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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

I think it's appealing to nerds to believe that a long-tail disaggregated phenomenon like EV V2G is going to save the grid, but the apparent truth is that the grid will be saved by central planning and top-down command and control. We see this in California. We have a million EVs registered in the state, but our grid-scale, CPUC-regulated battery stations are still larger in terms of energy storage, and unlike the EV fleet the availability and responsiveness of battery energy storage stations is assured.

Load shedding like that in the article is a vanilla feature of electric grids everywhere. Large consumers get discounted power in exchange for agreeing to disconnect during grid emergencies. Because the number of such customers is small, that feature is easy to regulate and you can ignore the game theoretic shenanigans that would emerge from widespread V2G with millions of individual participants.

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California is a bad example of "working power grids".

Thanks to decades of graft, PG&E keeps blowing up / burning down neighborhoods / cities, and then passes the liability cost to consumers.

At this point, we're paying $0.40 / kWh for grid power. National average is $0.08. Our solar + battery system is saving us something like $600 / month for a small, energy efficient house + one small, energy efficient EV.

With the new rates, there's barely any financial reason to connect to the grid at all. You have to get solar + battery anyway, and getting a backup propane generator to keep the batteries from running empty is only an additional $10-20K.

At that point, your house would be off-grid capable. Assuming a 10 year depreciation cycle on the generator, that's an additional $166 / month over the equipment's lifespan.

Finally, assuming people move to battery + solar to avoid paying $500-600 per month ($60K over ten years, which is more than battery + solar cost, so everyone should do that right now), they'll have to raise the rates so that people that are almost never importing power are still paying enough to cover liability + grid maintenance.

$166 / month / house isn't going to cover that. PG&E's screwed.

Personally, I want to buy a direct air capture device that I can plug into my house. Whenever the batteries charge above about 80%, I want it to convert all surplus electricity into little solid carbon bricks, and dump the "waste" air (with low CO2 content) into my house. That + propane generator + close my PG&E account seems ideal.

> At this point, we're paying $0.40 / kWh for grid power. National average is $0.08.

It doesn't help to exaggerate, that only undermines whatever legitimate point is buried in here. California weighted residential cost was 33¢ according to latest EIA data and the national average was 17¢.

> You have to get solar + battery anyway

Since more than 99% of California homes lack such a system, it is obviously not necessary to own one.

From a quick peak it looks like most of the gas to solid processes require a non-trivial amount of heat (ignoring turning it into dry ice cause it'd just boil away anyway), but I suppose your capture can be separated from your condensation and cooled separately.

You ever look at what the throughout might be? I was just curious if a homelab setup of what you described was possible but that was as far as I got

Tesla will come to the utility and say we can offer you 3000 MW of demand response in any granularity you want for $x/hr.

$x is usually not very big since the modus operandi for the bulk electric system in North America has been everyone can use as much power as they want whenever they want, so we have had lots of supply.

But a couple of times per year $x could be thousands of dollars per MW per hour, for a few hours. So not worth the effort really.

Maybe Tesla will offer the demand response more geographically so distribution utilities can also use it for peak shaving on their substations. But that is pretty brave area to be operating in for a utility, depending on Tesla to avoid overloading transformers or risk a localized black out.

There would have to be a serious penalty for bidding in the demand response but then not performing as well.

I agree it does seem far fetched at this time.

Edit: price signals to consumers is probably a better mechanism

> appealing to nerds to believe that a long-tail disaggregated phenomenon like EV V2G is going to save the grid, but the apparent truth is that the grid will be saved by central planning and top-down command and control.

I think this sentiment applies to a lot of facets of the energy transition/preventing climate collapse - perhaps sadly?

A lot of the cooler distributed solutions and demand-side solutions could have been our saviors had we started on them in earnest 10-15 years ago. They should still be pursued as part of a robust and resilient system (everything from re-insulating homes to V2G to cutting out dairy and meat from diets to dispatchable home heating/cooling-appliances etc etc) but the truth is that we are spiraling towards climate collapse and those sorts of solutions are simply put more difficult to implement and maintain, especially because they often involve massive social buy in; at the same time, those solutions don’t tend to address the source energy question in any meaningful way (besides rooftop PV which is not enough even for low energy homes in many climates), so supply-side solutions will always still be needed, and like you said, there are economies of scale in both thermodynamic/physics efficiencies and in management and planning. It would be awesome if everyone stopped eating steak, but the realist in me knows that expecting that to happen at a scale which moves the needle just does not seem realistic.

It’s sad to me in that the “distributed” solutions tend to actually address root causes of climate catastrophe - addiction to energy consumption, “capitalism” writ large, being good denizens of the planet, etc etc in one way or another - and would entail a real improvement to how we understand the fabric of society and modern civilization (I’m speaking broadly here of course, but I think it holds water), whereas the centralized solutions feel in some sense like bandaids that obfuscate our collective responsibility and engagement with the issue (besides tax dollars and utility rates going towards the solutions I guess), but at the timescale of the crisis we are dealing with the size of that lever and its effectiveness is kind of unarguable I think.

Build big solar and wind farms, lots of batteries, start using cleaner steel and cement manufacturing processes, hope that super deep geothermal or micro-reactors progress, hope that we find a better way to sequester carbon coming from either direct air capture or post-combustion carbon capture.

Everything else is just (important) gravy. And I say this as someone mostly focused on the demand side, not supply side! (I’m a building scientist)

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