Electric Cars to Help Utilities Load Balance Grid 247
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."
AC Propulsion (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting juxtaposition to the nuclear story (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Make money from your car? (Score:2, Informative)
This isn't new... (Score:1, Informative)
I believe the company was bought by Powergen in the UK then I don't know what happened to them. I remember once we put one of the systems in what was then a Norwegian PIVCO car. Later that crowd were bought by Ford and the PIVCO became the 'Think'. I think Ford then killed it?
Re:Yeah. Right. Sure. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Offloading costs more like it. (Score:5, Informative)
You do realize that this already happens, and the electric companies do pay you for it? Industrially, power compaines give large consumers a break on rates if they get a say in when the power gets used, for exactly this reason. Some consumers need fairly large amounts of power, but don't care when they use it. Think refrigerated warehouses -- you can turn off the refrigeration for hours to reduce load without trouble, but then they have to use more later. In exchange for doing this, they get reduced rates. In some areas, you can also buy time of day metering -- handy if you have grid-tie solar panels, as you get to run the meter backward at day rates, then come home and use power at night rates.
I imagine they would be happy to extend the same basic deals to your car. And as you point out, you're not required to do so, so if they want you too, they'll have to offer such things.
Re:Battery Life? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Better ways to balance load (Score:4, Informative)
Pumped hydroelectric is great where it's available, sure, but what would, say, New York City do? Pump out New Your Harbor?
No, they pump out a lake in the Catskill Mountains. [nypa.gov]
Re:Better ways to balance load (Score:5, Informative)
Hydrogen is small, but hydrogen always comes as an H2 molecule, and that is not quite the smallest gas particle. Helium is the smallest gas particle: the smallest of the noble gases, and it comes as single atoms. Leak tests are always done with He. If He doesn't leak, then nothing will. A nice extra is that He is virtually absent from our atmosphere, so any trace amount He found indicates a leak.
That said, it is certainly true that sometimes methane does not leak where H2 does. However this can never be in large quantities, as otherwise the methane would also be leaking already. I don't know whether this is a really significant problem with the existing gas network.
Much more likely an issue I think is hydrogen fatigue: many metals become brittle when exposed to H2 gas over a long period of time, and break. This is a serious issue in the design of chemical reactors, surfaces that are exposed to H2 can not carry any pressure load (so they build a second vessel around it, that carries the pressure, the gap filled with another gas such as nitrogen).
Re:Make money from your car? (Score:5, Informative)
Bzzzt... Wrong.
The energy shortage was real and localized. In the Enron days, California capped electricity rates as a consumer protection move. As a result, Enron in a move to cut losses from expensive generation and as a leverage tool to negotiate new rates, took the oppertunity when fuel prices spiked to shut down a lot of ineffecient generation plants for maitenance. This was followed by a heat wave which put a spike in demand for AC. A line tripped offline. It was either blackout time as systems cascaded carrying the overload or simply drop part of the load and leave the rest of the sytem up.
http://tdworld.com/mag/power_world_technology_update_2/ [tdworld.com]
"California Energy Crisis Reaches Stage Three Electrical Emergency Already under a Stage Three Electrical Emergency due to scant resources, the California Independent System Operator (California ISO) encountered a significant and sudden loss of transmission capacity Jan. 21, 2001, that forced municipal utilities in Northern California, U.S. to endure a brief 20-min transmission-related outage."
"The California ISO issued the controlled outage to keep the ac lines from overloading at Path 15, a group of high-voltage lines in central California already at their limit because of low resources in the northern part of the state."
There was a blackout because there was not enough in area generation online. The capacity of the system was stressed. A line failed. The already loaded lines couldn't take on the replacement load. Part of the area was shut off to preserve the remaining area. It was small blackout time of watch the entire area go dark as the system collapsed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis [wikipedia.org]
"Due to price controls, utility companies were paying more for electricity than they were allowed to charge customers forcing the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas and Electric and the public bail out of Southern California Edison. This led to a shortage in energy and therefore, blackouts. Rolling blackouts began in June 2000 and recurred several times in the following 12 months."
"Energy price regulation forced suppliers to ration their electricity supply rather than expand production. This scarcity created opportunities for market manipulation by energy speculators."
If you need any more proof that price controls cause shortages, just re-read the above. You can mandate $1/gallon for gasoline, but don't expect to find it for sale anywhere.
Read between the lines.. they didn't pay high prices for fuel for ineffecient plants.
"Despite the action, PG&E said it still is having trouble getting gas suppliers to comply with the emergency order originally issued January 19. PG&E has said it has enough gas in storage to make up for the lost supply under such a scenario until the first week in February. According to a company spokesperson, PG&E's storage currently is well below 50% full, or less than 16 Bcf and depleting rapidly by about 500 MMcf/d to 1 Bcf/d."
They used their reserve fuel, but could only buy fuel at a loss due to price caps and high fuel cost. Gas suppliers were not selling below market. They sold at market rates, a price the utilites could not afford.
Expensive to run generation plants were shut down for upgrades and maitenance while they waited out the high fuel prices. The spike in demand caused the inevetible. The lines into the area could provide only part of the cheaper power from elsewhere.
http://www.usbr.gov/dataweb/html/pninter.html [usbr.gov] This is the list of the lines from Oregon into California and their capacities.
Re:will never work (Score:5, Informative)
The battery in the car will give energy back into the system WHEN THE ELECTRICITY IS NEEDED, not when you have some available.
In the electric grid there is a minimal, constant power needed - this is the baseline. Above this, the request fluctuates - with some slow gradients and some fast gradients.
Slow gradients are things like the move from evening to night (people go to sleep, lights go off, TVs go off). As people go to sleep from - let's say 9 PM to 12PM, there is a slow change in electricity need. "Baseload" power plants usually can change their output to account for this.
And there are fast gradients. Some of them are small, like an entire office building starting or shutting down their lights. Some, however, are not so small - like - let's say - an entire neighboorhood starting their electric boilers at the same time). When this happens, a brownout ensures - the electric plant is overwhelmed, and its output voltage drops. Having a lower voltage, the electric boilers will consume less power than at full voltage (Power is voltage squared demultiplied by resistance/impedance). However, some consumers (switching power supplies) will just take a higher amperage, and the voltage goes even lower.
For this kind of fast gradients, the gas turbines are used as "fast switching" sources. A gas turbine is able to ramp from - let's say 10% to 90% rated power - in the space of a couple of seconds (for comparation, a hydroelectric big plant will ramp the same in a couple of minutes or more). Ramping back might be even slower on baseload power plants (unless they choose to vent already heated steam). Yet, electricity generated from natural gas is expensive (much more so compared to coal or hydro). Also, the nuclear plants (while they might be able to ramp quickly on and off) are NOT designed to do so, and are not tested to do so. They are just slow-ramping, base line power plants.
As such, the electricity company hopes to supplement some of this "fast switching", expensive electricity with your car's battery.
Re:But... (Score:2, Informative)