Electric cars are not just vehicles. These are big batteries.

Joe Biden is a self-proclaimed “car guy.” Lately, he's become an electric car guy. And he wants his fellow Americans to be electric car people, too. Transportation is Responsible of 29% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and Biden's ambitious climate policy, which aims to create a net zero economy in the United States by 2050, depends in part on the passage of Americans from gasoline to electric cars and trucks.

But Biden faces roadblocks. While the bipartisan infrastructure bill he signed into law in November provided funding to build half a million electric vehicle chargers across the country , the Build Back Better bill that would have included thousands of dollars in tax credits to help Americans buy electric cars is currently stalled in the Senate as Democrats try to find a compromise that satisfies Senator Joe. Manchin (D-WV), who declined to sign it in its current form. Another challenge is how Americans feel about electric vehicles versus traditional cars: A 2021 Pew Research Center report found that 51 % of American adults oppose a proposal to phase out the production of gas-powered cars and trucks.

So what will it take to convince more people to embrace EVs? One answer might be for everyone to rethink what EVs actually are. Most Americans, including Biden, are talking electric vehicles purely as modes of transport – which is understandable, given that they have motors and wheels and allow us to move. But they are much more than cars: they are batteries, and batteries have uses far beyond transportation. Done right, integrating electric vehicles into American society could help prevent blackouts, stabilize America's crumbling power grid, and save energy. solar and wind power more reliable sources of energy for more people. The first step is to stop thinking of electric vehicles as cars powered by batteries, and instead think of them as batteries that sit at inside cars.

Getting there won't be easy. "This kind of perception problem can be a challenge because it's really a paradigm shift," said Sam Houston, senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a science-based non-profit organization based in Massachusetts. Historically, vehicles have mostly had a singular use in American society: transporting people and goods from one place to another. , cars only serve their owners. Most gas-powered cars spend most of the day idling while we're at home or at work. But electric cars can do a lot when they're not moving.

“What we need to achieve is not just thinking about transport vehicles and a network to support those vehicles, but some kind of mutually beneficial relationship between networks and vehicles,” Houston told Recode. As an example, she cited renewable energy: One of the biggest challenges of integrating renewable energy into the grid is that it is unpredictable. Sometimes it can There's too much wind and solar power, and there's no good way to store the excess. Instead, the extra renewable energy is often wasted untapped. Electric vehicles, Houston said, could be a solution to this problem.

A car left at a charger in an office parking lot during the work day, for example, can optimize its charging schedule so that most or all of the energy used to charge the car comes from renewable sources , making the most of clean energy that might otherwise go to waste.

Electric vehicles can also be useful to the grid even if there is no clean power available. Utility engineers continually adjust the amount of electricity flowing through the grid to ensure that the electricity is generated and delivered at a constant frequency. Too little power generation to meet demand is one of the most obvious reasons for outages, but too much power is an equally important problem. Electric vehicles could act like sponges in these situations, explained Kyri Baker, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

“If you have a bunch of electric vehicles just sitting in a parking lot, they can charge or stop charging in order to make small adjustments in the balance of supply and demand to maintain frequency,” said Baker told Recode. Instead of just fully charging their batteries as soon as they're plugged in, cars that are left on chargers for long periods of time can wait to charge until the grid needs help getting back up. dump excess power, or they may reserve some of their batteries to help with frequency regulation.

This is just the beginning. One of the most ambitious uses of electric vehicle batteries comes from a concept called bi-directional charging, or returning electricity from an electric vehicle to charge objects ranging from power tools on construction sites to entire homes during power outages.

This is particularly appealing at a time of more frequent and severe blackouts caused by extreme weather conditions: EV owners could potentially get power to their homes during blackouts by plugging their car on a charger in their home – and it would eliminate the need for the sometimes deadly, carbon monoxide-spewing diesel generators that many people currently rely on.

Electric vehicle manufacturers are starting to use this idea as a selling point. Volkswagen's electric vehicles will support two-way charging starting this year, and Ford's upcoming F-150 Lightning, an electric version of the nation's most popular pickup truck, is designed to power an entire home for up to three days. An early commercial for the F-150 Lightning, released about three months after a series of winter storms in Texas knocked out power to millions and killed hundreds across the state in 2021, showed the truck's credentials: it can "help build your home," the ad's narrator said, "and if need be, Power this house. »

The marketing seems to be working; as of December, nearly 200,000 people had pre-ordered the F-150 Lightning. never would have predicted how many people would have pre-ordered it either, especially in rural and conservative areas,” Baker said. behind it, you want to protect your family. Having a big battery that can be a backup generator is just one way to do that.

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However, not all automakers are as open to two-way charging as Ford and Volkswagen. Electric vehicle batteries are larger versions of the lithium-ion batteries used in phones and laptops, and they degrade over time, just like the batteries in our phones, which means an EV's range will decrease over time. Most electric vehicles come with battery warranties that are void if the batteries are discharged for power something else, in part because constantly charging and discharging a battery can degrade it faster.

Baker isn't as concerned about degradation as others in the industry. "Every time I have these conversations with people about two-way charging, the pushback is always that it will degrade the battery," Baker told Recode. "But if you look at how often people in the United States replace their cars, I don't think that's going to be a barrier. In terms of the life of the car, I feel we're exaggerating that. Americans tend to keep their cars for an average of 12 years, and electric vehicles often enter the used-car market long before their batteries suffer major degradation.

And batteries can still be useful even if they're too degraded to use in cars. Houston told Recode that they tend to be considered too degraded once they can only hold about 80% of the original capacity, which is still a significant amount of energy. "We really have to figure out the angle of reuse and recycling after the vehicle is finished and the battery can still have a lot of capacity," said Houston said.

One possible solution – and another reason to think of EVs as more than vehicles – is that old EV batteries can be removed from cars and used to store solar and wind power. its way: A startup called B2U Storage Solutions has set up an energy storage facility in California that stores enough energy in a set of 160 used Nissan Leaf batteries to power more than 90 homes a day. is partnering with a solar power developer and utility company serving San Antonio, Texas to set up a similar facility.

The obvious next step, according to Baker, is to address degradation and recycling issues at the same time by putting processes in place that would allow EV owners to easily replace their old batteries the same way you can. replace your phone's battery. These degraded batteries could then be sent to energy storage facilities like the one in California.

Technically, reusing electric vehicle batteries for purposes other than transportation is fairly easy to implement, explained Mike Jacobs, senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. that supplies power to an EV can be used to extract power from the battery and use it to power a home. But it's more complicated when it comes to energy policy and logistics in the United States. USA. Most homes aren't wired to receive backup power in the event of a power outage – Ford's website includes the caveat that backup power would only work "when the home is properly equipped with a switch that disconnects the home from the grid. electric cars when needed.

The main problem, Jacobs told Recode, is that utilities have historically had a monopoly on power generation in the country and are unwilling to give up their literal and metaphorical power.” It really comes down to the public service's enthusiasm to fix the problem,” Jacobs said. “From a profit perspective, there doesn’t seem to be any reason any utility would want to do this.

One of the most stark examples of the utility's grip on power generation in the United States comes from solar panels, Baker told Recode. For the safety of their linemen, the utilities utilities install the circuits in most homes so that they simply shut down in the event of a power outage, even if backup power is available. chances are that during a grid outage, your rooftop solar won't be able to power your home,” Baker said. “It's a huge problem because people buy solar thinking that 'they're going to power their homes during an outage. To run rooftop solar — and EV backup power — during a power outage, Baker explained, homeowners would have to wire their panels and EV charger on a separate circuit from utility-supplied power, which is an expensive proposition that also negates the benefits of integrating EV batteries into the grid.

But we don't have to choose between grid and backup power from EV batteries: they can co-exist, and their effective integration could have a significant impact on emissions. "Houston said. "It's about breaking down political and administrative barriers.

Breaking down these barriers would help create a paradigm shift in the way we think about power generation, just as using our cars as batteries would be a paradigm shift. Electric vehicles are by no means a magic solution to our climate problems – there are many sources of greenhouse gas emissions outside of cars, and a reduction in transport emissions won't go far if our electric vehicles get their power from fuel-fired power stations fossils. .But their potential extends far beyond their wheels, and more Americans recognizing that this could mean more will decide to go electric.Saving our planet is going to take big, bold changes;buying a battery that finds to provide transport is the rare tangible contribution that ordinary people can make to help solve the climate crisis.

“And really,” Jacobs said, “when we talk about moving away from fossil fuels, it all matters. »