Are electric cars a killer app for utilities?
Producers and distributors of electricity, or at least the ones that can see the future, are looking at the concept of the electric car more as a profit center than as a mode of transportation.
It seems clear that fossil fuels won’t last forever, and that big oil will eventually have to loosen its grip on our throats. Standing in the wings, ready to support the electric car of the future are electric utilities that look at the electric car as much as a battery on wheels as anything else, and as a battery that need constant recharging, to boot. As the internal combustion engine has been a boon to the petroleum moguls of the past, the electric automobile engine will be a boon to the producers of electricity.
David Mohler, the chief technology officer of Duke Energy, is one of those that sees his industry’s future as bright partially because of the electric car. Mohler says, “I think PHEVs will be the killer application for the smart grid. They are able to both consume and provide energy like no other device can and can really change storage.”
Mohler is looking at the electric cars that will be introduced over the next few years. Although he is guessing at the actual battery capacity of those new vehicles, he thinks that a few of them may hold enough energy to power a house for a while. In an emergency, given the right hardware, that new electric car could make lights and heat possible, giving back in a very real way what it has taken out of the system during charging.
More importantly, with the coming of smart-grid energy distribution technology, all of those electric cars could provide help for the stabilization of the grid during peak loads, and could help to evenly spread the electrical load across the entire day. The cars could give their stored capacity back to the smart-grid system when demand is high, augmenting overall capacity, and increase demand when it is normally low, using those hours to charge up its batteries, according to a CNET story.
It is hard to see this as anything but a win-win situation. Less or no reliance upon rare and expensive gasoline, inexpensive transportation, plus a way to cooperate with the production of electricity and solve the problem of load-spreading. We can hardly wait for all of these things to come together.
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June 22nd, 2009
It all sounds great in theory, but there are a couple of glaring non-green problems with this utopian vision.
The first one is that electric vehicles are non-polluting. Sorry folks – all that happens is that the energy to charge their batteries gets produced elsewhere, very often by fossil-fuel burning power stations, so it simply shifts the blame as to who is creating atmospheric pollution.
If the power is from a nuclear source, what that creates is extremely toxic waste that needs to be stored safely for hundreds of thousands of years.
And let’s not think about how much energy is consumed in the manufacturing process for these new vehicles, let alone the source of it.
Another issue is that high-capacity battery technology is sourced from heavy metals, which has its own ramifications of safe disposal or recycling when the batteries need replacing.
Back to the drawing board again?