nytimes.com — MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., June 18 — Google and Pacific Gas & Electric have unveiled their vision of a future in which cars and trucks are partly powered by the country’s electric grids, and vice versa. The companies displayed on Monday six Toyota Prius and Ford Escape hybrid vehicles modified to run partly on electricity from the power grid...
Jun 19, 2007 View in Crawl 4
epiloniousJun 19, 2007
It's neat tech.... but the whole idea of storing power in hybrid batteries, and then pulling from them during high loads seems like it would just wear out the batteries a lot quicker (charge, discharge, charge, all while sitting in the parking lot)... couldn't the power companies just build a few mega-capacitors or something that behaved like electrical water towers and stick to charging the hybrid batteries overnight?
johnnyxmasJun 19, 2007
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that like a massive perpetual motion machine?
epiloniousJun 19, 2007
goodness, sounds like someone got his summer cooling bill and found it easier to bitch about the Goddamn Evil Power companies than to cut back on the A/C a little....Speaking of summer A/C... this seems like it might be a stopgap to having to build tons of extra power plants (which would cost even more money) just to keep from having rolling brownouts during 4 months of the year (which is much more annoying than having power companies push some of their storage losses to willing customers)... a common problem in California where this technology is undergoing testing.
nudarJun 19, 2007
I hate how they say these cars will get 75 miles per gallon of gasoline. That sounds impressive until your realize that's because of the extra electricity you paid for to power up the battery so it should say 75 miles per gallon of gasoline plus the fossil fuel powering the electric plant that is charging up your battery. Of course that would be more cumbersome.
lnxaddctJun 19, 2007
I think a lot of people are missing the point here. The power company pays you for this selling back of power, and you'll likely make a couple hundred dollars per year from it (in some cases a bit more). Google has a whole bunch of cars here that plug in during the day, and we really like the results. This is simply the next step.The idea is that a lot of energy is lost at night. At night the most wind blows, so wind farms are least effective during their most productive time (no one is using power at night, but the wind farms are at peak production then). Also, traditional power plants scale down at night and then have to ramp up again real quick when morning breaks. Most people would charge their cars over night though, so the lost wind power from night can be now be stored in cars and redistributed during the day while your car is sitting in a parking garage somewhere and you're working. Also, rather than power plants having to ramp up every day and down every night, they could keep things at moderate levels. The ramping wouldn't need to be as extreme because the cars would be handling the extra load.The power companies like it because it allows them to operate more efficiently. They are saving hundreds of thousands of dollars (or much more if this ever scales up across the country), and you are making some extra cash as well.Typical disclaimer: Even though I'm a Google engineer, this isn't official or anything.
drackerJun 19, 2007
Why would the car send power back?Where did it get that power from in the first place?