Electric vehicle war, is gas soon to be toast?

[DoubleF]

Originally Posted by kermitology

Why not just install batteries in the home? I'm not sure the value of draining your EV to put power back into the grid when you can do the same thing with a stationary battery.

Also, maybe we need to tone it down with Level 2 chargers. I was provided a level 1 with my Ioniq 5 and that's all I use at home.

Yeah I was thinking more like moving the energy around and thinking more like finding a discharging station and get free parking/paid for discharging at an establishment. Might even make sense in people bringing power to tourist towns, so as to reduce strain on smaller grids, but in a home in a city... I don't get it unless there's a ton of idle, rarely used EVs.

The battery from car into grid article started sounding like a weird way to describe the electricity company momentarily stopping power provided to your home and using you car to power your home, or something.

[Torture]

Originally Posted by kermitology

Why not just install batteries in the home? I'm not sure the value of draining your EV to put power back into the grid when you can do the same thing with a stationary battery.

Also, maybe we need to tone it down with Level 2 chargers. I was provided a level 1 with my Ioniq 5 and that's all I use at home.

Cause that requires two very large batteries that aren't cheap (car, house) and we already have a big battery sitting there already.

You're already making do with level 1 which kind of illustrates the point, somebody with a level 2, how often do they *really* need a fully charged battery ready to go at 100% charge? Even my PHEV with not a massive battery has been sitting in the garage all week at 100% cause I've been biking all week. Why not use that in the evening and top up it back up off the solar panels during the day?

[Fuzz]

I know charge discharge cycling has improved, but I'm not sure it would be great for longevity if you did it every day. At 50% discharge you get 1300 cycles and lose 20% capacity. That's unde 4 years. I wouldn't want to lose my max capacity for a bit of a reduced bill.
https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/one-simple-trick


Also, level 2 chargers are more efficient, so it will always cost you more to charge with level 1, particularly without a heated charging location in the winter.

[kermitology]

Yes, level 2 are more efficient, but do we all need 40-50A service? I question that.

[Wolven]

I was chatting about this in the politics thread but it sounds like a big step has been taken toward a production solid state (sodium-ion) battery by the largest battery company in the world, CATL.

This could be a massive step forward for EVs and household battery walls as the cost of sodium (salt) is a tiny fraction of lithium and sodium is far, far more plentiful. With the first version of these batteries going into production in cars this year it will be interesting to see how quickly they make improvements from V1 to V2 to V5 and beyond.

This is massive for cold climate EVs as sodium handles the cold way better than lithium.

Note: the video calls out that CATL has been oddly quiet about this technology. Is it because the batteries are bogus? Are they protecting trade secrets to establish an industry advantage? Or are they try to avoid political backlash from knuckle draggers?

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by kermitology

Yes, level 2 are more efficient, but do we all need 40-50A service? I question that.

No, 30A is fine too. But most people don't have that, either, so if you are upgrading you may as well put a 50A in. There are also solutions cheaper than a full panel upgrade that can better handle load balancing on lower capacity main feeds with a lower install cost. If you spend 70k on an ev, it's not a stretch to add 1-2k for more efficient charging and other benefits.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Wolven

I was chatting about this in the politics thread but it sounds like a big step has been taken toward a production solid state (sodium-ion) battery by the largest battery company in the world, CATL.

This could be a massive step forward for EVs and household battery walls as the cost of sodium (salt) is a tiny fraction of lithium and sodium is far, far more plentiful. With the first version of these batteries going into production in cars this year it will be interesting to see how quickly they make improvements from V1 to V2 to V5 and beyond.

This is massive for cold climate EVs as sodium handles the cold way better than lithium.

Note: the video calls out that CATL has been oddly quiet about this technology. Is it because the batteries are bogus? Are they protecting trade secrets to establish an industry advantage? Or are they try to avoid political backlash from knuckle draggers?

Can't watch that now, but I thought that chemistry wasn't well suited to o cars, but was great for stationary storage. Maybe they found a way around the issues?

[Wolven]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

Can't watch that now, but I thought that chemistry wasn't well suited to o cars, but was great for stationary storage. Maybe they found a way around the issues?

They are mass producing the sodium-ion batteries as Naxtra.
- Longer battery range
- Less degradation
- Better performance in cold
- No exploding in a ball of fire
- Sodium is easily available around the world

Apparently 6 automakers are going to put Naxtra batteries in 30 different 2026 models.

With this just being the first version of the battery, there is a lot of potential for these batteries to go from comparable to Lithium to vastly superior.

This is the kind of innovation I was hoping Canada would be leading going all of the way back to Ballard power fuel cell excitement ~20 years ago.