Re: Some questions I got from a listener by email

Hi Robb, I completely agree, I love the idea of vehicle-to-grid. When you look outside at the parking lot, and consider that each of those cars is essentially a 100kW power plant (for electric vehicles it'll probably be less than 100kW but still significant), it makes perfect sense that they could smooth out intermittent power supplies on the grid.

I have been thinking how this would work practically though. You charge your "mobile power plant" (aka your plug-in electric car) at night to take advantage of off-peak electricity (which eventually may become peak-electricity if everybody plugs in their cars), drive to work discharging your battery, plug-in at work to supply electricity to the grid to make up for peak-demand, discharging your battery some more, then drive home, discharging your battery, and plug-in at home, charging your battery. I think this would only work if there are lots of cars supplying the grid during peak-hours, since you don't want to discharge your batteries too much because you still have to drive home.

The other possibility of course is that you could bump up your base load electricity supply (such as nuclear) so that it meets traditional peak demand, and then during the tradition off-peak demand you'd have to find something to do with the excess nuclear energy, and so you'd charge your batteries.

If V2G was implemented there would be a huge boom in demand for computer scientists / controls people who have to write the software which figures out how many cars are plugged in, how much juice should be supplied/taken from the grid.

To answer your question about the differences in the grid CO2 content between Canada and the US: The US is 50% coal, Canada is 60% hydro.

To be a bit more specific:
Canada: hydroelectric (58%), coal (16%), nuclear (12%), natural gas (6%) , and fuel oil (3%), other (2%)
US: Coal (49%), nuclear (19%), natural gas (18%), hydroelectric (6.5%), fuel oil (3%), other (3%)