How Virtual Power Plants Will Strand Power Generation

The biggest new supply of energy after renewables will not come from a new oil and gas field, but from virtualized energy.

A few years ago, we bought a mobile battery booster pack (itself includes a lead acid battery) for just such emergencies, but we had never plugged in it, it too was dead, and worst of all, beyond recovery. We called around only to discover that there’s no publicly accessible mobile battery boosting service in our little town.

And now both that little vehicle lead acid battery and gasoline tank are about to give way to a much larger lithium ion battery in an electric vehicle. A vehicle battery will store enough power to run much of your household needs (short of heat) for 10 days or longer.

No more visits to the gas station. Instead, all those vehicle batteries will have to plug into the power grid to get power (or to the home solar panel system if you have that kind of money) called ‘grid to vehicle’ or G2V. Power utilities have conveniently strung copper wires to virtually to every street corner.

Through that same plug, power can be dispatched back to the grid, or ‘vehicle to grid’, aka V2G.

Plug in all these vehicles to draw power at the same time and we’ll bring the grid to its knees. On the other hand, plug in enough vehicles with some software smarts at the same time, and an enormous amount of that battery power can be simultaneously dispatched back to the grid.

The biggest oil discovery of my generation was in Detroit in the form of a technology shift. The adoption of battery electric vehicles is unlocking the largest new supply of power in the form of virtual power plants, and at the same time, hammering gasoline demand, natural gas investment and power generation.