V2G technology allows hybrid vehicles to feed electricity into city power grids

V2G technology takes advantage of the fact that gas/electric hybrid cars -- and in the future, fuel cell hybrid vehicles -- are power generation stations on wheels, and that power generation capability sits idle more than 90% of the time. By plugging vehicles back into the grid, and transferring power from the vehicles' onboard battery into the city's electrical grid, we could revolutionize both the utility of vehicles for personal transportation and the ability for cities to meet peak electrical demand without investing in expensive power stations.

Essentially, the promise of V2G is that of a distributed power generation network that can be tapped to supplement the already-existing power generation capability of any electrical grid. All of this may sound far-fetched, but in fact it's coming to fruition right now. There are V2G fuel cell buses being used in Toronto, Daimler-Chrysler is working on a pickup truck with V2G capability, a city in Florida is reported to be purchasing 50 city buses that are V2G capable, and a company called AC Propulsion plans to make 1000 V2G electric vehicles starting next year.

It's a new idea, and one that will take a lot of education and momentum to catch on. For one thing, there's no place to plug your vehicle into the power grid today, and utility companies will naturally be quite wary of opening up their grid to power transmission from the public. But it also holds the promise to take advantage of the investment in power generation technology found in hybrid vehicles, while reducing the cost to run a city-wide power network generation and distribution system. This is great technology that's just waiting for social acceptance.

• By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor So, you're thinking of buying one of those gas-electric hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius or Honda Insight.
• They're trendy, conserve fuel, and reduce pollution.
• But to really go "green," some entrepreneurs and academics say, you should try a Volkswagen Jetta.
• A dark blue one that a California electric-car company has modified so that it not only uses electricity but generates it for other purposes.
• "As electric-drive hybrids begin to penetrate the auto market, you now have distributed power generation on wheels," says Stephen Letendre, an economist at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vt.
• Of the more than 235 million vehicles in the United States today, only a few thousand are hybrids.
• And these lack the extra internal circuitry and external plug necessary to give electricity back.
• It would be far cheaper for utilities to tap the batteries of thousands of cars, say, than the current practice of keeping huge turbines constantly spinning just to supply power at a moment's notice, studies show.
• � A major Florida city is on the verge of buying more than 50 battery-powered buses, including several that are V2G capable.
• But it's the idea of V2G on a larger scale that most awes Howard Ross, president of Ross Transportation Technology, which is getting set to build the Florida buses.
• Wide use of V2G electric-drive vehicles could generate enough power to cut the requirement for central generating station capacity by as much as 20 percent by the year 2050, says the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility industry research center in Palo Alto, Calif.