Hybrid Owners of America (HOA) Update "Could plug-in hybrids be a big part of the answer to preventing future electrical power brown-outs? The authors of an intriguing article in MIT Technology Review think so. They make the case that "plug-in hybrids could actually help stabilize the grid if owners charged their cars at times of low demand, and if the vehicles could return excess energy to the grid when it's needed -- say while parked in the company lot at work during peak demand" ... http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/17930
This message is being touted by the elec industry, even here in Vermont. The utilities are excited about the prospect of providing the car industry their first 20-30 miles of fuel each day and leveling their load across all hours of the day. This is quite ironic since 50 years ago we trashed out electric mass transit infrastructure in favor of gas and diesel. Now the question is if PHEVs achieve 25% market penetration, how would the oil companies respond? Will they start buying utilities? Here in Vermont, a Montreal natural gas company just bought our 2nd largest elec. utility. These scenarios are quite a ways off but the migration to battery based transportation is imminent if oil remains above $3/gal.
The idea of PHEVs shaving the peaks of power demand by charging at off-peak times and feeding back into the grid at peak times, thereby reducing the need for new power plants, has been promoted by CalCars (the Prius-Plus Project, plug-in Prius) for at least a couple of years, maybe longer. I see two problems: 1. There would have to be an extraordinarily large number of PHEVs for this to make any difference at all; and 2. You would be "spending" battery charge/discharge cycles without getting much in return. We would need batteries with nearly unlimited cycle life before this becomes economically acceptable for the consumer. (The introduction of ultra-capacitors could solve this, but they appear to be some ways off still.)
Pouring money in hybrid-vehicle related research. I don't think so. Does anyone know of a multi-billion dollar Lithium-Iron-Phosphate battery large pilot plant being constructed? To me pouring money into a technology should run into the 10's of billons (US dollars) per year similar to the kind of money spent on display technology or microelectronics. For example, a new 12" wafer fab for manufacturing integrated circuits runs several billion dollars or a new flat panel LCD manufacturing facility is over 5 billion. Possibly I'm mistaken, but I'm not aware of a comparable manufacturing and development infrastructure being put in place for hybrid vehicles. Sorry, but getting a sizeable percentage of the US fleet converted to hybrid technology will require lots of real money to be poured into the technology similar to an Apollo program. At least it looks like GM is finally hiring at least a few engineers for hybrid development instead of just talking about hybrids. A quick check of the GM website turned up 58 openings (hybrid as the key word). http://www.gm.com/corporate/careers/jobsearch.jsp?p=search&keyword=hybrid&level=&x=30&y=9
