Driving a car is expensive. Gasoline prices keep soaring up and it is very unlikely that there will be a downward trend in the future.

How about earning money with your car when you are not using it? Seems far fetched? Well not if you have an electric car.

Researchers at the University of Delaware in Newark came up with a project, V2G, which is short for “Vehicle To Grid“, where the batteries of electric cars are connected in a power grid to sponge off excess power from utilities companies and to release it back when required.

Electric grid operators have to balance the generated electricity to meet customer demand and this can vary widely. They also have to keep a back up generator on in the event of a catastrophic failure on the grid. And this costs them enormously.

If the batteries of the electric cars can be used collectively to store up energy in the grid then the utilities companies will be saving a lot of money. They will then pass on some of it to the car owners who participate. Since the electric car has to be plugged in to be recharged anyway when not in use the owner has nothing to lose. Car owners drive, on average, about one to two hours per day.

Ajay Prasad, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Delaware, believed that a fleet of 300 cars is sufficient for a utility operator to run a V2G operation.

For the system to have the most value, electric cars need to be equipped with a high, 80-amp/240-volt plug. Most of the existing electric hybrid cars come equipped with a low, 15-amp, 110-volt plug.

The low-amp plugs will work too but it will net a car owner only $400 year, whereas an 80-amp plug could net $4,000. This high-amp plug can be easily installed by an electrician.

Unlike other alternative energy sources, such as hydrogen fuel, the infrastructure for electric cars is already there.

The V2G team has successfully connected one prototype electric car to the grid and was able to charge the battery as well as draw energy from it. They are presently working with four to six vehicles. They will finally test a fleet of 100 to 300 cars to supply a utility company with 3 megawatts of backup power. Also to be determine is how the life of the battery will be affected.

If 25% of the cars in US (50 millions) are electric, the power capacity of those batteries would be equal to 700 gigawatts, the entire power production capacity in the United States today.

Driving an electric car might not be a bad idea after all.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 11:26 pm and is filed under Autos, Spot News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.