Virtual Power Plants, enabled with Bi-directional charging, could upend the grid as we know it. China, of course, is a pioneer.
Vehicle to Grid tech has challenges, but that’s what engineers are for.
Virtual Power Plants, enabled with Bi-directional charging, could upend the grid as we know it. China, of course, is a pioneer.
Vehicle to Grid tech has challenges, but that’s what engineers are for.
Since the election, I’ve becoming more and more convinced that, if anyone can save our bacon, China might be it.
It’s a great idea, we have a company in NZ called Solar Zero that runs a virtual power plant using its own PV and batteries installed on houses round the country. It helped fend off power blackouts last autumn, all cool
Unfortunately, the company, founded in 1970, was bought in 2022 by Black Rock.
Who filed for liquidation this week, leaving the whole system hanging in limbo.
Great ideas getting hijacked and exploited and kicked to the kerb by “Big Everything” may not be the solution to anyone’s problems long term.
A brief history of developing V2G in the US back around the turn of the century. Interesting bits are the shifts in emphasis as shifts in grid management in California changed from bundled power prices, then unbundling (creating a valuable market for frequency regulation), then bundled them again.
False Starts: The Story of Vehicle-to-Grid Power
A 2001 experiment proved electric cars could feed the grid. So why hasn’t V2G taken off?
https://spectrum.ieee.org/v2g
I’m seeing a few things that might make this more common faster – 1st being having bidirectional circuitry built right into vehicles and chargers as a default, 2nd being home systems that would let a house island during a blackout, and run from the vehicle, 3rd being utilities and car charging tech being able to charge based on best availability – soaking up midday solar for low cost, for example.
The number of downed powerlines is only going to go up, especially in areas where burying the things is seen as too costly. If I lived in a rural or semi-rural area where number of ratepayers per mile of power line is low, I’d be very interested in using an integrated system like that – the economics of fixing power lines is still like the economics of electrifying the county – the denser the population, the more attention a line will get since more customers get fixed in one shot.
And there’s this.
“Most batteries will become available for second use at the end of the expected PEV service life of approximately 15 years. NREL studies show that these batteries—with as much as 70% of their initial capacity—potentially can continue to operate for another 10 years in second use as energy storage for utilities, translating into a total service life of up to 25 years.”
National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL)
Honda and Mitsubishi have a joint venture to use old EV batteries for stationary grid backup.
I also know of 4 companies that are already doing it.
And then they can be completely recycled.