The tie-up between a renewable grid and the electric car, or: "Why we are adopting the PHEV"

[kristopher]

Electric cars seen as killer app for smart grid
by Martin LaMonica

WASHINGTON--Where you see an electric car, your utility sees a battery on wheels.

Forward-looking utilities are gearing up to tap into the stored energy that plug-in electric vehicles can provide using smart-grid technology, said industry executives at consulting firm Kema's Utility of the Future conference here this week.

Car batteries can provide a buffer to lighten the load on the grid during peak times and potentially provide back-up power to homeowners. Down the line, old plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) batteries could be recycled as storage devices, they said.

"I think PHEVs will be the killer application for the smart grid," said David Mohler, the chief technology officer of Duke Energy. "They are able to both consume and provide energy like no other device can and can really change storage."

A number of plug-in electric vehicles aimed at mainstream buyers will become available over the next two years. Although there's no standard storage capacity, Mohler estimated that four of them could power a house, at least for a short time.

In the near term, the most promising marriage of the grid and car batteries is providing what the power industry calls "frequency regulation." It's an arrangement that could save utilities money, reduce pollution, and potentially save consumers money, advocates of the approach said.

Utilities routinely pay for frequency regulation services to ensure that the supply of electricity matches the demand. When an imbalance between supply and demand causes a change in signal frequency, power generators crank up to adjust the flow of electricity. ...

...To illustrate how the auto and electricity industries are connecting, Chrysler anticipates that it will be producing over 1 gigawatt of electrical capacity per year by about 2015, said Tom Sacoman, the portfolio executive of Chrysler's ENVI electric auto division. That's about as much power as a nuclear or coal plant can produce. ...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10269723-54.html


The minimum capacity a car must have to rate as a PHEV is 10kWh. I assume that is the basis of the "four of them could power a house" comment. The goal is about 50kWh/car at current weight and I personally believe the technologies in the pipeline make that goal a reality within about 6 years. Note the capacity that Chrysler is gearing up for and imagine the impact on price of a flood of money moving into the manufacture of battery storage. I think it so desirable as to be inevitable that these batteries will migrate from the auto to the home for support of solar and off-peak generation by wind. In other words, the article only evaluates the benefits of using the batteries with conventional thermal generation. It is good to keep our feet grounded in the reality of our current centrally controlled infrastructure; but it is also good to take a look at where we are going and recognize the need for selecting our path carefully.

[MarjorieG]

1. When are we getting the smart grid, bigger capacity? Enough investment to date, as stimulus?

[excess_3]

2. bigger capacity ??? are there rolling blackouts in your area? n/t

[NNadir]

3. Actually, the car CULTists have been talking this talk for years.

The car CULTist Amory Lovins for instance, reported that there was going to be hydrogen HYPErcars in showrooms "by 2005" in 2001.

So where were they?

The car CULTure cannot be sustained no matter how many bourgeois brats with poor educations try to greenwash with ignorant fantasies.

For the last 7 years that I've been here, I've been hearing all about "green cars" from stupid little links to equally stupid claims from the pop press.

Last I looked, which was about 2 minutes ago, the car CULTure was still dumping billion tons quantities of dangerous fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere in an unrestricted fashion.