How many of us know the history of electricity in India?
I guess many of us didn’t even thought of that before reading the previous line. Honestly, even I never thought of that before, but the history of electricity in India traces long back to the late 80s’.
The electricity was introduced by the British in India during the colonial period. They electrified the major cities, government offices, many ports for transportation efficiency. Company named PW Fluery & Co. used Light bulbs to demonstrate electricity on the streets of Calcutta during 1879. After that magical show to our Indian people, Kilburn and Co., electrified the whole Harrison street (now renamed as MG Road) in 1889. That was the first street in India to have packed with electric bulbs.
Some might think, why is he referring to these rather than explaining V2G technology. The reason why I am referring to these are to put the idea of “How old our Electric Grids are ?” In the early 1900’s many grid were built and electricity is distributed to each regions and to each houses/Industries/Offices, generally called as ports. During those times there were very small electricity energy demands, as many of the houses were using few light bulbs and radio. And the grid was designed to provide electricity and bill them once a month, which is an one-way interaction.Those one-way communication between grid and consumer may be effective to those days back in our past, nowadays there are several number of electrical instruments which is increasing the demand of electrical energy.
To cope up with that, we need to device a new methodology to have a effective energy generation, energy distribution and energy utilization. Many of you might have guessed the next word I’m going to say, yes it is the so called SMART GRID technology, which is a two-way communication between grid and consumers. In the smart grid technology, the electricity energy information are shared and it consists of developing network of communication, controls, computers and algorithms.
The smart grid helps us manage the electricity wages, usages, the smart appliances connected to the Home Access Network (HAN) can adjust their run schedule as they are connected to the energy management system to reduce the demand over the grid at critical times. One of the promising technology for the efficient growth of smart grid is the V2G — Vehicle to Grid Technology.
What is Vehicle to Grid (V2G)?
The Vehicle to Grid technology gives us the super power to push the energy back to the grid from the batteries of the electric vehicles. It gives us the opportunities for smart energy managements, which also unlocks the energy stored in the battery of electric vehicles so that we can support the grid during its peak demand.
Why V2G?
Obviously our next question will be, Okay we have a new technology what is the necessity of it, why we should care about that technology, what’s it going to solve. Well to answer to those kinds of questions, keep going down the blog.
No one can’t say, I get regular energy from the grid without any blackouts, without any power cuts for a short period of time. And many major blackouts of the grid is happening due to the natural calamities such as storms, earthquakes and many more. Let’s just say a storm has knocked out the power in your neighborhood and you don’t have a backup generator but what you do have is the Electric Vehicle standing in your garage with surplus amount of energy stored in its battery packs. What if you connected your vehicle’s battery to your house electric lines, you could power up some of the necessary appliances in your house during those blackouts.
This is where our V2G technology comes and saves us all, “We see V2G as the next most exciting opportunity,” said by Smriti Mishra, director of distributed energy at National Grid Ventures. With number of Electric vehicles exponentially increasing, the number of EVs on the world road’s is forecast to increase by 550 million by the year of 2040, which makes us to think why can’t we make best use of the population of Electric vehicles?
How V2G works?
Normally, while charging the Electric Vehicles we take the electrical energy from the grid (Grid to Vehicle), which is a one-way transmission. The primary use of the energy locked inside our vehicle battery is driving. There will also be times where we just charge our EV and park it with the energy locked inside our EV battery packs. With the help of Bi-Directional V2G Chargers and the modified design of the EVs we can power up the grid during it’s peak demand times.
The EV owners charge the grid for the service and enjoying the return on their EV investment. There are many experiments carried out in several regions of the world to check the compatibility of the V2G technology. There are experiments carried out in England, in which they will lease us the NISSAN LEAF, one of the only electric vehicles which is capable of handling the Bi-directional energy flow, the Bi-directional Charger and instruct us to charge the EV for a certain period of time (4PM to 5PM) and then connect it back to the grid during the peak energy demand timings(6PM).
Benefits of the V2G Technology
For sure it will benefit the Grid a lot, nowadays during the peak demand the grid will have to consent the reserve power plants or secondary power plants, generating energy from those are quite a pricey process. If we can optimize the V2G technology we eliminate the need to get power from the reserve power plants, even we can eliminate the need to build those in the first place.
There will also be benefits for the consumers too, they will be given incentives, which will encourage the energy companies to take part in it and those companies will also encourage their customers to take part too.
This technology will make us less dependent on the fossil fuels, to add to this fact I’ll say that in the coming year we will produce more energy from renewable energies such as solar and wind. The V2G will helps us in that situation too, such as during night when solar is not available and due to less transportation in night we can hybridize these two technologies.
And there will be reduction in the total cost of ownership of the vehicles, we can sell the vehicles with the added value, and there will stabilization of the grid.
Challenges in the V2G
The one is the very old-fashioned grid system in our country, some the regional grids are 100+ years old. We are in need to push the old grid to the new technology not only for the V2G technology but also for integrating the renewable energies in our grid. To integrate the conventional energies and renewable energies in our grid it should have a flexible system, Wider grid balancing area and many more, which is an whole other topic to discuss here.
So in the one way or the other, we will be forced to re-innovate our old grids with new technologies. Aside from this problem, there are no clear regulations in place for V2G and the infrastructure to make it possible is too expensive.
Unpredictability, is yet another issue for this technology to be optimized. For the V2G to work effectively all the consumers will have to plug to grid at the same time. One of the solution might be offering free parking at shopping malls, airports for consumers who plug in to the grid.
There are numerous applications to the V2G technology as shown in the image below. But I don’t want to bore you by explaining each of them.
Some of us might wonder, will it do anything to the battery life? The answer is simple, the batteries are supposed to do what they’re doing charging and discharging. And it won’t hurt to connect to the grid for few hours shouldn’t hurt the battery right! Many research work is also being carried on this query too.
There are many research works going on this field and many challenges are being solved by the researches, let’s all hope that it comes to common public use soon and optimized.
From the above explanations, I hope you grasped what the V2G technology is? Why we need it? , the intuition behind the technology, how it benefits us and the challenges in the technology.