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Owners of home photovoltaic systems will soon be able to make their households even more sustainable, because PV power is also suitable for charging personal electronic vehicles. A home energy management system created by Fraunhofer researchers incorporates electric vehicles into the household energy network and creates charging itineraries.
The house of the future is environmentally friendly, energy efficient and smart. Its inhabitants can utilize rooftop-generated PV energy not only for household consumption but also to charge their personal electric vehicle. This scenario has already become reality for a collection of row houses built according to the "Passive House" standard in the German city of Fellbach in Baden-Württemberg. The group of new homes was upgraded as part of the "Fellbach ZeroPlus" project to include electromobility enhancements as well as a comprehensive energy management system. The initiative is sponsored by the German Federal Government's "Electric Mobility Showcase" program.
A couple Soylentils have done something like this, so perhaps this would be of interest to others who are considering doing likewise.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by cmdr_tofu on Tuesday November 03 2015, @10:42AM
It's a great idea to use *excess* power to charge batteries in your electric car. I also like the idea of having your electric car power your home (in conjunction with home solar) during power outages (at least for a couple of days).
This can eliminate the need for purchase, maintenance and operation of many noisy, stinky home gasoline generators.
(Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Tuesday November 03 2015, @02:56PM
Nobody's really commercialized the vehicle-to-home or vehicle-to-grid backfeeding you're describing, though there's been lots of talk about it. It makes perfect sense, and the only real technical challenge is isolating the home such that, if the grid goes down, the vehicle doesn't wind up energizing the grid and killing the lineman who comes out to fix it. That's not much of a challenge; it's built into nearly every solar inverter ever sold.
Of particular interest for this sort of thing, at least while electric vehicle batteries tend to have relatively limited capacities and people are installing the smallest solar systems they can get away with, are plugin hybrids like the Chevy Volt and the BMW i3. You could run the battery down for some time and then have the onboard gasoline generator fire up should it turn out to be an extended outage. And you can keep refilling the gasoline tank indefinitely, whereas recharging the electric vehicle is going to require a daytime surplus from the solar panels, which you won't necessarily get unless you've sized the system accordingly.
In the long run, though...well, in the long run, the electric utilities are doing everything in their power to make themselves obsolete, so we'll eventually all be running rooftop solar with local battery storage and no grid connection. Solar plus battery is already cheaper up front for new construction than installing a grid connection -- never mind the fact that solar doesn't come with monthly bills. And solar plus battery is just about as expensive today as no-battery grid-tie solar was a decade ago when solar just started to take off, with prices still in freefall. But, again, the utilities are trying to emulate Ma Bell and force people to pay for what Ma Bell wants, desperately afraid of how they'll maintain their monopoly if mobile phones are allowed. It won't be long, no more than a decade or so, before cutting the power cord is as unremarkable as cutting the phone cord is today.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday November 03 2015, @07:46PM
Solar plus battery is already cheaper up front for new construction than installing a grid connection
BS. Sounds like you live up a mountain in Mongolia. Where I live you can hardly dig anywhere without hitting an existing grid cable. Let's see, the cost of say 10 m of 100A cable and two guys' half-a-morning's work is more than your solar panels and battery (and cables, and installing it)?