I meant to comment a couple of days ago on a Truthout.org column about the top green tech ideas of 2006. I was reminded of that today while reading an article on the upcoming Motor City Auto Show. I’m just going to go ahead and post the most interesting section below:

Plug-In Hybrids and the V2G At the end of 2006, General Motors announced it would commit to manufacturing a plug-in hybrid vehicle. A plug-in hybrid adds a larger battery pack and a plug to charge the batteries with grid power, allowing the car to rely more on the electric drive and less on the fuel supply. A new study for the Department of Energy has found that we already have enough electrical generating capacity to power 84 percent of our 220 million vehicles if they were plug-in hybrids. That’s because our capacity is designed to meet peak power needs for air conditioning on hot afternoons, and when peak power is not needed there is plenty of spare capacity to charge electric car batteries.

This would be a bad trade-off where grid power is provided by coal. But ask not what grid can do for your car; rather, ask what your car can do for the grid.

The real promise of plug-in hybrids is using their batteries to stabilize a power grid that is supplied by renewable but variable wind and solar power. Dubbed “vehicle to grid,” or V2G for short, the idea is to use the combined storage power of 220 million mobile battery packs to buffer the grid whenever the vehicles are not in use. Vehicles would absorb excess power at night or on sunny or windy days. The vehicle battery packs could then be tapped to help out during peak demand periods and a computerized “smart grid” would regulate it all. The potential is huge. Terry Penney, a technology manager at the National Renewable Energy Lab said, “if millions of these [plug-in hybrids] were produced, it would enable some of the renewable technologies to really take off.”