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You never know when you pass someone on the highway, but an electric car can have more power. It charges by plugging into the power grid, yes, but it can also send power into it. For the number of EVs, this vehicle-to-grid technologyor V2G, creates a revenue stream for drivers, who pay utilities to tap into their batteries when needed during grid spikes.
Utilities across the country are pursuing technology testing projects, figuring out how to connect hundreds, thousands, and eventually millions of EVs. To that end, today a consortium of companies—Eversource, National Grid, EnergyHub, Sunrun, and Mobility House—is launching an initial test of the technology in Massachusetts so utility customers can try it out. Lessons learned here and elsewhere can drive the process to greater prominence, making the group more credible and cheap electricityeven if you don’t have an EV. “It’s great that Massachusetts is taking the lead here and doing this because these studies are what will allow this technology to grow,” said Chip Silverman, director of grid services at Sunrun, a solar and battery company.
In the new system, participants connect to an existing program called ConnectedSolutionswhich enables buildings to charge their residential batteries, among other things. So when there is a “critical response” event, such as during a heat wave, EV batteries can help keep the grid moving. Participants are paid for this, as are some homeowners who provide energy from their own solar panels.
“It’s only a few hours a year that you’re draining the battery,” said Russell Vare, vice president of automotive integration at Mobility House North America, which provides charging equipment. “It’s not like it comes out every day, but it’s the times that it happens the most.”
Tools like V2G because they are dealing with a growing number of problems. For one thing, the demand for electricity is increasing if A lot of data like energy comes online and people switch from internal combustion vehicles to EVs and from gas furnaces to heat pumps. At the same time, utilities are trying to phase out natural gas and coal in favor of renewables like wind and solar. These clean technologies, however, are intermittent, because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. Utilities need ways to store energy in the bank for later use, so that’s why warehouses and even using the Earth itself as a giant battery.
Already, the Americans are fight against the rising cost of electricity for various reasons. Shareholders are reaping profits, for example, and customers are raising money for improvements, such as burying wires. so they don’t start wildfires or down in the storm. Building battery facilities and transmission lines will add huge costs—the unavoidable cost of paying for a cleaner and more reliable grid.
Except some of those damages can be avoided: V2G’s promise is that they can produce cheap electricity. Although the participants need a dual generator to send power to the grid, the utility does not have to restart the entire system. EV batteries are an available, common, and reliable source of energy storage for when it’s needed most, like during the summer when everyone is running their gas. “It’s the most affordable renewable energy storage that will ever be available on the grid,” Vare said.
As the world heats up, V2G becomes more attractive to look at the utility. People need extra AC to stay healthy, but appliances need more energy to run. If the energy isn’t from renewables, it’s causing more heat and more AC demand, and so on. In a V2G system, vehicles that follow a predetermined schedule, such as school buses and private cars, it will be very usefulin addition to their batteries being large reserves of energy. Even a typical EV battery, however, has about six times the capacity of a battery installed outside the home.
