Scientists Explore Putting Electric Cars On A Two-way Power Street
I ran across this item in Science Daily this morning. It is an interesting concept. Is there technology to make a circuit that is both charger and inverter, i.e., can use line voltage to charge batteries and then take battery voltage and invert it back to line voltage? I don’t know of any. If not, this concept would be workable only by adding an inverter circuit in parallel with the charger circuit, with attendant control mechanisms, which would add considerably to the purchase price of a PHEV. Go to http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081002172140.htm to read the full article
Scientists Explore Putting Electric Cars On A Two-way Power Street
ScienceDaily (Oct. 12, 2008) — Think of it as the end of cars’ slacker days: No more sitting idle for hours in parking lots or garages racking up payments, but instead earning their keep by providing power to the electricity grid.
Scientists at the University of Michigan, using a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), are exploring plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) that not only use grid electricity to meet their power needs, but return it to the grid, earning money for the owner.
“Cars sit most of the time,” said Jeff Stein, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “What if it could work for you while it sits there? If you could use a car for something more than just getting to work or going on a family vacation, it would be a whole different way to think about a vehicle, and a whole different way to think about the power grid, too.”
The concept, called vehicle-to-grid (V2G) integration, is part of a larger effort to embrace large-scale changes that are needed to improve the sustainability and resilience of the transportation and electric power infrastructures. If V2G integration succeeds, it will enable the grid to utilize PHEV batteries for storing excess renewable energy from wind and the sun, releasing this energy to grid customers when needed, such as during peak hours.
This will lead to more sustainable transportation and grid infrastructures, and will also increase the resilience of these infrastructures to sharp changes in energy costs, supply, or demand.
The NSF’s Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation program created a topic for a 2007-2008 call for proposals on resilient and sustainable infrastructures. This topic argues that the nation’s infrastructures over the past century have evolved largely independently but new technologies have emerged that coupled some of these infrastructures. This has created a need for fundamental tools to design and develop these new technologies and to evolve these coupled infrastructures.
Stein and others see the PHEV as a perfect example of such a new technology that in this case is coupling the transportation and power grid infrastructures.
V2G is an opportunity to look at vehicles beyond shaving miles per gallon. A team of experts in mechanical and power systems engineering, economics, and industrial ecology will examine every aspect of a PHEV and how it interacts with the electrical grid.
If PHEVs, which are anticipated to be on the market in 2010, fulfill their promise, millions could be on the road in the decades to come. This potentially will provide unprecedented shared battery storage to the grid and transportation infrastructures, thereby allowing these infrastructures to store renewable energy when available and use it when needed.
Aging electric plants are good at generating power, Stein said, but they face challenges in storing it, and lack ways to buffer against either big surges in demands, or interruptions in supply. Massive storage systems can be costly and problematic.
But, Stein said, think of all the “distributed” storage packed into millions of PHEVs on the road. He and his colleagues envision a world where the electric cars could double as mobile holding tanks for electricity, ready to serve in their down time.
“If we had lots of PHEVs all plugged into the grid, then what seems like an insignificant amount of energy storage becomes a large energy storage,” he said….
Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081002172140.htm
Tags: Alternative Energy Source, Alternative Fuel Vehicles, Electric Vehicle, Electric Vehicles