As the petroleum industry is fond of pointing out, “the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow.” The implication is that, for the foreseeable future, it will be necessary to burn fossil fuels if we want a stable electrical grid. Unfortunately, the future that can now be clearly foreseen indicates that we better ditch carbon based fuels as soon as possible.
Grid Management 101
The electrical grid is something that every part of our modern lives is almost entirely dependent upon, and yet we seldom give it a glancing thought until it stops working. In fact, there is an army of people out there working day and night to try to ensure that we never have to think about the grid. They work to predict what the demand will be in the hours ahead, what generation facilities will best supply that demand, and what pathways will be available to move that power from the source to the outlets in your house.
Let’s say you are a manager at one of the three power grids (Eastern, Western, and Texas) in the US. The weather forecast is predicting a blistering hot afternoon. It’s a weekday, so you can predict that loads from 9-to-5 businesses will taper off towards the end of the day, but air conditioning loads will likely skyrocket as workers come home from their jobs, cook dinner and take showers. Your grid currently has very little energy storage capacity: in order to supply the coming surge in demand, you will need to try to bring every peak load supplier in your Rolodex on line soon. This will be very expensive, but if nothing goes awry, you will have done your job and no one will notice.
But what if one of your peak load suppliers drops out, through a weather event, mechanical failure, software glitch or a computer hack? What if a critical transformer station has a meltdown? What if the demand is even greater than your predictions? You can handle one or two of these snags — you have a few reserves up your sleeve. But if several of these events conspire, the result can be a brownout — lower than normal voltage causing flickering lights, funny sounds from the refrigerator, etc. Since prolonged brownout conditions can damage lots of electrical equipment, you will need to quickly decide what parts of the grid to shut down in order to maintain sufficient power to the remainder. Blackouts! Nail-biting time for grid managers!
Peak Power is Very Expensive Power.
The power needs of the grid vary dramatically, from the unusually high demand described above, to the low demand likely seen at about 4:00 AM the next morning, when temperatures have dropped, most businesses are closed, water heaters have recovered, and people are asleep in their beds. Most power generating facilities can’t be cranked up to any appreciable extent — with the exception of hydropower, they are most efficient when they are continually operated at near their maximum capacity. So, with little storage, a big part of a grid manager’s job is turning various medium and small generators on or off to ensure that supply meets demand.
The folks who build the capacity to cover peak loads have an interesting business model. They have to buy some very expensive equipment — say a natural gas turbine generator — knowing that it may lie idle 95% of the time. In order to pay for their investment, the power that they sell must command a very high price. Grid operators are mandated to buy the cheapest power available to them at any given time, but an even greater mandate is to provide a stable grid. In the nail-biting scenario above, they will pay a very high price indeed to avert a blackout.
The high cost of peak power is hidden from most residential rate payers, as it is folded into an averaged “standard” rate that is constant. But many industries are already buying their electricity on a “time-of-use” basis, where the rate varies depending on the time of day, and more utilities are starting to offer time-of-use plans to residential customers. You may recall news stories about how some customers received shocking bills after the meltdown of the Texas grid during a disastrous cold snap in February 2021. They had time-of-use plans.
As global warming puts more strain on the electrical grids, blackouts and other “power anomalies” are becoming increasingly common. Read this Texas Monthly article for a fascinating inside look at the Texas Grid meltdown.
The Grid of the Future
In today’s grid, most of the power comes from relatively few large power plants, (coal or natural gas fired or nuclear) often at a substantial distance from the outlets in your home. As coal and gas is phased out the grid will increasingly be fed by a much greater number of smaller providers — wind and solar farms and even the solar panels on home roofs. To handle such a diverse and widely distributed grid, management will fall much more into the domain of automated “smart”technology.
Imagine a world where every building had battery storage in the basement and solar panels on the roof. The batteries charge when the sun shines and the stored electricity is used when it doesn’t. In effect, every building becomes a micro-grid, independent to a greater or lesser degree from the national grids, but connected in such a way that it can sell energy when it has a surplus or buy more when it has a deficit. This is not futuristic pie-in-the-sky — the components of such a system are available now.
Unfortunately, they’re not readily available. There is not enough battery and solar panel manufacturing capacity yet, and installers are begging for qualified workers. This is another area where industry is doing it’s best, but lack of government leadership is holding us back.
Enter V2G — Vehicle-to-Grid.
(Those impatient with numbers can skip to the next paragraph.) Right now there are about 286 million cars registered in the US. Let’s say at some point in the future 100 million of them are battery powered electrics. The average new EV has a battery capacity of about 60 kilowatt hours. Let’s say that at any given time those 100 million batteries are half charged, and 80% of them are plugged into V2G chargers. The power available to grid managers from this vast sea of batteries is roughly equivalent to the power output of 10 average size nuclear reactors for 10 days!!
Here’s how it could work.
You park your car and plug it into a V2G charger. On your phone, or in the car itself, you enter when you next need to use the car and how much charge you will need at that time — say you’ll need 40% charge to drive home after work at 5:00 PM. At this point the smart grid steps in, charging when power is most plentiful, taking back some power when it is needed, and making sure you have 40% at 5:00. “Wait!” you say, “I don’t want someone stealing my charge!” But remember that power has different prices at different times — your smart charger will be looking to buy power at a low rate, then sell it back at a higher rate. Your overall driving costs could be substantially lower.
A great example of the opportunities offered by V2G charging comes in school districts with a fleet of EV buses. Most of these buses operate on a predictable schedule, getting kids to school in the morning and back home in the afternoon. The rest of the time they can be connected to a V2G charger. In effect the bus fleet is a storage/peak power facility that can earn money for the school district, buying power when rates are low and selling it back at peak power rates.
Details, details……
Currently few EVs or charging stations areV2G ready — the Ford 150 Lightning pickup and the Nissan Leaf are two. But most car makers have it in the works. Positive results in several trials in England and Europe means that there is about to be a rush to this technology. As the installation of wind and solar generation increases, V2G will offer the means of storing a big portion of the immense power that the sun showers on earth every day.
Read how V2G technology can save green electricity that is currently being lost in Europe — CleanTechnica
Things you can do:
If you hear that old tripe about how “the sun don’t always shine” counter with your knowledge of V2G technology.
If you are thinking about getting an EV, look into models that are V2G ready.
If a business you patronize is thinking about installing EV charging stations, ask if they’ve looked into V2G.
Thanks for reading,
Doug Hylan, Brooklin, Maine
Do we value short-term advantages above the welfare of the Earth? Or will we think on longer time scales, with concern for our children and our grandchildren, to understand and protect the complex life-support systems of our planet? The Earth is a tiny and fragile world. It needs to be cherished.” ― Carl Sagan
Thanks for this one, Doug. As the saying goes, "Knowledge is power!" I've been stuck in the diagnosis phase of the climate crisis for a year or so, documenting all the threats and abject failure of governments to respond, but now it's time to take your daughters' advice and set sail for the Promised Land where people can devise new strategies and implement effective tactics to build a "New society within the shell of the old" as the International Workers of the World defined the mission back in the 30s. I consider your newsletter is one of the essential tools for those of us interested in being part of that transformation. BTW, check out a great documentary on Netflix called Kiss The Ground, an excellent investigation of positive action on the agricultural front lines to address the climate crisis and regenerate the planet.