Filed under: Emerging Technologies, EV/Plug-in, Green Culture, Hybrid, Solar, AutoblogGreen Exclusive
How PG&E will help Google with that 100+ PHEV, make computing greener and build the smart grid
I only briefly mentioned Pacific Gas and Electric Company in yesterday's post about the Google PHEV initiative. But aside from the work the company is doing on the 100+ plug-in hybrid, PG&E is also working with both Google and Intel on making computing itself a bit less resource-intensive. Through high tech energy efficiency incentives, the company hopes customers will move to newer, less-power hungry computers. But about that PHEV. PG&E's work on the car comes in the form of building up the smart grid infrastructure (which they call Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology). We've discussed the smart grid before, but let's go through the idea a bit more today, just in case some of our newer readers aren't up to speed on this. It is pretty unlike the current infrastructure, that's for sure.
Follow me behind the break for more.
In PG&E's words: V2G technology allows for the bi-directional sharing of electricity between Electric Vehicles (EVs) or Plug-in Electric Hybrid Vehicles (PHEVs) and the electric power grid. The technology turns each vehicle into a potential energy storage system, increasing power reliability and the amount of renewable energy available to the grid during peak power usage.
PHEVs include additional battery capacity, which increases the vehicle's ability to run completely on electricity and reduces reliance on fossil fuels, a significant contributor to climate change. In the future, V2G technology may enable these PHEVs to offset Google's peak energy usage with energy from the vehicle batteries stored the previous night, simultaneously providing environmental, economic and national security benefits.
As you can see, the great idea from the utility's perspective is that with V2G PG&E can make electricity 24-7 and have a place to keep what doesn't get used at 3 a.m. for when it's needed at 3 p.m. Over at the Google building, since they've got such a huge solar array (currently the largest at any corporate campus in the U.S.), the Google PHEVs could store some of that if there's any excess. That's the press release possibility, but because the release also says these solar panel can offset about 30 percent of the Google HQ's peak electricity consumption, I don't see that many extra electrons being available.
Also, as a reader said in comments yesterday, a smart grid system (widely implemented) could mean that all the electricity you use comes from burning the gas in your car. But, from the presentations I've heard about the smart grid, there is a lot of user control in the process, and you get to decide when your car feeds energy in and when it pulls energy out of the grid. This is programmable by time and/or price, and triggers when your settings have been reached. I assume you'd only set it to send energy to the house from the gas you burnt when it's cost-efficient to do so. Anyone have any numbers out there to calculate some potential pump and electricity prices to see when it'd be wise to do this vs. letting the utility power things?
Notice also, that hydrogen never comes up in V2G discussions.
So, please click on any of the following links for more on the smart grid. It's coming, and it'd be nice to know a little about the pros and cons before it gets here. The name implies that what we're dealing with now is a dumb grid. Let's see just how clever the smart grid is.
Related:
- California utility Pacific Gas & Electric previews future energy grid
- Interview with Michael Brylawski of RMI part three - Hypercars and Vehicle To Grid theory
- Plug-in hybrids could be a benefit to the electrical grid
- U.S. electric grid has capacity for a lot of plug-in hybrids
- More on Google's RechargeIT: Plug in hybrids and the smart grid
- Google.org announces RechargeIT, gives $11 million for PHEVs
- GridWise sets aside four days in April to work on U.S. smart grid
- PG&E, San Francisco and Golden Gate Energy team up on tidal power
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Alessandro Merolla 1:43AM (6/21/2007)
Instead in Italy...
http://dallapartedichiguida.blogosfere.it/2007/06/petrolio-se-google-trova-unalternativa.html
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Jim Beyer 2:02PM (6/29/2007)
I used to be a big fan of V2G.
But in looking into it more, there is a big problem with it (and a solution).
The problem is the current and future expense of batteries. They are very expensive now and likely to be quite expensive in the future. They are so expensive, that plug-in hybrids BARELY make sense, even with gas prices as they are today. V2G concepts, with their additional draws on batteries, may simply be too expensive to deploy either for the car owner or the utility.
How expensive are batteries? If with take the very optimistic assumption that batteries can be retailed to a plug-in owner for $300/kW-hr, then the energy equivalent of a gallon of gas would be about 10 kW-hr of electrical storage or $3000. If we get 1000 charge cycles out of the batteries, a pro-rate the cost per storage cycle, we have about $3.00 per gallon-equivalent charging. That's JUST the battery cost, not the electricity going into them. (The electric power cost for battery-powered vehicles is trivial compared with battery costs....)
What is the solution? Ultracaps. Unlike batteries, ultracaps are good for hundreds of thousands or millions of charge cycles. They are quite expensive, but with their high cycle life, are competitive with batteries in many ways. And unlike batteries, the can also sink or source large amounts of current with no degradation. So if a vehicle had a small amount of ultracapacitor storage on it (in addtion to its batteries) then this could be used for V2G use with no ill effects. One could have perhaps 0.1 kW-hrs of UCap storage on the vehicle - probably not much more than that. (A small amount of UCap storage greatly improves the performance of a plug-in beyond any V2G use.) This would mean more cars would be needed to accomplish the same effect, but the overall concept would be the same. Probably better, in fact, as the UCAPS would give the utility more flexibility in ranges of current sourced or sunk.
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