Toyota has outdone itself -- this time, advancing
the discussion within the auto industry on the
future of V2G. The company's reservations are
less significant than the fact that it is paying
very serious attention to the subject.

Background: On July 26, Toyota's VP Irv Miller
posted a video and description of Toyota's
objectives for its pilot program -- see it at
<http://blogs.toyota.com/2007/07/readers-of-this.html>.
We commented about Mr. Miller's favorable words
about conversions at
<http://www.calcars.org/calcars-news/804.html>.
The other big news from that blog posting turns
out to be an opening to the topic of V2G. Below
is Toyota's latest post, followed by a joint
response from CalCars and Prof. Willett Kempton,
who is probaby more responsible than any other
individual for gestating and developing the V2G
concept. (We did not include several other
comments that preceded ours that were interesting but off--topic.)


IRV'S SHEET: The Prius Plug-in as Energy Supplier
~ Contributed by Irv Miller, Group Vice President – Corporate Communications
July 27, 2007 Posted at 04:11 PM
<http://blogs.toyota.com/2007/07/irvs-sheet-the-.html>

We were very interested to read a question posted
here by Jon Wellinghoff, a commissioner with the
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Mr.
Wellinghoff asks, basically, about plans to equip
a production version of the Prius Plug-in
Electric Hybrid Vehicle (PHEV), the topic of a
previous blog posting here on Open Road, for
what’s called Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) applications.

As you probably know, the V2G concept means that
consumers would plug their PHEVs in overnight to
get them fully charged, then drive to their
destination for the day, plug them in again and
allow the PHEV to feed its stored electrical power back into the energy grid.

First of all, we’re very grateful for Mr.
Wellinghoff’s interest in Toyota's continuing
development of our plug-in hybrid technology, and
in the ways in which the Prius PHEV may fit into ideas about V2G applications.

However, we think it’s important to keep in mind
that Toyota’s first priority is to continue
developing its PHEV technology and then, when the
technology is ready, get PHEVs into the hands of
our customers. Secondly, our expertise is in
building motor vehicles. It’s not in power
generation. That’s something that we would prefer
to leave to those best equipped to do it.

That said, as you're no doubt aware, Toyota is
one of several auto makers who are developing
PHEV technology. While our various approaches to
solving the many challenges may differ, there is
broad agreement on this: Before market-ready
PHEVs can be developed, we need to develop
advanced batteries that can meet the customer's
expectations for performance, durability and
cost. Prior to any meaningful exploration of V2G
concepts, we must first resolve the very basic
battery and product issues that we're addressing today.

Beyond the challenges of developing PHEV
technology, electric-energy experts tell us that
the hurdles for V2G concepts are significant:

- Battery performance must be 10 times higher than today's best batteries.

- PHEVs are intended to be charged from home,
using existing circuitry. The grid contribution
from a single car therefore is insignificant when
compared to the massive size of regional
grids. This means that meaningful V2G
contributions will depend upon hundreds of
thousands of vehicles plugged into an existing
grid, all contributing grid services in some
yet-to-be-defined coordinated method.

- We are unaware of any discussions concerning
how to pay for the necessary infrastructure to
collect the 120 VAC current from each PHEV and
step it up to transmission and/or distribution voltage.

- We are also unaware of any concrete plan for
insuring the safety of utility workers in light
of such a massively distributed system.

- And while there are many concepts for vehicle
and account identification and communication,
none of these concepts are thoroughly developed.

There’s another important question, as well: In
light of the uncertainty of gas prices and
perhaps even future gasoline availability, will
motorists want to sacrifice overall MPG by
trading away their PHEV’s reserve battery power?

The automobile business is changing and will, we
feel sure, require strategies, partnerships and
alliances we might not even have thought of yet.
We don’t even know, for sure, if PHEVs will come
to market in the way in which we think they will.
Indeed, that’s the point of at least some of the
research now being done, using Prius PHEVs, at UC
Irvine and UC Berkeley. UC Irvine, with its
expertise in the technical side of these issues,
is studying that, while researchers at Berkeley
take a long, hard look at the human side of the
equation from the point of view of the PHEV consumer.

Finally, when we discuss various pricing schemes
to make the idea of V2G interesting to consumers,
we must make every effort to avoid unintended
consequences. We can all learn from the recent
problems with the California solar roof program,
where, in some cases, time-of-day rates actually
increased the overall utility bills of
participating customers. This had the
consequence of severely reducing program
participation by California consumers – the very
opposite of the program’s intent.

So while the potential for V2G is another
intriguing aspect of hybrid technology, we must
not become sidetracked so that we lose sight of
the immediate goal. That goal is to produce an
affordable, reliable PHEV that can be sold in
large quantities, that can be serviced at any
dealership, and that will meet the needs of the American motorist.

I assure you, that’s a big enough task.


RESPONSE BY WILLETT KEMPTON & FELIX KRAMER
Posted by: Felix Kramer | August 03, 2007 at 12:32 PM:

After Toyota's decision to begin building PHEVs,
motivated by what Irv Miller sums up as "that
goal is to produce an affordable, reliable PHEV
that can be sold in large quantities, that can be
serviced at any dealership, and that will meet
the needs of the American motorist," almost
nothing could make us happier than to have Toyota
begin to engage a Federal Energy Regulatory
Commissioner who calls PHEVS "cash-back hybrids"
on the potential and obstacles of vehicle-to-grid (V2G)!

As two people working every day to promote
plug-in hybrids generally and the integration of
the power generation and transportation sectors,
we're thrilled that it took only 23 hours for
Toyota's VP Irv Miller to respond to Commissioner
Jon Wellinghoff's question. That tells us that
the question didn't catch Toyota by surprise:
people in the company are thinking deeply about this subject.

We'd like to respond on three levels to the
issues raised, and point to some ways to move forward.

PRECONCEPTIONS
Just as it took a few years to persuade people
that the grid had enough night-time power to
charge cars, and that plugging in will provide
significant greenhouse gas reduction even while
the national power grid moves away from high-CO2,
it's important to begin to communicate that:
* Today's batteries can easily demonstrate the
benefits of V2G, many of which don't require high energy transfers.
* No car-owner will ever have to lose money
making the battery available to the utility. On
any day when a driver's battery is ever drained
significantly, the payments will always
substantially exceed the cost of driving home using gasoline.
* The technology exists today to implement V2G.
The big challenge is to carefully develop
protocols and standards for safety,
interconnections, data management and
communication, control, aggregation and accounting.

THE VALUE OF DEMONSTRATION PROJECTS
* Design, testing and evaluation programs
involving a few hundred cars can provide a
demonstration on a scale comparable to a
full-sized power plant, providing important
information for planning in terms of technology,
integration and business models.
* Here's the evolutionary path: Even a few
thousand cars can provide significant benefits in
improving the efficiency and reliability of a
utility's power generation and distribution
system. Then hundreds of thousands of cars can
turn intermittent renewable energy sources like
night-time wind power into reliable 24/7 energy
sources. And further in the future, tens of
millions of V2G cars can help provide homes,
businesses and communities with affordable
back-up power, reducing the consequences of power
failures. None of this is dependent on a
brand-new redesigned power grid: it can be added incrementally.

HOW DO WE GET THERE?
* We respectfully disagree with Mr. Miller's
suggestion that planning for V2G would sidetrack
carmakers from the immediate goal of
commercializing PHEVs. The stages we just
described provide benefits at every point. And
because V2G-capable cars (and batteries removed
in the future from plug-in cars for stationery
secondary use) can provide revenue streams, it
makes sense to give business planners (especially
in fleets) the information to take V2G into
account in projecting lifetime total cost of ownership of PHEVs.
* Because warranty and liability issues are so
critical, it may be that smaller companies will
pioneer in providing vehicles with high power
transfer capabilities for demonstration projects.
But it will be immensely beneficially for the
large carmakers to watch and participate in
discussions at every step along the way.
* As Mr. Miller said so well, carmakers'
expertise is in designing and building vehicles.
That's why it's appropriate that the utility
sector is taking the lead here. Meanwhile, other
carmakers are announcing research partnerships
with utilities. We encourage Toyota to do so as
well, either with an individual utility or one or
more of the organizations developing V2G technologies.
* Ideally, we would have the federal government
take the lead, so that all the intellectual
property would be public and designs would be
optimized for national security, electric
reliability and CO2 reduction. However, we don't
know when we'll get that level of commitment from Washington, DC,
* Mr. Miller suggested we're all in unexplored
territory that may bring us to "strategies,
partnerships and alliances we might not even have
thought of yet." Toyota would earn all our thanks
if it took the lead in organizing a consortium of
automobile companies, each contributing funds to
sponsor a large-scale demonstration program once
the first pilot programs are underway.

Once again, we thank the company and Mr. Miller
for its responsiveness and openness to new ideas!

-- Felix Kramer, Founder, The California Cars Initiative www.CalCars.org

-- Prof. Willett Kempton, Senior Policy
Scientist, V2G Research Group, University of Delaware www.udel.edu/V2G


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Felix Kramer fkramer@...
Founder California Cars Initiative
http://www.calcars.org
http://www.calcars.org/news-archive.html
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