Ancillary services is a new (to me) term being tossed out by the V2G crowd. Robert MacLeod suggests that we “give the utility companies charging control over plug-ins. This necessitates not only a 220 V wall plug, but an Internet connection.”
Why? He sees plug-in hybrid electric vehicles becoming another ancillary service to utility companies helping them with load following, voltage regulation, spinning reserve, etc.
I do agree with his assertion that PHEV development has the potential to create such a shift since “most people only commute a short distance every day” and the plug-in hybrid can be the all-purpose family car because it “retains the range and acceleration of its simpler basic hybrid cousin”.
And, we are talking about significant amounts of power:
About half of the cars on the road are driven less than 30 km a day. Current plug-in hybrid technology is easily capable of meeting this demand. Thus, in a country of about 33 million people (He is using Canada as his example.), the plug-in hybrid is realistically capable of shifting 500 PJ of load from oil to electricity.
Note: For someone with “a pathological hatred of acronyms”, he omits an explanation that PJ equals petra-joules. Also, his example is for Canada, where, as Engineer-Poet notes, “you seem to have hydro potential out the wazoo.” (Whereas the United States relies upon hydropower for only 10% of all electricty consumed.)
Nonetheless, even in the worst case, i.e., a shift from oil burned as gasoline in commuter automobiles to oil burned in power plants to charge the commuter automobiles, there is the potential for substantial energy savings, just not at the scale suggested in MacLeod’s calculations. Engineer-Poet calculates:
If we had electric vehicles, we could use quite a bit less petroleum. Combined-cycle gas turbines turn fuel into electricity at about 50% efficiency; allowing 7% for transmission losses, 10% each for charger and battery losses and 20% at the motor, the overall efficiency would be 30.1%. Compared to burning fuel in a 17% efficient car you could burn the oil in CCGT plants, get 77% more miles per gallon and still have the steam-turbine exhaust for industrial process heat. (Calculating more directly, if you burned straight crude in a powerplant which scrubbed the sulfur and whatnot and achieved 50% efficiency, the output energy would be 3.05 GJ/bbl or 20.2 kWh/gallon. Given 7% transmission losses and 350 Wh/mile at the wall [about 35% more than the plug-in Prius+], an electric vehicle would achieve an effective 57.6 MPG.)
Note: The subsequent commentary to Engineer-Poet’s post about petroleum independence makes for interesting reading since the commentators debate whether “batteries and fuel cells are currently up to the task of providing consumers with what they want in personal transportation at an acceptable price point.”
MacLeod’s “forward thinking” could discourage rather than encourage adoption. I worry that utility companies could join with “Big Oil” to stymie such development by preventing consumer inducements, changes in governmental energy policies, etc. MacLeod says that it would be prudent for governments to establish rules regarding electric vehicles plugging into the grid. “Otherwise we risk extra-strain on the grid, as demand skyrockets.”
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[...] The closure was interesting because he talked about making ethanol as an option. I opined about wheel-to-wells value and he about independence from utility companies. [...]
[...] Actually, this is somewhat of a misleading exaggeration since fuel is consumed to generate the electricity stored in the PLI batteries of the PHEV, all the more reason that publishers, editors, and writers of information about electric vehicles need to use a different, common standards, e.g., kilometers per megajoule. [...]
[...] The joint venture reminded me of a similar joint effort between Austin Power and Valence. As more PHEVs appear, we may see additional collaboration between manufacturers and utilities. [...]