Japan Wants To Boost the Use of Electric Vehicles as a Power Source During Natural Disasters (qz.com) 74
Japan, a country which frequently suffers natural calamities such as tsunamis, typhoons, and earthquakes is looking to further harness the power of batteries used in electric vehicles (EVs) during such disasters, local media reports. From a report: Nissan, which produces the Leaf, the world's best-selling EV model, plans to hold an event in March to let people stay overnight in their cars and try using the electricity stored in their car batteries to simulate the experience of being in an emergency, according to Japanese newswire Jiji. A fully charged electric vehicle can supply power to a standard home for up to four days, a Nissan official told the news outlet. The company last year came to an agreement with Tokyo's Nerima Ward and the city of Yokosuka to provide EVs for free in emergency situations. Nerima also last year (link in Japanese) implemented a system whereby owners of EVs would be able to loan their vehicles out for free to those in need during a disaster, and also started using EVs for its fleet of police patrol cars.
So... (Score:3)
... implemented a system whereby owners of EVs would be able to loan their vehicles out for free ...
Mandatory or voluntary ?
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Well ... i would like to be able go to a car rental place and have them loan me out a car for free.
Also if i owned a such a electric vehicle i would like to be able to loan-it to someone needing it for a amount of money.
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Since the alternative is "nothing backing your power grid", I'd have to say yes.
In most every part of the world the something backing up wind and solar will be natural gas.
It will continue to be natural gas until something as inexpensive and reliable comes along. Batteries will never be as inexpensive and reliable because batteries cannot produce electricity, they only store it. The cost of operation includes the electricity to charge them, and with any overhead from maintenance and energy losses. To get cheap electricity from batteries requires even cheaper electricity put into the
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Vehicular internal combustion engines are far less efficient than combined cycle gas turbine power plants. Not sure what the overall efficiency is from power plant to car wheel, but it could very well be better than a directly gas powered car.
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Forget natural gas then. Let's consider a "real solution". An electric car charged up from nuclear power would have far less CO2 emissions than an electric car charged from natural gas, coal, wind, solar, or hydro.
If those behind the Green New Deal were truly interested in reducing CO2 then they would have embraced nuclear power, not demand it be replaced with energy sources with higher CO2 output.
We aren't going to get to a zero CO2 economy without nuclear. There will be no dominance of wind and solar w
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In Japan everyone pulls together in the event of a natural disaster. Some of it is legal requirements, such as being required to leave the keys in your car if you abandon it so that emergency services can move it, and some of it is just people doing the right thing.
For example many vending machines switch to free vend in the event of an emergency, and some even offer charging for mobile phones. I'm sure many drivers would be happy to loan their battery to where it is needed, e.g. evacuation centres or medic
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It would still make more sense to subsidise solar panels on house roofs and fit them with batteries. They can keep generating electricity and all you need is an extension lead from any house, whose home power system is still running.
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Okay, this is weird. Who was triggered by this post? I mean how can someone be upset enough by it to label it "troll"?
Is this just straight up abuse, a stalking systematically hitting all my posts, or have we found some new species of snowflake?
More than enough power in an EV to do so (Score:3)
Not many people realize how much power EVs are capable of. I own a Chevy Volt which is a mixed battery / gas generator type vehicle and so I have a view of exactly what KWatt's I use when I drive around on my dashboard. Your average house rarely exceeds 10 KWatts at peak power use. Travelling on a straight highway uses about 21 Kwatts of power while slow speed urban driving can be as low as 7 Kwatts. Volt's peak battery output is around 107 Kwatts which could easily cover several houses all at once, it's amazing to think that's how much power is used when a car is accelerating. The Volt's gas engine / generator is about 80hp which is way above any of your camping portable generators which are probably a measly 1-4 hp. The issue is how to hook up the house power safely. Volt's primary power line off the battery is about 360v DC with enough amperage to more than put you in the grave. Unless the car maker safely designed a way to tap the system, it's difficult to do.
Re:More than enough power in an EV to do so (Score:4, Interesting)
The average American home uses 10,399 kWh in a year [eia.gov], or about 28.5 kWh per day. (Apparently a typical Japanese home uses a lot less.) So half-charging a Leaf every day (roughly 50 miles/day use) increases household electricity consumption by (20 kWh / 28.5 kWh) = 0.7 = 70%. Since all that additional electricity consumption happens overnight, if every house has an EV then suddenly the peak electricity consumption period switches from mid-day to overnight. And the lower electricity prices people are expecting to pay to recharge their EV evaporates. Moreso if there's significant solar power generation in the grid. Since solar provides electricity only during the day, the electricity during night to charge all these EVs will have to come from generators the power companies can spool up to meet the overnight demand spike. (Storing solar power in batteries for overnight use is not cost-effective unless solar generation exceeds 100% of daytime consumption. It makes no sense to run other power generators during the day just so you can store solar power in batteries for use during the night, when you can just use the solar power directly during the day (avoiding battery losses) and run the other power generators during the night.)
Meaning you're going to be paying the highest electricity rates to charge your EV, not the lowest. Modding me down doesn't change this truth. The same truth that lets your EV battery power your home for more than a day, also means the power pricing peak will invert when every home has an EV charging overnight.
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The average American home uses 10,399 kWh in a year
That's because an average American home is crap when it comes to efficiency. [shrinkthatfootprint.com]
Since all that additional electricity consumption happens overnight, if every house has an EV then suddenly the peak electricity consumption period switches from mid-day to overnight. And the lower electricity prices people are expecting to pay to recharge their EV evaporates. Moreso if there's significant solar power generation in the grid. Since solar provides electricity only during the day, the electricity during night to charge all these EVs will have to come from generators the power companies can spool up to meet the overnight demand spike.
Have you considered the possibility of charging *during the day*? It almost makes too much sense to store the surpluses, doesn't it? And consequently it makes too little sense to charge overnight. Thus no "overnight demand spike" is necessarily bound to happen.
Storing solar power in batteries for overnight use is not cost-effective unless solar generation exceeds 100% of daytime consumption.
Sooner or later, this excess generation is going to happen if the cost of solar generators becomes so low that using them pays off even despite not using their full output.
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For a person to charge their car during the day would mean having a place to park all day that was wired for it. A common parking spot is just a 10 foot by 20 foot slab of concrete, very cheap and very low maintenance. Wiring that for charging electric cars means a lot more expense up front and even more to keep it operational, and that (of course) includes the cost of the electricity. Will people be willing to pay for this when they (presumably) already have an operational charger at home?
EV advocates a
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No more subsidies!!
The government cannot legislate energy independence into being. The government cannot change the laws of economics and physics, as much as they might wish it otherwise. If you want electric cars to bring the USA into energy independence then build some better electric cars. There is no other way.
The USA is well on the path to being energy independent already, and became a net petroleum exporter recently. We can reach and keep that independence by keeping the markets open. If the gov
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No more subsidies!! The government cannot legislate energy independence into being.
Yes, it can.
If you want electric cars to bring the USA into energy independence then build some better electric cars.
I don't actually care about the US the tiniest bit, except for the parts that might affect me like foreign policy.
There is no giving to electric vehicles without taking from somewhere else.
National economies are not zero sum games, so the statement above is blatantly false.
Oh, and where is gas $6/gallon? I took a look at the AAA website and it's under $3/gallon for most of the USA, and under $2.50/gallon for places away from the east and west coasts. I can recall it being around $4.50/gallon once, but that didn't last long.
Most of Europe. [bloomberg.com]
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You make several valid points, but you miss one of the biggest issues: residential energy consumption is much less than all other uses.
As a simple example, peak electrical demand late at night is about 20GW in California, divided by approximately 12 million households = 1.7kW/household. At that same time, the average household is consuming less than 0.5kW. You can do a similar calculation at different times of day, but residential energy consumption is really only about 1/3 of the total, even in a state
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Since all that additional electricity consumption happens overnight, if every house has an EV then suddenly the peak electricity consumption period switches from mid-day to overnight.
So charge some of those EVs during the day instead and even out the load. Problem solved. Why do you assume EVs can only be charged overnight? They'll be charged whenever power is cheapest.
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The 40kWh Leaf has 38kWh usable. 20% is a ridiculous buffer, no car has anything like that.
Charging efficiency depends on the charge rate. For 6.6kW (typical home/work/destination charger) it's around 90% for the Leaf. 80% is more typical of rapid chargers (40kW+).
Overnight charging will remain the cheapest option because during the day consumption by industry and business is high. Also we have had remotely controlled off-peak energy for decades now. The power company sends a signal to turn it on when deman
Fukushima (Score:4, Interesting)
Back with the fukushima disaster in japan they were raiding the batteries from the cars in the company parking lot to keep the controls and monitor equipment running.
Also 4 days?! I know a EV holds a lot of juice but if it can really run a home with lights and HVAC for days it should already be being sold as a home backup option.
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4 Days admittedly might be pushing it. A Nissan Leaf has about a 24 KwH battery. It means it can run a 1000 watt microwave non-stop for 24 hours. If you're not excessively using power it should last at least 1-2 days thou.
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My furnace is rated at about 18kW, and I live in Midwest USA. It's natural gas, not electric, but that doesn't matter for the thermal output. My sister lives in "hill country" in the SE USA and she has electric backup heat for when the heat pump and/or wood stove can't keep up, and based on the size of their heat pump I'm guessing it's in the 15kW range. My brother used to live in a house where the natural gas lines couldn't reach, also in Midwest USA, and his electric backup heat was at least 15kW.
So, t
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These things are generally symptoms of permissive building codes and extremely cheap energy.
So you would prefer extremely expensive energy?
Ever heard of Passivhaus?
I'll admit I had to look that up. I've seen similar ideas and they are very expensive to build compared to "permissive building codes" we have now.
There's always a balance here and what I want is energy that is cheap enough that I can keep my open air backyard at a shirtsleeve temp in the middle of a Midwest February snowstorm if I wanted. We can get there if we want. This is nonsense to reach energy efficiency at the cost of all else. Make energy cheap and
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So you would prefer extremely expensive energy?
It's hardly a matter of "what I prefer". Right now, your "cheap energy" has significant costs socialized and pushed into the future (recent estimates are I believe equivalent to extra electricity cost of around $0.15/kWh for CCGT generation or $0.3/kWh for coal). Also, in most places, efficiency measures (the "very expensive things" of yours) are actually the most cost-effective way of reducing the impact of human activity.
Make energy cheap and clean then no one should give a damn on how efficient my house is.
OK, go build a hundred new nukes. Than you can waste energy to your heart's content,
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Four days is probably based on the average Japanese electricity consumption, not the energy-wasting lifestyle of USAmericans.
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Of course, I wrote my original comment without thinking about the weather... D'oh!
Only if you ration your electricity (Score:2)
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Average per house consumption in Japan is about 3500kWh/year IIRC, or about 9.5kWh/day. Even the first gen Nissan Leaf can supply that for a couple of days, and the new 62kWh one could easily do 4-5 days. Presumably in an emergency you would try to minimize energy consumption too, so it may actually last a lot longer.
I know, conversion losses blah blah, it's about right.
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HVAC? I'm sure if there's a natural disaster you have better things to worry about than your home chilled to 20C.
In the meantime my home uses ~7kWh / day on average across a given week, more on the weekends for obvious reasons. I can easily run my house for 10 days on a Model 3 battery. My girlfriend wouldn't even need to cut back her binge watching of Netflix.
Might not work as well as they hope (Score:3)
Unfortunately, this 1:1 transference of electricity from your EV to your home is necessary if you want people to conserve the power to stretch it out through a multi-day power outage. If you turn the electricity into a shared resource, the tragedy of the commons [wikipedia.org] kicks in. And people start using all the electricity they can giving little thought to conserving it. Japanese culture might help counter that (they place a high emphasis on responsibility to society). But one bad apple in the apartment drawing lots of wattage for an AC, water heater, and playing games on his high-end PC could put a significant dent in the available power across all EVs powering the building.
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If they have the real-time metering you could simply shut off apartments that are over the allocated amount.
eg. all the charge (+ discharge) bays are connected to the building grid. There's an issue with outside power, and building management checks the charge on all the vehicles and decides to allocate 10% of the available EV power sources that are above 80% to the building supply.
They then notify the apartment owners that each apartment has X amount of kWh available for the duration of the outage and to l
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Most Japanese people behave responsibly in the event of an emergency. For example some vending machines automatically switch to free vend and offer a wifi hotspot using their cellular connection (normally used for stock level monitoring and card payments). Obviously in many countries such a machine would be immediately raided, but in Japan it works.
Having said that, in the event of an earthquake it's usual to evacuate apartment blocks and move to a designated safe area. The risk of collapse is always there
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National Guard Officer: "We 'borrowed' your car for the emergency."
Old news... Works great... (Score:1)
The Prius battery is right at about 200V and most electronic things in your house (your TV, your computer and such) work on DC just fine. Those things that don't include electric motors or things that use old power transformer based power supplies instead of switching versions.
An ham radio operator published his experiences in using his daughter's Prius as a backup power source. He was able to power pretty much everything in his house that used a switching mode power supply without any issues directly
What if you need to get out of dodge? (Score:2)
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The roads are still impassable to cars, so you get on your petrol-powered scooter or mountain bike.