March 6, 2021

Rev. April19,2021

                                                         White Paper

Why Can’t Your Electric Vehicle Provide Backup Power to Your Home in an Emergency & Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) Power Status

 

By Ray Bosenbecker

 

1.0  Background

 

It's 18 February 2021 and as I went to bed, I thought of the people affected by the Corona virus and the plight of millions of people in Texas and around the United States who had no electrical power because of the extremely cold weather.

 

I thought of how they could benefit from backup gasoline generators ($600 to $1,500), or 20 Kilowatt (Kw) whole house natural gas permanent long-term generators ($10,000 & up installed), or how they could use small lithium-ion battery inverters ($700 to $1,700) for temporary home power sources, or how they could use their own solar collectors with storage batteries ($10,000 & up) to power their homes during state wide rolling power blackouts.

 

It was then when I realized that my family could easily be in the same situation and I began to wonder what I would do here in Chesterfield, Missouri.  Just two days earlier, one of my daughters, who has three small children, three dogs, a large tortoise and a husband who works till 8 pm lost electrical power. She and her husband decided to buy a large gasoline generator and connect it to a transfer switch that had been installed by the previous homeowners. 

 

2.0 Idea

 

A transfer switch is an electrical circuit that is installed between the circuit breaker panel and an external electrical receptacle that can be connected to an electrical generator.  When power is lost, the transfer switch can disconnect the home from the electric grid and connect a limited number of critical pre-selected circuits in the house to a gasoline generator that would be located outside and connected to the electric receptacle of the transfer switch. Fortunately, the electric grid power was restored before the generator got to their home and they did not need the generator that night. Note: Parts and labor for a manual transfer switch can usually be installed in a home by a reputable electrician for less than $1,200. Transfer Switch Figure 1

 

I dozed off and went to sleep and dreamed about alternative electrical power options. About 3:30 am I suddenly awoke and thought of my eight-year-old Chevy Volt parked in the garage with its 16-kilowatt hour battery with 10-kilowatt hours of usable power connected to the electric grid to keep the battery warm and charged. 

 

I would like to have said that I had previously modified my Volt by adding wiring, sensors, processing, software, controls, protection circuits, switches, displays, an inverter to convert back to 120 volts alternating current and an electrical receptacle so that I could connect an extension cord that would provide emergency electrical power to my home. However, that never happened.  What did happen is that I had an epiphany, my "Eureka Moment". Chevy Volt Schematic Figure 2

 

3.0 Eureka Moment

 

What if all the millions of electric cars, trucks, buses, aircraft etc. were designed so that in times of emergency, they could share some of their stored electric battery power through a transfer switch to a home, hospital, school or business?  Better yet, what if while they were sitting in a garage or parking lot, and were connected to the electrical grid to charge their batteries; what if they could also be used to help share some of their stored power to supply their home or the electrical grid with additional power in times of emergency. Proposed V2H Schematic Figure 3

 

Today there are more than 22,600 Electric Vehicles (EV) registered in Texas. As of December 2020, cumulative sales in the U.S. totaled 1.74 million highway legal plug-in electric cars since 2010, led by all-electric cars with more than 1 million units sold.

 

The current Tesla Model 3 Standard Range battery has a total capacity of 50-kilowatt hours while the Model S has a 100-kilowatt hour battery. For this example, I assumed each vehicle had 40 kilowatt hours stored in its battery available for sharing; with 22,600 Electric Vehicles this would provide a total of 904 megawatt hours of stored electrical power for emergencies in Texas. For the state this is not a significant amount of electrical power, but for a small community, this might help.

 

In Texas this winter, the state had a generating capacity of 67,000 megawatts per hour but by Wednesday February 17, 2021, because of the cold temperatures, they were down by 46,000 megawatts per hour because of offline systems; this left them with a total capability of 21,000 megawatts per hour. The offline 46,000 megawatts per hour consisted of 28,000 megawatts per hour from natural gas, coal and nuclear plants and 18,000 megawatts per hour from wind and solar, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. 

 

Since the Texas grid is isolated from all the other U.S grids, the state couldn’t borrow electrical power from nearby states.  As a last-resort measure used by utility companies to avoid a total blackout of the power system and to provide some level of electrical power around the state, the electrical grid had to be switched on and off in various regions, and this resulted in rolling blackouts.

 

In five years, the number of electric vehicles is expected to increase dramatically.  For discussion, let’s assume that in five years Texas has the same number of electrical vehicles as California currently has in 2020 which is 256,800 electric vehicles and assume each electric vehicle has 40 kilowatt hours available for emergency, then in five years the available battery power would be 10,270 megawatt hours which could be a significant help in a power emergency.  In time, the number vehicles will increase even more as well as the battery capacity per vehicle. EV Growth Figure 4

 

What if today, the aircraft, auto, truck and bus manufacturers and users, as well as construction companies, power plants and governments at all levels begin to think about the possibilities of this approach to store and share energy and start developing laws, requirements and standards and developing the technologies to make this happen.  The idea is simple.  Provide a capability on all electric vehicles so that stored electrical power can be shared for other uses.

 

As the Bible’s Gospel of John reported, "Jesus used five loaves and two fish to feed a multitude". In an analogous way, we can multiply the benefits from electric vehicles, improve the reliability and security of our National Grid by increasing the electrica joinl power storage capacity and help keep our neighbors safe and secure.

 

Once you change the paradigm that an electric vehicle is only for transportation, to one that it is also a mobile power resource, you create many new possibilities. A few examples are: a mobile power resource could power a home or provide power to a stranded motorist, power a remote cabin or campsite, provide power for a temporary emergency medical site or accident site or power electric tools on a construction site.

 

4.0 V2G Technology Awareness 

Shortly after I prepared the previous narrative and shared it with friends and some of the technical community, I learned that many others had a similar epiphany and that “my” idea of passing electric vehicle battery power back to the US electrical power grid to backup power plants has been around for more than 25 years. The concept is Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology and it includes battery electric vehicles (BEV), plug-in hybrids electric vehicles (PHEV) and hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV) that communicate with the power grid to sell demand response Services by either returning electricity to the grid or throttling their charging rate. 

Once I became aware of the technology buzzwords, V2G (Vehicle-To-Grid), internet research became easy. The internet provided many technical articles and studies describing the technology and You Tube, offered many video presentations on the subject. I read the articles and reviewed the presentations and they provided an interesting story of perceived benefits, risks, and impediments as well as examples of the technology currently being demonstrated, used and proposed.

 

4.1 Benefits

 

o   Home Backup Power – Vehicle-To-Home (V2H)

o   Power Grid Backup Power – Vehicle-To-Grid (V2G)

o   Emergency Response Team Power – Vehicle-To-Emergency (V2E)

o   Emergency Power for Hospitals – V2E

o   Power for Construction Sites and Businesses – Vehicle-To-Work (V2W)

o   Power for Stranded Electric Vehicles – V2E

o   Portable Electrical Power for Remote Cabins, Campers, Picnics, Outdoor Activities – Vehicle-To-Play (V2P)

 

 

     4.2 Risks

 

o   Degraded Batteries

o   High Voltage Injuries to Users

o   Invalidate Manufacturers Battery warrantee

o   Damage the Electric Grid

o   Insufficient Capacity to Help Grid

o   Incompatibility with connecting cables, Charging Stations, Local Aggregation Networks, Power Grid Synchronization and Power Plants

5.0 Examples

The following are a few examples of pilot programs and early implementors of this technology.

 

a)    US, UK, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Japan, China are just a few of the many countries investing in V2G technology. In the UK, Nissan is currently the only car manufacturer that offers CHAdeMO charging technology on BEVs — the Nissan LEAF and Nissan e-NV200 van — which are therefore the only EVs that can use V2G charging. CHAdeMO is a trademark technology and an abbreviation for “CHArge de Move” which is equivalent to move by charge.

 

b)    The UK believes by 2050, up to 45% of households will actively provide vehicle-to-grid (V2G) services, according to National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO)’s Future Energy Scenarios, published in July 2020.

 

c)    ESO is one of the world’s largest investor-owned energy companies and owns the ESO National Grid in Warwick England. The recently unveiled Nissan Ariya SUV, due on sale in the second half of 2021, will feature combined charging system (CCS) charging technology rather than CHAdeMO. Nissan says that bi-directional charging V2G or V2H will not be available on this vehicle in Europe at launch, but the company is looking at how it can implement it in the future, as it remains part of its strategy and it still offers benefit to the customer. Nissan adds that bi-directional charging is key to unlocking the full potential of EVs and it’s important that all organizations including grid operators and charge point companies enable this technology. Nissan also notes that bi-directional charging using CCS is under study.

 

d)    Bluebird Bus Corporation Manufactures school buses at two facilities in Fort Valley, Georgia. It sold over 300 lithium-ion battery powered buses with V2G capability to customers in several states in the U.S. Depending on the bus configuration, their buses have a capacity of up to 160 kWh. They are aligned with companies that provide the ground equipment to collect and aggregate V2G power back to power plants. They project 250 more V2G equipped bus orders for 2021. Blue Bird reported that they are ramping up for a production capacity of 1,000 buses a year. Over the years, Blue Bird has produced 550,000 School buses. Today there about 480,000 school buses operating in the US.

 

e)    Lion Electric, a Canadian company reported in December of 2021 that they delivered Lion C electric buses with V2G for testing in California and NY. The 5 buses delivered to the White Plains, NY school district are for a pilot test program with Con Edison using Nuvve’s V2G technology.  Funding was provided Con Edison, NY R&D Energy Authority and National Express to reduce carbon emissions and to maintain industry reliability. Their various bus configurations come with 126, 168 and 210 kWh capacities. Lion has a production capacity of 2,500 buses or trucks a year.

 

f)      In In addition to Blue Bird and Lion school bus companies, many other school bus companies such as Collins, IC Bus, Starcraft Bus, Thomas Built Buses, TransTech and others are selling school buses with V2G or options to add V2G.

 

g)    Recently Amazon announced that they are purchasing 100,000 electric trucks from US electric-vehicle startup Rivian (partly owned by Amazon) as part of its effort to eliminate the carbon footprint of the company by 2030. They are adding 10,000 trucks in 2021. If we assume each Amazon truck has 200 kWh battery, then the total capacity of 100,000 Amazon trucks in 2030 would be 20,000,000 kWh which is about 23% of the average total US power needs in 2019 for one hour. However, at this time, no mention has been made of Amazon adding any V2G technology in its trucks.

 

Note: For reference, in 2019, the US generated about 4,127 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) (or about 4.13 trillion kWh) of electricity at utility-scale electricity generation facilities in the United. That is an average about 11,000,000,000 kWh each day or 470,000,000 kWh per hour.

 

h)    The Ford F-150 hybrid truck has a 1.5 kWh lithium-Ion battery with a 2.4kW or optional 7.2 kW (for $750, the 7.2 kW inverter also adds a 240 volts ac output) inverter that has provided homes with V2H backup power during February 2021 rolling blackout in Texas. The F-150 hybrid also provides workers at construction sites, with V2W electricity to power 120-volt ac electric tools. When battery power runs out, the truck’s gasoline engine has the capability to automatically start the engine and charge the battery to provide continuous power for hours and perhaps days. Ford F-150 Hybrid Figure 5

i)      On April 14,2021, https://apple.news/AlJTID74dRgKApg8KwZwNUA Sasha Lekach stated that “Montreal-based Dcbel announced it's launching the r16, an all-in-one energy management unit.” Dcbel is a Canadian company focusing on solar inverters and home blackout protection. Its r16 combines that with support for the bidirectional charging already present in some modern EVs (like Nissan's Leaf, for example) to turn your car into a massive backup battery. The system integrates with home photovoltaic solar solutions and the public grid, channeling those sources intelligently into powering your home and charging your car. The system can be configured to rely on whichever is most cost-effective

Total cost for r16 is $5,000, plus installation. Dcbel's unit comes with an accompanying app to monitor energy usage in your EV and home. It will be available first in California later this summer, where CEO Marc-Andre Forget saw a need for better energy solutions (and because the state has high EV ownership). After the Texas climate crisis earlier this year, the company is eyeing a launch there too. The Dcbel can charge any EV, but to use your electric vehicle as a power source the car has to have bi-directional charging. Currently, Chademo is the only EV charging standard that supports bidirectionality, a standard rapidly losing out to CCS, which does not currently support bidirectionality. But support is coming: Once it's available, Dcbel will provide the requisite update for the r16. R16 home backup power is  only compatible with the Nissan Leaf and Mitsubishi Outlander plug-in hybrid vehicles for now. In the future, automakers plan to add direct vehicle-to-grid capabilities, like the upcoming Kia EV6 and all future Volkswagen EVs. Dcbel Vision See Figure 6

j)      It is also interesting to note that just 10% of the currently US Postal Service planned fleet of mail trucks - between 50,000 to 165,000 over the next 10 years - will be battery powered with no plans to include V2G capability. The other 90% will be powered by gas.

k)    US power companies and others throughout the world have prepared applicable studies and reports and are currently providing various storage capabilities for solar, wind and hydro sources to provide green Electric Power. Green power is a subset of renewable energy and represents those renewable energy resources and technologies that provide the highest environmental benefit.  The U.S. voluntary market defines green power as electricity produced from solar, wind, geothermal, biogas, eligible biomass, and low-impact small hydroelectric sources. Customers often buy green power for its zero emissions profile and carbon footprint reduction benefits.

One example, is Ameren Missouri of St Louis, Missouri and Illinois area; Ameren is committed to clean. The company has established a net-zero carbon emissions goal by 2050 across all its operations in Missouri and Illinois. In addition, Ameren laid out plans for its largest-ever expansion of clean wind and solar generation that maintains the reliability and affordability that customers have come to expect. 

Ameren’s Plan Includes:

·        A commitment to a net-zero carbon emissions goal by 2050.

·        The company’s largest investments in renewable solar and wind energy in its history.

·        An investment of billions of dollars, creating thousands of jobs.

·        Meeting customers’ energy reliability needs while keeping rates affordable.

The clean energy expansion is included in Ameren Missouri’s Integrated Resource Plan (IRP). The IRP is a triennial filing that sets forth Ameren Missouri’s preferred plan to transform its electricity generation portfolio over the coming decades. It takes advantage of the continued decline in the cost to build new clean energy resources. To learn more about the plan’s key features and important milestones their plan. Their  plan summary includes the following:

·       Reducing carbon emissions to target a 50% reduction by 2030 and an 85%   reduction by 2040, from 2005 levels, and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The new goals are consistent with the objectives of the Paris Agreement and limiting global temperature rise to 1.5° Celsius.

·       Adding 3,100 megawatts (MW) of new clean, renewable generation by 2030 and a total of 5,400 MW by 2040.

·       Advancing the retirement of Ameren Missouri’s coal-fired energy centers. More than 75% of the Company’s current coal-fired energy generating capacity will be retired by 2039 and all coal-fired energy centers will be retired by 2042.

·       Building on an already solid base of Ameren Missouri’s clean energy resources including nuclear, hydro, wind and solar.

6.0 Question

Why is the incorporation EV backup power, V2E, V2H, V2P, V2W and V2G implementation progressing so slowly and why aren’t options being made available in the millions of EVs that are being sold to the public? 

7.0 V2G Implementation Impediments

Perhaps a March 2020 GDS Associates study for Ameren Missouri provides some of the answers. It suggests that previous and current vehicle-to-grid pilot programs have indicated a lack of “off the shelf” available technologies and the need for new policy and standards that better allow for the inclusion of V2G to serve as a grid resource that may compete economically with other resources. Based on their review, they concluded there is insufficient information available to accurately support inclusion of V2G in the current Ameren potential study. Specific areas of concern the GDS team identified include the following findings:

o   V2G currently exists only as pilots in specific applications and is not currently available as a service option for owners of electric vehicles.

 

o   This includes both requirements for the vehicle which requires specific inverter technology and communication protocols as well as specific charging infrastructure technology.

 

o   Individual vehicle owners may be limited to frequency regulation markets due to the relatively small capacity resource individual electric vehicles can provide and lack of a market aggregator.

 

o   Fleet owners may encounter market regulatory costs that outweigh revenue generation.

 

o   Vehicle manufacturers have raised concerns regarding the invalidation of battery warranty for vehicles that are used as a grid capacity source rather than for the intended use of vehicle transportation.

 

[Author’s Note: In addition, Vehicle manufactures may have other, more profit-driven reasons. For example, Tesla, the largest producer of EVs in the US also is promoting autopilot technology that will enable EVs to be rented during work hours to provide income for the owners.  In addition, Tesla manufactures and sells solar collectors and the “Powerwall” which are being sold to provide electrical power for homes and businesses.]

 

o    Current market economics may not support participation by vehicle owners.

8.0 Way Forward

It took over 130 years for the first electric automobile to become widely used. In 1890-1891 William Morrison, a Des Moines, Iowa chemist developed the first successful US automobile. It was a six-passenger wagon that could go 23 mph.

 

With your support, we can change the way things are done and the electric vehicle power sharing technologies will follow a quicker path. The way forward will probably begin with V2H backup power for homes and V2W for construction sites using products like the Ford F-150 hybrid and then progress to V2G using examples like the pilot V2G Bluebird and Lion school bus programs. This will be followed by a critical mass of V2G buses and fleets of V2G delivery trucks. Once the public visualizes the benefits of the technology and expresses a need, the Electric Vehicle (EV) companies will have cost-benefit justification that enables them to produce millions of electric automobiles with electric power sharing options. Based on Ford’s F-150 Hybrid truck option that adds a 7.2 kW inverter for $750, it’s not unreasonable to assume that in large quantities, electric vehicle manufactures will be able to provide a Vehicle-To-Home (V2H) option for about $1,000. Future Figures 7 & 8

9.0 Make It Happen

 

If this information increased your awareness and understanding of the issues, risks, benefits, complexity and promise of this technology it served its purpose. If you want to accelerate the rate of incorporating V2E, V2H, V2P, V2W and V2G power technology; you can do it by sharing this information with those who can change the current status. Make this happen sooner rather than later! See https://evbackuppower.blogspot.com/

 

10.0 Backup Material

 

Preliminary Test Results and Home Backup Power information is provided in Figures 9 to 17.