Vehicle-to-grid Technology: Concept, Status, and Challenges

In the past few years, there has been enormous interest both in the industry and among consumers towards the transition from gasoline-powered vehicles to electric vehicles. Numerous factors contribute to this interest. Some of them include increased awareness about global warming, dwindling fossil fuel resources, and the hype around reducing one’s carbon footprint. Driven by the increasing market demand, researchers around the world are working strenuously towards making better batteries that possess high energy densities, capacities, and long cycle lives. While research on building better batteries and more powerful electric cars is progressing steadily, there is another closely-related concept that has been in the discussion lately. Known by the term, Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology, the concept involves parked vehicles generating electricity for the grid. At first encounter, one might speculate whether this concept can be useful at all and even if it is indeed useful, how effectively this can be implemented. An important statistic that motivated this concept is that in the United States, a typical car is on the road only for about 5 % of the day. Analyses indicate that even during peak traffic hours, as much as 90% of the cars remain parked. In addition, an equal percentage of the cars are not driven for even half of their full driving range every day. Thus, each parked vehicle can be considered as an under-utilized source of energy, and may even be shown to possess negative value because of the parking costs. To determine whether V2G is feasible, it is important to perform a cost-revenue analysis, taking into account the projected number of vehicles that will take part in V2G power, the total available storage capacity in the vehicles, and the power requirements of the grid supply. Research on merits of this technology implementation