What is it about?
Electricity consumption must be satisfied in real time. For example, when someone turns on a light, there is somewhere a power plant that instantly must produce that energy. In modern power grids, those ups and downs in energy generation are to a large extent assured by gas fired power plants, emitting CO2 and pollution. However, in the future, electric cars will replace the need for these fossil fuel power plants because they have batteries that can store energy for when it is needed. We have calculated how many electric cars would be needed in order to be able to shut down all gas power plants and discuss some of the benefits and challenges of this solution.
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Why is it important?
Solar radiation and wind are clean and abundant renewable energy sources expected to be the basis of future power systems; but they depend on the wind blowing and the sun shining. This means that power systems might have to continue to depend on dirty gas power plants to compensate for the ups and downs of energy demand, unless we could substitute them by clean backup power, such as the power available in the batteries of (many) electric vehicles. These results show that the development of electric mobility might have the 'collateral damage' of cleaning up the electricity power system! Now we ought to think about energy public policies to enable this fruitful outcome.
Perspectives
Society is on the verge of high renewable energy use and of electric mobility, and both can be coupled with several benefits. To take advantage of this, we need to continue to research how the technologies affect each other. This study follows previous work of ours on this topic.
Pedro Nunes
Universidade de Lisboa
This work derives naturally from the outcome of Pedro's PhD thesis on the complementary between the (expected) large scale deployment of both electric vehicles and photovoltaics. It tries to address medium-term issues regarding the role of gas-fired power plants in the national energy system, maintained idle for most of the year at high cost to all.
Miguel C Brito
Lisboa
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Displacing natural gas with electric vehicles for grid stabilization, Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers - Energy, December 2017, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2017.09.064.
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