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Vehicle to Grid - V2G

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CTF

Member
Mar 22, 2007
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Todays Wall Street Journal (subscription) takes a front page look at Austin, TX project to use EV batteries to store energy for peaking coverage. Very good to get the utilities involved early. Austin mgr. Dustin was greeted with silence from automakers when presented with the details of the plan. The article also mentions the Chevy Volt and has a cutaway to explain the hybrid technology. It mentions that the needed batteries are not yet ready and that EV production is years (2 to 3) away. The "Plug-In-Partners" plan has gotten 8,000 purchase pledges to buy whatever car they use.
 
Want Electric Cars En Masse? Time to Rethink Warranties
Alec Brooks, a renewable energy engineer for Google who’s credited with coining the term V2G and who previously directed vehicle technology for Tesla Motors, commented that ancillary services (such as switching directions between charging and discharging) won’t necessarily take a significantly greater toll on battery life than the wear and tear of simply driving the car. (Google’s Bill Weihl and Edward Lu will be speaking at our Green:Net conference in San Francisco on April 29.)

If there is another V2G thread this might go there. If not could a moderator rename this thread "Vehicle to Grid V2G" This one was not searchable.
 
NRG Energy launches nations 1st commercial-scale V2G project

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Interesting comments.
 
I suppose it'd be good to put the whole link up as well. I didn't think to do it here. The Tesla Road Trip Success that No One’s Talking About
I'm really excited to start looking at doing this with Model S.

What I was thinking after your article, that with connecting thru twitter, opting in or out is easy and no big administration needed!
Also could be rewarding for the drivers! apparently people/factorys get paid for stopping electriciuse at peakmoments!
TWiE 76 Forward off the climate cliff | This Week in Energy (TWiE)

And with the model s REST API now available, it must be easy to make a app to do this!
 
To be commercially valuable, any V2G will have to run through an aggregator who can predictably and reliably deliver meaningful quantities of regulation services (the most valuable ancillary service). Why?
  1. Grid operators don't interact with retail customers. They run wholesale markets, and in order to receive payments, a counterparty has to be a qualified wholesale market participant with proper credit postings, etc.
  2. Wholesale power markets work in units of megawatts, not kilowatts. Quantity increments are usually in 0.1MW or 0.01MW, far more than any single EV can provide.
  3. Grid operators require bids for blocks of time, looking forward, so that they can schedule physical resources. No one EV owner has such a predictable charging schedule, but in aggregate there is some reliable amount of regulation they can provide.
  4. Regulation providers are required to provide near-instantaneous response to changes in system frequency and/or regulation setpoints from the grid operator. In practice, that means regulation resources are deployed under software control, not manual instructions.
  5. Grid operators need to be able to monitor and verify performance. Given that EVs are not connected at a revenue-quality transmission meter, there would need to be protocols to demonstrate that requested changes in charging rate were, in fact, provided.
While these are obstacles to retail participation in providing regulation and operating reserves, an aggregator could overcome them by managing the charging rate of a fleet of EVs. The EV owners would have to allow the aggregator to control the charging rate in real time; hopefully, Tesla could provide a second level of passcode access to the cars that controls charging only. And, the cars/owners would need some way of communicating to the aggregator their charging plans for the next day and any changes to that plan.

So while the prospect of V2G regulation is a good one, there are a lot of gritty operational details that would need to be sorted out. Perhaps there's enough profit to inspire someone to cut through the thickets.