Imagine for a moment that your utility company draws power on occasion from your EV to stabilise the grid and pays you for it. Pretty far-out right? Well, apparently not!

Google, the IEEE, the Natural Resources Defense Council, a former CIA director, a U.S. senator held a symposium on the 19th of September and discussed just this, along with other relevant topics. The discussion revolved around the concept of a “smart grid” which allows EV’s to communicate with the grid and charge itself when demand and price is at its lowest, and when demand is at high levels, the grid can syphon off a small percentage of power from those EV’s that are plugged in and not in use. So basically, you’re only paying the lowest possible rate, and being paid for power that’s drawn from your EV’s battery from time to time.

There are, of course some difficulties with this concept. One concern is how this would affect battery life of the EV. Periodic demands from the grid, even if for only a tiny amount of the battery’s stored energy, would obviously affect the cells’ life span, but no one knows how much.  Utility and finance companies are looking into the idea of leasing the batteries to EV owners and then charge a fixed rate to recharge it, and pay back when “drawing” a small amount of electrical power from it to the grid. Then once your battery performance becomes too low to use in your EV, the company swaps it out with a new one, refurbishes the old one and utilises it for storage of power generated from renewable source power stations – something power companies have thus far never accommodated for at any scale.

For this concept to work, technology and policy advances are required, and is under intense development all around the world.

One of the biggest downfalls we hear critics talk about the EV is the amount of time it takes to recharge. Charge times of anything from 2 hours to 12+ hours on various models have been mentioned. That’s a long break at a filling station! So if I told you that it may be possible in the near future to fully charge your EV in about 10 minutes, would that quieten the critics?

Thanks to Altair Nanotechnologies, the design of a battery with high-surface-area nano-patterned electrodes and an unusually stable lithium chemistry, EV batteries can now be safely charged to full capacity in about 10 minutes – not recommended you try that with most lithium batteries (ka-boom?!)

BUT before we start breaking out the bubbly, there’s a small problem. Whilst the technology for the battery is a brilliant break-through, in order to be able to accomplish a “10-minute-fill” you’d need about 250 kilowatts of power— five times more than an average office building uses at its peak. So that means, unless you have an electrical substation in your back yard, you’re probably not going to be able to use this technology at home. Even rapid charge filling stations with an average of 4 filling points would require the power-equivalent an electrical substation to charge all 4 points at the same time, and I’d guess that we’d put a huge amount of pressure on the power grid if you had thousands of EV’s being rapid-charged all at once! So is that it for the rapid-charge theory? I’d say it’s just the beginning!

This is a brand-new technology. Obviously with further R&D I’m certain new developments will arise which allow for this concept to be more practical. Sven Thesen, supervisor of PG&E’s Clean Air Transportation group says PG&E is exploring the idea of installing battery storage facilities at its substations to facilitate rapid charging. The batteries would be charged overnight when the demand on the power grid is at its lowest, and the stored power can then be used for the rapid-charging process. It’s not just all talk either – PG&E plans to install an EV charging station capable of rapid charging at its Davis California facility utilising this concept in 2008.

Certainly a partnership between electrical companies and filling stations could see this become a reality, and open up a lot of new opportunities for the savvy entrepreneur…!