Mygreenwheels

It's referred to as V2G - vehicle to grid - and there are claims that owners of electric cars could be making £2,000 a year selling power stored on their car's battery back to the energy grid. The concept has been around for a long time, but it's really starting to get traction now.

The New Scientist reports that researchers at the University of Delaware are working on a new prototype to store or supply grid energy when required. Head of research Dr Willet Kempton points out that the average US car is only driven for one hour a day and combustion cars are of no use while they're off the road, but electric cars and plug-in hybrids could act as back-ups to the grid while they're idle.

Energy companies are constantly struggling to match supply with demand and it gets worse all the time. Think how much power the average house uses now compared with the 70s - multiple TVs, kitchen appliances, PCs, heating, aircon. Extra power storage facilities can help them ensure that power isn't wasted and that becomes even more significant for renewable energy because power from wind, the sun or the sea is often irregular in supply.

The V2G system could be a great help at times like the early morning when demand spikes while everyone turns their power on at once, but it's going to take an awful lot of vehicles to reach a worthwhile power storage base. Kempton estimates that 100 vehicles available for two thirds of the time could provide a megawatt of storage power. He's planning to spend the next 18 months building more prototypes and fine-tuning the software that's an essential element in connecting the cars with the grid.

Several things come to mind here.

First, the energy companies will be bending over backwards to support this sort of development, so they'll be right behind the electric car lobby. Nice to have some big players on our side :-)

Also, I wonder how this fits in with Shai Agassi's ProjectBetterPlace idea? If anyone can work that out for me, please oblige.

Finally, could electric car owners actually make an income from their cars by selling Zero Point Energy from their batteries? I could be in "too good to be true" territory here, but I've just read about GENIE and it proposes to do just that. Imagine a car that never requires ANY fuel ... that's too big a topic to tackle just here, so I'll save that one for later. If you're interested though, try Googling 'Zero Point Energy' and you'll learn some utterly fascinating stuff.

And before any sceptics out there jump to labelling me nuts, just consider this quote from Arthur C Clarke which I nicked from Mad Teddy's blog: "There are four stages in the way scientists react to the development of anything of a revolutionary nature:

            a) "It's nonsense,"
            b) "It is not important,"
            c) "I always said it was a good idea," and
            d) "I thought of it first."