(Credit: Pixabay)The city of Boulder, Colorado, is trying out a vehicle-to-building technology, which takes electricity from electric vehicles and feeds that into buildings. The same concept is in use now, which takes power from those EVs and sends it to the grid. Any distributed asset, generally, can do the same. The formal name for the assets — if used collectively — is called a “virtual power plant.”
As for Boulder, it is partnering with Fermata Energy to test the ability to reduce the city’s building energy costs with an innovative pilot at its recreation center. When most of us think of an electric charger, we envision a charging station pumping energy into a car. But Fermata has a bidirectional charging system that also channels power from cars to buildings.
The city will have complete insight into the program. The data will be shared via the project website.
Boulder has at least 21 EVs. As the program expands, more of them could be used as vehicles — pardon the pun — to send energy to the grid or buildings. A single fleet car will charge at night when the power demand is at its lowest, and it will discharge during the day when electricity demand peaks. The goal is to cut the city’s electricity bills.
“We look forward to testing this new technology and seeing the data to understand the potential of projects like this,” said Matt Lehrman, the city’s Energy Strategy Advisor. “If we can reduce our peak demand and save money through this project, it might unlock new use cases for expanding the city’s electric vehicle fleet. Not only can electric vehicles help meet our climate goals and reduce air pollution, they might be a strategy to reduce operating costs and enhance resilience.”
The Issue
The electric transmission network is the nerve center of the American economy — the largely unnoticed vital organ that keeps commerce and everyday life healthy. And President Biden’s just-released “Building a Better Grid Initiative” will be the mechanism to bring new technologies and policies to the fore. The goal is100% clean electricity by 2035 and a zero-emissions economy by 2050.
In practical terms, utilities can communicate with commercial and industrial customers and get them to adjust their energy usage during peak demand. Grid operators can also sniff out congestion and redirect electron traffic before any blackout occurs. But it leads to more distributed energy resources such as solar PV, battery storage, and microgrids.
What’s new is that software programs can coordinate thousands of disparate assets and feed that energy into the grid — a program that allows virtual power plants to be paid the same as traditional power suppliers. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued an order in 2018, which has been upheld by the courts.
Those virtual power plants can potentially change the energy horizon by harnessing locally-produced solar power and redistributing that to where it is most needed — all facilitated by cloud-based software that has a full panoramic view. At the same time, those smaller distributed assets can add more reliability and give commercial and industrial users greater peace of mind — a dynamic that enhances America’s generation and delivery network.
Indeed, fleet operators could decide to forego the use of their vehicles and to use them instead to heat and cool their businesses. Or they could make that battery power available to grid operators and get paid. If 200 vans, buses, and trucks are plugged into the grid during peak hours, that could save the utility a lot of money and possibly avoid building new natural gas-fired peaking plants.
The Potential for Boulder
Boulder looks forward to utilizing its entire EV fleet for similar purposes. Beyond that, commercial operations could go in the same direction: Consider the average Boulder resident uses 16 kilowatt-hours a day. A 2020 Nissan LEAF battery has 62 kilowatt-hours of storage, meaning that it could power a small commercial business for four days.
The electric vehicle, in essence, is to be viewed as any other distributed resource such as an onsite diesel generator or a demand response program. Suppose the primary grid is down and the microgrid must step up. In that case, the internal battery can be used to supply backup power and provide voltage support to prevent momentary lapses in electricity. Fleet operators, which have vehicles parked all day and whose internal batteries can provide such services, embrace the concept.
For example, General Motors and OnStar partnered with TimberRock Energy Solutions to form a vehicle-to-grid operation. Timber will manage a fleet of EVs. “We have given TimberRock the ability to use Demand Response to efficiently control the charging of their fleet of Volts. This is the first time a demonstration of Demand Response is being taken beyond lab or university studies,” says Paul Pebbles, GM global manager, Smart Grid and EV Services.
The Proven Results
Texas, of course, froze over in the winter of 2021. But there was a well-publicized event in which a man with an electric truck used it to power his home that had gone without electricity for a sustained period. It’s proven — whether for homes, businesses, or college campuses. It works for the University of California at San Diego, which uses its fleet of EVs to return power to the grid. And EVs are just one type of asset. There are also batteries, solar panels, and microgrids that can be managed and coordinated.
It is simply the orchestration of millions of dispersed assets to manage the supply of electricity — power that can be redirected back to the local distribution grid and transported to homes and businesses. It could defer investments in expensive capital projects.
Virtual power plants consist of several hundred thousand assets, which is the equivalent of one baseload power plant. But a single plant can fail — either because of weather, cyber-attacks, or maintenance issues. While one battery could falter, thousands of them that operate from remote locations have more staying power.
“Our technology is designed to assist EV owners in saving money, generating revenue, and reducing energy costs," said David Slutzky, chief executive of Fermata Energy. "We look forward to supporting the city's efforts to transition to electric vehicles in addition to leveraging EVs to help the city increase its energy resilience and save money with increased EV use.”
