Lisa, our ageing experimental Nissan LEAF, was conveying us towards a visit to the seaside in Exmouth when she popped into Exeter Services for a quick “splash and dash” charging session. Sadly it was not to be:
There’s nothing quick or dashing about waiting in the queue for a vacant Gridserve CHAdeMO charging connector. Especially when there’s a Tesla at the head of that queue, and there seems to be a vacancy in the adjacent serried ranks of Tesla superchargers:
Continue readingLong time followers of the V2G UK blog may recall that many moons ago we took Elon Musk to task for over hyping Tesla’s open source credentials?
Yesterday evening (British Summer Time) we spotted Elon “tweeting” about Tesla’s open source credentials once again!
Great Q&A @defcon last night. Thanks for helping make Tesla & SpaceX more secure! Planning to open-source Tesla vehicle security software for free use by other car makers. Extremely important to a safe self-driving future for all.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 11, 2018
Whilst we all wait to see exactly how Elon’s offer of “Tesla vehicle security software for free” pans out, I really must mention that something else flashed before my eyes on Twitter last night. Apparently one or more of the mavens in Tesla’s marketing department had dreamt up a scheme to create some much needed publicity by “giving away” two cryptocurrencies, namely bitcoin and ethereum!
By this morning (BST) it seemed that Elon’s reserves of virtual riches had almost run out:
Unable to resist the temptation I hastily sent half a hard earned ethereum in Elon’s direction:
The strange thing was, half an hour later I still hadn’t received my minimum 0.5 ETH back, let alone the promised 5.0 ETH. It was at that point that things started smelling somewhat fishy. I belatedly put my almost atrophied command line skills to work, only to discover:
At first it looked as though my virtual currency must have been sent to one of Tesla’s showrooms in Russia. Belatedly doing my due diligence I discovered that whilst apparently there is a single Supercharger in Moscow, the showroom count is zero:
I know that Superchargers are amazing machines, but can they run HTTP daemons? I fear not, and thus I’ve finally been forced to face the bitter truth. I’ve been conned. Now I cannot help but wonder whose desk the buck for the apparently total loss of my fractonal ethereum stops on? Perhaps someone at Twitter will carry the can?
Dear @Jack,
Last night (BST) I followed a link from @elonmusk's feed to "his" site giving away #BTC & #ETH. This morning I could resist the temptation no longer. I sent "Elon" 0.5 ETH, but I haven't even got those back yet.
Now I'm wondering if it's all a #cryptocurrency #scam? pic.twitter.com/lSJ78suVQw
— Jim Hunt (@jim_hunt) August 12, 2018
Or perhaps not? Meanwhile, according to the Great God Google:
Earlier this week I attended a vehicle-to-grid workshop organised by Nissan Europe. This one was held in Utrecht in The Netherlands, where I discovered that the workshop coincided with the announcement of a new partnership between the City of Utrecht and a number of Dutch companies to ultimately deliver 120 “smart charging stations” across Utrecht. There’ll be more from me on the workshop itself in due course, but for now let’s take a close look at the world’s first publicly available solar powered V2G capable AC electric vehicle charging station:
The charging station itself is a GE DuraStation with added bi-directional capability. Sadly my wish of a few weeks ago has not yet come true, and the Tesla model S you can see in the foreground is still only capable of being charged by the DuraStation, which is IEC 61851/62196 mode 3 compliant. However the BYD e6 visible in the background IS able to discharge its batteries back to the local distribution grid.
This particular charger is situated outside the offices of LomboXnet, and hence integrated with the CHAdeMO compliant V2G system we reported on back in March, which stores the excess energy generated by the Solar PV installation at a nearby primary school. Here’s another angle on the event, showing Councillor Lot van Hooijdonk shortly after she cut the ribbon to officially open the charging station:
Another part of my wish from last month has also yet to come true. In Utrecht as in the United Kingdom, and despite the red carpet, whether you own an electric vehicle manufactured by Nissan, BYD or Tesla, and whether it prefers to be charged via CHAdeMO, IEC 62196 or a Supercharger, you still won’t get paid for allowing your battery pack to be used to provide an extremely useful service to the local distribution grid. However, perhaps mighty oaks from little acorns do eventually grow?
Whilst we wait to discover if/when/how that happens, here’s the video that Robin Berg of LomboXnet showed the attendees of the 3rd Nissan V2G workshop: