My last video about vehicle-to-grid got a lot of negative response so I'm going to
give you a start with JB Straubel: "If we want to actually send energy back
from the car to the electricity grid this gets much more complex. That's
something that I don't see being a very economic or viable solution. Perhaps
ever but certainly not in the near term. Later on in this video
I'm going to break down all of what Straubel had to say at that forum regarding
batteries. Including vehicle-to-grid and using vehicle batteries after the
vehicle life is over for grid storage. He talked about a few other things I'm
going to cover that towards the end of this video. In my first video I compared
vehicle to grid to Robotaxi and I got a lot of objections that - Well, we don't
know when Robotaxi will be live. So I'm mostly going to leave Robotaxi out of this
I'm going to show a bunch of other reasons why vehicle to grid doesn't work. And I'm
going to address some of the other criticisms that were made. Another thing
I saw in the comments is a lot of people seem to think it won't cost very
much to use your Tesla vehicle as a Powerwall and plug into the grid. This
is grossly underestimating how much that cost would be. So Rani for example
said it should be under $1000. Way off! Sure you can find a study that assumes
that the cost of the wiring upgrades would be $650 to $1500 but that doesn't
mean that's the real price. A couple sources indicate the cost would be in
the ballpark of $5,000. And guess what - that's in line with if you go to the
Tesla website and you shop for a Powerwall One Powerwall is $11,000
and it goes up $6000 for each Powerwall you add.
What that means is the installation cost is $5000 to have Tesla
put one or more Powerwalls in your house. $5000 - That's the
same number. And that $5000 cost is just connecting to your
house. That doesn't include whatever else might
be necessary to connect to the grid. And another thing - People just don't get that
the revenue from vehicle to grid is far too low to be worth the effort.
In most situations most energy generators get paid between $30 and $40
a megawatt hour for electricity, which works out to 3-4 cents
a kilowatt-hour. Even if you manage to get 10 cents a kilowatt-hour
for that energy, it wouldn't be enough to justify doing vehicle-to-grid. Something
no one talks about is how fast would your vehicle send power up to the grid.
At best you're probably talking about 2 or 3 kilowatts per hour. My best
guess is 2 kilowatts per hour. That's just not a lot of energy going up. You're
just not getting a lot for your time of your vehicle stuck on the grid. If you
did manage to get 10 cents a kilowatt hour that would still only work out to
20 cents an hour. More likely you're talking about 3 cents a kilowatt
hour which works out to 6 cents an hour. It just doesn't make sense. You can
compare that number to driving. And you can take it out of the Robotaxi world
where I figure Robotaxis are worth $1 per mile.
The IRS reimbursement rate is close to 60 cents a mile. Even if you worked out
50 cents a mile and you average 20 miles an hour in your car you're getting $10/hour
for your time not 20 cents/hour. You can also think about it in
terms of cycles. If you have a car with a 4,000 cycle battery life and that car
cost $40,000 like a typical Model 3 costs right now, that costs $10 per battery cycle.
Now compare that to if you supply the grid with energy at 10 cents a
kilowatt hour, your 50 kilowatt hour battery pack is earning you $5
in vehicle-to-grid per cycle. $5. It costs you $10 per cycle to
buy the car you're losing money. You make $20,000 over the life the car you paid
$40,000 for. Contrast that with the driving value at say a 50 cent a mile
rate - less than the IRS reimbursement rate - and a 250 mile cycle is
$125 worth of driving value for you. Far more than the cost of
the car, and far more than the electricity value. I'm going to go through
what JB Straubel had to say next but first I want to address one other thing
I keep seeing there are people who say well when I get my car I don't want
people using it as a robo taxi I want to keep it for myself I don't want people
getting a dirty whatever that's fine but the problem is that once Robo taxis do
become real the cost of a robotex he's gonna be $200,000 or more are you gonna
buy a Robo taxi type vehicle and stick it in your garage and not use it you can
just buy a cheap ICV if you're not gonna drive it buy a cheap
ice vehicle it's not self-driving and paid $20,000 why would you pay $200,000
for something you're not going to use one more point on this if Tesla's
mission is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy and you
buy a Tesla and you leave it in your garage and you only drive at two hours a
day then you're decelerating the transition to sustainable energy Robo
taxi use where the vehicle is used a lot is what accelerates the transition
because that replaces internal combustion engine cars and it reduces
pollution and it makes our world a better place now we're gonna go through
the question that JB Straubel was asked at this forum and going detail through
his answer keep in mind when you listen to this how this relates to Tesla's goal
of accelerating the transition to sustainable energy it's not just about
profit I think they're aligned profit is aligned with the acceleration of our
transition to sustainable energy but deep down if you think about it this is
really about that transition here we go you talked about what you do with the
batteries at the end of their life and you say you would melt them down and
make new batteries this is the first nugget in this clip just him mentioning
that Tesla's plan is to melt down the batteries at the end of their life and
then reuse the materials they're not planning to salvage the batteries and
continue to use them in some form they're going to melt them down I didn't
hear Straub L say that in his presentation earlier in this video but
he said it in straw bail didn't deny it so that's something new because one
alternative would be to use those batteries which maybe have declined in
efficiency in static locations to help even out the unpredictability of
renewable energy supply but I wonder if you've taken that one stage further
because you know you will have a lot of customers around the world who have
downloaded cheap electricity at night when the wind was blowing or maybe in
the day time when the Sun was shining who maybe don't need their car on a
particular day have you looked at how they could then upload that electricity
to the grid to help even out the unpredictability of supply from
renewables and actually become electricity traders using their car as
the bank there was a lot in that car eluded question for one thing he
referenced the idea that batteries from cars would be used for stationary
storage which you're gonna hear later straw Belle's gonna reject but in the
end he goes right for vehicle-to-grid as if vehicle-to-grid as a solution and
is Tesla considering it straw Bell's gonna get there in his answer which is
coming up right now yeah we've looked at reuse or kind of a
second life of automotive batteries for Grid applications very very closely and
ultimately every time we've studied this we come to the conclusion that it's it's
not a very economical or very good use of those those assets right there straw
bail just bodyslams the idea no we don't use vehicle batteries for stationary
assets we've looked at it it's not a good idea and he's gonna explain next
why it's not a good idea you know by the time they come out of a transport out of
a vehicle that's it's lived its life you know the technology will be quite old
and we expect ten maybe fifteen year life at a minimum from these batteries
this was a really good idea that I honestly hadn't thought of if you
imagine a Tesla Model S that started in 2013 and it has a 10 year life so 10
years later is 2023 the battery technology in the 2013 model s is gonna
be so grotesquely outdated that why would you want to use that old battery
tech 2 batteries are improving so rapidly it's amazing and they just don't
need to use old batteries old outdated batteries anymore and you know the
degradation is not not entirely linear you know by the end of their life you
know the efficiency has degraded on every cycle you see lower efficiency the
capacity will have somewhat degraded and for a lot of reasons you know it makes
it very difficult to deploy those efficiently back into a grid setting
where you want high reliability and you do want predictability this is another
big point those older batteries have degraded in a variety of ways and
reliability and predictability are particularly important when they're
being used for grid storage and grid backup and Tesla's not gonna do that
they're gonna use new batteries instead you know my view is that we'll see you
know new batteries dedicated to that market that also have slightly different
characteristics they should have higher cycle life in an electric vehicle that
has you know 200 plus miles of range you don't need as many cycles as you do on a
battery that's designed to charge and discharge every single day on the grid
you know there's perhaps about a factor of four or five difference in the cycle
life that was a really interesting detail that as of 2016 Tesla's energy
storage battery chemistry's had four or five times the cycle life of the vehicle
batteries I keep in mind Elon mentioned at one point in the past that the grid
storage batteries they were using did have 4,000 cycles so that does seem to
fit ready to play power pack with 4,000 cycle life capability to your second
question about you know using vehicles as a buffer for renewable energy just to
be clear in this bit he's not talking about vehicle to grid he's talking about
the timing of when Tesla vehicles are going to charge so that they don't
charge from the grid at bad moments when the grid is under high demand you know
this is definitely something that that's coming and I think there's there's two
ways to implement this the first is to use dynamic charging and this is
essentially you know intelligently commanding when the vehicles absorb
their energy from the grid you know to match up with when you have renewable
energy available or cheap you know this is something we can do very very easily
with just essentially software and controls we don't have to change any of
the hardware and there's no additional regulatory or certification work needed
it's just essentially controlling the timing of when something would otherwise
happen and now here he gets into vehicle to grid if we want to actually send
energy back from the car to the electricity grid this gets much more
complex you know that's something that I don't see being a very economic or
viable solution and perhaps ever but certainly not in the near-term
you know the additional wear and tear and degradation on your vehicle battery
it has a fairly high cost and many of the people and small businesses looking
at this today you know don't take into account fully that degradation cost a
big reason why vehicle to grid doesn't make sense is because it degrades the
battery and the cost of degrading the battery is greater
than the revenue you're getting from the grid and also the additional in a you
know interconnection cost because if you interconnect your vehicle you do have
new regulations that play a part it has to interconnect in the same way that a
solar system would on someone's home or on a business which have different
standards so that they can protect line operators and people on the grid
it's the interconnection cost what I talked about earlier in this video it
costs a lot to set things up so that your vehicle can add energy to the grid
it's just not gonna happen there's your JB Straubel smackdown to
vehicle to grid hey thanks for watching I hope you liked this video if you
disagree please let me know in the comments if you liked it or if you have
other thoughts in the comments please say what you got to say if you loved the
video please share it please subscribe tell your friends and look me up on
Twitter and yell at me there if you need to thanks again for watching and of
course you know check out these other videos around here I think there might
be something else you want to see thanks