I’d like to see you make transportation fuel on YOUR roof.

Also, I’m not sure how large the frequency regulation market is – would prices crash if supply (i.e. vehicles available to regulate frequency) multiplied by orders of magnitude?

Dan, the problem with connecting cars to the grid is not that they will always need to be driven (“even at the busiest time of day, evening rush hour, research shows (counterintuitively) that about 90 percent of cars still sit parked”), but rather people are going to be reluctant to give their stored energy back to the grid while they’re parked at work. Maybe when the range of most electric vehicles gets extended to > 300 miles, people will feel more confident giving up some of their charge during the day, but that will also require more complex charging stations in parking lots – if I’m going to pay for electricity at night to charge my car, I’ll want to get credit for what I give back at work during the day. It’s not a simple thing to implement, and until there are enough cars with enough range, it won’t be worth creating and deploying the technology to do that.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/frequ ency-regulation/

http://bit.ly/v4lgYf (This link also has some background about the frequency regulation market.)

And here’s a piece on proposed changes in FERC rules so that regulation sources that respond more quickly, like flywheels or batteries, get paid more on the frequency regulation market. (Frequency regulation is also sometimes just called “regulation.”)

http://bit.ly/fmaEtU

Good comments, too. I wanted to respond to a couple of them. To SohoD,Mr Do and MickieB: The effects on a car’s battery depend on how the battery will be used. If the battery were to be drawn down significantly on a regular basis, that would cut into the life of an expensive battery, and you would be right. But that’s not how V2G is being implemented right now. The folks commercializing V2G are plugging into the frequency regulation market, not the bulk power market. Frequency regulation requires only very slight amounts of electricity drawn from (or added to) the battery–not enough to alter the life of the battery, according to experts I spoke with. However, it has to be done within seconds, and automatically, when the car receives an electronic signal from the grid operator. This service supplies the power needed to keep the electricity in our outlets at 60.0 Hz (no more, no less), which is necessary to keep all our clocks running on time and our electrical equipment from malfunctioning, and is required by law. The hardware and software to use car batteries to do this have already been developed at the University of Delaware, as I described in the story.

Because frequency regulation is technically difficult to pull off, it’s worth much more than bulk power. So, MitchW, you’re looking at a different, and less lucrative, market than the one they’re actually tapping into. PJM is not paying the University of Delaware for bulk electricity. They’re paying them to have their electric cars ready to provide frequency regulation. This is different from what the average consumer or business customer deals with, and pays a much higher price–enough for a single car to pull in $10 a day ($300 a month), as the U Delaware cars did.

Which brings me to KenG_CA’s point that “I have an electric car, and even if I could connect it to the grid during the day, I wouldn’t, as it would reduce the range and defeat the whole purpose of having the car in the first place (to take me places).” Luckily, even if everyone felt like KenG (and most people do) it wouldn’t make a lick of difference for the viability of vehicle-to-grid. That’s because even at the busiest time of day, evening rush hour, research shows (counterintuitively) that about 90 percent of cars still sit parked. So if you had 1000 cars ready for vehicle to grid, every driver could go where they want, when they want, and V2G would still work. All this and more is explained in the Miller-McCune story itself.

“But it would be great to have all those electric cars on the road”

CORRECTION: coal powered cars. So called ‘electric cars’ are a myth.

1) This car battery is capable of delivering 30,000 watts of power to the grid.
2) This car battery can do so for one hour per day before needing to be recharged.

You now have a 30 kw mini power plant. If peak electric prices for the hour in question are $300/MWh (a very high price), then our 30 kwh of power will sell for $9 per day ($300/1000*30). If you do this 30 days per month, you will gross $270. Unfortunately, the real-time price of electricity for PJM Eastern Hub exceeded $300/hour a mere 11 times in July and August, and on only 37 different days did the real-time price of electricity exceed $100/hour.

This, of course, says nothing about the $0.10/kwh you will pay for charging the vehicle. You may notice that $0.10/kwh at the retail level is equivalent to $100/mwh at the wholesale level.

I don’t understand the relevance of the first point. That’s supplied overwhelmingly from petrol so surely just shows how inadequate the power stations would be if large numbers of cars connected to the grid. By the time people charged the car for what they actually needed (which would surely be used in the day, when the energy grid most needs the energy people would be least likely to provide it) it would take significant amounts to then store some to sell back.

Also, it strikes me as fairly inefficient to use gas/coal plants to charge a car battery in the night just so the car can sell it to the grid in the day. I don’t know how much, but there must be a decent amount of lost energy there. Considering how rarely power stations are flat out it seems easier to let them just provide all the energy in the first place?

But burning expensive oil to produce cheap electricity? Even the power companies don’t do that any more, and their equipment is more efficient than yours.