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Fermata Energy's Claire Weiller on the opportunities for vehicle to X
74 Plays1 year ago
Claire Weiller, head of Product and Partnerships at Fermata Energy, joins Anthony, Mike, and Karthik to discuss how electric vehicles can act as energy storage for the grid.
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Transcript
Introduction & Fictional Tech
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to Innovation Matters, the podcast about sustainable innovation brought to you by Lux Research. I'm Anthony Schiavo. I'm your host. I'm joined as ever by my co-hosts, Karthik Subramyan and Mike Holman. And I'm excited to announce that we've developed a technology to unilaterally destroy all other podcasts on sustainable innovation via sort of a
00:00:29
Speaker
Large-scale particle accelerator we can we can shoot particles through the earth and defuse any podcast before it's produced So really excited to corner the market on on sustainable innovation podcast going forward Possibly we're gonna corner the market on all podcasts going forward. So yeah, that's uh, it's really exciting Mike I'm really pleased to the work you've been doing is paid off and I
00:00:56
Speaker
There was this paper, it's a 2003 paper that kind of went viral last week on this concept of using particle accelerators to destroy nuclear weapons. But you need a thousand kilometer long particle accelerator and a couple other things to make it work. 50 gigawatts worth of power as well. Yeah, that's actually already the amount of power we use to produce this podcast. So that part's fine.
Lewis Hamilton Joins Ferrari: Impact on F1
00:01:27
Speaker
How's it going, fellas? Karthik, I know you received a significant shock last week. How are you processing the Lewis Hamilton news? I was shocked when my friend sent me the message. He was like, yeah, Lewis Hamilton joined Ferrari. I was like, what? But it's only next year, though, because everyone thought it was going to be for this year, but he's actually joining next year. I feel sorry for the other Ferrari driver.
00:01:49
Speaker
Yeah, it's going to be a tense, tense year in the, who is he with currently, Mercedes? Mercedes. Little tense in the Mercedes race channels, you know, for this year, right?
00:02:00
Speaker
It just shows that Mercedes don't have a good car probably for this year, which is I think what Mercedes fans would be shocked about. I support Max Verstappen, so it's immaterial to me. It shook the world nonetheless. Teasing the podcast for next week, probably. I do have a demo booked for the Apple Vision Pro. The Vision Pro sewed. We'll report back on that to the podcast audience next week, I guess.
00:02:23
Speaker
Yeah. We're going to be doing, um, we're going to be doing this podcast via the, what is the thing called where you see the face? Oh, it's called a persona, the persona. We're going to be doing the persona podcast. Uh, it's going to be great. We're pivoting to that. In addition to pivoting to F1 content.
Decarbonization & Climate Tech in Europe
00:02:38
Speaker
Um, but we actually, we, we did have some, some news we want to talk about, Mike, you were sharing around these slides from Nat Bullard, who's an independent journalist really focusing on climate tech. And there's some interesting stuff in there you wanted to flag up.
00:02:52
Speaker
Yeah, so he puts out this presentation on decarbonization every year. It's 200 slides. And there's actually a lot of really interesting nuggets and things in there on everything from supply to critical minerals to the ESG backlash and all that sort of stuff.
00:03:12
Speaker
So it's pretty comprehensive. It's definitely worth a look through. I think one of the things that caught my eye that we were chatting about earlier is looking at the venture funding or tech investing, as he puts it, in Europe. And the carbon and energy category is now actually the largest
00:03:34
Speaker
Climate tech essentially is now the largest sector for venture investment in Europe, essentially, ahead of software, ahead of healthcare, biotech, ahead of finance, fintech stuff, which is a big change and a big contrast from what you see elsewhere in the world.
00:03:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's a big change even from a few years ago, right? This upsurge in climate tech funding has been pretty significant. It's not like it's grown steadily over the years. It's just in the last few years. Yeah, it's just like all in the last two years, basically. Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting. As much as I'm a Europe hater and I've made enemies with the people of the fine city of Brussels or whatever in the course of doing this podcast, we did an event in Amsterdam last year and I talked about how
00:04:19
Speaker
I could really see the European chemicals industry and the European sustainability industry a bit more broadly as being resurgent, right? And I think there's a sense that European industry has been maybe stagnating. You know, you look at in 2000, Europe was like a net exporter of chemicals, right? And today it's like a net importer by a significant margin, right?
00:04:41
Speaker
But what it's always done well is some of the higher tech stuff, the flavors, fragrances, healthcare. You have this very significant center for clean tech innovation. Europe could really be the technology exporter for a lot of different industries in kind of the same way that the Silicon Valley is like this hub and this sort of exporter of technology innovation globally today. And just in general, I think people sleep on Europe a little bit too much.
Europe's Clean Tech & Industrial Potential
00:05:08
Speaker
Probably this is, at least I have contributed to this in some way, but the kind of Airbus news of the... Excuse me, not Airbus, but the Boeing news recently where doors are just flying off and you compare that to Airbus, their plane caught on fire and everyone survived. It's basically as catastrophic of an incident as you can imagine. I don't know, man. Europe's got the juice.
00:05:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the Airbus Boeing one is an interesting case because it really has. I don't have the stats in front of me, but I was listening to a podcast about this a couple of weeks ago. And Airbus is really from kind of Boeing being a clear number one, like Airbus has really pulled ahead there. And there's, yeah, there's a lot of obviously a lot of investment and a lot of interesting
00:05:52
Speaker
and valuable stuff there. I guess the question is more, you know, as a technology exporter, that makes sense. But, you know, this has happened before, right, with the whole thing with solar, right? And in back in, you know, 2007, 2006, when we first started covering this stuff at Lux, the center of the solar industry was in Germany, right? That's where
00:06:12
Speaker
the most installations were happening. That's where a large amount of the manufacturing was taking place as well. And then China totally ate their lunch, both in manufacturing and in installations. And I'm not sure that Germany retains that much of the benefit from the investments that they made in kicking off the solar industry and building a lot of that domestic capacity there.
00:06:39
Speaker
I'm not surprised by this. And the reason I say that is because when I was at the conference in Brussels, sorry, Mike, sorry, Anthony, I mean, it's still a nice city. I was at Brussels. The general consensus that I always feel when I talk to people representing European organizations in general is that Europe always wants to be the torchbearer of the energy transition. So they want to be the one that lead innovation that show the world how innovation is meant to be done. I'm not surprised to see climate tech, which is the need of the R.
00:07:09
Speaker
is what's getting the most interest in Europe, and I expect this trend to continue. Perhaps with chemicals or specific industries, I don't know which ones, but I think they're going to pour in a lot of money for R&D in general across various sectors related to climate tech. Mike, you brought up the solar example.
00:07:24
Speaker
I think we see today that governments are a lot more proactive in funding the development of the technologies, but also funding the scale up of the technologies in America. We have the IRA, even in Europe, we have a more intensive industrial policy, right? And it looks like that policy is going to continue to intensify.
00:07:44
Speaker
Is it a different situation compared to a decade ago or two decades ago with solar, where you had, of course, economic advantages in a Chinese law class labor, but also a lot of pretty strong subsidies. There's a government policy element to what the Chinese government did with solar. Do you think that that playing field is more leveled now and maybe the technologies are going to have a better chance of staying in Europe? Or do you think that it's going to have a similar experience?
00:08:13
Speaker
I think there's potential for it to be different this time around. Because I think one of the dynamics with solar is it was really the reason that the idea of being a technology exporter didn't work there is it was really pretty conventional technology. Silicon solar panels have been around for a long time.
00:08:34
Speaker
The sort of stuff that's being developed in Europe now is more novel and kind of cutting edge. It's not as much just a matter of scale up. One of the big things was thin film solar, right? There were all these companies, a lot of them in Germany, were developing novel thin film technologies, SIGS and more of a silicon, Cattell and all these.
00:08:57
Speaker
all these sort of technologies. And if those had panned out and had proved to be the future of solar, then I do think, you know, Germany and Europe would have been in a stronger position to benefit from them.
00:09:09
Speaker
you know, in the event they all kind of got crushed by the incumbent technology because just because the the silicon approach got so cheap and a lot of the, you know, the thin film things didn't didn't work out. But I think if I do think we are to kind of get to this next stage of the energy transition, I think it is clearly going to require
00:09:31
Speaker
more novel technology and not just scale up of things that we know pretty well already. So I do think that that presents a better opportunity, but it will depend on the industrial policy, I think for sure.
Nuclear Energy & Alternatives
00:09:48
Speaker
Speaking of industrial policy in Germany,
00:09:54
Speaker
Germany is very notable for its policy of shutting down nuclear reactors, right? Despite the fact that it's in an energy crisis and also it's gonna replace them with coal.
00:10:05
Speaker
And I think that this is very emblematic of where we're at with nuclear, which is we're still fighting a lot of the same battles. I was reading this book from 2012 about clean tech in general. It's kind of written by this crank, but a lot of the complaints he makes about nuclear in the book are still pretty valid, right? Issues of proliferation, issues of
00:10:29
Speaker
And Karthik, you flagged up an interesting startup that you wanted to discuss operating in the nuclear space. What's this company and what are we doing here in this space? This company is not German, they are Swiss, but they recently raised $20 million for what they call as a transmutation reactor, or that kind of a concept. What they do is the reactor is subcritical. So for listeners who don't know what criticality means,
00:10:57
Speaker
criticalities when a nuclear reactor can sustain its reaction.
00:11:01
Speaker
So you don't need any external inputs, but they make it subcritical. So you have an external neutron source that keeps powering this reactor, which is of course much safer because without this external source, the reaction can't continue. So you shut down this external source, for instance, a particle accelerator, not as long as 1000 kilometers, but something much smaller, but still enough to keep that reaction going. So it's a safer reactor.
00:11:27
Speaker
Again, as you mentioned, Antony, one of the biggest concerns of nuclear is always proliferation, right? So you think about uranium, you can use uranium to make plutonium. Plutonium is used in bombs. People don't like that. And it's very hard to sort of separate nuclear energy program and nuclear weapons programs. It's always very difficult, as you say. So what these guys propose is that they would use thorium instead. So they are thorium you can read. Yes. So they are a thorium reactor and they're going to use lead bismuth cooling.
00:11:57
Speaker
They haven't released so much information on size and things like that, but it's just that they're a subcritical reactor. So that's their big differentiator. I feel like people my age, which podcast listeners, you can just sort of guess whatever makes you feel comfortable. People my age, like when I was 16, I was doing a lot of reading online about thorium reactors and there was like a lot of, it was kind of this, and like in college as well, it was like this kind of like,
00:12:23
Speaker
18-year-old engineers, 16-year-old aspiring engineers all got really into thorium through very early YouTube videos and online discussions and stuff like that. So I didn't realize this is thorium because I think when you think about conventional nuclear, to me, a lot of the risks are overblown. A lot of the complaints are pretty misplaced in pretty bad ways.
00:12:47
Speaker
But nuclear proliferation is distinctly not one of those. I think it's pretty legit. And you know, the reality is nuclear waste is certainly a vector for proliferation. So it's not just about.
00:13:01
Speaker
the fuels up front, it's also about the waste at the back end. So this is actually more valuable than I realized when you first told me about it. Any type of non-self-sustaining nuclear reaction, that's going to be less energy efficient. You're producing less energy overall. Do you see that as an issue? It's got to be a lot of capex too. What do you think? Is this viable?
00:13:26
Speaker
I mean, in terms of CAPEX, generally speaking, nuclear is very expensive. So I think when you talk about it, I don't think CAPEX is going to be the bigger argument here. How much more expensive is it going to be? I really don't think so much. I'm not familiar with particle accelerator costs. But as Mike mentioned in the paper that recently went viral, if you're going to spend $50 billion on just the particle accelerator, then we can throw that idea completely out of the window.
00:13:52
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at the diagram on their website and the particle accelerator is they've drawn it as like maybe 5, 7 meters in diameter. So it's not like a super huge one. Exactly. And the issue that you bring up with energy efficiency is the more interesting one because particle accelerators always take up a lot of energy. And the problem is if you want to say we're going to have a continuous power source,
00:14:22
Speaker
your particle accelerator is the single point of failure here because if you can't reliably keep that running or powering that, you stop the nuclear reactor from working. So first of all, you need huge amounts of power and energy to keep the particle accelerator running and it has to be foolproof. So you have to ensure that there is no shortage of stoppage, which I think is gonna be the more difficult part with this, which is why I think it's gonna be tough.
00:14:49
Speaker
This concept I don't think has been tried before commercially, of course. So God knows what challenges we will face with, you know, regulations and if regulators can even understand how this thing works and if they can, you know, give design licenses and safety parameters and defining all of that. So that's going to be a big hurdle also. Yeah, that's a good point. Like one of the things that, you know, nuclear reactors do so well is their capacity factor is like 90%. Right.
00:15:16
Speaker
which is way better than even coal plants, right? Let alone intermittent renewables, which obviously have a very low capacity factor by default. So taking a nuclear and saying, yeah, what if the capacity factor was like 60% because some amount of time or, you know, we need this pretty complex piece of equipment to be working and doesn't necessarily have 100% uptime, right?
00:15:42
Speaker
Yeah, so when we did our economic analysis for nuclear reactors in our recent report, we did see that decreasing capacity factor can have a huge impact on your LCOE and your levelized costs, because the moment you go from, let's say, 85% capacity factor to 65% capacity factor, your LCOE rise, if you would call it that, would be by 30%. So your electricity becomes 1.3 times more expensive.
00:16:10
Speaker
And that's just with existing technologies. So I'm not sure how it would work with this one. Is the uptime that much of, I mean, it probably will be at first because just because it's a new technology, but I don't know. I mean, a particle accelerator is a complicated piece of equipment, but we've also been running particle accelerators for 75, 80 years now. Yeah, but have we been running them continuously? Right. Like that's like running a piece of scientific equipment.
00:16:36
Speaker
to me is very different than running a particle accelerator as a part of an energy generating system. You know what I mean? Yeah, but I think I would imagine like the, I mean, you know, with with something like, like, what's the giant, the giant one, the large hairdryer? Like those sort of the one that's on, right? Yeah, the one in certain like, yeah, they'll, they'll like run it for like 10 minutes, and then it's down for six months or something.
00:17:01
Speaker
They can only fire it up every several months. Whenever they need to alter the timeline of human events. It's interesting you bring up Sun because this project was actually inspired by the Sun particle accelerator. I think one of the founders has worked with the Sun team before and he's the one who came up with this concept in 2019. It's definitely further out than a lot of the other alternate nuclear concepts.
00:17:26
Speaker
I would think, though maybe it's more realistic or nearer term than the fusion concepts would be, which we also talk about.
Guest Claire Weiler: V2X Technology Insights
00:17:46
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome back. For this episode, we have Claire Weiler joining us from Formata Energy. For those who are unfamiliar with Formata Energy, they are a V2X, so vehicle-to-anything solution provider. And this anything can be vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-building, vehicle-to-home, so anything related to bidirectional charging capabilities, et cetera. So Claire, welcome on the show. Nice to meet you.
00:18:15
Speaker
Why don't you go ahead and introduce Formana Energy for us first? Yeah, sure. Thank you very much for the invitation on your show. Formana Energy is a software platform that also comes with charging hardware that delivers integrated vehicle-to-everything solutions. As you just said, Karthik basically we turn
00:18:42
Speaker
electric cars while they're parked into many battery storage assets through software mainly, but also hardware technology. So we're a really technology solutions provider in that space. One thing that I noticed while we did reach out to you was that since your time at the University of Cambridge, you have worked in V2G, EV charging.
00:19:05
Speaker
And I think this was at a time when EVs and V2G was not really the thing to think about when it comes to electrification. So I'm curious to know about your innovation journey, what's it been like from University of Cambridge all the way to where you are at this point.
00:19:23
Speaker
Yeah, well, I have to say I feel very fortunate on a daily basis that I'm actually working directly in the field of my academic studies. And in the past, I'm working now with a company that's actually like turning vehicle to grid and EVs into a reality. And so where this kind of started for me was I started very broad actually in undergraduate studies focusing on environmental science.
00:19:51
Speaker
in general, so realizing it occurred to me that climate change would be one of the major issues for the next century. And from the environment, undergrad studies, I kind of focused in in energy science and technology, and that kind of brought me to the world of renewable energy. And there was this one innovation, electric vehicles, that got me particularly interested around that time, and especially the questions of
00:20:20
Speaker
How can electric vehicles be better integrated in energy systems? And what are the business models that are going to make it possible for this technology to come to market and to be widely adopted? And you're right, at the time 2010 or so, when I did my master thesis in Palo Alto at EPRI on grid impacts of electric cars, there was still a big
00:20:48
Speaker
question mark, open question as to whether electric cars would sort of take up as an industry. And so that's how I got interested in business model innovation and the new business models. And so I started thinking about these questions around vehicle to grid, how to lower the cost of ownership of electric cars, and how to reduce the barriers to consumer adoption of electric cars quite early on.
00:21:18
Speaker
Yeah, and then started working in a related space in renewable energy investments that sort of was scouting out for companies, especially startup companies that were active in e-mobility and active specifically in the kind of integration of electric cars in the energy system and came eventually landed at Formata.
00:21:44
Speaker
So I'm curious because you described Formata as kind of a vehicle-to-anything platform. And one of the big questions for me as we think about this space is, where is that initial application really likely to spread? And where is this likely to be common? Because there's a lot of vehicles on the road today. Most of them are not, as far as I'm aware, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but most are not doing bidirectional charging.
00:22:14
Speaker
So where do you see the sort of the scale up, the initial scale up happening in vehicle decks? You know, is it more decentralized in homes or more large scale in grids? And how do you see that playing out? That is a great question and really great question and kind of very core to a company like ours is strategy in the market. And so the way we're approaching it at Fermana is
00:22:44
Speaker
starting in the commercial segment for vehicles. So fleet vehicles, that can be light duty, but it can also be medium and heavy duty vehicles like school buses or trucks. Why? Because business owners have the mindset of focusing on total cost of ownership and really enjoy the aspect of our application, which is
00:23:11
Speaker
that we're earning additional revenue and we're demonstrating this across sites in the US today, earning thousands of dollars from electric vehicles while they're parked for these fleet operators. And so asset owners who are looking to kind of maximize their asset returns are adopting kind of for economic reasons at this stage. But we do see the mass market to come a little bit back to your question in the residential
00:23:41
Speaker
residential passenger car market and that's the majority of vehicles for private transportation are in that segment and we are in the middle of preparing a solution with partners so will be announced hopefully in the next few weeks or months for the residential market and that's where I think in the home when people buy a car and decide
00:24:10
Speaker
hey, I want to do a vehicle to home. I want to use my car to power up my own house when there's a grid outage or maybe to maximize the benefits I get from my solar panels. That's where I think that the mass market is going to be for the technology. On that point, I'm curious about the industrial and the more fleet applications because it seems like there's a tension there. You know, fleet operators,
00:24:38
Speaker
They want to typically be maximizing the usage of their fleets. And time spent not using them is typically lost time. This is one of the big issues when you think about electric trucking. And one of the big complaints against electric trucking is, oh, it's going to have this long charging time, downtime. You won't be able to drive the trucks as much. So is there...
00:25:00
Speaker
You know, for these fleet operators, is that a concern or are these, you know, are there constraints where they sort of naturally have time that they're not charging the vehicles or sort of, you know, not using them as well? Or is there that flexibility in the system? Yeah, it definitely depends on the usage profiles of the different fleets and vehicle to create makes sense where there's some flexibility in that time that the vehicle is being used.
00:25:29
Speaker
So as long as vehicles are parked for longer than they need to charge, there's a great potential to do vehicle to grid. And that means fleets of vehicles like school buses, for example, are a great use case because there's very specific routes they do in the morning, they'll do in the afternoon to pick up the kids from school, and then
00:25:53
Speaker
The rest of the day, the rest of the hours of the day and all summer, by the way, sometimes when there's school breaks, these vehicles are parked and can be used as great assets. And we see other specific use cases for light duty fleets. In a lot of cases, there's service vehicles or municipality owned vehicles or utility owned vehicles that are basically parked at the end of the working day and stay on site at a depot, for example,
00:26:21
Speaker
wherever they are at an office site, and they'll stay parked from kind of end of the afternoon until early morning. And that vehicle is actually a resource for the grid that can be used for about 12 hours a day. So that's also a great application. Car sharing. Car sharing is a great combined usage where whenever the vehicle is not being driven and booked by car share users,
00:26:49
Speaker
going on trips, it can be actually making money in the meantime just while it's connected to the system. One of the things that also struck me while having this discussion, of course, is it seems that with vehicle to grid, it's very easy when you can aggregate vehicles at a spot because you have your patterns, you have a cadence that you can stick to that makes it very easy to monitor and manage the assets.
00:27:19
Speaker
When it comes to vehicle to home, and I guess you may already know what I'm going to ask, but when it comes to vehicle to home, it's sort of like trying to dictate free will, because if I have an EV, I want to go to a store whenever I want. I want to go to the park whenever I want, and I want to use my car. So it becomes really difficult to sort of, let's say,
00:27:43
Speaker
load manage or create the demand flexibility when it comes to vehicle to home. And you also said that what drew you to this field was the business model side. So how do you see business models sort of impacting vehicle to home specifically and individual consumers? Because I see that as maybe the next step after fleet. So what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the key premises that our service is based on is that users are free to
00:28:13
Speaker
drive their cars whenever they want to. There's no restrictions. Absolutely. As a car owner, you can't have your freedom to use your car whenever you want restricted. So it's really on our service to manage that variability and a bit of that randomness in when a user drives to the shop and when another user comes back. And so that's really embedded within our solution. We have multiple tools to address that problem.
00:28:43
Speaker
But one of them is our AI-based algorithms that are basically forecasting when cars are going to be in and out and making these predictions of the capacity that we as a company have to work with across all of the residential sites to present that capacity as a whole to the utility markets and utility programs. So it's really all about forecasting
00:29:11
Speaker
probabilities of people plugging in, plugging out at different times. We are also developing vehicle telematics integration solution, which helps us when even fleets sometimes have pretty sporadic duty cycles and usage patterns. And yeah, and so that's one way that we have of sort of
00:29:37
Speaker
getting data on their routes and being much better at forecasting granularly and especially not getting in the way of our customer's usage of their vehicle, just working in the background with what they can have to offer from their vehicles.
V2X Technology: Adoption & Challenges
00:29:53
Speaker
What do you see as driving this more consumer oriented adoption? Is it something where this is going to be like a visible thing to them that they're going to kind of opt into as like, Hey, like this is a service you can earn revenue or have these advantages? Or do you think this is something that's going to be a bit more passive? Like all OEM cars of Brand X are just sold with this type of thing. And the instructions are plug your car in when you're not using it and like,
00:30:23
Speaker
it sort of is invisible-ish to the consumer. How do you think that market's going to develop? Yeah, that's a great question. It depends a little bit on the role that the car manufacturers want to play in the long-term product, let's say. I think we will see manufacturers offering the option. Like, do you want your vehicle to have that option enabled for bi-directional charging or not?
00:30:51
Speaker
probably just like any other options that you can buy with a car that comes with it. The consumer then purchases the charger that goes along with the bidirectional to make it work. And in terms of why people want to buy this, it might be partly for energy savings to participate in some of the utility programs that are available, but
00:31:17
Speaker
We also really think it's for people to take control of their home energy consumption and to power their home basically when the grid lets them down and during outages. So we're seeing this as an alternative buy to generators, for example.
00:31:38
Speaker
I guess how widespread do you expect that to be and are you looking for like a regulatory push here? Because most homes don't necessarily have a generator, but presumably we're going to shift to EVs in a much broader scale, right? So there's kind of a mismatch there.
00:31:56
Speaker
that type of, I don't want to say, prepper. There's a sort of type of person who's very concerned about being off-grid or maybe not even being off-grid, but having that level of resiliency. Even in Massachusetts, where there's a lot of rooftop solar, you don't see as much of that kind of grid resiliency or home resiliency driver, at least in my experience. So I'm curious as to, as we scale up EVs, do you expect that this is something that will ultimately become standard and just
00:32:26
Speaker
Or is this something where they will be part of homeownership or part of EV ownership will be sort of you're going to have to be more aware of this type of thing? Yeah, I absolutely think that this technology needs to become mainstream to have like there's more storage embedded in electric vehicles on the road today in the US than in all utility scale grid storage. So that capacity just needs to be
00:32:55
Speaker
unlocked somehow for the utility. So there is a regulatory push from the energy market side. Why are cars not coming out though today with this capability already? I think that's something that we are working very hard on a day-to-day basis to work with car manufacturers and get them to produce the cars with the right technology, to understand the business case.
00:33:25
Speaker
The reality of where they're at is there's more and more electric car models, but it's still not the majority of cars in the market. So we're still a little bit early even in the EV market. And car manufacturers are just figuring out their strategies around mass market electric vehicles. So they're busy producing those with standardization for the general market, for public charging.
00:33:54
Speaker
communication standards with charging. And so there's a bit of a shift that's required for V2G in the vehicle manufacturer not just selling a car upfront and then sort of leaving it up to the after sales network for all the service and maintenance. But in potentially, V2G potentially means that OEMs retain a stage and recurring revenue potential
00:34:21
Speaker
and recurring customer service and engagement with those customers once the vehicle has been purchased. But that's a huge shift in the mindset and in the business models again of OEMs. So we're seeing that this mass market is in preparation in all of our sort of behind the scenes industry conversations, partnerships that we're building across the OEM industry and across the charging industry.
00:34:51
Speaker
They're preparing things, they're getting prepared basically for the mass market launch and they can't afford to get it wrong because they have their reputations on the line. So they like to make things absolutely perfect and watertight before releasing products to market. So we know a ton of OEMs that have announced new vehicle to bridge compatible models.
00:35:19
Speaker
So that includes Volvo, for example, that includes Stellantis, Renault, and a big one that we've been working with for a very long time has been Nissan. And Nissan really has figured this out on Vehicle2Grid from the very beginning. And that's why we've been sort of demonstrating everything we could with them for the last 10 years or so in the US.
00:35:47
Speaker
But other car manufacturers are taking an interest and catching up on it and also preparing. And I think we will see many, many more bi-directional vehicles released in the market within a year or two. And that will really kind of kickstart the mass market for that. Because once some cars come with it, then other car manufacturers have to offer it as well. It's just otherwise you're no longer competitive.
00:36:14
Speaker
When it comes to, Anthony was talking about how Massachusetts has a lot of rooftop solar. In California, you have a lot of rooftop solar. And we generally see when people add a lot of rooftop solar, they add a lot of stationary battery storage behind the meter with that so that they improve their energy efficiency and their grid resiliency from the grid. And when you couple this with the fact that if you have a vehicle with bidirectional charging capabilities,
00:36:40
Speaker
you're still cycling it a lot more because whenever it is stationary, it is still running the battery, right? So if you think about cycle life overall, it goes down compared to having it stationary and not charging the grid. Do you see that as being one of the reasons why automakers have sort of hesitated to go to V2G as a standard solution or are there other factors at play?
00:37:00
Speaker
I think the battery cycling issue might be one, the OEMs are still sort of collecting data and having research on, but all of the early deployments of V2G have shown that actually battery degradation costs from V2G cycling, even with very intensive V2G activity that's earning a lot of revenues from various markets, is actually very, very small compared to other
00:37:29
Speaker
factors of battery degradation. So calendar aging, which is just the passing of time, is basically the biggest factor of battery degradation. And then if you look, actually, someone who has the opportunity to see the power flows from a vehicle's battery, during driving, those power flows are orders of magnitude higher than what we're talking about
00:37:58
Speaker
when we're talking about charging and discharging the vehicle while it's parked. So that is almost like a gentle massage for the battery you could think of because the sea rates are very, very low. Generally, you won't install a charger that's, you know, if it's in a home that's much more than a 0.3 or a 0.5 sea rate. But the sea rates that they get, well, when for propulsion, when a vehicle needs to drive and kind of carry that huge
00:38:28
Speaker
mass forward on the road is much, much higher. So actually, V2G degradation and we're working to collect more and more data about this. And there's a bunch of research that has come out pretty recently suggesting that V2G actually doesn't have a big impact, even though there is additional cycling for charging, discharging, earning economic revenues.
00:38:57
Speaker
from grid opportunities, that the cycling effect has very minimal negative impact on the battery life and we can actually manage battery health to help improve the battery life compared to what an uninformed user might do with their battery.
00:39:18
Speaker
One last question, and maybe one last more serious question as we kind of finish up here. We've talked a lot about the auto OEMs, their incentives, and even with charging, there was a pretty long period of auto OEMs trying to develop proprietary standards and then sort of reluctantly moving towards a unified standard now, it seems like, in the face of both some regulatory pressure and also some
00:39:47
Speaker
you know, some things winning in the market a bit more. How do you see that developing in this space? Do you think that maybe, you know, you'll have the same long period of OEMs each trying to win? Or do you think because the charging is already becoming increasingly standardized, we can move more quickly towards a standard year? But how do you see that developing? And what are the incentives at play, you know, from your perspective there? Yeah, the question of standards for bi-directional charging is just not resolved yet.
00:40:16
Speaker
Um, so there has been the Charamo standard, the one developed by Nisa or implemented by Nissan and the Japanese car makers, uh, was the one that can do V2G, um, naturally. Um, and that's why all of those cars were, were V2G compatible from, from the start. Um, and then the kind of European auto industry, uh, and North American as well sort of decided they didn't want to apply that standard for, for EV charging.
00:40:47
Speaker
and developed their alternatives, so the combined charge standard, CCS. And that one is having difficulties, I would say taking hold because the version of the underlying ISO communication standards that could do bi-directional or has been designed basically to do bi-directional
00:41:12
Speaker
is quite complex. And so a lot of the OEMs are actually still fighting against it, not really wanting to implement it. And that is completely, I'd say, yeah, one of the reasons that's holding vehicle-to-grids primetime back a little bit at the moment. So it's not a given. A lot of people said Chardonnault standard is dead. It's being replaced by CCS 15-20, but actually,
00:41:43
Speaker
I, our view, I think from some of our people internally at, at Vermont energy is that the standards battle is kind of not, not over and not decided yet. And there still is room for a better solution to, to come to, to market. So maybe we'll see that coming from China. Maybe it will be some adapted version of the CCS standard. Um, but there, there definitely needs to be a standard that
00:42:13
Speaker
comes quickly enough to make this mass market and work interoperably across chargers and EV models. Last question. I think we really appreciate you coming on, Claire, and chatting with us. I've learned a lot. What are you driving? That's the big question. Do you have an EV? Are you driving an EV? Are you doing vehicle degree to yourself? Are you practicing what you're doing here? Absolutely.
00:42:39
Speaker
It's Tesla Model 3 and I did try to get a contract with the utility to make it participate in some of these demand response programs over here in London. Now I charge in public chargers because I live in an apartment and so I don't have a dedicated sort of garage or charge point and they said I can't do it because I use public chargers to do it.
00:43:09
Speaker
Absolutely, if I could monetize my EV, why not? And help the grid at the same time. I think that's a winning proposition for all of us. And frankly, I cannot wait for the day that Tesla announces bidirectional compatibility of their cars. And from some insider friends, it sounds like they're imminently going to do it, but then
00:43:35
Speaker
Who knows? You don't know. Elon Musk, we know you're listening to this podcast. Claire says, get on it. We expect your email within the hour. Thank you very much. All right. Well, Claire, thanks so much for coming on. We really appreciate your time and having this great conversation. If Elon does any of that stuff, we'll be sure to invite you back on to get your report. Definitely. Thank you so much for joining. Thank you both. It was a great time.
00:44:04
Speaker
All right, we'll leave it there. If you want to support this podcast, you can follow us on Spotify or on Apple podcasts. You can also join us at our upcoming forum series. We're really excited. These are, I think, all live now. We have the forums in Houston.
00:44:23
Speaker
in actually pretty soon in March we have March 5th March 5th Brussels and Boston and then we're gonna be doing one in Chicago, but I don't think we've finalized the date yet So, you know, we're we're delighted to see you all there. Yeah Come out They'll be good. I'm out Lux research out. Um, they're all up there. Www dot Lux Research Inc dot com slash forums
00:44:53
Speaker
slash forums. Just type that into your web browser.