A Plug-In Prius that Powers Your House

For $320 total additional cost a plug-in Prius could use wind power for its first 100,000 miles of use!

PG&E goal: The Prius battery (used by PG&E) could help PG&E implement the new law in California mandating use of renewable energy.

Toyota goal: Toyota engineers get a 'carbon budget' for CO2 pollution - for lifecycle of all materials used in the car (per recent EV world posting of presentation by Bill Reinert of Toyota) ==> http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=ar...mp;storyid=1127

To help both PG&E and Toyota meet the goals listed above here is a suggestion (and to other manufacturers and utilities that share these concerns):

Package the (plug-in) hybrids for sale with 'wind power' certificates for the wind power premium for the first 100,000 miles of the vehicle - a value of $320 (included in the vehicle sales price). The plug-in car now runs on wind power (i.e. places equivalent wind power on the grid). Here is the calculation:

Given: 80 cents for a gallon equivalent of electricity (using standard electricity costs per Kw) and a gallon goes about 50 miles on the Prius (so the Prius uses about 2,000 gallons in 100,000 miles)
Given: wind power certificate is equal to about 20% higher charge for electricity today (so 20% of 80 cents per gallon equivalent is the additional cost of non polluting wind power or 16 cents)

Calculation: 2000(gallon equivalents)*16(cents) = $320.00 (total) for wind power premium for first 100,000 miles

California gets a car that causes zero green house gasses and zero NOX etc. (and achieves Toyota design goals with a carbon budget of zero for the fuel). The consumer gets a truly revoluntionary 'green' car.

The car could be marketed as 'let the wind carry you', 'run with the wind', 'with the wind at your back' and 'the first non-polluting car that goes 0-60 in 9 seconds' etc. Also, Toyota could work out joint marketing agreements with large electric energy companies (like PG&E) that could advertise the cars to their customers (with special additional incentives etc. if you buy the car and charge at night - could this incentive from PG&E be $40 a year and eventually add up to $320 required for the wind power premium ?).

This would build upon/emphasize the value proposition of the Prius, help Toyota achieve its design goals (zero carbon budget - see above), diversify automotive fuel sources (at a time of geo-political instability), and increase public good will (and brand loyalty/brand equity for both Toyota and PG&E) by helping to provide scalable solutions to the significant challenge posed by global warming. As mentioned, PG&E gains the benefit of that much more wind power on the grid per recent California mandate. And, the consumer (and California) get a pollution free car. Everybody wins.

Best regards,

Eric Nothman

 

Or just buy one of these:

http://www.renewabledevices.com/images/BBC_Newsnight_2.mpg

and take the gasoline and electricity generation companies out of the loop completely! Why buy fuel when you can make your own?

(Average output 12 kWh per day in good sites, enough for 50 miles electric range per day, or 18,000 miles per year from home-made wind power alone).

 

What about www.priUPS.com ?

As an IT company that bought a Prius, it's something I'm thinking of doing, use my car as a big UPS for my company. Being in Montreal, Quebec, power failures are a common occurence and often last in excess of one hour.

Rather than spending 5K$ in UPS batteries to get 15KWH to power my computers & servers, and renting a generator + power conditioner (to get a nice Sine wave), just bring a 10 gage 50' extension cord to my Prius.

I think I'll simply ask Richard Factor to come up here and help me with the setup. If I do, I'll document and send pics on the forum.

A commercial application of the Prius as a business UPS for a software dev company. Sounds cool!


FWIW, I think it's silly to convert gas into electricity to sell back to the grid. A converted Prius to Hydrogen, still requires making Hydrogen which requires electricity.

However in California, where at peak the KW/H cost 10x more than what I pay here Quebec, I can imagine it being cheaper to use your car than to get it from the utility company, but what about gas pollution? Utilities use highly efficient turbines that produce little pollution, and I'm sure less pollutants than even a Prius if you compare KW to KW.

I really liked that Swift Turbine, would look great at my company on the roof. I could power the free Wi-Fi routeurs I plan to setup soon.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Eric Nothman @ Nov 16 2006, 12:50 AM) [snapback]349995[/snapback]</div>

FREAKIN BRILLIANT!

You should make a point of taking this idea beyond the forum... this could and should be put to use!

 

One issue that needs to be addressed is that feeding electricity from your vehicle to the grid will increase the number of charge/recharge cycles and will speed up the point at which the battery reaches the end of its life. There is a cost associated with shortening the life of your battery as that amortized cost needs to be considered when one is computing the true cost of the kwh derived from the grid. This is derived from the cost of the battery over the miles driven using the battery. Perhaps someone can enlighten us as to what a reasonable estimate of what these costs coud be.

Grid to vehicle seems like a great idea if the additional capacity required can be done in a way that does not endanger the grid or lead to an increase in co2 emissions. The variability of wind availability can be mitigated somewhat because recharging the Prius power pack will not necessarily require a steady flow of electicity. Vehicle to grid would , in essence, increase the base load, but as I said above I wonder about the impact of shortened battery life. Perhaps if this program were implemented, PG&E would be required to pay a premium to reflect this additional cost.

Further, is the use of vehicle to grid (V2G) a better approach that some other method of storage such as pumped storage or a battery of banks at the point of power production? Or is PG&E proposing v2g with the idea that they don't have to incur the storage costs?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Eric Nothman @ Nov 15 2006, 09:50 PM) [snapback]349995[/snapback]</div>

Awesome ideas. I hope you send them on to said companies.

 

Battery cycling depends on how much power you're actually feeding.
Ever notice that when the car's sitting there in Park but powered
up, the HV battery tends to drain down to two pink bars while
powering the electronics and pumps through the 12V converter, and
when the ICE starts to push a little more charge into the battery,
it only gets bumped up a bar or so every time? That's one scenario
for power generation, in a way, and the battery SOC remains fairly
steady or contained in a very narrow range. Similarly with steady-
state highway travel -- SOC remains within 5% or so of 60% without
a whole lot of variance. For these situations, you can pretty much
cut the battery out of the calculations entirely.
.
Now, this plows right into running the numbers to see the MAJOR
problem with V2G. In http://techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/cars/prius-curves.gif
we see that engine efficiency doesn't really pick up until you're
producing about 10 kilowatts. That, coincidentally, is the demand
level that normally causes the ICE to kick on to help push the car
when the SOC is at its nominal level. 50 amps at 200 volts. Now,
what's the peak draw of your house? With the dryer and water heater
and heat-pump A/C all running, not to mention all the little stuff,
you could easily reach or exceed 10 kW draw. Further, there is the
limitation of what MG1 can generate, which also happens to be in the
ballpark of 10 kW. I think it's good for a little more than that,
but you would probably not want to run it at its absolute maximum
output the whole time. So let's say your house needs 10 kW peak,
and the rest of the time you'd like to generate 10 kW with the car
to either meet that need, or sell a healthy chunk o' zoobs back to
the power company. Dynamically allocated depending on demand, gee,
where have we seen that thinking before? If you're not using it,
maybe your hybrid-less neighbors are so you figure you still win,
because you've calculated that if you produce 10 kW all the time
you're running the engine decently up into the efficiency curve,
with a heavy but reasonably safe load on MG1.
.
That also happens to be about the same amount of power that would
motor you down the highway in the neighborhood of 60 miles an hour,
give or take a little. Now, how long do you normally drive at a
stretch? Do you begin to see the problem here?
.
After a day of producing 10 kW for yourself and your nearest
neighbors, you've effectively driven 1440 miles. After a month,
you've put about 44,000 miles' worth of usage on the engine. In
just three months when your clock clears 130,000 effective miles,
you're so out of warranty it's not funny, and your little generating
plant still totally has new-car smell. Can it last out the year??
.
That's what people never take into account in V2G scenarios -- engine
runtime. The Prius could probably do a bit better with a lighter
load and intermittent engine run, but it's still a *lot* of hours.
.
And I haven't even thought about refueling here. About three tanks
a day, right? I hope we're at least recapturing the *other* 20 kW
that gets blown off as heat somehow.
.
_H*

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(hobbit @ Nov 20 2006, 03:59 PM) [snapback]352317[/snapback]</div>

Did I miss something? Weren't we talking about a car that doesn't exist yet, a plug-in, not the current prius? Weren't we also talking about emergency, temporary power during a black out?

And regards to helping the grid - It would seem to me that when there are fleets of plug-ins across the continent, the amount of electricity needed from any one vehicle to help stabilize the grid would be small and the draw would be for a short time and only during relatively rare peak consumption periods. No need to have an engine turn on at all. Any charge that was supplied to the grid early in the evening would be replenished in the middle of the night.