I do wonder how much it would cost to build a code-compliant, UL-certified/listed system for home battery backup at 50 kwh, with a system that knows to balance things between cells over many charge/discharge cycles.

I gotta imagine a lot of the value add of the established names is that they actually operate in the U.S. (even though all 3 companies I named are Chinese owned). That’s not just about marketing (even if it is true that having U.S. operations helps significantly with marketing), but the cost of certifying for different third party safety standards, and having assets/operations that bring them within reach of U.S. courts and regulators.

Yup. A huge part of the cost is the batteries, the electric motors, the sensors and controllers that manage charging and discharging.

Looking around at home battery backup solutions, for example, simply having the same storage capacity as an EV (50-75 kwh) can cost almost as much as an EV itself.

Jackery has add on batteries for about $1000 for 5 kwh, Ecoflow and Anker Solix cost $2000 for 6 kwh.

At those prices, a 60kwh battery pack in an EV basically represents $12,000 to $20,000 in battery cost alone, plus a whole system around charging it and using it for an electric motor, and then a whole car around that.

It’s not a perfect comparison, but it does show that the actual material cost of what goes into an EV is primarily the electric drivetrain and battery.

Being prepared for emergencies is a good thing. But not everything we do has to actively prepare for an emergency.

This article is about people installing equipment that alleviates their energy costs and reduces the amount of energy they draw from the grid, especially during high demand times. That is worth doing, entirely separately from being prepared for emergencies.

So the fact that this equipment does not prepare for emergencies is relevant to know, but doesn’t change whether it’s a good idea to install the equipment.

It’s possible, but needs to be engineered for safety, and that design/testing/certification will increase the cost and complexity.

You can have solar panels and a battery totally off grid, where the big battery just acts as a generator, with its own inverter creating AC power for anything you plug in. That’s really simple and cheap, but isn’t safe for connecting to and powering a grid-connected house circuit. So anything you want to power with one of these systems needs to be plugged into outlets that only get their power from these batteries.

You can add a grid-following inverter that safely matches the grid frequency AC, so that you can use the solar power you collect in your own normal home circuit, to power your own household appliances. But the simplest design here is a grid following inverter that doesn’t work when the grid isn’t connected. It can only add to something that already exists and can’t do things on its own.

If you want to do both, where it can work without grid power and it follows the grid when the grid power is on, you’ll have to design a system that can switch between the two modes without delivering power where it’s not expected or generating power that conflicts with the grid’s AC waveform. Making it automated, like an UPS system, is even more complicated.

It’s not impossible, or even that difficult, it just does add complexity and the engineering tradeoff is always the question of “what problem does this solve, and is solving that problem important enough to devote these resources to it?” For anyone on a reliable electric grid where power outages are rare, the answer is usually no.

It’s mainly an adjustment to how you handle pit stops. I’ve learned to embrace the leisurely pit stop where you pull up to the charger and plug in, and then walk and wander around a shopping area or restaurants and maybe even sit down to eat slowly.

I also have a long road trip planned next month, where I’ll be leaving in the afternoon/evening so I might have to sleep overnight on the way there. If that happens, I’m going to prefer a hotel with overnight charging options, rather than have to try to find a separate charger from where I’ll be sleeping. But I haven’t fully planned that out, and it’ll be my first EV road trip over 600 miles/1000 km.

I read the article’s main point as being that waste heat is all around us, and in places that get cold (like the Great Lakes region), that heat can be moved to where it is useful.

I’m thinking of the brain meme where each level represents something better:

1. Electric power is used to generate heat in places that need to be heated, using resistive heat.
2. Electric powered heat pumps move heat from air where it’s not needed to places that do need heat, using heat pumps that draw heat from ambient air.
3. Heat is transferred from places that actively need cooling to places that need heat.

The main point in the article is that if we’re using electricity to cool a place while also using electricity to heat a place, can we just use less electricity to move the heat from the place where it’s not wanted to the place where it is wanted?

So seen in that light, it’s not so much about how much thermal efficiency a power plant achieves, but rather a question about whether there is something better that can be done with that heat that doesn’t become electricity.

It might be cheaper in some settings.

For certain food styles, I buy bulk spices sometimes because I don’t like to pay for an entire jar I won’t use, knowing that most of it will go stale by the time I’m through the jar. Being able to buy tiny quantities is sometimes way cheaper.

I’m also mismatched in my conditioner and shampoo remaining where I can buy the matching set and let the difference persist, or I can try to buy a single catch-up bottle of whatever I have excess of, to hope that they even out by the time I get to the bottom of a bottle.

Basically, I can imagine where it might be preferable (for both cost and convenience) to buy an arbitrary amount of something rather than buy a fixed factory container of that thing. I know I already do it for certain things.

Doesn’t look like anything to me.

Grid scale storage is actively being worked on.

Chemical batteries, like rechargeable lithium ion batteries, are a big part of it. Sodium ion batteries and iron air batteries are coming up, as well.

Somewhat related are rechargeable fuel cells and flow batteries, that similarly store chemical energy that can support two-way charge/discharge cycles.

Gravity storage, like pumping water up into a reservoir and then using it to drive turbines on the way down, or elaborate elevator shaft type systems, can store some energy but require lots of land and material, or require very specific geographic features not commonly found.

Kinetic energy storage, turning lots of heavy flywheels and then recapturing that momentum to produce electricity when needed, is also on the grid (and kinda mimics the rotational inertia of the turbines traditionally synced across the grid).

Some other storage technologies include capacitors, pressurized gas containers, and thermal heat storage with molten salt that can be used to make steam to drive turbines on demand.

But all of these solutions are difficult to scale up to the point where they make a significant difference in addressing the mismatch between supply and demand at different times of day. We gotta do all of it, and right now the most cost effective solution is chemical batteries, so that’s been growing at an exponential rate.

It’s like a dumpster filling up, where you have to pay a waste management company to come haul that stuff away, at least if people can’t find a way to take it off your hands for free.

The non-Honda traditional automakers are getting dragged, kicking and screaming, into actually providing EV options.

Kia and Hyundai’s E-GMP platform has a few hundred thousand vehicles on US roads. They have had reliability issues on the charging unit, though, so I’m not sure if the newest ones have fixed the problems there. Still, they’re moving a decent volume, and electric represents a big chunk of their overall sales now.

GM saw a huge increase in EV sales in the past few years with a lot of newer models on their main BEV3 platform (including the Honda and Acura EVs). I’m a bit biased against GM generally, but I have no reason to assume that their EVs are somehow worse than their ICE vehicles.

Volkswagen, Volvo, Mercedes, BMW, and some other European manufacturers have been trying to make inroads with EV consumers, with mixed success.

Ford recently acknowledged that its Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning were designed sub-optimally as EVs, with too many unique parts and designs for each model, through their traditional way of doing business through existing supply chains and vendors. Left unsaid in that interview, though, is how much they were held back by dealers trying to jack up prices on EVs or discourage their sale (knowing that they get better service revenue on ICE vehicles).

And even though Toyota has tried a whole bunch of other stuff seemingly to avoid building pure battery EVs, they’re launching all electric models of the Lexus ES and the Highlander and finally getting on board.

I think we’re at a critical point, and current U.S. government policy might be discouraging EVs, but EVs have plenty going for them, even with government hostility. I’m hopeful we can see gasoline consumption drop in the U.S. over the next few years.

A gravity storage system that stores about 100 MWh and outputs about 25 MW is much, much larger than the 65 battery containers they’d replace. It stores basically 4 hours worth of energy in what appears to be a large steel and concrete structure 150 m tall (the equivalent height as a 30-40 story building) on a 100m x 100m footprint.

If we’re talking about storing a terawatt hour, then we’d be talking about about 10,000 of these gravity storage systems needing to be built. That’s what I mean by existing technology not really meeting the scale requirements of the problem.

Gravity storage systems all basically suffer from this problem. Water-based solutions need to be sited on favorable geography to have large scale (otherwise water itself isn’t dense enough to compete with concrete and stone and sand).

Meanwhile, storing the same 100 MWh of energy in containerized lithium batteries would basically require a 4x6 stack of 40-foot shipping containers that each can store 4MWh.

We can get there on storage, but we’re talking about decades of planning and implementation, across all technologies, before we can even credibly reach storage representing one whole day’s electricity usage. How many man hours of labor does that engineering and planning and building represent? How much steel, energy, and machinery would these projects use up?

Anyone who talks about this stuff without recognizing the scale involved is basically not serious about solving it. It’s an engineering problem that exists independently of money (and it’s also a money problem, but that part will probably pay for itself because of how valuable a solution to this problem would be).

We have the storage technologies, the only thing missing is money.

When discussing large public projects whose scale is larger than anything before seen, the money is mainly an accounting placeholder for the real resources that need to be expended.

Grid scale storage has been expanding at an exponential pace, but the sheer magnitude of the materials and engineering work that needs to be done to make a dent is pretty huge.

Bloomberg projects that total cumulative installed capacity should hit 2 Terawatt hours by 2035, noting that would represent 8x the number for 2025. But when you compare those numbers to just how much electricity is produced or consumed, with 22,000 TWh per year, we’re talking about demand periods measured in minutes, not even hours, much less days.

At scales large enough to make enough of a dent to show up in global energy stats, we need to recognize that even infinite money would run into the real resource constraints of how much capacity we as a species have for pulling minerals out of the ground, processing them into useful materials, and engineering them to be useful energy storage solutions (whether pumped hydro or other gravitational systems, compressed air, flywheels, or whatever battery or fuel cell chemistries can store energy in an efficient way).

We have some technologies, but need things to improve significantly before storage can actually meet the needs for power that meets demand at any given moment in time. In the meantime, matching supply and demand in real time is a true engineering challenge, not just a monetary challenge.

But because of the unsubstantiated hatred of anything Chinese

That might apply for the Chinese manufacturers you’ve listed, but the others are available in the US, even the ones with significant Chinese ownership (Volvo/Polestar mostly owned by Geely, Mercedes Benz owned significantly by Chinese investors). Many of these companies simply choose not to go through the trouble of importing or manufacturing some of their EVs for the US market, despite continuing to manufacture/import other EVs for the US market. See, for example the Kia EV6 GT (no longer offered in the US, despite other trim levels continuing to be sold), the VW ID.7 (canceled plans to bring into US and Canada), Polestar 2 (no longer available in the US), Ford F-150 Lighting (the recently discontinued electric version of literally the top selling vehicle in the United States), etc.

A big part of the problem with the US isn’t that there aren’t choices, it’s that many of the choices are bad. Lots of EVs are expensive, and competing for the expensive luxury market. Even then, some of those brands are struggling. I don’t know what the future holds for Rivian or Lucid in the U.S., but those companies aren’t exactly making money.

Without sales volume, they won’t hit the economies of scale necessary to actually profitably sell those cars. Lucid is absurdly expensive while the company loses money on each sale. Rivian has similar problems, although they might actually turn the corner to profitability soon. Polestar is probably in the same boat for the US market, but is propped up by its owners and partners for now.

So no, I don’t think that US EV new car buyers are suffering from a quantity of options. It’s just kinda a quality problem, where the consumer has a lot of mediocre choices, and only a few good choices.

Honda is a company built around manufacturing internal combustion engines. Anything that uses an internal combustion engine is fair game: lawnmowers, motorcycles, ATVs, generators, and regular old cars.

So it’s been hard for them to shift their culture to where they don’t actually use the thing they’re best at, the foundation for their company’s whole history.

See also BYD that eventually got into making cars simply because they were so good at making batteries.

Supreme Court struck down tariffs enacted by the President under one particular law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which Trump used to add tariffs to almost everything coming in from every country.

There are longstanding tariffs that are authorized by other laws, on specific countries like China, or on specific goods like lumber or steel or vehicles or semiconductors, unaffected by the Supreme Court ruling.