This entire area is a mess, I spent a year or so trying to get bidirectional charging set up at home in the UK. I even went to several of the vendors mentioned in that post and said "I've got basically a blank cheque and permission to do whatever you want however you want, even use it all as a case study to make this work" and nowhere could/would do it.

The most frustrating thing is it looks like V2G is easier and more accessible than V2H[1]: it's easier to give control of your battery to your energy provider and bypass your house to help the energy companies than it is just to power your own home with your own car battery.

Technically, this is ridiculous. You don't bypass your house when you do V2G.

My tinfoil hat is clearly making me too cynical when I say this, but I think it's this way because of the relationship between energy providers and law makers. These are the same energy providers that use "changes in wholesale pricing" to justify increasing how much they sell me electricity for, whilst reducing the amount they pay me for the solar electricity I sell them.

[1] https://octopus.energy/power-pack/

▲

hedora 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're definitely right on the tinfoil hat angle. Vehicle to home is inevitable, but the rollout is intentionally slow / designed to fail, so the utilities can keep milking folks and justify their natural gas peaker plant investments. Also, once it works, vehicle to home will immediately tank the grid-storage and home-storage battery industry.

Some company is going to create a gray-market "high voltage -> top N home battery systems" dongle that you can just wire into the battery pack on your car. That company will make a fortune (but only if they're able to dodge liability).

I've heard of people doing similar with old prius beaters. You wire the 500V (or whatever) DC battery into an inverter, and then plug your fridge, etc into it. Leave the car ignition on, and it runs the gas engine for a few minutes an hour indefinitely because it sees the drain and thinks you are driving it.

Most modern EV's support this sort of thing officially, but they're hardwired to one brand of house battery. So, when you buy a new car, I guess they think you will throw out your house solar panels and backup battery. If you want two cars, then I guess you get a divorce?

	▲	1dom 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks, I really appreciated this comment, a lot to think about! > Some company is going to create a gray-market "high voltage -> top N home battery systems" dongle that you can just wire into the battery pack on your car. I agree. I've been thinking of trying to build a similar but more generically, a "240v in dongle" which would just be a bench PSU with phase synching and islanding config (e.g. allow power if islanding is handled at home level, or operate grid tied and cut off if not). This would allow any device with a standard 240v AC output to safely power a home, so this would include basically any EV (as most have V2L) as well as a lot of other generators, UPS batteries etc. I thought the phase synching/grid tying stuff was really hard or complex or expensive to do, but the recent boom in balcony solar shows it's totally feasible to make and distribute hardware that apparently safely does this for less than a couple hundered. This issue is regs. Tbf, I think in the UK, it just needs someone with money and confidence to do it fast and safe enough that the obvious immediate benefits force a law change. The balcony solar regs changes this year really showed how needlessly behind our grid regs are. Now is the time to do it too, with big scares around energy costs and WW3, this would gel well with the push for EVs. > Leave the car ignition on, and it runs the gas engine for a few minutes an hour indefinitely because it sees the drain and thinks you are driving it. Oh wow, I hadn't even thought of that! I'd only ever considered pure EVs. Feels like hybrids have a lot to go wrong, but this is a really interesting use case that I could justify a hybrid to entertain. > Most modern EV's support this sort of thing officially, but they're hardwired to one brand of house battery. I haven't seen this much though - most cars I've seen that mention v2g or v2h mention the generic standards around it, rather than any specific manufacturers. The "hardwired to one brand" tend to be hardwired to the brands that have said they support the standards (OCPP, ISO 15118 etc.), at least in the UK.

▲

hommelix 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is the same as home photovoltaic or backup petroleum generator. The home kits don't have their own frequency generator. They lock on the grid frequency and just follow it. A system with own frequency generator needs to be able to bias its own frequency to get into phase with the grid before the breaker is closed. You need a controller that measure both the local and the grid frequency to control this synchronization.

Once you have one such frequency source in your island grid, then you can operate it together with the simpler home kit. Just need one source of frequency. On a generator, look for isochrone vs droop operation.

▲

the_sleaze_ a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> My tinfoil hat [...] the relationship between energy providers and law makers

My local establishment's energy czar is also on the board of the electric company (itself a natural monopoly of course).

No tinfoil hat required. They have re-elected her several times as well.

	▲	logicchains 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>itself a natural monopoly With widespread solar and batteries, energy is becoming less and less of a "natural monopoly", the state should stop granting legal monopolies to energy companies under the outdated assumption that it's more efficient.