Using a car to cool your house off
In an ode to hilarity, The Daily Show recently had a bit on Earth Day, with my heroine Samantha Bee showing up at an Earth Day rally. She was hauling around a gas generator hooked up to an air conditioner and walking around the rally with them both on. "What? I'm warm!" she yelled at the onlookers, agog at the sheer egregious use of wasteful energy.
So I was reading a report in the SF Chronicle about Google writing software for using energy from cars to provide household power (i.e., your car runs your house's air conditioner). You might wonder why a company known for going green would spend its efforts doing that.
You see, it's long been known in the power industry that energy cannot be stored, at least not in any significant quantities. This has long been the reasons not to use many renewable sources, especially wind and solar. (You don't stop needing power when the sun goes down.) More recently there's been discussion of putting turbines in the San Francisco Bay that would take advantage of the tides flowing in and out of the Golden Gate. But a strong tide at 3 AM is of no use when everyone's lights are out and no one needs the energy. At least solar has the advantage that it generates the most power when consumption is at it's highest... in the middle of the day when air conditioners are cranking.
And Google's recently been putting its money where its mouth is about going green for cars. Most specifically, by adding additional batteries, it's working to turn many of its fleet of already-green hybrid cars into plug-in hybrids. That way the use grid power for much of their use, stored in their batteries, and only using gasoline when the batteries run out or when extra power is needed such as accelerating or at highway speeds. The idea is that eventually as battery technology progresses, they might one day totally run on battery power. (See my previous post about the electric car.)
The other point being is that most of these cars hopefully would charge at night, when the electric grid is least used. Also, power at night is the most efficient, as only the cheapest sources are used at night when consumption is at its lowest, and more expensive units go idle. Hopefully it's also the most environmentally friendly, such as nuclear or hydro-electric power. (Progressive companies like PG&E also apply a "carbon adder" to sources, meaning they'll use non-or low-carbon emitting sources before having to put other carbon-emitting sources online.) And by evening out electricity usage, fewer power plants are needed.
But like I said, you can't store this more environmentally-friendly energy. But you might be able to soon.
The problem with storing energy is that the batteries are very expensive. But in an electric (or plug-in hybrid) car, those expensive batteries are used to actually get you around.
And so the idea Google has is a second use: powering your air conditioner.
Here's the deal, and one we know extremely well in California: It's really expensive to build a power plant. Not only is it expensive, it takes a long time, and no one wants a big coal plant in their back yard, let alone nuclear. The problem is that electric use peaks. For a couple weeks in July, our usage can be twice what it is in winter, and the usage at 4 PM is over twice what it is at 4 AM.
So for a couple weeks in July, your power producing capacity has to be much higher than what it is the other 11 months of the year. That last power plant to go online has an extremely small return on investment, meaning those incremental kilowatt hours are a couple orders of magnitude more expensive than producing a kWh at 3 AM in January.
Unless you could store it. Say you plugged in your hybrid at night. (Or one day, your electric car.) It's charging away. The next day the temperature climbs to 85 in San Francisco and 107 in Walnut Creek. Air conditioners are cranking away at every last home. Fearful of rolling blackouts, people with excess power in their Priae (plural for Prius) start powering the grid, as told by the software that Google wrote. (You can select only to do so under certain conditions, or only to so much, so you can still run to the store that evening.) And then your car just charges back up at night when the air conditioners relent. Think of it as giving your hybrid a day job.
Oh yeah, and you get a credit on your bill for doing so. Think of it this way. You buy 10 gallons of gas for $2 a gallon. Later on, someone else really needs it, and they say, I'll pay you $4 a gallon for 5 of those gallons. You can still get the store on the other 5 gallons, so you do it. Later on, when the prices go back down, you buy another 10 gallons for $2 a gallon.
Well, instead of gas, it's electricity. Cuz you can store it and they can't. Simple, ja?
The end result? People stay cool, and there's one less coal plant in someone's back yard.
Crazy? Not really. It makes sense when you think about it. Of course, we're not there yet. But one day. And maybe sooner than you think.
So I was reading a report in the SF Chronicle about Google writing software for using energy from cars to provide household power (i.e., your car runs your house's air conditioner). You might wonder why a company known for going green would spend its efforts doing that.
You see, it's long been known in the power industry that energy cannot be stored, at least not in any significant quantities. This has long been the reasons not to use many renewable sources, especially wind and solar. (You don't stop needing power when the sun goes down.) More recently there's been discussion of putting turbines in the San Francisco Bay that would take advantage of the tides flowing in and out of the Golden Gate. But a strong tide at 3 AM is of no use when everyone's lights are out and no one needs the energy. At least solar has the advantage that it generates the most power when consumption is at it's highest... in the middle of the day when air conditioners are cranking.
And Google's recently been putting its money where its mouth is about going green for cars. Most specifically, by adding additional batteries, it's working to turn many of its fleet of already-green hybrid cars into plug-in hybrids. That way the use grid power for much of their use, stored in their batteries, and only using gasoline when the batteries run out or when extra power is needed such as accelerating or at highway speeds. The idea is that eventually as battery technology progresses, they might one day totally run on battery power. (See my previous post about the electric car.)
The other point being is that most of these cars hopefully would charge at night, when the electric grid is least used. Also, power at night is the most efficient, as only the cheapest sources are used at night when consumption is at its lowest, and more expensive units go idle. Hopefully it's also the most environmentally friendly, such as nuclear or hydro-electric power. (Progressive companies like PG&E also apply a "carbon adder" to sources, meaning they'll use non-or low-carbon emitting sources before having to put other carbon-emitting sources online.) And by evening out electricity usage, fewer power plants are needed.
But like I said, you can't store this more environmentally-friendly energy. But you might be able to soon.
The problem with storing energy is that the batteries are very expensive. But in an electric (or plug-in hybrid) car, those expensive batteries are used to actually get you around.
And so the idea Google has is a second use: powering your air conditioner.
Here's the deal, and one we know extremely well in California: It's really expensive to build a power plant. Not only is it expensive, it takes a long time, and no one wants a big coal plant in their back yard, let alone nuclear. The problem is that electric use peaks. For a couple weeks in July, our usage can be twice what it is in winter, and the usage at 4 PM is over twice what it is at 4 AM.
So for a couple weeks in July, your power producing capacity has to be much higher than what it is the other 11 months of the year. That last power plant to go online has an extremely small return on investment, meaning those incremental kilowatt hours are a couple orders of magnitude more expensive than producing a kWh at 3 AM in January.
Unless you could store it. Say you plugged in your hybrid at night. (Or one day, your electric car.) It's charging away. The next day the temperature climbs to 85 in San Francisco and 107 in Walnut Creek. Air conditioners are cranking away at every last home. Fearful of rolling blackouts, people with excess power in their Priae (plural for Prius) start powering the grid, as told by the software that Google wrote. (You can select only to do so under certain conditions, or only to so much, so you can still run to the store that evening.) And then your car just charges back up at night when the air conditioners relent. Think of it as giving your hybrid a day job.
Oh yeah, and you get a credit on your bill for doing so. Think of it this way. You buy 10 gallons of gas for $2 a gallon. Later on, someone else really needs it, and they say, I'll pay you $4 a gallon for 5 of those gallons. You can still get the store on the other 5 gallons, so you do it. Later on, when the prices go back down, you buy another 10 gallons for $2 a gallon.
Well, instead of gas, it's electricity. Cuz you can store it and they can't. Simple, ja?
The end result? People stay cool, and there's one less coal plant in someone's back yard.
Crazy? Not really. It makes sense when you think about it. Of course, we're not there yet. But one day. And maybe sooner than you think.
posted by Joe Carlin at 6:22 PM
1 Comments:
Well written article.
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