Study suggests electric cars could pay their owners back

Green Mountain College ^ | 2007 | Stephen Diehl

[T Ruth]

Poultney, VT - Imagine collecting a paycheck from your utility company each month simply for plugging your electric vehicle into the power grid and making it available to supply or download power.

"There's a whole new way to look at energy supply and distribution, and our love affair with cars," said Dr. Steven Letendre, professor of management and environmental studies at Green Mountain College. "In the not-so-distant future, electric cars should be viewed both as environmentally-friendly suppliers of services to the power grid and as sources of income for owners."

An article written by Dr. Letendre and Dr. Willett Kempton of the University of Delaware, appearing in the February 15 issue of Public Utilities Fortnightly suggests that this vehicle-to-grid scenario (dubbed "V2G") is not only feasible, but close to reality in some parts of the U.S.

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By the end of this year, the first wave of vehicles able to supply auxiliary power to homes and contractors will hit the market, but with modest modifications, these vehicles also have the potential to "sell" their electricity back to the power grid, increasing reliability and efficiency of the power system and netting a profit for the car owner.

* * *

In the most profitable scenario, the owner charges the vehicle while rates are low and provides services to the grid operators as requested. The study estimates that a properly managed V2G car could net the owner close to $3,000 per year.

* * *

[posterchild]

Can’t imagine the powerplant in a passenger car can even approach the efficiency of a utility company’s large scale dedicated power producing facility. Add in transmission loss and the car may as well just keep it’s energy for future road use.

[T Ruth]

Vehicle to Grid (gasoline powered generator running at night) I don't think this is what is proposed. Rather, it is first grid to vehicle at night (coal, nuclear, hydro); then vehicle to grid during peak demand time.

Maybe, some long time in the future, the vehicle could be a source of power (fuel cell?) but what the article proposes is using vehicles as storage.

[DoughtyOne]

As I mentioned, if you have enough charge and allow half of it to be sold back to the utility, and still have 100 miles left, you should be okay getting home. I would imagine there would be a way to time the process and only allow your charge to be tapped for a certain period.

If a person didn’t have redundancy, then this obviously wouldn’t work for them.

[RS]

“Wouldn’t it be better from the utility’s point of view to have millions of car owners foot the capital cost of battery storage capacity?”

That’s the plan - buy the batteries from them when they have lost 50% capacity and are basically worthless for cars.

Look, if the system works and is profitable for the car owner, companies would simply buy batteries wholesale in quantity and specifically for fixed use at a much cheaper rate right now.

[Squantos]

first 200 miles was all electric .....then it reverted to hybrid mode again.

I am 13 miles from my driveway to my work parking lot and the company gave us a chance to try the Prius if we wanted for a week or two. I signed up for 2 weeks. Drove it 26 miles a day and parked it as the boss said no joy riding etc .....:o)

Good acceleration to cruising speed of 70mph where I set the cruise control....... I am gonna buy one . I did drive it 6 days and the looked at the battery meter on the dash and plugged it in overnight on day six and it was full up ! I wish I had checked the draw on my electricity to see what the cost would have been. Hypothetically one can have gas in the 10 gal tank go bad on em if they live close to work and stay in electric mode all the time......

I think the modification done involved replacing the Nickle Metal Hydride batteries with lithium Ion (lap top style) battery banks. Not sure what that will cost to replace in the vehicles average life time etc ......

Neat and cheap.......but the goobermint is never gonna MAKE me buy one......

Stay safe .....Nite !

[Kevmo]

This one seems suitable for the renewable energy ping list.

[timer]

Ditto. One of my on-going projects is converting an old trolley to electrically propelled - 10HP and parade-slow vehicle anyway. So I called up this battery outfit in Utah : how much for lithium-ion batteries. Oh, about $60,000 he said. eeeyeah, rrrright.

We have heard though about a company developing lead-foam plates vs flat plates : far greater surface areas for anode/cathode reactions, thus greater energy density. How are they coming along? Then there’s blacklightpower.com

[HardStarboard]

>>>How in the world is that going to work?<<<

Simple, you overthrow the laws of Physics that say there are conversion losses each time you convert from AC to DC (wall plug to Inbred Car) and DC to AC (car back to grid) and that there are line (trasmission) losses each way....

But hell, they are only the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics so it should be a trivial matter to get past their onerous restrictions.

[billmor]

“In the most profitable scenario, the owner charges the vehicle while rates are low and provides services to the grid operators as requested. The study estimates that a properly managed V2G car could net the owner close to $3,000 per year.”

Sure, and if you believe this we’ll throw in a bridge in Brooklyn !....and the govMINT might even refund your taxes back to you..The day any utility company hands you a check for $3000 or even $300, better check and see if the flag flying over the WH is red, white and blue, or all red !

[DoughtyOne]

I had read that the original motor wasn’t powerful enough to use as an electric only all the time. I would think they have upgraded that as well. Glad to hear you enjoyed the car. I try to keep my eyes and ears open to what is out there.

I have a Mercury Mariner Hybrid. I love the thing. I’ve had more fun with it trying to see what mileage I could achieve with the four wheel drive vehicle.

Take care.

[T Ruth]

A difference of opinion is what makes a market.

I am looking forward to the day when oil is like water: despite a high intrinsic value, it would have a small market value because the supply is great in relation to demand. In this connection, marginal demand and supply set the price. A small absolute change in either can have a large effect on the price, as witness the current spike in oil prices. If the use of oil in transportation is displaced by electricity generated by coal, nuclear or hydro power, the market price of oil likely will fall to little more than the cost of production. There would no longer be any economic rent accruing to the ownership of oil-producing lands. The Saudis, Iranians, Venuzuelans, Russians, etc. would be deprived of the revenue necessary to support their nihilistic ambitions.

So, I will try to bring to the attention of intelligent, well-informed, independent-thinking, initiative-taking FReepers ideas that will make this happen.

"And a good night to all."

[kinoxi]

I don’t know too much about ‘lead foam’ batteries but I would assume that being lead based would create the inevitable weight/efficiency problems.

[ME-262]

“there are already ideas to buy back car batteries that have lost capacity to use in massive storage banks.”

why buy new batteries when you can buy up internally shorted ones that won’t hold a charge and piss away your power so much faster...absolutely brilliant I should have thought of using bad batteries in all my stuff.

I’ve got a number of old car batteries that don’t work. Now I just need to find a liberal who’ll buy them.

$3000 a year...Hmmmm...I’ll buy a fleet of vehicles on credit, let the power company make my payments...quit my job and live off of the rest and deduct enough fleet depreciation that I’ll never pay taxes again. Maybe I will teach perpetual motion physics at Green Mountain College with all my free time.

[sphinx]

They want to buy back they’re own juice, at a loss.

They want to capture power that is now being wasted for lack of storage. The simplest example is a big hydroelectric dam. The water goes over the dam 24/7. Suppose between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., only 10% of the power is used. (I made up the numbers but you get the idea.) So the question is, can you find massive storage at an affordable price? Batteries are expensive, but if there is large-scale adoption of plug-in hybrids, there is a potential there that might be exploited.

Hydro is an obvious example but the same principle holds for a nuclear, coal, or natural gas fired system. It doesn't simply shut down and go cold at night. The operators can throttle back somewhat and save a bit on fuel but the system still is live around the clock, and a lot is wasted. Cheap storage is worth exploring.

[riored]

to post 51
agree entirely.

[kinoxi]

Ok. Lets take your point from the optimal view. The operators cannot simply drain peoples car batteries and throttle down if the demand is not needed. What are they going to do?

[ThomasThomas]

If they can produce electricity cheap enough to sell for profit, forget the rest of the car just get the engine and generator.

[ThomasThomas]

To make this work the cars would need to be on line during peak demand hours which are also peak drive hours.

[RS]

“why buy new batteries when you can buy up internally shorted ones that won’t hold a charge and piss away your power so much faster...”

Yep dumb idea ... someone tell these guys -

http://blogs.business2.com/greenwombat/2007/06/photo_green_wom.html

“Those batteries have some residual capacity and that residual capacity is actually valuable,” Tesla CEO Martin Eberhard told Green Wombat last week. “At a substation you take a whole stack of three-quarter dead batteries and just run them into the ground an then chuck them into recycling.”

[sphinx]

I don't follow you.

For vehicle to grid to work optimally, a number of things have to happen. There has to be widespread adoption of plug-in hybrids and a reengineering of garage spaces to accommodate them. The hookup has to be engineered and metered to run both ways. Utility pricing has to become much more time sensitive, presumably with higher premiums for peak power and really, really low rates at, say, 2:00 a.m. These things won't happen overnight but there is nothing intrinsically difficult about them once plug-ins start hitting the road in large numbers.

So: you plug in your car when you get home. Very possibly, your charging unit will have a timer which you can set to take advantage of the best rates. You charge up overnight. You drive to work and plug in again. The grid draws power as needed while your car is parked. Your car is programmed to retain enough power for normal operation but you can sell any surplus back to the grid. The complex thing here is the metering, especially if people start plugging in away from home. Presumably an onboard computer will track everything and report all power transfers through your meter when it is plugged in at home.

If batteries were cheaper, utilities could and would simply buy storage themselves. To date, this has not been economical. But every car already has a battery, and most cars are sitting idle most of the day. The cost of those batteries is already sunk. That's a huge, presently unutilized resource that could be tapped with a little rewiring and smart metering. We're still going to need lots of new power plants to handle additional demand but if we can increase the efficiency of the system, it makes sense to do it.