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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."
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)
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
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?
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.