Our car will power our house
Utilities need power storage. EV owners can help.
Buddy always insisted that electric vehicles aren’t green; they just move the carbon emissions to our electric utility. His favorite vehicle used truly sustainable energy!
YESTERDAY
When my brother and I were kids, my parents would put the basement off limits before the holidays. After supper our father would disappear downstairs to put together the Lionel electric train set, our Christmas present.
TODAY
It’s more likely that we find a miniature electric car under the tree—along with a whole set of other toys that work with the car. We would get:
A model car, powered by a rechargeable battery, with a tiny charging plug.
A model filling station, with a tiny charging cable that fits into the car’s little plug.
A dollhouse that plugs into our home electricity, with tiny LED lights in its various rooms and a little charging cable in its garage for the car’s power plug.
A miniature power utility building connected to a spread of miniature solar panels. Managed by the utility, the array has little power lines connecting to our dollhouse and the gas station.
A tiny vehicle-to-home (V2H) charger in the dollhouse garage. It allows bidirectional flow of juice into and out of the car’s batteries.
A game console that coordinates all our electrical toys.
Yes, some assembly required, but our whole present takes only a few minutes to assemble and hook together.
TOMORROW
This toy set, like the toy rockets and racing cars of old, reflects what’s coming. In real life we’ll drive our car into the garage and plug it in. When charged, we can drive it for hours before we charge it again, at home or an EV charging station along the road.
On hot evenings when the air conditioning demand in our area is high and our utility raises the rate for the kilowatts they send to us, that V2H console will automatically flip a switch and power our house for a few hours from the car’s battery. The utility will encourage this; it helps them smooth peak demand and avoid outages.
When a storm damages the utility power lines (or an extremist shoots up their transformer) and the lights go out, our controller will flip a switch and draw the home’s electricity from our car. The car will hold about two days of electricity to power our house normally, much longer if we ration its use.
At night the utility doesn’t get any solar electricity, so our controller will automatically send some juice from our car battery back up the cable to the utility to replace their solar source. This will reduce the number of battery facilities the utility needs to build and the extra power it needs to buy from fossil fuel plants during those hours. They’ll deduct what we send them from our monthly bill.
WHAT WE CAN DO
When I started learning about the future V2H systems, I was hoping I’d find suggestions about how to prepare our home and our lifestyle for them.
Sorry, no such advice.
The difficulty in suggesting preparatory work for later installation of such systems is that V2H technology is still in its infancy, so exactly what preparatory activities could be done now are not yet definable.
As there is no common system or standard, any V2H system you prepare for at the moment would also need to be car specific. Developments are taking place to streamline such systems – but it is likely a little way off before we see the outcomes. [The Driven]
At least we can get to know a good electrician in our area for when the time comes.
HOW SOON?
Only one of ten new cars today in the US is an EV. (It’s four of five in Norway!) The health benefits of getting gas and diesel vehicles off the road alone justify a big push by governments at all levels. Some states here are talking about ending the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2030.
While basically simple, building out the EV charging network and home charging systems faces complexities.
Investors and utilities don’t want to build charging stations before there are enough EVs in the area to use them, and locals don’t want to buy EVs until there are enough chargers around.
Some charging locations will need new higher-capacity connections to the grid.
More efficient chargers and new federal standards are requiring rapid upgrading charging stations—before the equipment has been paid for.
Here’s a good discussion of these problems.
THE EXCITING POSSIBILITIES ARE FOR BIGGER VEHICLES
Electricity is about to become more shareable—among the utility, our home, our car, and maybe our neighbors. And our school buses!
Electric car batteries hold relatively little electricity, around fifty kWh, but transit authorities and especially school districts are beginning to replace their buses with EVs, and those vehicles hold several hundred kWh each! School buses in particular are off the road most hours of the day and could store and return power to the local utility when needed.
In North America, at least two major school-bus manufacturers—Blue Bird and Lion—are working on proving the benefits of vehicle-to-grid electrification. As of 2020, school buses in the US used $3.2B of diesel a year; their electrification could help stabilize the electrical grid, lessen the need for power plants, and reduce exposure to exhaust. [Wikipedia]
The health, environmental, and cost benefits (not to mention the emissions reductions) of transforming trucks, buses and other big vehicles to electric power are huge. I’m sorry Buddy isn’t around to follow these developments.
While we hope the advantages of powering America’s transportation with electricity are becoming irresistible, there remains the challenge that Buddy saw so clearly. Producing an EV’s electricity must increasingly be by gathering the sunlight and breezes around us, not by burning fossil fuels.