After Gutenberg

Now here is a clever idea from Tom Konrad. I think it is clever because I mentioned something similar in a prior post.

Much has been made of V2G (Vehicle 2 Grid) as a way that utilities, by offering two-way charging stations, might have access to local storage of energy.

A molten salt system can be can be a means to store thermal energy, thus mitigating the problem of an intermittent source for generating electricity at night or during cloudy weather.

In his next most recent post, he mentions that molten salt thermal storage is one of his top ten favorites for an alternative energy future. “It’s cheaper to store heat than electricity,” writes Dr. Konrad, “and molten salts can store a ton of BTu’s very cheaply. And concentrating solar power can produce a ton of heat… without pollution or fuel.”

He also mentioned V2G, but in his most recent post, he suggests V2G… without the Vehicle. What probably gave him the idea was the heavy, bulky, expensive, hardly-ever-used, UPS (Uninterruptible power supplies) sitting in his home office. He imagined that a way utilities could spread out the cost of spinning reserves by offering to lots of consumers a cheaper UPS that could be used by the utility.

While, in theory, lots and lots of batteries connected to a modern, optimized Grid can comprise a temporary energy repository, so that utilities could shave peak load, the consumer route seems somewhat unlikely. Perhaps, as the cost differential between peak and off-peak times increases, organizations with high peak demands or that need to invest in backup power systems will look to offsetting those costs by investing in systems that allow for peak shaving.

That’s not to say that Big Eddie is uninterested in providing a more ubiquitous, more efficient and potentially much cleaner fuel for grid connected transportation. Cal Cars News reports James Woolsey noting recently that utilities are interested “because of the substantial benefit to them of being able to sell off-peak power at night. Because off-peak nighttime charging uses unutilized capacity, DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory estimates that adopting plug-ins will not create a need for new base load electricity generation plants until plug-ins constitute over 84% of the country’s 220 million passenger vehicles.”

Thus, plug-in hybrids and other Grid connected transportation will “save the Grid“, not in the way that Kevin Bullis rasps*, rather more simply, by a regaining importance as a critical, national energy program.

* Note: The MIT Technology Review writer is not the only person. One V2G advocate envisioned, for Canada alone, using plug-in hybrids to shift 500 PJ (petra-joules) of load from oil to electricity. Unfortunately, durable, low cost electricity storage is non-existent.