The CAISO shows that their current power generation capacity is about 53000 MW.
A Tesla model 3 has 60kWh of capacity. A million of those would allow generating 60000 MW for an hour if they would be discharged from full to empty during the span of that hour.
In practice, they wouldn't be able to be discharged that quickly and there would be losses due to going from DC to AC, but it's interesting to think that the total deployed battery capacity of EVs could have a significant impact on the need for peaker plants in the upcoming years.
You wouldn't fully discharge it. The car has way more power than your house needs in a single night. You could probably run your house for a few days, even if your house has the AC on full, is huge, and poorly insulated. In which case you'd have a huge incentive to do something about your grid electricity cost. Installing solar panels and batteries is a way to do that. Driving an EV makes total sense if you have those. And adding that battery capacity to the mix makes even more sense.
You'd use an app to control how much power you allow to be taken and when. Mainly grids have peaks in the early evening and excess wind power during the night and excess solar power during the day. It's as much as being able to absorb that excess power than it is about providing power during peak hours.
The idea is not to fully discharge it overnight, but to smooth out demand.
During the daytime, solar power is plentiful, but not during the evening. However, during the evening, there is demand from residential customers so that they can cook, watch TV, use their computers, and whatever else people do in the evening that uses electricity.
Because there needs to be as much energy supply as there is demand, peaker plants (coal or gas typically) run during the evening to compensate for the fact that solar generation isn't available in the evening. There is less demand for power overnight though, since most people are sleeping.
As such, what would make sense would be that people would recharge their cars during daytime, drive back home, connect their cars to the grid and have them contribute some percentage of their battery to lower the need for peaker plants in the evening, then charge to full overnight.
As I understand it, this program starts discharging at 6pm. Off-hours power is almost always cheaper, so I imagine you could discharge in the evening/night and buy back whatever you needed from the grid in the cheaper hours of the night/morning for a profit.
The CAISO shows that their current power generation capacity is about 53000 MW.
A Tesla model 3 has 60kWh of capacity. A million of those would allow generating 60000 MW for an hour if they would be discharged from full to empty during the span of that hour.
In practice, they wouldn't be able to be discharged that quickly and there would be losses due to going from DC to AC, but it's interesting to think that the total deployed battery capacity of EVs could have a significant impact on the need for peaker plants in the upcoming years.