an important
consideration because even if a battery's capacity drops to maybe 80 percent or so after a couple of
hundred thousand miles of driving and is therefore no longer quite good enough to propel a car with
the same vigour as a new battery, it's still perfectly viable for many more years as an
energy storage medium in a situation where all it has to do is provide electrons for grid stability.
Given their economic value, their physical size and weight, and regulations around end of life
use, it's fairly reasonable to assume that all these batteries will be collected rather than
being crushed along with the rest of the vehicle. After all the lead acid batteries using cars today
have an almost 100% collection rate and EV batteries are a far more valuable commodity,
so they'll be collected and given a health check. Any battery below 70% of its original capacity
will be recycled, and all the others will be allocated for second life use. The authors of this
paper reckon about three quarters of all retired batteries could be repurposed in this way by 2050.
Overall the research team found that based on the range of market growth forecasts EV
batteries will have what they describe as a Global Technical Capacity, which they define as the total
cumulative available EV battery capacity in use in vehicles, and in second life use,
at any given time of somewhere between 32 and 62 terawatt hours by the time we reach mid-century,
which for context is almost twice the total annual electricity consumption of Denmark!
And even if only 50% of all retired EV batteries were repurposed into electricity storage
facilities then the papers authors found that the participation rate vehicle to grid electron
sharing could be less than 10 percent while still providing all the necessary short-term
grid storage as early as the end of this decade. But what about the thorny question I posed right
at the start of the video? Does the constant back and forth of electrons between your EV and the
grid mean your car's battery pack is going to get degraded much more quickly causing you to have to
either replace the pack or change your vehicle more often than you would otherwise have to?
Well that was indeed specifically one of the models that the research team included in
the paper. The resultant flowchart is a classic example of what happens when very clever people
quite rightly include every possible variable and metric into their calculations to ensure
they arrive at the most accurate outcome. That's great from a technical point of view but it's not
so good from the point of view of presenting it all to normal folks like you and me! It'd probably
take an entire separate video to properly analyse all the calculations involved in this thing, but
as a brief overview it takes into account crucial factors like state of charge, depth of discharge,
speed of charging, average country temperature, and life cycle degradation among others. If you're
a fan of things like square roots and calculus then I've linked the full paper in the description
section below so, you know... fill your boots! The long and short of it is that according to
the findings of this particular research paper just five percent of the theoretical available
battery capacity is likely to be lost as a result of battery degradation by 2050. Now it's worth
noting here that the way we interact with electric vehicles may well change in the future as well.
The current obsession with longer range and faster charging times is arguably a delusional mindset
based on an internal combustion engine refueling model that's been ingrained in our collective
psyche for nearly 150 years. You're actually much more likely to degrade your EV battery quickly
if you constantly use modern ultra fast charges at motorway charging stations than you would be
by slowly charging overnight at home or via an on-street charger, even if your car is sharing
electrons with the grid all night long. As EVs become a mainstream commodity and charging points
become ubiquitous in the coming years consumers will most likely get used to this dynamic and
become far more relaxed about charging their cars just like we all had to learn how to charge our
smartphones in a more rational way when they exploded onto the scene more than a decade ago.
Okay then, so what about the electricity grids themselves? We've all no doubt heard the horror
stories about the constant blackouts that we're all going to be suffering as a result
of millions of new electric vehicles, so will we really be risking the wholesale meltdown of
our grids and societal chaos that some of our tabloid news outlets are suggesting?
Well, while that's not specifically addressed within the scope of this research paper,
it is a calculation that was fairly carefully considered by graduate mechanical engineer Jason
Fenske over at his Engineering Explained Channel back in 2021. I've linked that video in the
description section below, but as a very brief summary Jason pointed out that the capacity of
America's various electricity grids quietly grew by an average of four percent per year
during the 40 years between 1960 and the turn of this Century, largely to accommodate the
enormous number of new air conditioning units and all sorts of other electrical devices that
American consumers now take for granted as part of their everyday lives. Jason showed
that if that fairly modest average annual capacity increase continued from today onwards then it'll
only take about six and a half years for there to be enough extra capacity on the US grid to enable
every single one of America's 230 million licensed drivers to switch over to an electric vehicle.
There's no doubt though that properly harnessing the potential of vehicle-to-grid energy sharing
will have critical implications for the energy transition and that means our policy makers
will need to fully understand the risks and opportunities so that they don't make epically
stupid decisions that mess the whole thing up! There will need to be attractive incentives in
place like decent micropayments for services to the grid and we'll probably need some regulations
in place to make sure the relevant hardware and software solutions like smart charge
controllers can be seamlessly integrated so that consumers get as much benefit as possible from
cheap off-peak supply, and other regulations will be required to ensure that batteries are
genuinely recovered at the end of their automotive lifetimes and easily integrated into the grid.
There's been a lot to cope with over the last few years, what with pandemics, fuel crises and
illegal invasions, so it's not hard to see how the energy transition might have passed many of us by,
but make no mistake dear friends, we are right in the thick of it. Right now! And the technological
revolution that's about to touch all our lives will be very similar to the one we experienced
shortly after Steve Jobs held up an iPhone for the very first time back in 2007. No doubt you've got
your views on this one and I'm very interested to hear what those views are so I'll be down in the
comments section below here for a while now to see what you think. That's it for this week though.
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As always, thanks very much for watching, have a great week and remember
to just have a think. See you next week.