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Tesla plans its future electric vehicles to absorb energy and spit it back on the rack. Tesla did not specify when this capability would be available when CEO Elon Musk made the announcement during the long-awaited Tesla Battery Day event in Palo Alto, California.
But rather than exaggerating this development, Musk downplayed how useful it would be for the company’s vehicles to be able to connect to the grid. “The grid vehicle sounds good, but I think it actually has a lot less utility than people think,” Musk said. Apparently he wants consumers to keep buying Tesla Powerwall batteries for their homes, rather than using his electric vehicles as batteries on wheels. “I think it will actually be better for people’s freedom of action to have a Powerwall and a car,” Musk said. Lack of infrastructure and customer acceptance for cars that can discharge unused power to the grid could also be causing Tesla to halt.
Despite Musk’s reservations, there is a lot of potential for Tesla’s EVs to do more than drive. A fully charged Tesla Model S Long Range Plus could drive 400 miles on a single charge of its 100 kWh battery pack, but most commuters aren’t driving that far in a day. All that excess power could be better used by keeping the lights on in the driver’s home during a sudden blackout, an event that is not unusual in California during wildfire season. If Tesla owners can discharge their batteries to the grid every time there is peak demand, they could even avoid power outages and earn some money in the process.
“The amount of energy storage you have driving on four wheels is far more than any electric company will build and put on the grid,” says Gerbrand Ceder, professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. “So now it starts to make sense to use this as a resource to stabilize the network.”
A decade ago, it might not be worth it for a Tesla owner to make some cash selling money online because it shortened battery life. Former Tesla CTO JB Straubel has been skeptical for that reason. Giving in used to be a skeptic too, but he’s not anymore. Now, the batteries are tough enough to return power to the grid without losing a lot of battery capacity in the process, according to Ceder. “Now you are basically making money off the vehicle on the net,” he says.
However, there is still a lot of infrastructure to build so that electric vehicles can give back to the owners’ homes and to the grid. To start with, Tesla will need to build new connected chargers, and households will need additional hardware to be able to draw power from an EV battery.
Musk’s comments during Battery Day also suggest that the company doesn’t think its customers are hungry enough for the vehicle’s on-grid capabilities just yet. “Very few people would actually use the vehicle on the grid,” Musk said during Battery Day. “We actually had that with the original Roadster. We had vehicle-to-network capabilities, nobody was using it. “
The assumption is that Tesla owners buy the car to drive it, not to use it as a battery. “Obviously it is very troublesome if [in the morning] his car, instead of being loaded, was unloaded at the house, ”Musk said.
“Tesla is intensely focused on the customer experience,” wrote Ryan Hledik, director of research consultancy Brattle Group that focuses on distributed energy technologies, in an email to The edge. “Anything that could threaten that, like a car that is not fully charged when a customer expects it to be, or a battery that drains earlier than expected, could be viewed by Tesla as unattractive at this stage.”
Tesla would also need enough customers on board to make an attractive offer to the utilities that could buy its power. Historically, utilities have turned to gas “peak plants” to meet demand during periods of power shortages. “Both utilities and system operators still don’t trust the performance of a distributed battery group in the same way that they trust a single gas plant or some other type of centralized resource,” Hledik says.
Tesla may also have another, more selfish reason for stalling on vehicle-to-grid capabilities. You May Not Want To Cannibalize Your Powerwall Business, Experts Say The edge. If Tesla EVs can drive and provide backup power to their owner’s home, why invest in a Powerwall?
Drew Baglino, Senior Vice President of Powertrain and Energy Engineering at Tesla, hinted that its Powerwalls might sell better to utilities than its electric vehicles. “Remember that your car is not plugged in 24/7, so it is an unpredictable resource for the network. It will have a value, but it is not the same as a stationary battery, ”he said yesterday.
Vehicle-to-grid capabilities could eventually see Tesla become an influential energy arbiter, Ceder says. Tesla has become the world’s largest electric car maker; This year it reached a milestone when it delivered more than 1 million cars worldwide. Together, your global fleet can operate like a huge virtual power plant.
But Tesla is already trying to do something similar with its Powerwalls. Tesla’s pilot residential virtual power plant in Australia has received positive feedback after saving residents up to 20 percent on their energy bills, according to an April report. The company installed solar and storage systems in more than 1,000 public housing properties and plans to expand to 50,000 more homes.
“I think a lot of us expected Tesla to become an actor in the arbitration of electricity because, in the end, that is what they have prepared themselves for,” Ceder says. “I always joke that Tesla wasn’t really a car manufacturer, it was really a battery manufacturer.”
Tesla’s announcement comes as increasingly intense wildfire seasons make widespread blackouts more common in California, where Tesla is based. “Right now there is a real need to provide backup power that [batteries] it can provide, ”says Jeff Cook, renewable energy policy and market analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
If Tesla doesn’t meet the need first, others might. Nissan and Honda have ventured into two-way charging. “You’re going to see more of this, I would say, in the future,” says Cook.
