Think of your petrol-guzzling car standing in your garage all night. Then imagine in that same garage an electric vehicle — storing energy when it’s idle‚ and pumping that energy back into the power grid.
New research just published says this is the way of the future: electric cars could store power and become "mobile batteries".
However‚ the current technology can "damage car batteries"‚ and several advances in design would be needed for the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) model kick in.
According to the researchers Dr Kotub Uddin at the University of Warwick and Dr Matthieu Dubarry at the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute‚ energy from electric cars could help regulate the frequency of the electricity supply‚ reduce the amount of electricity purchased at peak times, and increase the power output of the system.
"V2G is not going to be easy but‚ if done properly‚ it has a chance to make a difference for both utilities and electric-vehicle owners. We need more research to understand the process better and benefit from the technology‚" they said.
The Hawaii-based institute had found that V2G damages the battery‚ but the British one found that a "smarter grid" would make the process economically viable and even improve the battery. The two then came together to find the way forward.
Uddin says funding is needed to develop new testing standards and control strategies to guide policies that support V2G. One key element to improving the system‚ he says‚ will be the measurement of battery degradation.
For South Africans groaning under the weight of the Eskom debacle, the idea of driving around in your e-vehicle and feeding electricity back into the grid is an exquisite utopia — but it’s still far off.
Earlier this year‚ Deloitte released the results of its annual automotive consumer study.
It showed that South Africans’ expectations and anxieties were not quite in line with the current technologies. More than half said they would wait for at most an hour for a battery to charge‚ yet this currently takes three to four hours.
South Africans are also scared of getting stuck on the road with no place to charge and would want to be able to go for about 400km on a charge — whereas most e-vehicles today can only handle 300km at the most‚ and usually closer to 100km.
In 2016‚ only 100 electric cars were sold in SA. The country could be in a chicken-and-egg situation, with the industry waiting to see decent demand before investing in manufacturing and infrastructure, while motorists stay away from electric cars until the infrastructure is there.
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