Austin's Electric Car Folly

Turning Cars into Power Stations. Austin's mayor Duncan has spent $1 million promoting his scheme to have cars suck up electricity at night so they can act as electric power stations by day.
Works great, except for the $10,000 battery cost. It seems Austin forgot that batteries wear out. They figure just the cars have batteries anyway, so they are free.

In reality, hybrid batteries are long lasting only because they are not heavily used. They are rarely fully discharged and normally charged only to 60% so they have room for regenerative breaking energy. Here's a rough cost analysis. The new Prius batteries hold 1.8 kWh of electricity. Bought at night and sold in daytime this might save 7¢. These batteries are pretty much the same as in your laptop and are pretty well kaput after 1200 full cycles. That's an electricity saving value of $84. The Prius batter costs over $3000.

The problem is that once cars are used as power stations every day, their batteries will no longer last the life of the car and will have to be replaced at huge cost to the car owner. Excerpts from Wall St. Journal ♦ Battery life