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. A huge thank you as always to the Channel's
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you to the supporters whose names are scrolling up the screen beside me here, all of whom celebrate
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watching, have a great week and remember to just have a think. See you next week.
