Preparing for a car-2-grid world
Okay, maybe the idea of having plug-in hybrids and electric cars that interact with the grid is far off in the future. But we all have to admit that it’s an attractive future. It means as the grid gets cleaner, so do vehicle emissions. It means millions of cars collectively act as a huge battery storage system, drawing power when it’s cheap and selling it back to the grid at a premium. A plug-in future is potentially a grid stabilizer; it also offers a way of smoothing out demand peaks so we don’t have to build extra just-in-case generation.
But getting to this utopia, assuming battery technology will ever be mature enough, requires some highly complex software that can manage the individual connections between car and grid. A Seattle-based software company called V2Green Inc. is getting into the game early, betting that such a world will one day exist. According to the company’s Web site, utilities using V2Green’s software “can remotely control the time and rate at which vehicles charge, minimizing demand spikes and matching load to the availability of intermittent renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power.” The company says it plans to launch field trials with “leading U.S. energy companies” beginning in the fourth quarter of 2007 — in other words, beginning now.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a more in-depth story on the company here, based on an interview with founder David Kaplan, 54, a former Microsoft software veteran who, seeing cars like the Chevrolet Volt and Tesla WhiteStar in the not-so-distant future, figured there was serious money to be made in car-to-grid energy management.
BTW: Another plug — if you’ll excuse the pun — for a plug-in hybrid conference that will take place on November 1 and 2 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The PHEV2007 Conference is shaping up to be an insightful, information-packed event. Everybody who’s anybody in the plug-in hybrid universe appears to be attending this conference. Two technical sessions that look particularly interesting deal with battery technologies and vehicle-to-grid applications.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
October 13th, 2007 at 11:33 am
The idea of V2G seems compelling at first, but under closer scrutiny, the benefits do not seem to outweigh the problems. The real benefit is G2V. To sell the power back to the grid, the vehicle would bave to be plugged in somewhere. As most people drive their cars to work during the day, this would require a lot of new infrastructure. This infrastructure would not be justified unless it was used on a regular basis. Selling power back to the grid on a regular basis would reduce the batteries life due to the extra cycling. Additionally, if the grid companies are counting on these baqtteries for backup, what happens when everyone leaves work to go home?
What is not onvious at first is that we don’t need V2G, we only need G2V. By communicating real time pricing, customers can program their cars to charge at the least expensive time. This concept can be applied to any large cyclical load. For example, cold storage wharehouses can make ice at night, using it to provide the cooling during the day. This is the real potential of grid-vehicle/appliance communication. By smoothing out the load throughout the day, you won’t need peak power generators.