Tesla says it could have bidirectional charging in two years, but will it?
Tesla vehicles will be capable of bidirectional charging within the next two years, according to comments from Tesla VP Drew Baglino at today’s Investor Day event.
A question was asked during the Q&A portion about whether Tesla would move towards enabling bidirectional charging on its cars, noting the company’s historical reluctance to do so.
Drew Baglino, Senior VP of Powertrain and Energy Engineering, answered the question by noting that the lack of bidirectional charging was not really a conscious decision, but rather not a priority at the time. But, as Tesla has improved its power electronics units, it has found ways to reduce cost while also bringing bidirectional charging to its vehicles.
Baglino went on to say that this could happen within the next two years, as Tesla is currently within a retooling process for their power electronics manufacturing.
But immediately after this answer, CEO Elon Musk stepped in to pour a little cold water on the idea, stating that “I don’t think very many people are going to want to use bidirectional charging, unless you have a Powerwall, because if you unplug your car your house goes dark, and this is extremely inconvenient.”
The answer was interesting because it gives a little insight into what Tesla’s thinking has been about bidirectional charging all along.
Bidirectional charging is the capability of a car to not only take power to charge the battery, but to send that power back to power devices, a home, or even the grid. These are further categorized as Vehicle-to-load, vehicle-to-home, and vehicle-to-grid, or V2L, V2H and V2G respectively, and sometimes categorized overall as V2X.
Historically, Tesla has indeed opposed putting bidirectional charging systems on its vehicles. Most manufacturers have as well – only a few cars have bidirectional charging, and it’s often limited.
The Hyundai/Kia E-GMP platform cars are capable of V2L, Rivian is capable of V2L with potential V2H capabilities coming later, and Ford’s F-150 Lighting is capable of V2L, or V2H with its Ford Charge Station Pro. The Nissan Leaf is the only car we’re aware of with V2G capability, which has been built into the cars since 2013 but only recently got a charger that enables it, though Lucid has said they’re working on V2X for their vehicles as well.
So where does that leave us with Tesla? It sounds like they will have the technical capability of providing bidirectional charging, but as the answer was short, we didn’t get a lot of specifics on the various forms.
One reason Tesla hasn’t considered bidirectional charging a priority is because there are some reasons that an owner wouldn’t want to use it. For example, if you parked your car with 200 miles of charge and plugged it into the house, then the house or grid decided to discharge your car to take advantage of peak electricity rates (perhaps through Tesla’s Virtual Power Plant program), perhaps you’d be surprised to return to it to 100 miles of range – maybe you made some money, but now you can’t get where you were planning to go.
For this reason, you’d need to have robust controls and internet communications with the car, so that owners can manage demand, but that shouldn’t be hard since every Tesla has internet communications built-in.
The house going dark isn’t really a big concern, though, unless we’re talking about off-grid solar-only houses that use the car as their sole overnight energy storage or something. Otherwise, a home would simply switch to grid power when the car is unplugged. So Musk’s answer was, at best, quite glib.
Baglino also mentioned that there is more value in simply “charging the car at the right time,” rather than sending energy the other way. And this is true – while the dream of using millions of EVs as backup power for the grid is interesting, EVs can already help the grid just by charging at the right time, when excess energy is available, and by not charging at peaks.
Most EVs already do this, because many locations offer “time-of-use” rates allowing EVs to get cheaper electricity at night, which already works well at encouraging owners to charge at night instead of during peak electricity demand And in fact, Tesla even announced that very thing in today’s Investor Day event – they’re offering overnight charging for $30/month in Texas later this year, where their isoated grid often deals with a glut of wind at night with nobody to sell it to, such that wholesale prices occasionally go negative.
But these answers do indicate possible internal tensions over whether to add bidirectional charging capability to cars. This is something that many EV owners like in theory, but could perhaps open a whole can of worms in practice, and may not actually help Tesla to sell all that many cars anyway since it’s a rather small crowd of people clamoring for this feature.
Baglino’s answer showed that the technical capability is there, but Musk’s answer showed that perhaps Tesla still thinks that customers might be too confused or resistant to the idea of losing a certain amount of control over their vehicle and home’s energy usage.
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The storm hit. The power’s out. With all the damage around you, it looks like you might be without power for a few days (at least). But you planned for this. You have a home backup battery. What happens now?
If you’re considering a home backup battery, or you already have one and haven’t needed it yet, you might be wondering what you’re supposed to do when the inevitable happens. The good news is: you probably won’t have to do much at all.
Whether you’ve got an industry standard like the Tesla Powerwall, one of the new GM Energy Storage Bundles, or any of the other excellent home battery systems on the market, from your point of view they’ll function in pretty much the same way.
Step 1: do nothing
Modern home batteries are paired with an automatic transfer switch. That’s a switch, usually installed near your home’s electrical panel, that allows you to go from grid power, to battery, and back. And, because it’s automatic, you don’t have to do anything at all.
The instant the grid goes down, the automatic transfer switch recognizes the loss of power and automagically disconnects your house from the grid, seamlessly connecting it to your backup battery instead. Your lights stay on, the refrigerator keeps humming, and whatever else you’ve chosen to back up just keeps on keeping on. In some cases, the transition to battery power happens so smoothly that you might not even realize the neighborhood’s lost power, not noticing the neighbors’ dark windows until you step outside.
When the power comes back, that side of the switch gets energized, and it does its thing again, only in reverse – switching you back from battery to grid power and intelligently re-charging the battery in anticipation for the next blackout.
How long will my battery last?
Unfortunately, this is one of those questions that doesn’t have an easy answer. In the simplest terms, if you have a small battery and try to keep the AC running, you might run out of juice in a few hours. On the other hand, if you have great big battery and save its electrons for just the barest essentials (a few lights, a laptop, and a phone or radio, for example) you might never run out of power.
To put some numbers to that, a 31 cu. ft. Samsung RF32CG5400SRAA stainless steel refrigerator is rated at 785 kWh/year. That works out to about 2.15 kWh/day. Factor in 20-40% higher energy needs for warmer temperatures, a few daily door openings, defrost cycles, inverter losses, etc. and you’re looking at 18-22 kWh of usable battery capacity to keep that thing running for a full week on battery power. Now do that same math for every appliance you deem a “must have,” then do the “nice to haves,” and on down the line.
That doesn’t even address the other form of “last,” and whether you’re looking for a ten- or twenty- year battery solution.
What you need to do, in other words, is talk to the experts. Let them know what appliances you need to keep running, how long you want to prepare for, and let them do the math to help determine which battery solution is right for you.
I’ve included a video that covers the process of picking a solar battery from EnergySage (a trusted affiliate partner), below, and invite you to share some of your own backup battery-picking experiences in the comments.
How to pick a solar battery
Original content from Electrek.
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Just days after Chevrolet beat the mighty Ford Mustang GTD’s Nürburgring track record with their Corvette ZR1 and ZR1X, Ford went back to the ‘Ring to reclaim some glory. They didn’t bring a Mustang along, though – they showed up with an electric van, and record-setting hot shoe Romain Dumas behind the wheel.
* it’s not your typical van. It’s a SuperVan.
Ford took back a fair bit of Chevy’s headline-grabbing glory this week when LeMans-winning driver Romain Dumas lapped the 12.9 mile Green Hell in just 6 minutes and 48.393 seconds – a blazing performance that makes the 2000 hp Ford SuperVan 4.2 the ninth fastest car to ever blast around the storied German racetrack.
Dumas is no stranger to the Nürburgring’s Nordschleife. He was first overall at the 2007 24 hour race there. He also holds the outright Nürburgring track record for EVs, which he set back in 2019 behind the wheel of the Volkswagen ID.R, completing the circuit in 6 minutes and 05.336 driving the Volkswagen ID.R.
The new ‘Ring-record comes just a few weeks after Ford beat out every other supercar at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in the UK with its all-electric SuperTruck, crushing the “competition” with their 1,400 hp prototype EV silhouette racer.
No word yet on what track record Ford plans to snatch with an EV next.
Electrek’s Take
If there were still Ford guys and Chevy guys, I like to think I’d be a Mopar guy – but even from the sidelines, I can tell that Chevy’s been having a rough couple of weeks, performance-wise. Not only did their top-shelf ZR1X get beaten by a Ford van (even if it is a SuperVan), but their clean sheet, future-thinking, pie-in-the-sky concept Corvette got beat to the hypercar headlines by a Chinese rival with 1,000 extra hp.
Take my advice, GM: it’s time to drag Warren Mosler back home from the Virgin Islands, figure out where Rod Trenne’s hiding, and get them to build you a proper, 900 kg electric ‘Vette. Y’all let me know if you need help setting that up.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Ford.
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EV drivers who use the Pennsylvania Turnpike just got a jolt of good news: Two Applegreen DC fast charging stations have come online, adding to the growing network of over 60 EV chargers along the 360-mile toll road that links Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia.
The new 400 kW Applegreen Electric charging stations are at the PA Turnpike’s North Somerset (MP 112.3 westbound) and South Somerset (MP 112.3 eastbound) Service Plazas. Each site includes two DC fast chargers for a total of four charging ports, with two NACS and two CCS plugs at each service plaza. The PA Turnpike says the sites are equipped to be expanded.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike plugged in its first EV charger in April 2014. A decade later, more than 60 charging stations are online at eight of its service plazas, giving EV drivers a reliable boost across the state. And thanks to a new partnership with Applegreen Electric, 80 new universal EV chargers are on the way. By 2027, all 17 service plazas will feature DC fast chargers.
“We are pleased to offer our EV customers convenient access to the latest, fastest technology – without leaving the PA Turnpike,” said Director of Facilities Operations Keith Jack.
The EV chargers at North Somerset and South Somerset, along with an EV charger at the Hickory Run Service Plaza scheduled to open this fall, were funded with grants from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s Driving PA Forward program. The chargers at nine service plazas scheduled to open in 2027 are being funded through grants from the Biden administration’s federal National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program.
Applegreen Electric chief executive Eugene Moore noted that the PA Turnpike’s fast charger rollout “marks a key step in building a connected corridor with Pennsylvania as a vital part of the seamless network that now spans New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Delaware. With more to come soon in Ohio and Massachusetts, we’re accelerating the rollout of reliable, accessible EV infrastructure across the region.”
Applegreen is deploying fast chargers on the New Jersey Turnpike, with which it now has an exclusive agreement – it’s taking over from Tesla.
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Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.
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