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."
Make money from your car? (Score:3, Interesting)
Oops (Score:4, Interesting)
Better ways to balance load (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:will never work (Score:2, Interesting)
photovoltaics (Score:3, Interesting)
how to solve the energy crisis (Score:1, Interesting)
I have a much better solution to the problem of energy. There are thousands upon thousands of people behind bars. All they have to do is hook up rows and rows of stationary bicycles, where the flywheels of all the bicycles on each row are connected by an axle, at the end of which is a coil that serves as a generator. Put the inmates on these damn things for 18 hours a day, with groups of inmates starting and stopping at two hour offsets to make sure that there will be electricity generated 24 hours per day, and make them pedal hard to generate that electricity. Each bike would be fitted with a device that senses if the inmate on that bike isn't pedaling hard enough, and if so, the taskmasters assigned to that group of bicycles would use a whip to provide incentive to pedal harder. The prison walls could be built out of lead-acid batteries arranged like bricks to house excess energy.
Some (nearly) facts... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've actually been exchanging emails with the UK's National Grid on a very similar topic: if I add some extra batteries to a grid-tie/UPS solar PV system, are they interested in it for frequency/fast standby support? Nominally I could automatically switch it on in one cycle to pump back at maximum for 30 minutes or more, which meets several of their key requirements. (See towards bottom of this page: http://www.earth.org.uk/saving-electricity.html [earth.org.uk] under From Net-Zero Electricity to Negative-Carbon.)
So, I'd get paid for the electricity AND for providing a standby service to help grid stability.
1) Even if you don't cycle batteries they still have a finite life: use them or loose them.
2) You could easily set your system so that if the batteries are below 90% charge you won't support the grid: you'd hardly ever notice diminished capacity and you'd still be able to make a significant stability and peak-shaving contribution, and you'd also avoid deep-cycling for the grid which would wear them out faster.
3) You avoid frying linespeople in a power cut with a system approved to G83/1 or similar: this is old tech.
Rgds
Damon
A question (Score:2, Interesting)
let's get some facts straight (Score:5, Interesting)
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).