Jay said:

Suppose a company were to come along and be willing to own ALL the necessary hardware and V2G batteries installed in V2G cars, then monitor the driving patterns to best leverage the energy and capacity so as to not compromise the vehicle’s driving needs. What then about the whole thing being a fraud? The company could make its money back on the expensive batteries from V2G services, then of course that allows car buyers to buy EV’s without having to pay for the battery, or for gas anymore for that matter.

If you’re going to own the batteries to make money off of grid buffering (buying power during low times and selling it back during high demand) then you would be much much much better off just owning the batteries at a static plant and doing it that way. Much more effecient, larger batteries last much longer, you could condition the batteries.

Or even better solution – don’t bother with expensive batteries which need to be replaced. Just build a pumped storage hydro plant.

The economics don’t add up. What? The owners don’t actually own the batteries? They just use them while they belong to the V2G company? Why would the company want to let car owners use them? What is their payback? Or is it that they are going to charge some kind of lease fee to the owners of the cars?

The company that owns the batteries still has to charge whatever fee is necessary to cover all expenses.

Regardless the owners of the vehicles are still getting shafted because they will have their vehicle usage compromised. Driving patterns are not 100% predictable. On occasion people will take a longer drive than normal and some drivers have driving habits that are just plain sporadic.

Conspiracy theorists? No conspiracy theory here. Just a bad idea. It’s like “conspiracy theorist” is thrown around to describe anyone who is disagreed with. No, it’s just a stupid idea. Not all stupid ideas are conspiracies. Most aren’t.

Remember those DVX DVD players that were supposed to play movies once as an alternative to rental? Failed. Was a stupid idea.

Remember the Nintendo Virtual Boy? The thing that had crappy stereoscopic monochrome graphics?
Failed. was a stupid idea.

Remember MSN Direct? The service to send short text updates on news to wristwatches by a very unreliable FM-radio based system, despite the fact that everyone had cell phones by the time it debuted

Failed. Was a stupid idea.

Stupid ideas happen. People push them. They are pointed out as being stupid but they get pushed anyway, some get financed and make it to market. They fail because they’re stupid. No conspiracy necessary.

If it makes business sense it will happen.

Mark my words, it won’t happen. The only way it will happen is if it is somehow mandated and subsidized, and even then it will be on a small scale and never be worth it.

        Jay said:

Suppose a company were to come along and be willing to own ALL the necessary hardware and V2G batteries installed in V2G cars, then monitor the driving patterns to best leverage the energy and capacity so as to not compromise the vehicle’s driving needs. What then about the whole thing being a fraud? …. Let’s apply some business-level thinking and ask questions that actually aim to solve problems instead of just being afraid of evolving. Evolution is what we are meant for.

It’s because many of us have applied business-level thinking, (having done it for a living) that we reject this idea. The capital costs of the batteries is the major flaw in this whole idea, and if there was a profit to be made by owning them and, in effect leasing them to drivers for a few hours a day, the utilities would be all over it. In fact they are probably the only one that could even begin to contemplate such a scheme, because of the very long pay-back on the investment, and the razor-thin profits that would be realized per installed unit.

Nor is there a convincing argument that battery cost will drop, particularly if BEV applications make a major penetration into the market. Already strains are showing on some of the raw materials, and this is likely to get worse before it gets better.

The bottom line is that if there was money to be made owning batteries, it would already be done. The fact is that the battery cost is the limiting factor with this scheme, which is why they want the car owners to foot the investment at a loss.

        Aaron Bennett said:

AC motors are more efficient than DC motors and requires less maintennance

That depends a bit on the circumstances, but there are advantages to AC motors that are enough that some electric vehicles use AC traction motors instead of DC. The Tesla roadster, for example, uses three-phase AC motors and has an onboard inverter to power them.

But that really has nothing to do with vehicle to grid.

        Aaron Bennett said:

AC motors are more efficient than DC motors and requires less maintenance.

It’s the extension cord that gets you when you use them in electric vehicles

I stumbled across this looking for “vehicle to grid scam”, and y’all covered some of the issues.

The biggest two parts of the “scam” are when peak demand occurs, and the supply-demand relationship for pricing V2G services.

Check out the overlap between “drive time” and “peak demand”. If there is any at all, the idea won’t work. Indeed, V2G will make it worse since the peak production from V2G will be removed when the owners want to drive home, and have to be replaced. Which is a bad idea.

Also, consider what will happen if millions of these V2G vehicles start showing up. When supply rises relative to demand, the price falls. What might have made sense when V2G was a novelty suddenly doesn’t make sense when you’re competing on price with millions of other people.

        lousloot said:

As smart-grid technologies improve and lossy small generators and inverters are improved on and new techniques are discovered and energy costs skyrocket, solutions will be found — this may just work.

It’s not that new. It’s not an issue of improving things so much as it is scale. Modern inverters are pretty effecient, but you compound the loss when you have to go through more systems to get to the main power distribution network. Big thermal engines are just more effecient than small ones. the same is true with generators and such.

        lousloot said:

As smart-grid technologies improve and lossy small generators and inverters are improved on and new techniques are discovered and energy costs skyrocket, solutions will be found — this may just work. This is all new and experimental — don’t kill it yet. Let the engineers and scientists play with it.

First most of this isn’t new and experimental, all of these technologies have been around for ages and they have evolved to the point where ant improvements will be incremental, not revolutionary. Generator efficiency, for example is in the range of 93-98%, not much room for improvement there. The efficiency of inverters usually ranges from 85% to 95%, with 90% being about average, assuming the right size has been selected for the job. Again not much can be done here. Smart grid technology won’t make more energy – the best it can do is limit losses, but losses aren’t the major problem with V2G.

I can’t understand why it isn’t crystal clear to everyone that V2G is nothing more than a flim-flam to get consumers to assume the cost and maintenance charges of very expensive storage modules so that the power companies can lease them back at a discounted rate. It’s a fraud, pure and simple, yet everyone behaves as if it were some advantage to the owners of these vehicles.