Why “Vehicle To Grid” is a horrible idea
February 5th, 2010
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In the near future, we may see a transition to an electric-based transportation system, specifically with electric vehicle drive trains and vehicles which drive on battery power, with or without an additional internal combustion engine to provide for extended range operation. This is already starting to happen with hybrid vehicles being produced by most manufactures and models like the Chevy Volt coming out, which are equipped with a fully electric drive-train and the ability to travel short distances without burning any fuel.
This is where the idea of “vehicle to grid” power comes in. The idea is that since we don’t drive our cars all the time there will be a large number of batteries and motor-generators connected to the power grid. So why not use them for something? The basic idea is that the vehicles would charge during times of relatively low power demand and that during times when demand is high, these vehicles would instead discharge to provide power to the grid. Owners who back-feed the grid with power from their cars would be paid a premium for the power to make it worth their while. Power would be priced based on grid demand, thus allowing vehicle owners to make money by charging when demand is low and discharging when demand is high.
The image on the right comes from this website.
Apparently those who are behind this concept believe that in the years to come our power grid will be pushed so close to the brink of complete collapse that it will be necessary to resort to vehicles for energy storage and generation in order to avoid regional blackouts becoming a common occurrence.
There are three basic vehicle-to-grid systems proposed, based on the vehicle type:
- Battery Electric Vehicles – The vehicle’s battery charges when plugged in during times when there is power avaliable on the electric grid, but if there is a time of high demand when power is in short supply, the process is reversed and the battery discharges electricity back on to the grid
- Plug in hybrids/Extended Range Electric Vehicles – These vehicles have batteries which allow them to travel short and medium distances on only battery power. They also have a gasoline or diesel engine connected to a generator to provide power when driving beyond the range of batteries. Since the batteries on these types of vehicles are of limited capacity, they would be exhausted after only a relatively short period of time and most of the electricity back-fed to the grid would come from the internal combustion engine powering the generators.
- Fuel Cell Vehicles – These vehicles would never charge from the electric grid and would get all their power from fuel, such as hydrogen, which would be purchased at filling stations just as gasoline is. Today most hydrogen comes from the steam reforming of natural gas, but since the entire point of using hydrogen is to allow for an “renewable” form of energy that is not fossil fuel based, presumably this hydrogen would be produced from water by means of electrolysis or thermochemical reactions. (using hydrogen as a fuel presents other issues that go beyond the scope of this post)
So this sounds like a great idea, right? Actually it’s a horrible idea.
Unfortunately, all of these proposals suffer from some rather extreme problems, which makes it unlikely that they’ll ever actually be used on any large scale. If they are ever used it will be only because of mandates and subsidies, not because they actually are desirable or benefit utilities or their customers.
Some of the big, fundamental problems of the whole concept include the following:
It complicates control and management of the power grid – Even when using only a few power plants, keeping the electric grid up and running smoothly is a twenty four hour a day job. Reserve must be maintained, transmission lines must be utilized efficiently and without overloading and loads must be balanced. At any time, a grid operator needs to know how much power is being drawn, where that power is being consumed and the status of all their power plants, including which ones have additional capacity that can be called up.
The “vehicle to grid” concept would mean that grid operators would need to know the status and availability of thousands or millions of tiny generators. They’d need to know where they are located and whether the local transmission lines had the capacity to transmit electricity to the areas where it is needed. They would need to be able to communicate to each of these vehicles and throttle them up and down, calculating, in real time, which ones were suitable for use. Power would be flowing every which way. Residential areas would be generating some of their own power while transmitting some extra to commercial areas, which would be simultaneously getting some of their power from centralized power plants. Some residential areas would be drawing power and then five minutes later, they would have surplus power. Industrial customers would be drawing power from numerous sources at once.
If this is not complicated enough, power grid management is more complex than just keeping demand and production in balance. Frequency and phase must be maintained across the grid and where non-synchronized transmission lines meet, phase compensation must be used to keep them from experiencing a phase miss-match. Loads must be balanced across the three legs of a three phase system, so that no one leg ever has signifficantly higher or lower voltage, which could cause severe damage to equipment. Factors like inductive reactance and standing waves need to be taken into consideration.
It is not simply an issue of the current grid not being designed for this. Even if a new grid were built from the ground up, the control and communication issues would be daunting and require numerous complex management systems.
It’s unreliable - One of the biggest issues is the fact that it places a great deal of importance on something that can’t necessarily be counted on. By making vehicles a major contributor to power generation, the habits of vehicle owners becomes a major factor in whether power can be reliably provided. If demand is high on a given day and there are many vehicles connected to the grid, then there will be sufficient capacity. However, if a large percentage of the public is not home or has chosen not to have their vehicle back-feed the grid on a given day or night, then a spike in demand could cause a major power shortage.
Not only must there be enough vehicles connected and ready to generate, but they must be in the right locations and connected to sufficiently high capacity power lines to transmit electricity to the areas of demand. If a major traffic jam stops many people in critical areas from getting home when anticipated, or if an event like a holiday causes many to travel, the generating capacity may suddenly not be there.
It’s undesirable to have vehicles discharge – Imagine coming home from work and plugging your vehicle in to charge. The next morning, when you get in your car, you expect the batteries will be fully charged, or at least nearly fully charged. Likewise if you have a charger at the parking lot where you work, you expect that by day’s end you’ll have batteries that are full for the drive home. If your vehicle has been discharging, however, then you’re going to have a big problem. It has been proposed that vehicles could be designed to only allow discharging a portion of their battery capacity or only when high rates are offered. However, electric vehicles already have issues with range and starting off with less than full batteries is not going to help. Since the capacity of vehicle batteries is pretty low to begin with (in grid terms) if you only allow the vehicle to discharge a relatively small portion of the batteries, it won’t make much difference to begin with.
Of course, if your vehicle is not purely electric, such as a plug-in hybrid, then you’ll be a little better off, because you’ll probably still have some gasoline left to drive on. Of course, once the vehicles batteries are depleted, you’ve defeated the entire purpose of a plug-in hybrid and those big batteries become nothing but dead weight you may as well not even have in the vehicle. If power demand is high enough, your engine will have come on to generate power, resulting in not only your batteries being dead, but a signifficant amount of your expensive gasoline having been burned. Of course, if you park your car in a garage, this may not even be an issue, because you’ll already be dead from carbon monoxide poisoning before you even realize the predicament you’re in.
A hydrogen vehicle would be no better off, as hydrogen fuel also costs money and the power company would have to pay out astronomically high rates to make burning through your own hydrogen worthwhile.
It’s horribly inefficient - A consequence of thermodynamics is that any time energy is stored, converted from one form to another or transmitted, some of it will be lost. This loss may be very large, as in a thermal engine, or it may be very small, as in an electric transformer. However, the loss always compounds, so if power goes through a series of transformers, inverters, charge controllers, voltage regulators and other such devices, each will contribute some loss that compounds.
There are, of course, ways of keeping this loss to a minimum. One important consideration is the effeciency of systems being used. As a general rule, bigger is better. Huge steam turbines at power plants are far more effecient than small engines. Big centralized equipment can be maintained at higher tolerances than would be economical for millions of tiny engines and it is cost effective to invest more in effeciency when its only one unit. The engine in a car may have a total thermal effeciency of 30%, but a combined cycle power plant can easily be greater than 50%
An example of this would be inverters. If batteries are to be connected to the grid, the current will need to be inverted to produce alternating current. Utility scale inverters are very effecient, some of them achieving close to 99% of total power effeciency. The smaller units that would be used in combination with an automobile are nowhere near this effecient. Considering the compounded loss from transmission, charging, discharging, inversion and retransmission, this loss becomes a big consideration.
The fact that energy would need to be repeatedly transmitted to and from centralized regional lines only makes the situation worse. Electricity companies try to avoid using energy storage when possible, but occasionally methods like pumped storage hydroelectric are used for load balancing. When this is the case, these facilities are located near power generators and connected directly to regional lines to reduce the loss of repeated conversion and retransmission.
It trades cheap fuel for one of the most expensive – Cars run on gasoline because it is easy to transport, tanks can be refilled easily, it’s reasonably stable and has numerous other desirable qualities. They do not run on it because it’s the cheapest fuel around and that is becoming more and more of a consideration. Generating power by burning coal is filthy, but at least its economical. Uranium may be even more economical and natural gas, though more expensive, is still a lot better than burning gasoline.
With the exception of some areas of the Middle East, only a tiny portion of the world’s electricity is generated from burning petroleum and the power plants that do burn petroleum usually burn relatively inexpensive bunker oil or other heavy fuel oils, not highly refined gasoline. Gasoline does burn more cleanly than heavier petroleum-based fuels, but using it for power generation would borders on insanity.
Hydrogen could, in some ways, be even worse. If hydrogen is generated from water (the only way of doing it in a truly “clean” and fossil fuel free manner) then a great deal of energy is lost in the conversion of heat and/or electricity to hydrogen and then back to electricity by a fuel cell. The price of hydrogen would therefore always be higher than the price of an equivalent amount of electrical energy. This may be considered worthwhile if it allows portability of energy, but the idea of paying for hydrogen at a filling station only to convert it back to grid electricity is absurd.
It puts wear and tear on vehicles unnecessarily – Batteries don’t have unlimited charge cycles and are expensive to replace. This is a major issue that is faced by battery electric vehicles. Maximizing battery lifetime is a critical concern when it comes to creating viable electric vehicles for the mass market. One thing that would NOT help the situation is using these valuable batteries for more than propelling the vehicle.
The same is true of fuel cells and internal combustion engines. All engines wear with use, and in addition to reducing their total lifetime, the more an engine is used the more it will need maintenance, such as oil changes and the replacement of everything from spark plugs to air filters.
It would necessarily be enormously expensive – In addition to the gargantuan expense of equipping every car with a static inverter, control interfaces and communication systems the price paid to end users to generate electricity would necessarily need to be very very high. After all, they’re burning your gasoline or hydrogen, putting wear and tear on your expensive batteries and potentially causing you some pretty extreme problems with mobility. It’s going to need to be pretty high a payback to justify that kind of sacrifice and to cover the costs incurred.
If the price paid for electricity is very high then so to must be the price it is sold at, and this creates a huge problem. If you own a car and are a net producer or produce nearly as much electricity as you consume, you might come out okay, but what about those who don’t own a car or who have a long commute and thus can’t afford to have their batteries constantly discharged? They’re going to have a very hard time paying for the exorbitantly high cost of electricity. Of course, the largest users of electricity are industry, so unless they generate their own power, industrial users will simply be wiped out.
There are better, cheaper, more effecient ways of storing electricity – At first it might seem like it’s using a resource free for the taking, but the fact that vehicle to grid requires such enormous upgrades to the system and such uneconomical pricing models, it costs more to use vehicles than it would just to build dedicated energy storage facilities. In circumstances where energy storage is needed for the grid, pumped hydroelectric has been proven to be economical and reasonably effecient. There are also utility scale battery systems which tend to be used for shorter duration and smaller application uses, but offer higher effeciency. If on-demand generation is required, there are modular gas turbine generators that work well for non-spinning reserve.
It’s worth noting that batteries, generators and engines are all optimized to their purpose. Designing something like an engine involves a lot of compromises and trade-offs. Ideally you’d want the engine to be as small as possible, as cheap as possible, as effecient as possible and as reliable as possible. Yet these ideals are often in opposition to each other, thus requiring that the designer choose which ones are most important and which can be compromised. For example, the engine inside a car should ideally be as effecient as possible, but if achieving higher effeciency means making the engine much heavier then it may not be worth the added weight, as the additional effeciency would be lost to the added energy required to move the heavy engine around. Yet in a static application, weight doesn’t really matter, so a heavy and effecient engine is desirable. Similarly, the batteries in a vehicle should have an effecient charge cycle, but it’s also important that they charge rapidly. It may be worthwhile to design batteries with lower charge cycle effeminacy if it means they can be charged rapidly.
Providing power to the grid and storing large amounts of energy in a static location is a much much different job than propelling a car around town. Thus the systems that do one are not going to be that good at doing the other. It’s possible that the same kind of system could do both, but it would not do both very well. One might compare it to the concept of a flying car. It is possible to make a car that can also function as an airplane and there have been many built over the years. However, due to the completely different nature of the requirements, they end up being capable of both driving and flying, but don’t do either very well.
Finally, it should be noted that there’s no enviornmental benefit to this at all – If anything, the increase in batteries that need to be manufactured and replaced and the huge losses involved make it a very bad enviornmental policy. There are many who like to talk about “distributed generation” being better for the enviornment, but don’t explain why burning fuel in a lot of little put-put engines is better than burning fuel in one place.
There actually have been some who claim that vehicle to grid systems would result in lower emissions of sulfur, carbon dioxide and other pollutants. However these claims are based on the presumption that gasoline engines are used to provide most of the power. Compared to coal, gasoline produces less CO2 and more water per unit of energy and while coal is filthy, gasoline burns reasonably cleanly. However, if you’re going to burn gasoline to make power, you could just as easily do it in a big centralized power plant and at least get a little bit better effeciency. Then again, if you are planning on burning gasoline to make electricity, you may as well consider just burning money instead.
This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Obfuscation, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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February 5th, 2010 at 11:39 pm
Sorry it took so long to get another post up. This issue has been mentioned here before, but given that it’s become a popular idea in the whole “Green energy” community I figured it was about time I posted an in-depth analysis of all the reasons its a bad idea.
Quote Comment
February 6th, 2010 at 12:31 am
There are multitude of other potential problems: Can the vehicle transmit energy back onto the grid in a safe manner? What is the risk to the consumer? If a $20,000 lithium-ion battery is damaged, who’s responsible? The utility?
If you’re going to put equipment on a car that allows bi-directional power transfer, then you need to offer the consumer a financial return. Who is going to pay for this? The same sap that’s buying the power to charge his car in the first place. Wanna bet that the buy/sell offset will favor the utility.
But why make the battery systems for peak demand be mobile? Why not build them into the infrastructure as you pointed out. Easy, so the sucker buying the car assumes the costs, including disposal which is a non-trivial expense for any battery system and one of the reasons the utilities do not already have large battery yards, the same whay they do sub-stations.
This is not just stupid, its a con-job of breathtaking dimensions.
Not only that, this would never be needed except for that other energy delusion: renewables. A robust supply of nuclear generated power would make the need for storage moot. So now we are building one fantasy system on top of another. Jesus weeps.
Quote Comment
February 6th, 2010 at 12:59 am
DV82XL said:
Well, actually, there are some utility scale batteries in use in Japan and they’ve also been deployed on an experimental basis in the midwestern US.
However, regarding the cost of batteries and disposal and the idea that the “so the sucker buying the car assumes the costs,” I’m not sure the utility ends up getting a sweet deal on this end either. Sure, they may avoid the cost of the battery itself, but instead they are going to be forced to deal with equally demanding and expensive issues involving control, grid stability, potential complications, reliability and so on. In the end, they may take just as much of a bath on this as the consumer due to the fact that it creates an inherently complex and difficult to manage system.
I don’t think any power company in their right mind would really want to get involved in this and open up the can of worms that comes with hundreds of thousands of put-put generators on their grid.
Remember, utilities really don’t want to even bother with reverse metering. For them, buying a couple kilowatts power from a home owner at retail price is more trouble than it’s worth and is generally a financial loss.
The only way I could see this happening is if some similar mandate forced the power companies to do so or if a very generous subsidy made it worth their while to deal with the huge problems it creates.
There is plenty of expense and headache in this to go around. It could be an everyone loses situation. Power customers face higher bills and wear and tear on their cars and grid operators face higher operating costs while industrial customers face cripplingly high rates.
A lose-lose-lost situation on all fronts.
Quote Comment
February 6th, 2010 at 2:43 am
drbuzz0 said:
Yes there are utility scale batteries in use, but not many, and only where the economics are very favorable. I did some work for a group that wanted to deploy a number of ‘battery yards’ (their term) around North America. I was mostly tasked with looking at the back-end of the cycle, and while I’m not sure it was the deal-breaker – disposal costs were very significant.
The utilities probably aren’t wild about it, I’m sure, but the whole V2G farce is based on trying to ameliorate the huge storage costs of renewables, to keep that idea alive. Outside of that context, it’s just plain stupid.
Quote Comment
February 6th, 2010 at 2:45 am
I’m so glad someone took the time to write about what a horrible idea this is. I never understood why this was thought to be a good idea in the first place just from the losses incurred at all the various energy transfer points. It also seems to be targeted toward the suburban homeowner with a garage which also narrows the market scope.
I do think the Chevy Volt is a great car idea though. The concept of using just electricity for short trips with a gasoline generator/backup engine seems like a nice way to augment the strengths of each technology. I don’t know if the Volt is a plug-in as well but it seems like the plug-in feature could be an additional option on the car. Even if this makes cars a bit more expensive, it may seem cheap when gas gets over $5 a gallon.
Quote Comment
February 6th, 2010 at 3:26 am
I agree that getting the vehicles to feed back power into the grid is a horrible idea (actually, I think that having homeowners feed solar power into the grid isn’t such a great idea either).
What might work is if car battery chargers had a setup similar to off-peak hot water storage systems, which have a high-power element switched by the power company (and metered separately at a lower price) that heats up the water for later use, and sometimes a smaller “booster” element connected to the regular meter that heats up the water during peak hours if it gets below a certain temperature.
If car battery chargers were connected to an off-peak supply like this, car owners would have the benefit of cheaper electricity for their car and the power companies would have the benefit of better load control.
Quote Comment
February 6th, 2010 at 9:22 am
The arguments against V2G in this article are quite good, but it gets even worse. The V2G concept started with a couple of professors in Delaware. If you actually read the papers that they published on the idea, you’ll see that they didn’t examine whether this idea was sound energy policy or whether it was good business for the utilities or even whether it was an “environmentally friendly” idea (that was taken as given in the introduction). No, the paper was on whether the car owner could make money off of the idea.
They investigated whether the amount of money that could be made would pay for the up-front investment costs. The cost of the car is taken as zero, since it is assumed that it has already been purchased for transportation, as is the equipment needed to charge the car, since a plug-in EV would be worthless without it. The main cost considered in the study is the amount needed to upgrade the electrical throughput to and from the house, since the standard set of wiring used in houses today simply can’t cut it. Another cost is the electricity that is pulled in to charge the car.
The study uses a typical contract that is used for peaking power generators as its model. From these assumptions, the authors balance costs versus income for several scenarios, to determine that a car owner could probably pull in a net earning of several hundred dollars a year.
Sounds good, right? Getting several hundred dollars a year for “saving the world” with your eco-car? Not so fast. The details are interesting.
The first thing to notice is that the car actually doesn’t provide much electricity to the grid over the year, since the current flows out only when the price of electricity is sufficiently high enough to make it economical. Even with these very high prices per kWh, however, the actual amount of money made from selling electricity is surprisingly small — it is not nearly enough to justify the costs of the system.
The lion’s share of the money for the car owner comes from the contract that requires the car to be available to provide power to the grid. That is, the owner is getting paid for not using his car 14 or 16 hours a day (obviously, this scheme is most viable for the owner’s rarely used second or third car). Without this, the owner would not make any net money. Most of this time, the car is doing nothing, not providing a single Watt to the grid.
So there you have it: V2G is expensive electricity, for which the majority of the money goes to pay someone to not use his car. It has to be one of the more half-baked ideas I’ve seen in a long time.
Quote Comment
February 6th, 2010 at 10:46 am
Thanks for this in-depth analysis. I had been very optimistic about the prospects of distributed power for a while, but am no re-thinking. If we have learned anything from the fiasco in the financial markets, it is that too much complexity is bad. This is especially true for the energy system. As it is, it’s already too complex and vulnerable. The fossil fuel system with its global supply chains is coming unglued. The last thing we want to do is add more complexity to the energy system (in this case the electric system). This would require additional layers of systems to monitor, which we don’t understand. The most straightforward solution would seem to yes, switch to electric transportation (light rail, electric rail in general, and also automobiles, whose total number needs to be reduced). The electricity should probably come from a relatively small number of nuclear power plants which we understand and can handle. Depending on how technological developments in car battery storage play out, either electric-only vehicles or HEVs running on electricity plus nuclear DME would seem to be a wise choice.
Quote Comment
February 6th, 2010 at 11:15 am
DV82XL made the point a couple of time. This idea is closely tied to renewables. (wind, solar) because a storage system is essential with these intermittent, unreliable sources.
DV82XL: ‘Not only that, this would never be needed except for that other energy delusion: renewables. A robust supply of nuclear generated power would make the need for storage moot. So now we are building one fantasy system on top of another. Jesus weeps.’
There is no way to say it better.
Quote Comment
February 6th, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Wow what a stretch, instead of including one iota about the main assumed benefit of V2G(efficient off peak use of renewables–tangible for rate-payers) you speculate about unfounded impacts. It never fails to amaze me the propaganda one can find on the blogosphere…
Depleted Cranium; Perfectly descriptive title for anyone who would buy into this garbage you have posted
Quote Comment
February 6th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
NRGindeepndnt said:
You have some data which refutes the claims made in the post?
Quote Comment
February 6th, 2010 at 3:24 pm
NRGindeepndnt said:
Typical. Tdiots show up to the debate without one substantial counter-argument, and lecture us sanctimoniously on not presenting the other side’s views. Make an argument NRG or sod off, you have nothing to criticize us for if you can’t even articulate your own position.
Quote Comment
February 6th, 2010 at 3:27 pm
NRGindeepndnt said:
Well that’s just the catch, isn’t it? These putative “benefits” are assumed — usually by people who don’t have the first clue about how electricity generation, transmission, and distribution work and are, frankly, just bad at math. These people can never provide convincing evidence of these benefits (i.e., by using numbers and data); hence, such benefits are always “assumed.”
There is nothing “efficient” about V2G, nor are their any tangible benefits for rate-payers. Instead, as I point out above, the whole thing is a scam that is geared toward having the rate-payer subsidize toy eco-cars for enviro-yuppies who are wealthy enough to afford the garage, the equipment, and the spare EV car that they hardly ever use.
Quote Comment
February 6th, 2010 at 3:29 pm
NRGindeepndnt said:
The opening of the post contains these sentences:
The basic idea is that the vehicles would charge during times of relatively low power demand and that during times when demand is high, these vehicles would instead discharge to provide power to the grid. Owners who back-feed the grid with power from their cars would be paid a premium for the power to make it worth their while. Power would be priced based on grid demand, thus allowing vehicle owners to make money by charging when demand is low and discharging when demand is high.
I’d say he covered the basic idea of “the main assumed benefit of V2G” pretty well there.
Quote Comment
February 6th, 2010 at 4:13 pm
DV82XL said:
Grid energy storage has its place, but it is always a net consumer of energy (more goes in than comes out). This is true for pumped hydro and for batteries. Pumped hydro is still the most common and we may see batteries more common for some smaller regional applications in load smoothing, but really, those are not for much more than short term spikes in demand.
Grid storage is not as good an idea as it might sound at first. Utilities will use it in some cases in circumstances where it is favorable, but generally load following is best done by alocating certain plants as baseload and others as fast-response load followers. The gold standard for this is hydroelectric. If you have a descent number of hydro plants in an area, even if it’s only a minority of generating capacity, allocate those to fast response peaking and it’s a no brainer.
On small inverters and generators and such things:
Absolutely small inverters, generators, regulators, transformers are much more lossy than the big guys, but there’s another side to it to: they don’t produce as good quality power. Big inverter plants like they have with HVDC lines produce excellent AC power – steady frequency and a perfect sign wave, with well phased three phase output.
Not so much with the little guys, which are akin to a bigger version of those boxes that let you plug in AC stuff to your car. Ever notice most of those have a fan in them? Yeah, that’s because they generate quite a bit of heat. This should be obvious to anyone who knows the first thing about physics. If it generates that much heat, that’s loss.
Then the other side: the power quality from those might be descent, but not nearly as clean as the big utility generators and inverters. What this means is they are prone to producing harmonics in the power, high frequency noise, unstable voltage, imperfect waveforms and such. Here is the problem: Connect many of those to the power grid and the noise adds up to “dirty power” which is a bad thing. It can put strain and wear on electric company equipment and on things like motors. The lifetime of an AC motor is diminished badly if it doesn’t get good quality power. It’s also bad for electronics. It increases the chances of power supply failure and noisy power can contribute to errors in network applications, so you can end up with slower networking and bad signal to noise.
Another thing: Houses are wired for single phase, which works fine for most stuff, but generators should be connected for three phase output to the grid. It’s more effecient and it prevents the possibility of having slightly more voltage on one leg than the other two. Even a small voltage differential is bad for induction motors.
On the utility company:
This is a no-win situation for them hands down. The fact that they may get some “free” energy storage is moot. For one thing, they don’t like to use energy storage if they can avoid it. For another, it’s going to make management harder and it will “dirty” their power, which can mean reduced lifespan and increased chances of failure of their equipment. Nobody really wants to buy the crappy power from a bunch of little generators.
The other problem is load distribution. Residential areas and light commercial are not the big draw on power. The biggest are industrial customers. However, city centers do also require some pretty heavy power usage. Now the problem is that if a significant portion of your generating capacity is out in residential neighborhoods in the suburbs, but most of your demand is in the cities and at aluminum mills and chemical factories and so on, how in the hell does it get there? The system was not built with the capacity to back feed that much power from traditionally low-demand sprawling areas to demand centers. Modifying it to do so would be super expensive. We’re talking about multiplying the capacity at all the suburban substations and running a lot of new lines to accommodate the fact that power is now going every which way.
I am 100% certain this in no way shape or form benefits the utility. The only question is who is the bigger loses: The consumer or the utility. Well, it doesn’t matter really, because when the utility takes a bath on things like this, the rate payer gets hit hard too.
On the price issue:
If you’re going to pay people to provide electricity from something as expensive as gasoline or even from their lithium ion or metal hydrate batteries, how much will you pay them? You need to pay them a lot, because gasoline is about the most expensive way to produce power.
Only an idiot would agree to hook their car to the grid as a storage medium if the net return per kilowatt hour was 10 cents. If it were 50 cents, maybe. If you’re talking about a gasoline engine, it’s going to have to be a lot more.
How much would electricity have to cost to make gasoline a cost-competitive fuel and make it worthwhile to hook up your car to the grid? Actually we can figure this out. A gallon of gasoline can be used to produce roughly 9 kilowatt hours of mechanical energy (the true content of gasoline is higher, but we’re talking about the useful power that comes out of the engine) Of course, small generators are not super-effecient, and small inverters and transformers are not either, so lets say 8 kilowatt hours per gallon as a reasonable estimate.
Lets say gasoline costs four dollars a gallon, which is probably not unrealistic for the future, especially if we were dumb enough to use it in this capacity. Therefore 8 kwh costs you four dollars to generate. 50 cents per kwh and that does not include the wear and tear on your car, the need for more frequent oil changes and everything like that. So then how much? I’d say that ballpark, you’d need to pay people about 75 cents per kwh to make it worth their while, and to make it the kind of thing that I’d personally be willing to do, you’d need to pay me a good dollar a kwh.
That is astronomically expensive for power! add in the transmission costs and the utility’s cut of it, and you’re looking at power that costs upwards of ten times the current price! The current price is about 9-16 cents per kwh
So – depending on how you do it, the market price has to rise anywhere from five to ten times as expensive to make it economically viable!
Then the question who wins and loses?
The utility loses big time. The consumer, possibly comes out ahead if they provide enough power back, but ultimately most lose. Those who don’t own a car – enormous losers, because prices go so high. Big energy consumers like manufacturers – probably just go out of buisiness, because at a buck a kwh for power, there’s just no way. Local governments are huge losers because of the cost of street-lighting and that kind of thing.
Winners: Battery companies, companies that make the charge controllers, the inverters, the control systems and other associated products. Rich people who can afford the cost of installing a big deisel generator, because if the costs were high enough to make cars a competitive source of power, than a one megawatt deisel generator (far more effecient and cheaper per kwh) would be a cash cow.
NRGindeepndnt said:
Sir, you have no idea what you are talking about. Distributed energy storage and generation are problematic even when you’re talking about relatively large units. These impacts are not speculation. Believe me, people have tried using batteries on utilities before or using small generators. It’s been done and we know the problems it causes.
Let me tell you why this is even being promoted: People now are getting that the so-called ‘renewables’ are useless without storage. (Even with storage, they’re still expensive and not big providers, but without storage they can’t provide much of anything useful). Storage is expensive. So here’s the deal: tell people you’ve figured out a way to use an untapped storage medium to make this all work. Tell them it will benefit the consumer.
Oh, by the way: it’s a lie. They like to talk about all these batteries and generators ripe for the picking and act like they’re the way to go but omit all the complications and problems it causes.
Renewable and “green” energy is all about window dressing in order to get subsidies and funding and to keep natural gas in buisiness by creating the illusion that there is a solution in the works.
The reason this is being researched and promoted is simple: To deceive the public and to gain some subsidized funding for “research” that will never amount to anything at all.
It will NEVER happen. There will never be mass deployment of V2G. It’s too stupid an idea. If it ever were to be deployed, it would be by mandate, not because any utility company with an ounce of sanity embraced it by choice.
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February 6th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
Jason Ribeiro said:
I am not totally opposed to demand based pricing of electricity, as it can help encourage certain high energy tasks to be done at low demand times and that helps overall cost.
However, in this situation, it won’t work if a kilowatt hour costs nine cents during times of low demand and twelve cents during high demand.
The cost of installing the back-feeding equipment is significant and so is the cost of the wear on the car. It would have to cost a lot more to make it a worthwhile investment for the end user.
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February 6th, 2010 at 10:20 pm
THANK YOU! Finally someone publicly just coming out and saying it: IT IS A HORRIBLE IDEA AND WON’T WORK.
Even if we had electric cars with huge batteries they would be horrible for grid energy storage. It would mean a car has to be a slave to two opposing masters. It has to be there to discharge to support the grid and it has to be a vehicle and therefore have ample charge when it is needed. These are not compatible. Also, cars are not always here and that is needed. At rush hour most cars are on the road and can’t be used and when people get home from work, most of the batteries would be low in remaining power.
The only model that MIGHT WORK AT ALL is the one that has hybrids acting as generators but it’s still a horrible idea. There are already many generators that sit unused day and night almost all the time. Every hospital, police station, fire station, cellular transmitter and many schools, supermarkets and businesses have a generator on the site for use in power outages. Why not run these all the time to power the grid or switch them on during high demand? Because that would be about the most expensive way imaginable to generate electricity.
Small gasoline engines in cars would be the same thing, only even worse!
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February 7th, 2010 at 5:01 am
Thanks for this. I hadn’t considered the problems of this sort of thing except for a vague feeling that I would be well and truly pissed if I rushed downstairs to jump in the car and the bloody thing wouldn’t start because the power company had pinched all the juice. This would only have to happen once, and I would pay the penalties and cancel my contract!!!
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February 7th, 2010 at 5:36 pm
So, does using a superconducting grid offset some of the drawbacks here?
As i understand it, superconductors will act as large batteries, and flatten out draw from different sections of the loop.
Will it also “clean” the power, since it will be leveling near the speed of light?
Is the Tres Amigas going to be converting to DC on it’s loop, then reconverting to AC for the feed?
http://tresamigasllc.com/about-overview.php
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February 7th, 2010 at 8:40 pm
morganism said:
No.
First of all, a “superconducting grid” does not exist. Next, even if someone were to try to build such a grid, even the best superconductor technology would be prohibitively expensive to implement. That is, any savings from line losses would be paid for several times over in costs to keep the lines cool enough to superconduct.
Finally, superconductivity is not some magic want that “cleans” power. It is simply a property of certain materials under unusual conditions (very low temperatures near absolute zero). Although some of the effects that are observed when materials enter a superconducting state are quite fascinating (google “Meissner effect”), there is nothing that will give someone something from nothing, and there is nothing that will save the inherently flawed V2G concept.
I’m sorry to say that you’ve been reading snake oil advertisements.
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February 7th, 2010 at 9:17 pm
morganism said:
The “Tres Amigas” project is not a superconducting grid. It’s an interconnect station which uses superconducting lines to connect the inversion stations within the facility, but all and all it’s only a few miles of superconducting conduit. Superconductors do not clean power or in any way compensate for bad power. They have been used to a limited degree for some interconnects. They have the advantage of extremely high capacity per line, but they’re expensive and they need constant cooling with a system that pumps refrigerant, usually liquid nitrogen or liquid helium, depending on the type, through the cable conduits.
The expense of insulation, cryo cooling, specialty materials and so on makes it only suitable for limited use, at least for the time being.
The “Tres Amigos” station doesn’t use superconductors for energy storage. In theory, you could store energy in superconducting coils, but that’s even more complex and expensive. Tres Amigos uses DC and inverters because it’s tying three unsynchronized grids together – so it has to reinvest the power to keep it in sync.
The only “storage” is a lot of sodium sulfur batteries – which don’t provide much storage.
The project is supposed to make renewable energy a useful, create a smart grid, change everything, make power more reliable etc.
It’s basically paid for through government subsidies and the “Stimulus Package.” I’m skeptical that it will do all that much. There are already links between the grids that allow energy trading. No amount of technology will really change the basic fact that you need enough generation capacity to provide for demand. If demand is 4 gigawatts and you have 3.75 gigawatts of power generation, you’re screwed. Someone’s going to have to go without power or you’re going to have to brownout or load shed or something. This doesn’t change, no matter how much whiz-bang buzzword “smart” technology you throw at it.
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February 8th, 2010 at 2:56 pm
Well,
I understand this is just an interconnect, but seems like it solves the V/Grid issues. Since it is on DC, can’t panels and cars just dump into it without having to use inverters? doesn’t that change the cost equations to favor multiple inputs? Doesn’t matter if it is “clean”, since its DC, has no phase, and no modified sine?
By removing transmission losses, we add 10% back into the web right there, if i remember the graph you had up. That isn’t free, but at least as cheap as building new capacity, without having as much regulatory review, if we get room temp wire soon.
They have figured out how to make carbon nano wire using an acid bath, and the science on graphene is really pushing the envelope right now. Lots of different room temp stuff being worked on right now.
Seems like i read that a superconducting ring can act as a storage medium on its own also, that the charge flow can keep being upped, and it just flows faster. Takes more than the 9 wires Tres is going to use tho.
Could also put in a bunch of Gyros and maybe even the salt storage cans using calcium hydroxide. That is mainly for geothermal and direct solar, but if you have extra, that is not going into pumps, it’s easy to make heat!
Seems like a lot of the ElCo’s are really interested in the wire for motor wrappings in industrial settings, and for line transmission also. If we were to build in supergrids under the pending high speed rail right of ways, we could power the trains, and have a high power transmission system go in at the same time.
This will be going through out of the way places, and that is where the solar, geo, and wind are setting up shop. If the solar is just focused beam instead of PV, it makes a better balanced investment.
Also allows you to keep the Nukes running at full output, to keep it at top efficiency.
I know you all find anything but nuclear distasteful, wastefull, and not even wrong, but i like having a dispersed rural generation capacity.
As for Tres itself, this is going to be a huge help to the Texas grid, I read right here onsite about the trouble they are in, that the whole system down there is already dangerously unbalanced, and underpowered already. They will probably want to build their own ring in-state.
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February 8th, 2010 at 9:27 pm
Morganism said:
The only DC being used is in the link between the grid connect stations in the project. DC is not used to serve the end user. Nobody’s home is getting connected to the DC feeders. You would not want to anyway. AC current can be stepped up and down easily with inductive transformers which are inexpensive and effecient. DC requires more complex converters.
High power DC transmission is useful in certain applications like point to point long distance transmission, especially in submarine cables. It is also useful for circumstances like the tres amigas station, which is connecting non-synchronized grids. When feeds are not synchronized it has to be rephased anyway.
Aside from that, the whole issue of dirty power and inversion is not even the big problem with v2g. It’s one of the many smaller technical issues, but the big problems stem from the nature of vehicles needing to be charged when they are to be used and their general unreliability, expense and control issues.
Morganism said:
That is a HUGE HUGE ENORMOUS “IF” If it becomes possible to make room-temperature superconductors that are as easy to produce as standard wire, or anything close to it, the ramifications would be almost as great as a simple energy producing fusion reactor.
Morganism said:
Yes, there are ways of using superconducting coils or potentially superconducting capacitors as energy storage mediums. If those were deployed on the grid, then what would be the point of using vehicles? You would have provided a near lossless energy storage system right there.
Morganism said:
Actually I like hydro a lot and always have. Distributed generation has it’s place. Utilities talk about distributed generation in terms of units that are a few megawatts or so. The thing about distributed generation is that it can be deployed fast to an area without needing feed upgrades. It works decently as a peaking generator.
There are turbine gensets that can be placed at locations like substations. They’re not the most fuel effecient, but the capital cost is low and they can be operated remotely, requiring very little maintenance and on-site management. They can kick on at times like afternoons during a summer heatwave to provide some extra power in the areas of demand when needed.
One thing that is important to realize is that the economics of a reserve power generator are very different than a baseload station. Baseloads need to be cheap to operate and may have high capital costs. Generation that will be cold reserve has a much different requirement. Since it is only used every once in a while, effeciency doesn’t save you that much, and capital cost is the bigger consideration.
Even on a rural grid, anything under a megawatt or so really isn’t worth a bucket of spit to the overall grid.
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February 10th, 2010 at 6:42 pm
Great! At first, I was “open” to the idea of V2G because that would promote electric cars. Obviously, trivial little greenyisms should be exposed. I like the part about hydrogen always having to use more electricity than battery electric itself, always knew that. Also that a larger powerplant is more efficient (than a car engine, especially).
I believe, though, that electric vehicles could have their battery “exchanged” within seconds or minutes at the “filling station” like propane tanks. If large scale solar and wind is used, they can simply charge the batteries when they want (within reason). It seems that it would have to be lots cheaper than gasoline since ecars are so much more efficient. And since the batteries would be charged in a convinient windy or sunny time, no need for V2G. Also, ecars push for clean energy like 10,000 square miles of solar thermal, wind and or fission based on the molten salt reactor (MSR) concept.
Ecars DEMAND lots of electrical power thus laws should be created to ensure V2G will never be needed (laws that demand the creation of the best and cheapest clean energy)! I believe that other more responsible ways of power leveling will be used. Imagine an all nuclear baseload… Utilities would need large molten salt heat reservoirs (or something better and cheaper) for smoothing so they would not have to shut down a nuke plant when everybody turned off the TV at the same time. So this may be the only argument “for” V2G. Obviously, the tanks of molten salt would be easier and more reliable!
Thanks for pointing the arguments against V2G out!
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February 12th, 2010 at 5:09 pm
The latest on hydrogen.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18511-sunpowered-water-splitter-makes-hydrogen-tirelessly.html
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February 23rd, 2010 at 12:48 pm
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I agree. V2G cannot be done cheaply with existing technology — Electric cars cannot be done cheaply with existing technology. 40K for a Chevy Volt? 30K for a LEAF? Pricey!
As smart-grid technologies improve and lossy small generators and inverters are improved on and new techniques are discovered and energy costs skyrocket, solutions will be found — this may just work.
This is all new and experimental — don’t kill it yet. Let the engineers and scientists play with it
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February 23rd, 2010 at 7:20 pm
lousloot said:
First most of this isn’t new and experimental, all of these technologies have been around for ages and they have evolved to the point where ant improvements will be incremental, not revolutionary. Generator efficiency, for example is in the range of 93-98%, not much room for improvement there. The efficiency of inverters usually ranges from 85% to 95%, with 90% being about average, assuming the right size has been selected for the job. Again not much can be done here. Smart grid technology won’t make more energy – the best it can do is limit losses, but losses aren’t the major problem with V2G.
I can’t understand why it isn’t crystal clear to everyone that V2G is nothing more than a flim-flam to get consumers to assume the cost and maintenance charges of very expensive storage modules so that the power companies can lease them back at a discounted rate. It’s a fraud, pure and simple, yet everyone behaves as if it were some advantage to the owners of these vehicles.
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February 23rd, 2010 at 7:36 pm
lousloot said:
It’s not that new. It’s not an issue of improving things so much as it is scale. Modern inverters are pretty effecient, but you compound the loss when you have to go through more systems to get to the main power distribution network. Big thermal engines are just more effecient than small ones. the same is true with generators and such.
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