Now, that’s what I call V2G

I get why people are excited about Vehicle-to-Grid. EVs are giant, relatively cheap-per-kWh batteries, and it feels like a waste to let them sit on the driveway doing nothing.

But as I’ve written before, I think conventional V2G – bidirectional chargers, household regulatory approvals, degraded car batteries – is too impractical to ever really take off. Home batteries are getting cheap enough that the whole complicated dance stops making sense.

Then I watched this video and had to reconsider.

Naked Packs in the Desert

Redwood Materials – founded by JB Straubel, the engineer who helped build Tesla – has been pulling used EV battery packs out of retired cars and standing them upright in the Nevada desert. Just the raw packs, planted in the desert in their hundreds on a couple of acres of scrubland, each connected to a custom inverter.

They’ve wired 792 of them into a 63 megawatt-hour grid battery. It’s been running for seven months at 99.2% uptime. This week, they announced a sevenfold expansion.

In Australia, we’ve had startups promising to repurpose end-of-life EV packs into packaged units for small commercial customers or homeowners. But they have to repackage them, make them safe, and make them attractive to the customer. That gets complex and expensive – which is likely why all those startups seem to have disappeared.

Redwood skips all of that. The packs are already sealed to survive under a moving car in all weather. Stand them in a paddock and connect each one to a bespoke DC-DC converter (Redwood Pack Manager) configured to the electrical specs of its battery pack. Connect the outputs to a common DC bus and connect that to a giant inverter. Done.

Redwood reckons setups like this could eventually make up 50% of the world’s stationary battery fleet. At a fraction of the environmental and financial cost of new.

Australia Has Plenty of Paddocks

We’re a few years behind the US on EV uptake, which means we’re a few years behind on the wave of retired packs. But Australians love their cars, and we’re not short of cheap, empty land. If Redwood’s model holds up – and seven months at 99.2% uptime is a decent start – I think this makes more sense for Australia than any version of residential V2G out there.

Phase Shift is a weekly opinion column by SolarQuotes founder Finn Peacock. Subscribe to SolarQuotes’ free newsletter to get it emailed to your inbox each week along with our other home electrification coverage.