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Plugging into the Future

May 10, 2007

Open the bill from your electric utility and your eye invariably heads to the bottom line to see what the damage will be this month.

What if, instead of a bill, the monthly greeting from Your Town Power & Light contained a check paying you for services rendered?

Not only that, selling such services also could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, lower air pollution, cut the U.S. loose from dangerous oil-exporting regimes, and lessen the chances of blackouts.

It sounds like snake oil. While there are obstacles that remain to be overcome, the idea is real and the potential benefits are substantiated by research from credible sources.

The vision of cars as something other than sinkholes in the family budget and environmental villains was sketched out by Jon Wellinghoff, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, at an energy technology conference held on Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus on May 7.

To understand how the concept would work, it’s important to understand how electricity is delivered.

When you flip a switch to turn on a light, your utility is doing more than sending electrons into your home wiring. It’s operating a grid that enables the utility to supply electric power to you and thousands of other homeowners, businesses, factories, schools, hospitals, and military bases. The product is a necessity that must be delivered reliably to all customers, from the biggest steel mill to the smallest tenement, and at all times, from the hottest summer afternoons to the coldest winter nights of the year.

It’s a remarkable engineering feat that no other industry can match. The butcher, the baker, and the candle stick maker can store surplus meat, flour, and wax, respectively, if demand falls or draw down inventories when demand surges. Not electric utilities. Since electricity is not easily stored, supply and demand must be balanced instantaneously 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

For that to happen, the power distribution grid must be kept stable. If it’s not stable, brownouts or blackouts will occur. Too much or too little supply must be avoided. “Regulation” is a service that enables grid operators to fine-tune the supply-demand balance moment to moment. Today, regulation services are provided by power plants under computer control by grid operators.

Here is where your car would come into the picture. But not any car you can buy today. It would have to be a “plug-in” hybrid electric vehicle.

Today’s hybrids run on a carefully designed combination of electric motors and gasoline engines. The plug-in would have an added feature—a battery that could be recharged by plugging into a home outlet overnight, when electric utilities have plenty of surplus capacity.

During the day, when power demand is high, the roles would reverse. While cars are parked at workplaces, their batteries could supply regulation services to the grid via two-way connections. Car owners could contract with utilities to deliver specified amounts of grid regulation and get paid for it.

Wellinghoff estimated that car owners could be paid $2,000 to $4,000 per year for regulation and other grid support services.

That’s not all. Car batteries could also store surplus electricity generated by renewable resources, such as wind and solar, overcoming dependability and load following issues that could hinder widespread deployment of these intermittent power sources.

There’s more. Used to their most efficient advantage, and fueled with E85 (85 percent ethanol, 15 percent gasoline), plug-in vehicles could get 500 to 1,000 miles per gallon of gasoline, according to an estimate from former CIA Director James Woolsey. That’s quite enough, Woolsey said somewhat playfully in a video played at the Microsoft conference, to get the attention of Middle Eastern autocracies whose oil revenues are cash registers for terrorists.

And still more. A recent study published by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory estimated that if all U.S. cars, pick-ups and SUVs were plug-ins today, there is enough off-peak generating capacity existing now to supply 84 percent of them. Transferring automotive power from gasoline to electricity could cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 27 percent and oil consumption by 31 percent.

However, there would be a trade-off. The study also estimated that sulfur dioxide emissions would more than double, primarily as a result of greater use of coal-fired power plants in areas where coal is the dominant power source. Electrifying auto transportation would make it more imperative to diversify power generation away from conventional pulverized coal, which today supplies more than half of America’s electricity.

Moreover, the nirvana of electric utilities paying car owners to stabilize the grid, protect the climate and thumb their noses at OPEC is not ready for prime time. Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are not commercially available. The “vehicle-to-grid” concept is in the early testing stage. There are technical and cost issues to sort through. Potential impacts on the grid need more study.

There are glimmerings on the horizon. At the Detroit Auto Show earlier this year, General Motors unveiled an intriguing concept car, the Chevrolet Volt, which would be powered by electric motors. Electricity would be supplied by a battery that could be recharged overnight from an ordinary household outlet, or recharged by an on-board combustion engine that would generate electricity rather than drive the wheels. The engine could run on gasoline, E85, or biodiesel.

The battery would have a 40-mile range, good enough for routine trips to work or school. Volt owners could conceivably go for months without buying one drop of liquid fuel.

How soon will the Volt be in a showroom? GM won’t give a precise date, pointing out that the lithium ion battery that is the centerpiece of the technology is not ready.

Critics of slow-moving automakers say it’s not necessary to hold up introduction of plug-ins until lithium batteries are ready. Put some plug-ins on the street today with plain old lead-acid batteries, they say. While their range would be lower, early adopters could serve as beta testers for the plug-in concept.

Regardless of how the battery debate turns out, it’s clear that an exciting ferment is roiling the energy world, as transportation and electricity generation move towards a transforming convergence.

Belying the dispiriting rhetoric from radical politicians and talk show hosts that America can’t afford to rewire its energy economy, creative engineers and entrepreneurs are bringing forward the energy and climate solutions that America and the world will need.