The electric grid’s next power source might be sitting in your driveway |
The context you need, when you need it
When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.
We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?
The electric grid’s next power source might be sitting in your driveway
Batteries that could help drive the switch to renewable energy are already, well, driving.
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
There’s a technology sitting idle in garages and driveways across America that provides a solution to its own potential problem. As more and more electric vehicles tap into the grid, their giant batteries add to the system’s load. Timing is also a challenge: When people get home from work and plug their cars in, so too is everyone elsewhere switching on their own appliances, like washing machines and ovens and such.
But instead of being burdens to the electrical system, a clever trick is putting EVs on a trajectory to help save it. More models feature the ability to send their energy back to the grid in times of high demand — a trick known as vehicle-to-grid, or V2G — forming a vast network of backup power across a city. As demand wanes through the night, they charge up, ensuring an EV owner has enough juice to get to work in the morning.
However, a new study warns that for V2G to fully compensate for all those batteries plugging in, the technology needs an assist, in the form of infrastructural improvements like new transformers and transmission lines. That will create a more resilient system and encourage the growth of renewable energy. “You have to upgrade your power system as soon as possible,” said Ziyou Song, an energy systems engineer at the University of Michigan and co-author of a new paper describing the findings. “V2G is really helpful, for sure — 100 percent. But just to some extent, V2G itself cannot resolve the charging demand of so many electric vehicles in the future.”
For this study, the researchers modeled scenarios for the San........