www.forbes.com/leadership...07/100.html
A Light Bulb Goes On
Joann Muller 01.07.08, 12:00 AM ET
Willett Kempton sees your car--and the electric grid--as a solution to America's energy problem, not the source of it.
Lawmakers in Washington want to solve America's pollution and energy problems by imposing higher fuel economy standards on automobiles. Willett Kempton has a more exotic approach: turn cars into rolling power stations that can provide clean energy when utilities need it most.
Kempton, a wiry, 59-year-old renewable energy professor at the University of Delaware with round, wire-rimmed glasses and a shock of white hair, is the nation's foremost proponent of what's known as vehicle-to-grid technology. For ten years he's been trying to convince utilities and automakers that electric cars could draw power at night, when power is cheaper, and then discharge some of that juice back into the grid during the day to balance supply and demand for electricity. Kempton's theory is beginning to win applause from some car and utility folks, but daunting technical and economic obstacles make it a tough sell.
Kempton argues his idea doesn't have to wait for cheaper batteries, the main stumbling block to production of electric vehicles. He's got a way, he says, for owners of electric cars to recoup the cost of even very expensive batteries, the ones with price tags in the $20,000 range. It involves using cars to supply a reserve of electric power that can smooth out minute-to-minute shortages in the transmission grid.
Kempton parks a plug-in Toyota (nyse: TM - news - people ) Scion in his garage that can discharge 19 kilowatts of power from its battery. The average house uses 1.5 kilowatts. "When I run it backwards at full power," says Kempton, "I'm running my whole block," or he would be if the system were up and operating.
The Kempton plan is just one of several proposed schemes for interconnecting the country's transportation and electric networks. Another, proposed by former software executive Shai Agassi, entails electric filling stations at which car owners would make a quick swap of a depleted battery for a charged battery. forbes columnist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Peter Huber is a fan of plug-in hybrids ( FORBES, May 24, 2004). Equipped with charging stations at home and at the shopping mall, these cars would be able to run on grid electricity for short trips.
The Kempton, Agassi and Huber proposals have this in common: They take advantage of the fact that energy bought from a central station power plant is cheaper than energy bought from a gasoline pump.
Kempton first got the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) idea in 1996, while wrestling with a fundamental problem with renewable energy: Solar power peaks at noon, and wind power peaks at night, but demand for electricity peaks between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. The solution came to him at a conference on electric vehicles. Kempton realized that most of the power available from electric cars' large batteries was being wasted, because the cars sit parked 95% of the time. "That was the eureka moment," he says.
The following year, he and a colleague at the University of Delaware, Steven Letendre, published a research paper describing the V2G concept. The reaction was swift and negative. Carmakers argued that electric vehicles already have a limited range; no way would drivers want to give up precious miles by selling power back to utilities. And they said the batteries would wear out prematurely.
Kempton's response: Driver patterns are predictable, and motorists could control when utilities tapped their car for power, making sure they wouldn't be stranded. As for battery usage, Kempton says that initially utilities would need only tiny bursts of power to balance cycles for a minute or two, so there would be no need to fully discharge the car's battery. There's a well-defined market for this kind of power balancing, and it could help fund a shift to electric cars. (It's distinct from another need of utilities, which is for some way to store up electricity generated at night and release it over the course of several hours of peak demand during the day.) The power balancing involves borrowing a bit of juice and then replacing it a few minutes later.
Utilities, for their part, complained that when they need reserve power the most, in the midafternoon, all the cars would be on the road. Not true, according to Kempton, whose research team studied road-use statistics and found that even during the worst traffic periods nearly 90% of cars are idle.
Huber is skeptical of the Kempton plan because there are other ways utilities can store energy. "Enough hamsters running on a wheel could displace a power plant, but no one's going to do it, because it's too expensive," he says. Utilities would be better off storing power in flywheels, or as ice for air-conditioning systems, he says. "They're way cheaper than anything Detroit can build."
A Light Bulb Goes On
Joann Muller 01.07.08, 12:00 AM ET
Willett Kempton sees your car--and the electric grid--as a solution to America's energy problem, not the source of it.
Lawmakers in Washington want to solve America's pollution and energy problems by imposing higher fuel economy standards on automobiles. Willett Kempton has a more exotic approach: turn cars into rolling power stations that can provide clean energy when utilities need it most.
Kempton, a wiry, 59-year-old renewable energy professor at the University of Delaware with round, wire-rimmed glasses and a shock of white hair, is the nation's foremost proponent of what's known as vehicle-to-grid technology. For ten years he's been trying to convince utilities and automakers that electric cars could draw power at night, when power is cheaper, and then discharge some of that juice back into the grid during the day to balance supply and demand for electricity. Kempton's theory is beginning to win applause from some car and utility folks, but daunting technical and economic obstacles make it a tough sell.
Kempton argues his idea doesn't have to wait for cheaper batteries, the main stumbling block to production of electric vehicles. He's got a way, he says, for owners of electric cars to recoup the cost of even very expensive batteries, the ones with price tags in the $20,000 range. It involves using cars to supply a reserve of electric power that can smooth out minute-to-minute shortages in the transmission grid.
Kempton parks a plug-in Toyota (nyse: TM - news - people ) Scion in his garage that can discharge 19 kilowatts of power from its battery. The average house uses 1.5 kilowatts. "When I run it backwards at full power," says Kempton, "I'm running my whole block," or he would be if the system were up and operating.
The Kempton plan is just one of several proposed schemes for interconnecting the country's transportation and electric networks. Another, proposed by former software executive Shai Agassi, entails electric filling stations at which car owners would make a quick swap of a depleted battery for a charged battery. forbes columnist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Peter Huber is a fan of plug-in hybrids ( FORBES, May 24, 2004). Equipped with charging stations at home and at the shopping mall, these cars would be able to run on grid electricity for short trips.
The Kempton, Agassi and Huber proposals have this in common: They take advantage of the fact that energy bought from a central station power plant is cheaper than energy bought from a gasoline pump.
Kempton first got the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) idea in 1996, while wrestling with a fundamental problem with renewable energy: Solar power peaks at noon, and wind power peaks at night, but demand for electricity peaks between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. The solution came to him at a conference on electric vehicles. Kempton realized that most of the power available from electric cars' large batteries was being wasted, because the cars sit parked 95% of the time. "That was the eureka moment," he says.
The following year, he and a colleague at the University of Delaware, Steven Letendre, published a research paper describing the V2G concept. The reaction was swift and negative. Carmakers argued that electric vehicles already have a limited range; no way would drivers want to give up precious miles by selling power back to utilities. And they said the batteries would wear out prematurely.
Kempton's response: Driver patterns are predictable, and motorists could control when utilities tapped their car for power, making sure they wouldn't be stranded. As for battery usage, Kempton says that initially utilities would need only tiny bursts of power to balance cycles for a minute or two, so there would be no need to fully discharge the car's battery. There's a well-defined market for this kind of power balancing, and it could help fund a shift to electric cars. (It's distinct from another need of utilities, which is for some way to store up electricity generated at night and release it over the course of several hours of peak demand during the day.) The power balancing involves borrowing a bit of juice and then replacing it a few minutes later.
Utilities, for their part, complained that when they need reserve power the most, in the midafternoon, all the cars would be on the road. Not true, according to Kempton, whose research team studied road-use statistics and found that even during the worst traffic periods nearly 90% of cars are idle.
Huber is skeptical of the Kempton plan because there are other ways utilities can store energy. "Enough hamsters running on a wheel could displace a power plant, but no one's going to do it, because it's too expensive," he says. Utilities would be better off storing power in flywheels, or as ice for air-conditioning systems, he says. "They're way cheaper than anything Detroit can build."
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Re: Electric Cars and the Energy Grid. . .
Wed, February 27, 2008 - 6:30 PMI do see electric cars as holding great promise.... always have..
1) evens out demand on power grid by charging at night
2) forces people to become educated on how the grid work and their demands on it
3) clean technology
4) using solar or wind to charge and perhaps putting power back into the grid
Then we've got to deal with cleaner power plants whether nuclear, turbine or algae.
This solution scares the shit out of car and fuel companies because it decentralizes the power in power and threatens their survival. These types of cars don't break (very, very rare), don't need fuel, oil, coolant, etc AND can go hundreds of thousands of miles.
