Electric Cars to Help Utilities Load Balance Grid

Reservoir Hill writes "A team at the University of Delaware has created a system that enables vehicles to not only run on electricity alone, but also to generate revenue by storing and providing electricity for utilities. The technology, known as V2G, for vehicle-to-grid, lets electricity flow from the car's battery to power lines and back. When the car is in the V2G setting, the battery's charge goes up or down depending on the needs of the grid operator, which sometimes must store surplus power and other times requires extra power to respond to surges in usage. The ability of the V2G car's battery to act like a sponge provides a solution for utilities, which pay millions to generating stations that help balance the grid."

Comments

Battery Life?

[corsec67]

Most batteries have a nominal number of charge/discharge cycles that they can go through before they can't hold any capacity any more.
Why would you wear out an expensive, hard to dispose of part of a car like that?

(Unless the cars use Supercapacitors or a high-speed flywheel, in which case the only issue is transformer/inverter losses, which might be balanced by transmission losses if the usage is near to the car, in which case this could be a good idea)

Re:will never work

[myrdos2]

To my mind, the serious flaw here is that the highest cost of running an electric car is having to periodically replace the batteries. If you talk to the owners of lead-acid battery cars, they'll tell you they replace them an average of once per year. These things are only good for a few hundred deep-discharge/recharge cycles.

Of course, the electric company might not deep-discharge your batteries, but they're still wearing them out. The battery is the weakest part of an electric car. Expensive and barely adequate to move you around. I'd prefer to wait until my battery's capacity had dropped below the point of being usable, and then let them store power in it while I buy myself a new one.

Re:Better ways to balance load

[edwardpickman]

Natural gas lines are't suitable for hydrogen. It's the smallest atom so it tends to leak from most any seal. Part of the problem with hydrogen is storage and distribution because of leakage. If you leavea full tank of gasoline for a year it's still full. Even the best hydrogen car storage system would be empty long before the year is out. If you are driving constantly the loss would be manageable but even leaving it overnight would result in some loss and a weekend might see a noticeable drop in tank pressure. I love hydrogen but it seems best suited for short term storage and it's strictly a storage medium and not a true power source. I think it's better suited to home storage system of power for solar and wind and recharging electric cars. Even the hydrogen cars that are being proposed are in truth electric cars they just use hydrogen instead of batteries. I've never heard of a hydrogen car getting 200+ miles on a tank like some of the latest electric cars using batteries. Recharge times are the biggest problem but that's strictly for long range travel since most people see home recharging as a plus with electrics. Capacitors may eventually solve this problem. Either way electrics if the cost of batteries came down would still work for 90% of the driving and even at current prices they are radically cheaper than hydrogen fuel cells. Platnium is going to keep the costs high. Electric is practical today and works with or current infrastructure. People complain about costs and range on electric cars I can't see them accepting hydrogen cars that cost many times as much and have a range of a 100 miles. Nano processes may drop the amount of platium needed but it will still be expensive and the storage problems still exist. You still need an energy source to produce hydrogen so there is no real difference between it and electric cars.

Offloading costs more like it.

[SeaFox]

The ability of the V2G car's battery to act like a sponge provides a solution for utilities, which pay millions to generating stations that help balance the grid.

So since I'm now taking over that job, how much will my cut be?

I thought so.

And this wont have any impact on the life span of my car's expensive battery will it?

Oh, it will.

Well since they're now saving so much money, they'll be able to lower utility ra---
What's so funny?

Re:will never work

[fractalVisionz]

It will never work not because of the fact that the energy conversion isn't this or that, it will never work because nobody would ever want their car half full, or less, right as they are about to head out on a long trip. Long trip by todays electric standards is about 150-200 miles also.

Re:will never work

[evilviper]

it will never work because nobody would ever want their car half full, or less, right as they are about to head out on a long trip.

When you're planning on a car trip, you SHUT OFF this V2G mode, and put it on the normal charging cycle.

The other 99% of the time, when you need less than half the range to get you through the day, you leave it to charge in V2G mode, and potentially make some money while it's sitting there. It's not an issue.

The only issue is the lifetime of the batteries and converters, and the amount of money the power companies are going to pay participants for providing the service.

Though, peak metering would serve the same purpose better, and once there are a significant number of electric vehicles, the off-peak loads will be high enough to make it economical to just build more power plants, and run them at max capacity 24 hours a day.