Good way to appreciate how tiny PW's are compared to EV batteries.
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Driving on Sunshine
- Thread starter dhrivnak
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- Energy Environment Policy
Good way to appreciate how tiny PW's are compared to EV batteries.
thesmokingman
Active Member
israndy
Supercharger Hunter
No I mean a Smart EVSE, as the charger is actually located in the car itself. The EVSE communicates with it and can tell it when to charge and can tell it how fast to charge, but otherwise it's basically an extension cord. The Tesla has a sorta smart charger in that you can set it to charge at many different rates and it can handle multiple voltages/amperages, it can be set to start at a specific time, and it can use the rate setting to calculate when it needs to start to finish at a specific set time (like when you need to leave for work).
Not sure how to respond, I am just looking at ALL my solar generation and then capturing any excess in the car's battery, if I go to 240V I would be charging the car from the grid, not from solar excess, please explain how that is MORE environmentally friendly
OK, but if EVERYONE of them set the car to start charging at the end of Peak time, won't that lead to the problems that I specified above? Since the JuiceBox is internet enabled they may be one of the first to come up with this protocol I referred to that allows the utilities to balance where the power is going. It's not like we at home know how many other cars in our neighborhood are all starting to charge at the same time, but the power company can see the draw and with car communication could control the draw with enough precision that they spin up car charging instead of producing heat to burn off extra energy that is being generated overnight when demand goes away.
Eventually there will be enough MegaPacks out there storing excess electricity that they could actually spin down the Peaker plants and rely on batteries to handle transient draws, but most battery production is currently going into producing electric cars.
JuiceBox works with PoCo's for these programs and uses data from CalISO in CA. Users set the earliest time when charging can start but JuiceBox will often shift it later depending on grid conditions. So, it can do demand-response shaping. For example, I set earliest time for charging start at the beginning of off-peak time period (11pm for me) but charging often don't actually start until 2 or 3 am.
The short version is you are artificially bumping up the energy required to charge your car by about 10% (~7 kWh on a full Model 3 LR charge, or ~5 kWh for a more normal charge). 5 kWh is a not-insignificant number. If you opt to instead charge your vehicle overnight at 240V, you are effectively creating 5 kWh of zero-impact energy relative to your present behavior. Meanwhile, the energy produced by your solar panels during the day which you may not have used yourself instead feed into your neighbors' usage, and your vehicle charges off of grid baseload overnight.
Whether you choose to charge directly off of your panel output or not is superfluous to your impact on the grid--that energy is being produced and consumed either way. The goal should be to use energy efficiently and to produce as much solar as you can rather than charging less efficiently at artificially-chosen times in order to use your own PV production.
Truly being self-powered only becomes a consideration when you have enough PV production and storage capacity to comfortably cover your entire usage at virtually all times.
swaltner
Active Member
Production has continued to be more than my yearly consumption since the new panels were expanded.
Current lifetime solar production is 100,160 kWh of electricity. Woohoo on that milestone!
The EVSE in the garage reports 27,159 kWh being consumed there, and according to my records, 21,100 kWh of that has gone into the Tesla with the balance on a previous EV.
Rothgarr
Active Member
israndy
Supercharger Hunter
OK, odd this thread hasn't been updated in all this time, I have updated my app to control the car while it's plugged into 240 volts. Instead of having a 120v switch turning charging off and on I do it by asking the car to stop and start charging, but I am still consuming my own solar, so a lot of it is at low wattage as I am sharing with the rest of the house. I am sure in the WORLD of generated power I am doing a disservice to someone, but using my own power means I am only paying 7¢/kWh that the power company would pay me for that same power. This is about half of what if would cost at night if I had TOU. It seems the deck is stacked in favor of me doing it this way.
The way Tesla appears to be about to do it too:
Tesla launches new feature to help solar homeowners charge with excess solar power
Tesla is launching a new feature to help homeowners with rooftop solar to charge their Tesla vehicles with excess solar...
electrek.co
OK, odd this thread hasn't been updated in all this time, I have updated my app to control the car while it's plugged into 240 volts. Instead of having a 120v switch turning charging off and on I do it by asking the car to stop and start charging, but I am still consuming my own solar, so a lot of it is at low wattage as I am sharing with the rest of the house. I am sure in the WORLD of generated power I am doing a disservice to someone, but using my own power means I am only paying 7¢/kWh that the power company would pay me for that same power. This is about half of what if would cost at night if I had TOU. It seems the deck is stacked in favor of me doing it this way.
The way Tesla appears to be about to do it too:
Tesla launches new feature to help solar homeowners charge with excess solar power
Tesla is launching a new feature to help homeowners with rooftop solar to charge their Tesla vehicles with excess solar...
So, would non-Tesla solar systems be supported?
israndy
Supercharger Hunter
If you mean doing what I am doing, running my app, controlling my car to charge only when my system shows excess power, yes, my system is non-Tesla, my app is my own.
Rothgarr
Active Member
That's exactly what I do. Like here's an example -- I just charge mine when it's sunny out, like this (the large light-orange chunk from 2PM to 5PM is when my car is charging). it's all excess.
israndy
Supercharger Hunter
I used to do that, set a timer, but I kept getting clouds or foggy days so I wrote my app that allows it to respond to the actual solar generation and turn more devices on, the Tesla acts as my catchall as I can set it to charge from 2 to 40 amps, so after other devices come on I turn on the Tesla charging and it will grab the little bits of unused solar that would go to waste. Just got two Zendure 4.6kWh 'portable' batteries for $5,000 yesterday so that I can hopefully cover my night time usage by running outlets around my house off them and recharging them when the sun returns, at least for the next 6000 days (that's like 2039).
dgpcolorado
high altitude member
An update to my posts several years ago.
My solar arrays are a lot smaller than most and my data collection is daily pen and paper plus spreadsheet. Primitive by the standards here, I suppose. My first array was 700 watts installed in 2008. In 2012 I added another 1470 watts, total 2170 watts, once I had empirical data on how much energy my EV used:
^ I put a meter in to measure my EV charging back when I got my first EV in 2011. I've had my S-60 since March 2016:
Over the years my two arrays have produced 38,499 kWh, through yesterday, and I have put 21,864 kWh in my EVs. Most of the rest was used to run my house, although I have a credit balance with my power co-op of about 700 kWh. Haven't paid an electric bill since 2012, save for the monthly service charge, currently about $23. That may change soon since the power co-op plans to start reconciling customer renewable energy production once a year at the end of March.
It has been a cloudy, snowy winter so solar has been down in recent months. My credit balance has been falling steadily!
My solar arrays are a lot smaller than most and my data collection is daily pen and paper plus spreadsheet. Primitive by the standards here, I suppose. My first array was 700 watts installed in 2008. In 2012 I added another 1470 watts, total 2170 watts, once I had empirical data on how much energy my EV used:
^ I put a meter in to measure my EV charging back when I got my first EV in 2011. I've had my S-60 since March 2016:
Over the years my two arrays have produced 38,499 kWh, through yesterday, and I have put 21,864 kWh in my EVs. Most of the rest was used to run my house, although I have a credit balance with my power co-op of about 700 kWh. Haven't paid an electric bill since 2012, save for the monthly service charge, currently about $23. That may change soon since the power co-op plans to start reconciling customer renewable energy production once a year at the end of March.
It has been a cloudy, snowy winter so solar has been down in recent months. My credit balance has been falling steadily!
israndy
Supercharger Hunter
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