ROCKY MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE HAS
long been a leader in the diverse fields of
energy, transportation, and green building.
But today the Institute stands on the cusp of
a completely new era that will see all three
coalescing into a new energy paradigm: the
“Smart Garage.”
Smart Garage is an idea, a sweeping
concept, about the seamless integration of
vehicles, homes, and offices via the electric
power grid. The components of the system
would share power and share it in such a way
that consumers would make better choices
about the energy they use, they would have
access to more reliable, cheaper, and cleaner
energy, and they would need less of it. This
shift—which could help change the way we
interact with energy systems in our society—
is occurring because of recent advances
in both the grid and vehicles . These
innovations are happening so quickly that
RMI is gearing up to guide the hundreds of
products, the thousands of players, and the
billions of dollars that will come together in
this next big energy solution.
A Simple Concept
Electricity is a beautiful but fickle
mistress. It’s best made in the amounts that
society needs, generally near where it’s
needed, and nearly exactly when. And
because it’s the life support system of
everything from medical equipment to
financial data, we are slaves to its ways. The
simple problem is electricity cannot be
cost-effectively stored in large quantities.
Seventeen years ago, RMI Chief Scientist
Amory Lovins and a small group
of transportation researchers—including
Michael Brylawski, Vice President of RMI’s
transportation group, MOVE—developed a
concept about vehicles and the grid.
The idea was simple: vehicles with
electric drivetrains would, by most
extensions, include some kind of electric
storage or conversion device or combination
of devices—batteries, fuel cells, whatever.
Even back then it was obvious that there was
a lot more power in electrified vehicles and
their storage devices than there was in all the
power plants connected to the grid.
Photo © www.laurendiscipio.com
RMI Top Brass Stephen Doig, Amory Lovins, Greg Franta, Mike Brylawski
The real benefit of electric vehicles,
however, is that they bring a new level of
stability and control to the grid—including
giving power back when it’s needed most (in
blackouts or at times of peak demand). By
some estimates, a battery-electric vehicle,
with about 40 kilowatt-hours of usable
energy, could power an entire residential
block for over an hour if necessary.
In 1991, however, this technology was just
a gleam in the eye of RMI’s researchers for
several reasons. For starters, there was nothing
close to an electric grid that could handle such
operations. Cost-effective electric traction for
vehicles was still years away. Batteries that could
store the required power had yet to be
developed. Integrated renewables and buildings
were relatively unsophisticated. And digital,
Internet-based, and wireless communications
were mere infants. Today that’s all changed.
Green Trends for the Car, Home, Office, and the Grid
Even if you pay only passing attention to the electricity
industry, you’re probably aware of talk about a so-called “Smart
Grid.” Although the smart grid is largely an idea at this point,
those exploring it are already touting its virtues.
The smart grid is basically the same grid you’ve grown up
with except that it’s tricked out with modern equipment—
sensors, rapid communications devices, and distributed
intelligence. Its various components talk to each other and
report problems and failures, update each other’s data, and send
messages to users like homeowners and factory managers.
Proponents say its capabilities could range from turning parts
of the grid off when power failures occur (so that they don’t
propagate across wide areas) to energy management activities like
“demand response” (a way of letting customers know when
power is scarce, and thus expensive, so they can opt to trim or
defer power use). The Smart Grid can also accept power in better,
more intelligent ways from storage systems—like electric cars.
Numerous organizations are quickly investigating the
potential of a smart grid, what it can do, what it might cost,
and how to set one up. In the early 2000s, RMI was part of a
multi-year project with PECO Energy in Pennsylvania, Nevada Power, and all three major California utilities to see how
much demand could be reduced using smart technologies
and demand response. Another example comes from
Boulder, Colorado. In March 2008, Xcel Energy announced
that it would start implementing a full-blown smart grid
there sometime this year.
A second important trend is the vehicle sector’s rapid
move toward fully electric or
partially electrified vehicles,
notably plug-in hybrid
electric vehicles (PHEVs).
The causes are many and
varied ($4-a-gallon gasoline,
greenhouse-gas emissions,
consumer energy choices,
etc.), but the reality is
undeniable.
“Vehicle start-ups are
sprouting like mushrooms,
and we haven’t seen this in
years,” notes RMI Analyst Laura Schewel, who manages the
Institute’s Smart Garage project. She lists new automakers
such as ZEN, Miles EV, Fisker, Phoenix, Aptera, Vectrix,
GEM, Zap, and Venture Vehicles—all of which came on the
scene within the past few years, or even months—as
evidence of what’s happening.
Companies such as Tesla Motors and Th!nk are already
selling electric vehicles in small quantities, and Toyota and
General Motors have both committed to having a plug-in
hybrid electric vehicle for the U.S. market by 2011.
Renault-Nissan recently announced the development of a
mass-market electric vehicle in conjunction with Morgan
Stanley-backed Project Better Place, a business based on
revenues from charging the new vehicles.
RMI got into the fray as well, spinning off a for-profit
PHEV technology developer, Bright Automotive, early
this year.
Green building design has also come a long way, as have
photovoltaic (PV) cells. Increasingly, PV systems are being
incorporated into the exterior walls and roofs of buildings,
inconspicuously absorbing light and generating a charge.
“It would be potentially a minor adaptation in most cases,”
says RMI Principal Architect and Senior Vice President Greg
Franta, FAIA. “On the other hand, some situations would not
just be suitable at all, and in some climates we’re going to have
more problems than in others in terms of renewables. In new
buildings it should be easy to incorporate.”
Several green building projects that RMI has worked on
in recent years point the way to the Smart Garage paradigm,
namely the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law and
the Missouri Department of Natural Resource’s Lewis and
Clark State Office Building. Both have power outlets so
visitors and employees can hook up electric vehicles for
charging (the Law School planned to buy green power for
those vehicles; the Lewis and Clark building has its own
photovoltaic system).
Economic Motivations
The economic prize for developing a Smart Garage energy
paradigm is considerable.
Utilities sell a disproportional amount of their power on hot
summer afternoons. At night, business plummets. For the
utility, that means their expensive generation and transmission
equipment stands idle. “Night-charging” vehicles, therefore,
could be a lucrative twist on the business of selling electrons.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory recently
estimated that if half the nation’s light vehicles were ordinary
plug-in hybrids they would represent a night-charging market
of 230 gigawatts. That’s good news for the U.S. wind industry.
In many areas, wind tends to blow harder at night, creating
more energy when the vehicles would be charging.
“The utilities are going to sell a lot more electricity with
plug-in hybrid electric vehicles,” notes Brylawski. “[A] utility
will be able to better match variable supply resources (like wind)
with demand. … [C]ars will buy power mostly at night when
the utility wouldn’t normally sell power. In other words, these
kilowatt-hours would normally not even be used. The Smart
Garage paradigm is like a discount store for the utilities because
they can then sell their previously unwanted kilowatt-hours to
a really hungry new market.”
The Smart Garage could even create revenue for the
consumer. On hot summer afternoons, utilities often struggle to
keep power flowing so offices are lit and buildings are cool.
Electricity is sometimes in such demand that it could be worth
dollars per kilowatt-hour, not cents. Under this new paradigm, car
owners could let their batteries drain onto the grid during the
day, then drive home from work on gasoline. The value of this
“load shaping” could be credited to the car owner’s electricity bill.
Additionally, utilities must reserve some portion of their
capacity to respond to second-by-second variations in the load
and to provide “reserve” power in case of power plant or
transmission line failure. The storage capacity of cars could be
used to provide these “ancillary services” to the utility. And,
again, the utility would pay the customer
for using his battery.
Aside from utilities, many other industries stand to gain
from the Smart Garage, too. Companies specializing in
everything from the wireless telecommunications business to
the financial sector to component-making to electric-load
aggregation could see their markets expand or even find ways to
enter entirely new markets.
The battery industry offers a stunning example of the
potential: lithium-ion batteries—which are becoming popular
with electric car companies—represent a business that’s less than
fifteen years old. And yet, worldwide investment in lithium-ion
battery technology R&D is well over $1 billion annually, and
expected to grow to more than $5 billion by 2015, according to
RMI’s survey of the industry.
Carbon Reduction Benefits
The carbon reduction benefits are also huge. A Smart Garage
energy paradigm could simultaneously reduce the environmental
impact of both the transport sector and the electricity sector.
Driving a vehicle that uses electricity creates fewer greenhouse-
gas emissions than driving a vehicle that uses gasoline, even if
the electricity is made from fossil fuels (such as coal).
“There have been more than seventy studies on this
question,” noted John Waters, a former RMI practice leader
who left last year to lead The Bright Automotive spin-off.
“Do we net a better carbon dioxide reduction by relying on
the grid rather than relying on gasoline or diesel? Depending
on how you evaluate it and which region of the country you
study, there’s a 30 to 75 percent reduction in emissions by
using coal-based electricity rather than liquid fossil fuels in
cars and trucks.”
A fleet of 500,000 PHEVs could reduce carbon dioxide
equivalent emissions by 40 million tons compared with the
equivalent gasoline-powered vehicles over the ten-year life of
the PHEV, RMI calculated last year.
A recent study by the Natural Resources Defense Council
(NRDC) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI),
which RMI believes uses conservative estimates on
achievable mileage, found that widespread deployment of
plug-in hybrid electric vehicles by 2050 could
reduce the U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions
by more than 500 million tons
annually.
Also, improving the finances of
PHEVs by reaping benefits from the
power sector, Smart Garage will accelerate
the penetration of important green
technologies—hybrid cars and wind
turbines, to name two.
More importantly, wind turbines
built to serve the night car-charging
market would still spin whenever the
wind blew and may eventually be able
to meet a considerable portion of
America’s electricity demand—a huge
step toward reducing the country’s
reliance on fossil fuels.
MOVE team members Laura Schewel and Dave Anderson at RMI's Snowmass HQ
The Smart Garage Summit and Model
Rocky Mountain Institute is in a
unique position to steer the Smart
Garage paradigm.
“We know a lot about the grid, the
needs of buffering wind and solar with
some sort of storage, and we have a
strong vehicles background,” notes RMI
Vice President and Energy & Resources
Team Leader Stephen Doig. “ That’s a
nice combo that most can’t match. But
in the end, this is going to take a lot of
collaboration so for now we are really
just instigators.”
RMI’s position today is somewhat
analogous to the Institute’s position in
2003, when RMI devised and published
a strategy around energy-efficient data
centers. That effort required deep
knowledge of the grid, power supplies,
building design, and server architecture—
among others.
“Obvious analogies will be in the
development of the cell phone,” notes
Lovins. “About twenty things came
together to make a cell phone possible,
like packet switching [in which
messages are cut up into chunks before
being sent then transmitted
individually—often times via different
routes—and then reassembled at their
destinations] and developments in
micro electronics and batteries and
mi ni ature antennas as well as the
convergence between global wireless
and the Internet.”
So how do you steer a massively
complex paradigm shift? One way is to
develop the leading analytical model to
show how the implementation of the
various aspects of the full Smart Garage
concept might come together, and to
hold a summit to talk it through with
industry partners. To date, those partners
include the Google Foundation, Ford,
Johnson Controls, Duke Energy, and
Danaher, with at least ten more expected
to participate.
The model would include the obvious,
like different kinds of batteries, different
kinds of car models, the
miles a commuter drives, and other
characteristics of a wide range of scenarios.
Even within the battery sphere, as Schewel
points out, differences in chemistry, cost,
size, durability, environmental impacts,
and other factors can mean very different
outcomes. The greatest complexity lies in
how those factors interact over time.
Coupled with a dozen automobile
configurations, there are hundreds of
different scenarios the model will describe
in the near-, medium-, and long-term.
“We’re trying to design it so that it has
a very simple interface,” Schewel says. “And
we’re going to publish it open-source on
the Internet so the public can use it. They
might log on and change, say, the 35 most
relevant parameters like their region’s
weather, or gas prices, or driving patterns,
and each will get unique results.”
The results could include everything
from emissions to energy prices to
information about the optimal hours
for charging.
