The city of Austin has developed a grand scheme to use plug-in electric car batteries to capture wind-generated electricity at night, then feed it back to the grid in the daytime when demand is high. There's just one problem: those cars don't exist yet.
That little detail hasn't stopped Roger Duncan of Austin Energy, which was already getting 6 percent of its electricity from wind three years ago and wanted to get a lot more. To time-shift that renewable power, TiVo-style, from nighttime when wind production peaks to daylight hours when it's most needed, Austin's "Plug-In Partners" campaign already has 8,000 people pledged to buy a plug-in EV as soon as they're available. Austin's City Council has $1 million in rebates reserved for the first 1,000 buyers.
To tap into that stored power in the daytime, municipal parking lots will be equipped with Internet-connected, computer-monitored plugs for "harvesting" electricity from parked EVs. Unlike those yet-to-be-perfected plug-in batteries, the enabling technology for vehicle-to-grid power (V2G) already exists and is gradually being deployed by utility companies. But here, too, there's work to be done.
Meanwhile, Duncan and his colleagues are spreading the idea of using plug-ins for power storage in Austin and nationwide — and with great success: mayors of 50 major cities and hundreds of utilities have endorsed the Plug-In Partners campaign, and transit systems and utilities in San Francisco and elsewhere are actively studying the idea for their own systems.
Once all the pieces fall into place, the opportunity is huge. A Department of Energy study released in January shows that the nationwide electrical grid has enough spare capacity at night to charge up to 180 million electric cars — 84 percent of the number of cars in the U.S. today — at 30 percent the cost of gasoline fueling. The next big trick will be to make sure that power is coming from clean, renewable sources. There, too, Austin is ahead of the game.
In Quest for Cleaner Energy, Texas City Touts Plug-In Car [Wall Street Journal (subscription required)]
