A utility taps this electric vehicle for reserve electricity, and pays a nice price to the University of Delaware for the privilege. Credit: University of Delaware

Walking around the local mall today, I took in the latest car show in the aisles. That’s when they simply drive cars into the mall to advertise dealers or certain cars that they want to get rid of. It was clear why local dealers were trying to get rid of these cars. Their gas mileage varied between 17 mpg to 22 mpg in the city to only a little better mileage for the highway. I thought what great cars some of them could be if they were electric cars, but as they were — most people would not want these cars, even if deeply discounted.  So when is the electric car renaissance coming?  I hope it’s coming soon because my current vehicle is getting rusty.  Like a lot of people, I’m waiting until someone starts to manufacture the affordable electric vehicle that I can charge up without going broke(r).

According to a recent ScienceNOW article, this is something that is poised to happen.  We can soon expect to plug in our electric vehicle to the smart grid and make money from our car’s batteries. Now, wouldn’t that be great?

Here is what came out of the most recent AAS annual meeting on this:

Widespread adoption of plug-in electric vehicles could dramatically cut greenhouse gas pollution and reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil. But results of an electric-car pilot project presented here today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes ScienceNOW) provide added incentive to go electric: Car owners could return unused electricity back to the grid and make real money while doing it.

Electric cars need big, powerful batteries to accelerate to highway speeds and travel scores or even several hundred kilometers on a single charge. But because most drivers drive just a few dozen kilometers a day, most of that battery capacity sits unused. To take advantage of that storage capacity, Willett Kempton, director of the University of Delaware’s Center for Carbon-Free Power Integration in Lewes, teamed up with an electric car maker, several utilities, a software company, and PJM Interconnection, one of 10 regional organizations that coordinate and control the U.S. electrical grid.

To ensure that electricity flows steadily and without interruption, the U.S. government requires PJM Interconnection and its counterparts to have reserves of power to tap into in case a generator goes down and other electrical reserves to maintain the 60-hertz frequency of alternating current that our appliances and devices are accustomed to dealing with. Today, PJM Interconnection and its counterparts pay conventional power plants to maintain this reserve power. But as renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, which provide energy cleanly but intermittently, come online, these grid operators need to ramp up their storage capacity to ensure a steady electricity supply. So Kempton, electrical engineer Ken [...]