05 May 23 - California bill to mandate bidirectional charger
Vehicle-to-grid (V2G)
California’s legislature advanced SB-233 last week. If the 14 million+ cars currently registered in the state had a 75 kWh battery, the combined energy storage would amount to just over a terawatt-hour.
California is evaluating a mandate requiring all electric vehicles (EVs) to have “vehicle-to-everything” (V2E) capabilities by January 1, 2027. The state defines V2E as a system where an EV’s battery’s stored energy can be used for various purposes, including powering a home (vehicle-to-home), a building (vehicle-to-building), a microgrid, another vehicle, or providing electricity to the electrical grid (vehicle-to-grid).
All V2E vehicles and infrastructure will be required to be interoperable.
The bill, SB-233, includes light vehicles and school buses. On April 25, 2023, it passed the legislature’s Transportation committee 11 to 3, and is now advancing to the Appropriations committee.
The bill notes that California already has laws on the books that project deployed EVs will exceed eight million cars by 2030. At 75 kWh per vehicle, it’d total 0.6 TWh of cumulative energy storage. As of 2021, more than 14 million cars were registered in the state. If all 14.2 million cars had a 75 kWh battery, the combined energy storage would amount to just over a terawatt-hour.
The bill would dictate that starting in 2024, California will hold quarterly interoperability testing events, allowing companies to share products and information while testing the compatibility of electric vehicles, electric vehicle supply equipment, and emerging V2E technology. These events will contribute to the development of state standards.
Additionally, before 2027, the state plans will incentivize buyers to acquire bidirectional equipment, in order to smooth the transition.
As part of the research and development process, California will evaluate individual use cases to identify vehicle and charger types that may not benefit from this technology and could be exempted. One potential exception cited is high-speed public DC chargers.
Analysts estimate that between 80% (Tesla) and 90% (Lazards) of future battery cells will be used in vehicles, leaving 10% to 20% of remaining cells for power grid energy storage. Benchmark Mineral Intelligence projects that approximately 8.5 GWh/year of lithium-ion battery cell manufacturing capacity will be available by 2030.
If eight million cars were connected to California’s power grid, 600 GWhs of capacity would be added. To counterbalance the state’s peak electricity demand in August and September, California would need to deploy an additional 10 to 20 GW of resource adequacy, operating for four to five hours, amounting to 40 to 80 GWh.
Level II electric car chargers have output of 3 to 19.2 kW (the Ford Lightning). If cars averaged 10 kW, it’d take one to two million EVs to generate 10 to 20 GW of electricity.
01 May 23 - Ford and Collins share specs for E-transit elect
Vehicle-to-grid (V2G)
The E-Transit Type A school bus, which Ford showcased back in March, is now available for order from Collins Bus Corporation, one of the leading US school bus manufacturers.
The E-Transit is currently the leader of the US electric van market, with about 60% of last year’s EV van sales. But the E-Transit isn’t just a cargo van; you can also buy it as a cutaway chassis which can then be upfitted with various containers on the back, depending on what niche you want the vehicle to fill.
Collins is a bus manufacturer that Ford has worked with to fill that niche with a traditional yellow American school bus on Ford’s all-electric chassis.
The bus is a “Type A,” which is the smallest type of school bus, typically built on a cutaway van chassis – like that of the E-transit. “Type C” is the stereotypical purpose-built long, yellow bus that most often comes to mind when thinking of school buses.
The E-Transit school bus will be able to hold a dozen seated passengers or eight seated passengers and two wheelchairs in an alternate floor plan.
It maintains the 68 kWh capacity of the E-Transit van, which is good for about 100 miles of range after upfitting the vehicle through Collins. The plain cargo E-Transit gets 126 miles of range, according to Ford, but 100 should be more than enough for most school buses and their short daily routes.
Collins is not the only manufacturer who will use Ford’s school bus package, but Ford wanted to highlight Collins since the two had worked together on the original demo vehicle shown back in March.
FORD V2H
The all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck was unveiled on May 19, 2021 and received 20,000 reservations within 12 hours. The starting price is $39,974 for the entry-level version with Standard-Range Battery. The mid-series XLT trim will start at $52,974 MSRP
Most drivers want an EV in the next few years with V2L or V2G
Most Australian drivers planning to buy an electric vehicle “within the next few years” want vehicle-to-load or vehicle-to-grid technology, a recent survey conducted by The Driven and Jet Charge reveals.
And they may well have to wait that long, because with no signals at a federal level to bring more EVs to the country, many waiting lists for EVs are stretching into 2022 and in some cases 2023 and 2024.
The results underline the enormous interest that Australian drivers now have in electric vehicles. With petrol prices are soaring above $2.20, and despite little federal government support ,more drivers than ever before are looking to a car that needs less money spent on it in both power and servicing.
We’ve seen this in EV allocations from carmakers such as Hyundai and Kia being sold out in a matter of hours and even minutes. We’ve also seen it in soaring secondhand EV prices, because there are enough drivers out there sick of waiting for an EV and willing to pay more to get one now.
Therefore, the findings from the 1,248 people who responded to The Driven and Jet Charge survey couldn’t be more timely: the insights present a snapshot of what potential EV owners – who accounted for 44% of the respondents – want in their next car.
It’s no small matter that according to these results, just 15% are prepared to wait until EVs cost the same as combustion cars.
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Honda’s swappable battery stations for electric motorbikes, hoping to go global
Honda’s swappable battery packs, known as the Honda Mobile Power Pack e: (MPPe:), are soon getting their own Gogoro-style battery swapping stations for recharging.
The station will be known as the Honda Power Pack Exchanger e: (HPPEe:), just in case we needed another long acronym.
It features a number of battery slots that would allow electric scooters and motorbike riders to pop in their nearly depleted batteries and slide out a freshly charged MPPe: battery.
The stations have been delivered to Gachaco, the battery pack swapping company we first reported on earlier this year, and which was jointly formed by Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki, and Suzuki.
Those motorcycle makers, collectively known as the Big Four in Japan, led the founding of a consortium to develop a universal standard for swappable batteries used in electric motorbikes. Ultimately though, it appears they’ve all just decided to use Honda’s batteries as the standard.
Battery-Swapping Tech Gives Electric Motorcycles an Edge
Industry players are working on standardized swappable batteries that could shake up everything from garden trimmers to EV rickshaws.
THE IDEA OF swapping flat batteries for full ones on electric cars has been around for over a decade, but is still struggling to get traction despite the best efforts of Nio. On two wheels, though, the same idea has pulled together manufacturers like nothing else before in a global effort to create a standardized battery that works across multiple brands and models, and which opens the door to a new way of thinking in EV development.
In the West, electric motorcycle evolution and sales lag behind their four-wheeled equivalents. Smaller figures for sales, production and profits, longer model cycles, and a customer base that’s both enthusiastic about traditional ICE technology and wary of radical change mean that developing electric bikes and turning them into a large-scale money-making proposition is a daunting challenge that nobody has yet truly risen to.
But with legislation on the way to end the sales of carbon-emitting two-wheelers—as early as 2030 for smaller, lower performance bikes in the UK, if current government proposals get the green light—there’s a fast-growing need to solve the question of how to balance range, performance, and price of electric bikes in a way that will keep customers coming. And battery-swapping looks set to be a substantial part of the solution.
For electric cars, the challenge of swapping batteries is a monumental one. The car needs to be designed with it in mind, and the vast size and weight of battery packs means an automated, mechanical system is required to do the job. What’s more, with a growing number of EVs integrating their batteries into their structure to save weight and space, making them easily removable requires a complete U-turn in engineering. Even when battery-swapping has become a reality, as with China’s Nio brand, it’s limited to that company’s vehicles. Imagine if car makers a century ago required you to use only their brand of fuel, incompatible with any other vehicle—that’s the current state of the art for battery-swap tech in cars.
On two-wheels, a clear divide is starting to appear. While several brands focusing on larger, higher performance electric motorcycles are following the car route—engineering bespoke battery packs into their frames as structural components—a significant second group has realized that battery-swapping could be the key to a beneficial cycle, and that by working together to establish a standard (just as early electronics companies came together around the familiar AA, C, D, and AAA cells that are still in use today) they open the door to cheaper, lighter electric motorcycles and scooters that have none of the range anxiety associated with fixed-battery designs.
Future expansion of MPP applications
Considering the secondary use of MPP which becomes unsuitable for the use of mobility products due to degradation. Expanding the use of MPP beyond the boundaries of industries, while also working toward standardization.
Working toward the realization of carbon neutrality, Honda is striving to further expand the use of MPP for a broad range of products. At the same time, Honda is working on plans for secondary use (repurposing) of MPP when it becomes unsuitable for the use of mobility products due to a reduced battery capacity as a result of degradation, including uses as a storage battery for household use and as a power source for other products.
Moreover, various companies are currently considering the development of products that will use MPP as a power source. In order to accelerate such development and expand the use of MPP, Honda has been working toward the establishment of industry standards for portable and swappable batteries.
Honda developed MPP in order to enable people to use electricity from renewable energy sources conveniently, anytime and anywhere, for their mobility and daily lives by storing a small portion of such electricity in a portable and swappable battery. Moreover, MPP enables people to store and manage electricity, get connected with others and mutually accommodate electricity needs within a small unit such as mobility products and houses.
MPP e: is a lithium-ion battery capable of storing a large amount of electricity, more than 1.3kWh, which can be utilized as a power source for a broad range of electric devices including small-sized mobility products.
High versatility: In addition to mobility products, MPP e: can be utilized as a power source for a broad range of compatible devices.
High durability: By considering heat dissipation during continuous discharging, deterioration due to high temperature is prevented, and sufficient water resistance, vibration resistance and shock resistance are ensured under the expected normal operating environment.
Data utilization: The built-in control unit recognizes the conditions of the MPP e: and records the occurrence of all events. This data will be collected through the connector while MPP e: is charging and then utilized for the battery sharing operation and other sec