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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."
Wait until everyone leaves on holiday some unusually hot 4th of July morning. The earlybirds are fine, but those leaving later have empty "tanks" because ConEd sucked out all their battery power to run all of the air conditioners.
Probably lose 10% of power charging and 10% discharging if you are lucky. You want your car in the daytime when loads are heaviest. Must not put power on lines when linemen are working on them. Pumped hydroelectric is much better and currently used to store power. Always thought wind powered generators near a pumped hydroelectric would be a good thing. Also large windfarms in places like west Texas generating hydrogen would also be a reasonable thing to do. When we run out of natural gas, the existing gas distribution system could be used to pump the hydrogen all over the country much as we do with natural gas today.
Disclaimer: I worked on some of the software in the vehicle mentioned in the article. The article was a little light on technical details. Dr. Kempton is much more qualified to comment with respect to V2G technology, but I'll try to preemptively clear a few things up, here.
Why would I let the big bad utility company wear out my expensive battery?
Because they'd pay you more than enough to make it worthwhile. The details of the business model are undefined, but as TFA explains, there is a lot of money on the table (at least $4K/year), so there is considerable financial incentive to put a fleet of vehicles to use. The basic idea is that a vehicle owner would sign on with an aggregator, who would control a fleet (thousands or hundreds of thousands of vehicles) and sell regulation services to the utilities at the megawatt level. It could be that you'd lease your battery from the aggregator.
The most-valuable proposition is called ancillary services. Very simplistically, in this model you're not really moving much energy; you're really just selling the availability to provide fast-reacting regulation. Grid operation is a giant, complicated balancing act -- balancing generation with load.
Right now the balancing is done by ramping generator output up and down. As greater amounts of solar and wind make their way into the power mix, generators will end up doing even more regulation. Unfortunately, generators are generally least efficient and most polluting when ramping, so a fleet of vehicles that can provide small amounts of regulation within milliseconds is extremely attractive to grid operators.
But what if the utility company drains my battery when I need it for that long trip?
Obviously the system would have to be designed to take your individual driving needs into account. The good thing is that it doesn't really matter what you do as an individual -- the statistical behavior of the fleet as a whole remains predictable.
Furthermore, with a sufficiently large fleet of vehicles, it's possible to provide all the necessary regulation just by charging. If a vehicle is charging at 10kW, but is capable of charging at 20kW, then it can adjust its power up or down by 10kW, subject only to the constraint that it needs to be full by morning (or whenever). I've seen estimates by people more knowledgeable than I that we could regulate all of California with a fleet on the order of hundreds of thousands of EVs.
If you're doing all your regulation via charging, then you can't claim you're wearing out your battery prematurely (unless you were never planning to charge it again, of course).