For years, dreamers have imagined a smart grid where millions of electric cars would act as a giant back-up system, balancing energy supply-and-demand more cheaply and cleanly than today’s “peaker” stations, and offering a solution to renewable power’s intermitency. To skeptics, though, the idea always seemed fanciful–and not just for technology reasons. For one thing, why would anyone want to use their car to help a power company do its job?
Well, slowly, the vehicle to grid (V2G) concept seems to be becoming reality. And, the answer to the question is a good one: in return for their batteries, consumers could earn lots of cold, hard cash.
Last month, NRG Energy, a New Jersey power company, announced that it wanted to commercialize V2G technology developed by Willett Kempton, a professor at the University of Delaware. Kempton, who first proposed V2G in the mid-1990s, has been developing a pilot for three years, where seven cars feed power to the grid and consumers receive monthly payments.
NRG’s service, called eV2g, will consist of two elements: a bidirectional power unit, allowing power to go back and forth between batteries and grid, and an application where users can designate times when they need the car, and times when they are happy for NRG to take a battery over. “It allows the end-user to say ‘I need my car fully-charged at this time, but I can make my car available on the grid at 3 o’clock in the afternoon when prices are high,'” says Denise Wilson, president of NRG’s alternative energy services.
Before you get your hopes up too soon, though, it is likely to be two years before eV2g is offered to consumers. Among the issues NRG still has to decide on: how the customer-company communication will work; whether the application will be in cars, or on a handheld device (or both); and how much users might get paid. Wilson mentions figures of $500 to $1,000 per month–though it is unclear how many batteries would need to be aggregated before companies, like NRG, might start paying out.
Kempton has said he sees groups of 100 cars generating $25 to 35 per megawatt-hour, or 30 cents per car, per plugged-in hour. Others have forecast a return of $7 to 10 a day. Either way, NRG wants eV2g ready in time for an expected surge of about 150,000 new EVs by 2013.
The “cashback car” is one step closer to reality.
Headquartered in New Jersey, NRG Energy, generator of electricity for nearly 20 million U.S. homes, is going to partner with the University of Delaware on a vehicle-to-grid scheme that will supposedly become the U.S.’ first commercial-scale V2G project.
NRG Energy states that the vehicle-to-grid project, called eV2g, will use parked electric automobiles as grid-stabilizing units, meaning that plugged-in vehicles will send juice to the grid when demand is high. In return, owners of plug-in vehicles participating in the project will get paid an undisclosed amount of money. Denise Wilson, president of NRG’s alternative energy services, describes the functionality of eV2g:
Working in partnership with the University of Delaware, eV2g technology will for the first time offer a true two-way interface between electric vehicles and the electric grid, resulting in cost savings to EV fleet operators and eventually other EV owners and consumers, and cleaner and more reliable electricity for everybody.NRG claims that the average amount of energy contained within each plug-in vehicle’s battery is roughly equal to 10 kilowatts and says that using batteries to stabilize the grid will only require two to four minutes of access at a time.
NRG’s project with the University of Delaware will compliment its eVgo charging network. eVgo kicked off in Dallas in spring of 2011 and that network will include 120 “Freedom Stations” in Texas by the end of 2012.
If you have not seen my Hybrid/EV video, the “CashBack” concept is described.
I had a surprise yesterday: my wife saw an electric car in a supermarket parking lot, plugged into a socket on the lamppost. It seems that all the lampposts in the parking lots have sockets on them to provide power for some sort of maintenance. If this be a general provision, then one of the big problems with electric cars (the availability of parking lot power stations) vanishes. Supermarkets can provide free power to electrics, making money because it gives them a competitive advantage, The shopper is not likely to spend more than an hour at the store. If each circuit is limited to 20 amps, then in an hour the user will pull only about 2 kW-hrs of energy, worth about $0.25. Sounds to me like a great way to pull in customers, project a clean green image, and make bigger profits.
And given the large roof areas of shopping centres and parking stations, they’d be able to get the required power nearly free. All it takes is a reasonable number of panels – or, sooner than we might think, roofing materials that are solar collectors themselves.