Porta Santo Electric Vehicles used as Power Stations.

The car has to be charged during the day and isn’t available to use, then at night the battery is being drained and is not fully charged in the morning.


That isn’t going to work in northern countries, there isn’t enough hours of sunlight to allow sufficient charging in between short journeys.

It's maybe a bit more subtle than that. If you're running an island you'd probably have enough wind to supply your baseload, probably plus a bit, and then you'd have a peak of solar production centred around the middle of the day - which would be good for feeding air conditioning plant in hot areas but not much good for the evening peak. So the car could fully charge while the (desk bound) driver is at work, discharge a bit on the journey home (but probably still 70% charged), then during the evening it helps the grid during the evening peak (maybe down to say 40% to keep a reserve) and then re-charges overnight from wind when other loads are low.  There'd, I imagine, be an option for drivers to raise the reserve temporarily, if they expect to start an unusually long journey before morning. Zoe users probably won't be that bothered about the extra cycling shortening the battery life, as the batteries are normally on lease from Renault (at least they are in the UK), rather than owned by the driver - so as long as the tariffs are attractive (overall it makes it cheaper to opt in) then I think there would be some takers.


On a larger cloudier islands like the UK it would need to operate a little differently of course, but usually there's merit in pooling resources like that - sharing what you don't need day-to-day but at the same time having access to larger capacity when you need it. It works well in all sorts of areas - from power networks to computer memory, so I don't see why it shouldn't work for batteries.


   - Andy.

The car has to be charged during the day and isn’t available to use, then at night the battery is being drained and is not fully charged in the morning.


That isn’t going to work in northern countries, there isn’t enough hours of sunlight to allow sufficient charging in between short journeys.

It's maybe a bit more subtle than that. If you're running an island you'd probably have enough wind to supply your baseload, probably plus a bit, and then you'd have a peak of solar production centred around the middle of the day - which would be good for feeding air conditioning plant in hot areas but not much good for the evening peak. So the car could fully charge while the (desk bound) driver is at work, discharge a bit on the journey home (but probably still 70% charged), then during the evening it helps the grid during the evening peak (maybe down to say 40% to keep a reserve) and then re-charges overnight from wind when other loads are low.  There'd, I imagine, be an option for drivers to raise the reserve temporarily, if they expect to start an unusually long journey before morning. Zoe users probably won't be that bothered about the extra cycling shortening the battery life, as the batteries are normally on lease from Renault (at least they are in the UK), rather than owned by the driver - so as long as the tariffs are attractive (overall it makes it cheaper to opt in) then I think there would be some takers.


On a larger cloudier islands like the UK it would need to operate a little differently of course, but usually there's merit in pooling resources like that - sharing what you don't need day-to-day but at the same time having access to larger capacity when you need it. It works well in all sorts of areas - from power networks to computer memory, so I don't see why it shouldn't work for batteries.


   - Andy.