Plugging in: The Chevy Volt, due out this year, is one of a new wave of electric vehicles that could benefit from a new charger from GE.
GM
The devices could help stabilize the grid, and make charging electric cars cheaper.
This spring, GE will start selling a line of "smart charging stations," devices that communicate with utilities to optimize charging, for electric vehicles. The technology could be key to ensuring that electric cars don't strain the power grid, and it could cut down on consumer electricity bills. Eventually, because the charging stations could help stabilize the grid, they could allow utilities to rely more on intermittent renewable sources of energy such as solar and wind power.
The GE products come as automakers introduce a new wave of electric vehicles. GM, Nissan and Ford, for example, plan to start selling electric vehicles this year, and others will follow. While other companies already offer electric vehicle chargers, GE's products could be important because they're made to work with the rest of the company's "smart grid" infrastructure, which stretches from the power plant, through the grid, all the way to smart appliances in the home. The company also has close relationships to utilities, which could speed adoption.
Electric cars could eventually have a big impact on electricity use--charging a plug-in vehicle would account for about 30 percent of a typical household's electricity bill, says Michael Kintner-Meyer, a senior research scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA. (He helped develop a smart charger for electric vehicles, which PNNL has made available for licensing.) If too many people decide to charge their cars during times of peak electricity use, it could force utilities to use expensive and often dirty "peaking" power plants to meet demand, or even threaten power outages.
Smart chargers could solve this problem. At the simplest level, GE's chargers would let owners program their cars to delay charging until the middle of the night, when demand is low. As more utilities start to use "time-of-day pricing," when they'd charge less for electricity in the middle of the night, for example, this feature could save customers money. But the chargers can also respond to real-time price signals sent by utilities to GE's smart meters, which are now being installed in some homes. These signals would trigger changes in charging, making it possible for electric vehicles to serve as a buffer, smoothing out variations in supply and demand.
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You'd better make them real smart
I can see it comming:
1. You program your charger to start when cost is the lowest at night. All your neighbours do the same.
2. All the cars start charging at the same time. The load on the network gets higher so the price goes up, your car stop charging (as all other).
3. No cars are charging, so price goes down.
4. goto step 2
You can end up with a battery charging by small steps which kills your battery quickly.
And finally you don't get the expected lowest price.
So those chargers should have a good contention management algorithm include randomization,...
Or maybe have them talk together like Ethernet ( Aloha protocol ), so each can have a turn at charging.
Re: You'd better make them real smart
Good point. The wise folks over at GE have already been working on this problem with their smart grid research, including algorithms for staggering price signals.
Re: You'd better make them real smart
Obviously all chargers will link to Internet, and
the server will range them like Skynet.
The price depends on which time the lowest consuming of electricity
Hey Folks,
This is a good conversation. But I think you are all forgetting the reason people will buy the car and the charger is electricity is cheaper than gas; we can tell OPEC to go screw and there will be less pollution.
I am not interested in trying to make money with my car, I am interested in saving money.
Plus the simpler and cheaper the better. If I can get away with a programmable mechanical on/off switch to charge my electric car that costs 30$ I will probably go that way.
the problem with 'the reason people will buy the cars is because electricity is cheaper' is about the ONLY reason. Even this advantage may possibly go away in a world short on fossil fuels. Electric rates where I am have only been going up. If every vehicle was electric it would take 7 times the capacity of today's electric grid and vast expensive investments would need to be made in the grid. electric cars are kind of like network cables in the computer world. It is great to be 'wireless' and not have network cables. But electric cars never let you get far from a charging station like chemical fuel cars do. you are 'tied to the plug'
They have so many other drawbacks compared to chemical fuel cars that they will take along time to be adopted in any significant numbers and then only in certain settings.
Need I remind you:
Despite all the hype in 'who killed the electric car', the consumer did:
they are more expensive, re Prius extra expense doesn't pay for the extra cost via fuel savings
and I'm told emergency personnel won't use 'jaws of life' on electric cars due to batteries possibly exploding or sulfuric acid spill perhaps.
pure electric cars have limited range
charging options are either non-existant or horrible. Filling up in two minutes vs charging your car for 5 hours - what would you want when fleeing houston before a hurricane?
if a gasoline engine degraded as quickly percent wise as a set of electric batteries does in automotive use you wouldn't buy it.
the total energy stored of 1/35th to 1/75th that of a tank of gas limits the ability to do much useful like actually haul stuff or tow a boat or trailer or have a large car so you can carry (insert the huge list of stuff that people like to put in their cars, vans, pickup trucks)
the electric car is like the emperor without clothes. No one will say the emperor has no clothes on. We'll subsidize it with billions in govt grants to 'ram it down our throats' to paraphrase another political battle.
selling electricity back to the utility is the stupidist reason to have them yet. that's great: I can buy electricity at 18cents/kw (more at times here) then sell it back to them for their wholesale rate of 4cents?
even at the same rate, after conversion losses in each direction, it would have to be an astronomical amount to be worthwhile.
Now that I've trashed electric battery cars, the drivetrain is a different matter. having electric motors and NO hydrocarbon engine MAKES SENSE, if only we didn't have to replace it with horrible batteries.
That leaves only fuel cells, which use chemical energy, and depending on what they burn produce only water, water plus CO2 or water plus a tiny amount of nitrous oxides. (ok for the really ignorant out there they DON'T burn the fuel, they turn it directly to electricity via chemical reaction which is why they are double the efficiency of gasoline engines). The Bloom stack fuel cell (see article this site) now shows that they can be made commercially, as large companies are adopting them as backup generators.
Get over the idea that there is a hydrogen storage problem. nature has already solved that, the trillions of tons of water on this planet are evidence of that. It can be liberated on demand to match engine needs in a vehicle. the metal+water -> yielding metal oxide plus hydrogen gas works at room temperature with aluminum
(ok in the presence of a small amount of gallium to keep aluminum's surface coating from forming and stopping the reaction or your window screens would have turned to gray powder long ago in a damp sea breeze)
and also works with magnesium to liberate hydrogen at temps similar to those of today's internal combustion engines. That hydrogen could be burned in engines similar to today's cars or used in fuel cells with an electric drive train at double the efficiency of internal combustion engines, so you have double the range.
all that is needed is progress and mass production of fuel cell membranes and filling station will be able to pump aluminum pellets plus water into your fuel tank and pump out the aluminum oxide slurry to reduce back to metal for re-use as fuel, hopefully eventually with the use of pv solar panels like first solar now makes in 19 countries or modular solar thermal dishes, such as stirling energy sells.
we already reduce aluminum oxides to aluminum in vast quantities in huge plants around the world as efficiently as we are likely to every be able to. it takes lots of energy but thats why it stores lots of energy via the reaction to liberate hydrogen. And I really would feel perfectly save with a tank of aluminum pellets and 30 gallons of water under my car. A leaking tank might just put out a fire on your car in an accident.
" If every vehicle was electric it would take 7 times the capacity of today's electric grid"...
What? Sorry, erbium, I stopped reading when you made your first significant error on the 4th line. I now assume everything else you write is equally flawed. Your 'claim' need evidence. How about this, from a recent white paper by Environment Illinois:
• The current electric system has the capacity to fuel up to 73 percent of American vehicles without building another power plant by charging vehicles at night or using solar panels by day, although grid modernization would be required to fully capitalize on its potential.
To view the full report, visit www.environmentillinois.org.
Perhaps its right, perhaps its wrong - but at least it is evidence, not an outlandish statement made without even passing reference to evidential support. If you quote great statistics, then you should honour the person/s who created them; and if you can't then you are not contributing to the argument but polluting the blogosphere, adding hot air rather than intellectual fresh air, or pushing a (hidden?) agenda - but in your case, its not so hidden, I think?
Anyone seriously interesting in sustainable energy solutions should read David JC MacKay's "Sustainable Energy -- Without the Hot Air" (http://www.withouthotair.com/) perhaps it has already have been mentioned here? Its free as a 10Mb PDF download, and summarises many of the issues around energy very well, even amusingly. Don't be put off by the fact that he is a Cambridge Professor and the material is often based in Britain, it is easy to apply to other parts of the world. A review is given at http://boingboing.net/2009/04/09/sustainable-energy-w.html, commenting 'This is to energy and climate what Freakonomics is to economics: an accessible, meaty, by-the-numbers look at the physics and practicalities of energy.'
And for him - McKay - the bottom line is that electricity is the most 'renewable' of all our resources. It's great then that an electric car is cheaper to run than a gas one, this must give us all some hope!
Btw, if I have been too harsh in my criticism I apologise, but as an Australian I prefer people to state their case accurately and directly. I hope I have done that here.
Short of feeding power back into the grid when there's a power failure, lots of people would be happy just to have the car's batteries serve as a private power backup for the home. I know the backup power gadget for my computer is only good for a few minutes.
Smart cars with smarter drivers
The idea that utilities will "quickly raise rates if wind power dies down" seems fanciful, if not just silly. But more likely "smart chargers" will be tethered to "smart chips" in the car telling it what your typical daily usage is, whether it needs to be charged at all, and whether that will require a 6 hour charge or a 2-hour "top off."
(Newer batteries don't exhibit the 'memory effect.') If you only need to drive the car 40 minutes back and forth to work, that's one thing. If you sometimes have much more than that, presumably that's another, and there will always be some sort of 'override' function because you know you're driving to your Mother's house 4 hours away this weekend.
The meme of all cars, everywhere, being charged every night seems a bit stretched, to say the least. And presumably, since the grid can carry data as well as electricity, the utility might even have some way of staging the "recharging" of vehicles in waves as their capacity allows.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
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flyingmonster
29 Comments
New business model
It might be possible that this could become an investment model. Forget the car. Install high efficiency batteries. Buy power daily on the lows and resell on the highs. Retire and watch the meter do all the work.
Reply
gametheoryman
21 Comments
Re: New business model
If this strategy were profitable, every utility would already be doing it.
Right now, the only "batteries" efficient enough are water reservoirs above a dam; pump water above the dam at night and have extra come down through the generators during the day. Unfortunately, only a few locations have this option.
For this strategy to be profitable, it has to beat using a natural gas plant a relatively small proportion of the time. We plug in extra natural gas generating capacity that remains idle for much of the time and turn it on when we need the extra power.
Reply
ecogeekology
1 Comment
Re: New business model
The notion that all good ideas must have already been implemented by any industry is specious on the face of it.
Each marketplace competitor seeks to optimize costs, investing only enough to beat the competition. Producing a better solution beyond what's required to dominate market share is deemed a waste of shareholder money and grounds for a CFO's pink slip. Otherwise, why did it take so long to put wheels on luggage or seatbelts in cars?
Reply
smithsomian
182 Comments
Re: New business model
The scope of the problem is such that, while humans have managed to put wheels on many hundreds of thousands suitcases, no one has yet cracked the problem of *cheap* long term energy storage.
There's nothing at all impossible with storing the energy at night for use the next day, it's just only several thousands times more expensive and inconvenient than getting it from the mains.
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