Environment & Energy
In reply to the discussion: Intermittency Of Renewables?… Not So Much [View all]kristopher
(29,798 posts)Are you of the opinion that they drain them dry?
What if you could sell gasoline out of your tank and make a couple of thousand dollars per year? You can set it to keep however much you want in the tank, and most times it will have nearly as much or more gasoline in the tank as when you parked it, but you'll get a healthy check for the utility having used it.
Would you sell them gasoline?
I think part of the reason you are skeptical might be that you aren't familiar enough with the mechanics of the electrical system and perhaps don't appreciate the amount of potential power that the vehicle fleet represents. Consequently you seem to have a vision of massive draw requirements foisted onto a very limited amount of storage capacity.
You may want to look into ancillary services and reactive power (there is no market for reactive power support yet but it is a niche that has demand that will increase with renewable penetration). The way V2G is most valuable is as a stabilizing tool and when used that way it only takes sips of electricity and puts them back almost immediately. There are other services that will be be part of the program, but they won't pay as much for that power.
Remember, there are 200+ million registered light duty passenger vehicles in the US and at any given time and they are parked 20+ hours per day. You can play with the amount of available power at different penetrations of EVs and differing levels of participation to see what you come up with. For purposes of electric policy, as I recall, if 5% of an electric fleet is participating, any stability problems associated with a distributed generation grid is largely eliminated.
There is a lot of information on this online. ETA: Just found this:
How People Use Their Vehicles: Statistics from the 2009 National Household Travel Survey
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/jckrumm/Publications%202012/2012-01-0489%20SAE%20published.pdf