It seems like the auto industry is heading towards a future of more electric and less gasoline. This is great for the quality of our air and our children’s air. It is also great for reducing the amount of carbon dioxide that we are putting in the atmosphere (assuming they get their electricity from renewable sources). But the coolest part about all of these electric cars taking over our driveways and garages is that they each have a battery built in to them. In a previous blog post I talked about one of the biggest barriers of solar and 
wind energy is that they fluctuate and we need storage to offset those fluctuations. Soon all of these electric cars will be plugged into the grid and they will communicate with it in order to give and take power as necessary.
Of course a majority of the time, cars will be taking power off the grid so that they can have fully charged batteries for the drive ahead. But it is also likely that when the sun goes down, a small fraction of the electricity stored in millions of cars will be used to pump up the electricity of the gird to supply the night time demand. If we make batteries that can serve multiple purposes such as powering our vehicles and balancing the grid, they become more cost effective and there is more incentive for people to buy them. Just investing in batteries to balance the grid and nothing else is a much tougher sell.
When cars become one with the grid, they will also be able stabilize sudden power failures or sudden spikes in power. Currently if some generating equipment goes offline, it can mean a power outage for customers in the affected area. With car batteries supplementing the grid, these bursts and shortfalls will all be smoothed out. There will be less power failures, and less need to rely on ramping natural gas turbines up and down.
Do your part, go out and buy a plug in electric vehicle today!
Lead PC: https://scrapit.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Large-Car-Cropped.jpg
Sun PC: https://3c1703fe8d.site.internapcdn.net/newman/gfx/news/hires/2015/25-researcherss.jpg
