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The new V2H system is part of the Toyota City Low-Carbon Verification Project

Toyota has created a vehicle to home (V2H) system that will allow electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHVs) to share power with homes.

The new V2H system is part of the Toyota City Low-Carbon Verification Project, also known as Toyota City Project. The project began in April 2010, and aims to boost EV adoption with new and convenient technologies.

The system, which will use Prius PHVs for testing, works by putting an AC100 V inverter on the Prius PHV. The vehicle converts the stored power into AC that can be used by the home, and the power flow is controlled by the signals between the Prius, the home and the charging stand.


Home or regional solar generators create low-carbon electricity, which is stored in the vehicle's drive battery. This electricity is then used to power a household during peak hours through a home energy management system (HEMS).

In addition, vehicle batteries can be used as an emergency power source by setting the electricity flow to run from the battery through the charging stand to the home's power outlets and lights.

According to Toyota, the new V2H system is capable of powering average electricity use in a Japanese household (10 kWh) for four days.

Toyota will be testing the V2H system in Toyota City, Japan later this year. All households participating in the testing will use Prius PHVs to exchange electricity between their vehicles and homes.

Source: JCN Network


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Pretty neat idea
By Richlet on 6/5/2012 10:53:56 AM , Rating: 4
Have to say, I like this idea. It would be awesome for times when the grid goes down and there's no power to be had (thinking back to the east coast blackout 10 years ago or so)




RE: Pretty neat idea
By gamerk2 on 6/5/12, Rating: 0
RE: Pretty neat idea
By Iaiken on 6/5/2012 11:25:40 AM , Rating: 5
So basically your saying that you have no idea what you are talking about?


RE: Pretty neat idea
By gamerk2 on 6/5/12, Rating: 0
RE: Pretty neat idea
By FITCamaro on 6/5/12, Rating: -1
RE: Pretty neat idea
By WalksTheWalk on 6/5/12, Rating: 0
RE: Pretty neat idea
By thurston2 on 6/5/2012 9:21:39 PM , Rating: 1
You had me agreeing with you until.

quote:
(namely liberal, urban areas)


Then you had to be a partisan douche and I quit reading the rest of the comment.


RE: Pretty neat idea
By FITCamaro on 6/6/2012 8:08:04 AM , Rating: 2
No it points out that many of those who would believe in this crap largely don't live in areas where it would even work.


RE: Pretty neat idea
By FITCamaro on 6/6/2012 8:08:56 AM , Rating: 2
And if you want to try and argue that large, extremely urban areas don't vote liberal, then you've clearly never looked at an election map.


RE: Pretty neat idea
By thurston2 on 6/6/2012 12:35:44 PM , Rating: 2
Not arguing it at all, just saying if you wouldn't be such a douche bag all the time people might listen to what you say. I don't mind if we don't agree about something, but your us vs them attitude instantly turns people off from listening to you.


RE: Pretty neat idea
By mindless1 on 6/7/2012 10:29:12 AM , Rating: 2
If you don't like two little words someone writes, you'd best get off the internet. Censorship is far, far worse.


RE: Pretty neat idea
By mcnabney on 6/5/2012 1:28:47 PM , Rating: 2
Power grids are actually very efficient. Large scale energy production is much, much, much more efficient than local. Grids are also managed to use the most cost effective sources at any given time. That is why coal and nuclear run 24/7, natural gas runs only during the peaks, and solar+wind are used at their peak efficiency.


RE: Pretty neat idea
By DanNeely on 6/5/2012 4:19:04 PM , Rating: 2
That's over simplifying things. Nuclear is too slow to start up/down to use as anything but base load. Coal is significantly less efficient when ramping up/down. However with the collapse of natural gas prices in the US; gas is cost competitive with coal; and a number of old less efficient coal plants are only operated on high load days and otherwise are shut down. Many of those coal plants will be shuttered in the near future due to the cost of complying with new emissions regulations exceeding the cost of building and operating additional gas fired generators. The growth in shale gas production is likely to accelerate this trend.


RE: Pretty neat idea
By Samus on 6/6/2012 2:21:08 AM , Rating: 2
This is, and never will be, anything more than a simple emergency power generator for a small residential property that needs 40-50 AMPS of backup power to run the heat/AC, fridge and tele.

This talk about putting power from your Prius back into the grid is the worst science fiction ever theorized.


RE: Pretty neat idea
By kattanna on 6/5/2012 3:01:08 PM , Rating: 2
dude.. you should seriously reread what you have posted as you contradict your self from one paragraph to the next.

quote:
No, I'm the only one with common sense left


I do want to thank you for that line though, I really needed a good laugh.. especially after reading what followed.

thanks!


RE: Pretty neat idea
By Solandri on 6/5/2012 5:36:47 PM , Rating: 4
Hoo boy. You have some huge misconceptions:
quote:
There is no reason whatsoever to rely on a massive, inefficent power grid.

The power grid is actually very efficient. Typically 95%+ of the power put into the wires at the power plant reaches the wire coming into your house.
quote:
Have every home generate its own power [Solar + Wind], and wire then together. Done. You now have a much more efficent, reliable, and cheap power grid.

You can't simply wire houses together. You're completely ignoring the amount of power being transmitted. The current power grid is like a spoke and hub airline route. Power/people from the center radiates out of the big central airports, to the smaller regional airports, to each home. People between the central airports is carried by big airliners. People between the central and regional airports is carried by smaller commuter planes. And people from the regional airport to individual homes are carried by cars.

You cannot replace this with a system where all people are transported by cars. The roads simply don't have enough capacity to do so effectively. So you end up replacing the cars with buses. But most of the time you don't need the full capacity of the bus - it's just there for emergencies. So you end up with buses which are carrying just 1-4 people 99.9% of the time, just so you'll be able to carry 20 people during the 0.1% of the time there's a power failure. It's horribly inefficient.

In other words, the electrical infrastructure between your home and power plant right now is just enough to supply power to your home. That's it; no more. The extra redundant power lines are between the big segments of the power grid and between power stations. Like each big central airport having flights between each other. This provides most of the redundancy you'll ever need at very minimal cost - you're getting about 95% redundancy by upgrading just 10% or less of the wiring. For the most part, it works very well. The big power failures we're talking about are once in a decade events. That's a completely acceptable failure rate IMHO.

What you're proposing is that redundant and higher capacity power lines be installed everywhere. So if one neighborhood's wiring goes down, surrounding neighborhoods can take up the additional load an route around it. Yeah that'll be more reliable, but it's terrible bang for the buck. You're proposing reliability be increased 5% (from 95% to 100%) by upgrading 90% of the wiring instead of just 10%.

Also, the big regional power failures aren't caused by the grid failing. They're caused by the grid working as designed. When the amount of power which needs to pass through equipment exceeds what the equipment can carry, a breaker trips and the equipment goes offline rather than burn itself off trying to do something it can't do. That way to restart the grid you simply have to reset the breakers one at a time over a span of hours or days. That may sound bad, but it's much more preferable to having to replace all that equipment over a span of weeks or months.

If we went to a distributed power grid, all the wiring would have these safety breakers, and all would have to be reset after an outage, instead of just a few at the local power plant. I'm very skeptical of leaving the maintenance of this up to every resident in a city. Right now, if there's a downed power line and someone installed the solar panels on their home wrong, it can electrocute the power company worker sent out to fix it. Do you really trust every homeowner to have installed and operated their panels, wind turbines, and wiring correctly?

quote:
Power plants get reduced to backup for high demand periods, and otherwise would be running at well under maximum capacity.

Solar and wind cannot provide base load. They're inconsistent and intermittent. Sometimes they produce too much power, sometimes they don't produce enough, and only a very small part of the time do they produce just the right amount. Batteries are pathetic for energy storage (they exist only because they're the only alternative for mobile applications). And alternative energy storage technologies (flywheels, pumped water) are in their infancy.

Base load has to be provided by a more consistent source like nuclear, geothermal, or fossil fuels. Hydro works too, except it ramps up and down so easily it's really best to save it for transient power spikes. Solar and wind work best at supplementing that base load when they are available. The base load station has to have enough capacity to power the grid assuming you're getting zero solar power (cloudy or nighttime) and zero wind power (no wind). In other words, the presence of solar and wind does not reduce your base load capacity requirement.

Wind and (after technology improves) solar have their place. But people have got to get over the notion that we're anywhere close to those providing 100% of our power. It's a pipe dream created by authors and script writers with little to no knowledge of physics. There will need to be decades if not centuries of improvements in panel and turbine efficiency and energy storage technology before we're anywhere close to that dream.


RE: Pretty neat idea
By Schrag4 on 6/5/2012 11:37:38 AM , Rating: 1
quote:
Plus, it saves taxpayer dollars since state funded power co's wouldn't be nearly as large anymore, as they would basically be grid supplaments, and not the primary suppliers...


LOL

Ok, so a bunch of cars will "supply" the grid with power? How? By relatively inefficiently burning gas in an ICE? I don't think you thought this through.


RE: Pretty neat idea
By FITCamaro on 6/5/2012 1:09:41 PM , Rating: 2
Did you really just say that vehicles would create a network of power that would become the primary supplier of power for cities with power companies only being there to supplement them?

If so holding back my laughter won't be possible.


RE: Pretty neat idea
By Reclaimer77 on 6/5/2012 2:10:34 PM , Rating: 2
Gotta love those progressive fantasies. It's like they took physics classes where they were taught power can be generated out of thin air.


RE: Pretty neat idea
By foolsgambit11 on 6/5/2012 5:38:42 PM , Rating: 3
Wind turbines.

(I'm just trying to mess with you here.)


RE: Pretty neat idea
By Reclaimer77 on 6/5/2012 10:59:12 AM , Rating: 1
I personally would rather use a generator, or even better a natural gas home generator. Having to make the choice between powering my home, or not having transportation, isn't a situation I would want to be in.

Yes the idea is "neat" though.


RE: Pretty neat idea
By xthetenth on 6/5/2012 11:23:06 AM , Rating: 2
This uses the battery, not the engine. With a hybrid, you won't lose transportation if there's gas in the tank. With a pure EV you're screwed regardless, the things don't have enough range to stay moving for everyday needs for very long. You'd want a generator regardless if you have an EV and are worried about blackouts, but that'd take away a lot of the charm of a coal powered car.


RE: Pretty neat idea
By Reclaimer77 on 6/5/2012 11:44:06 AM , Rating: 2
What I'm saying is if you have to go somewhere while people are at the house, oops, no more power. So yes, you're making a choice between transportation and power.


RE: Pretty neat idea
By ClownPuncher on 6/5/2012 12:46:50 PM , Rating: 5
Screw those people, sometimes you just need to go get some Arby's.


RE: Pretty neat idea
By FITCamaro on 6/6/2012 8:10:01 AM , Rating: 2
Mmmmmmm......Jamocha shake......


RE: Pretty neat idea
By xthetenth on 6/5/2012 3:32:53 PM , Rating: 2
Unless you don't have power it's not a big deal to unplug, it adds capability. Sure a generator is better but all this does is add capability, which is nice.


RE: Pretty neat idea
By FaaR on 6/5/2012 11:11:04 AM , Rating: 2
It's a nice idea as long as the gas engine doesn't turn on to top up the batteries while the car's parked in the garage, powering your house... :)


RE: Pretty neat idea
By ATX22 on 6/5/2012 11:03:20 PM , Rating: 2
Hm... this isn't exactly something I'd honestly want to use my car for... I like my fossil fuel ICE based vehicles... I generally don't have to worry about lightning taking out my car along with everything else wired into the house when it strikes. Also, what affects would this have on the overall lifetime of the on-board battery? Won't this result in an increase of charge/discharge cycles over a given amount of time?


Hmmm
By joe4324 on 6/5/2012 12:42:10 PM , Rating: 2
This doesn't really add up. If you are using the powered stored in your batteries from last time you drove to power your house (outside of emergencies) then you are severely lowering your MPG next time you drive the car. It might even be more expensive than the household energy you saved.

I like the idea of intelligent grid networks that can integrate a automobile with your home/bike and electric tractor and tie you to the greater grid at times when needed.




RE: Hmmm
By Harinezumi on 6/5/2012 6:01:35 PM , Rating: 3
The way I see it is that the car would act as a massive UPS for the house. When you're dealing with the threat of rolling blackouts/brownouts (as Japan has been ever since it went hard anti-nuke after Fukushima), it makes a fair bit of sense to hook a massive battery up to your house that can charge up when the grid is at full power and supplement the grid during a brownout or an outage.

The fact that this battery is also attached to a portable generator is just icing on the cake.


RE: Hmmm
By ritualm on 6/6/2012 2:42:47 AM , Rating: 2
That's not quite accurate. Japan didn't go anti-nuke after 3/11. Government inaction was the cause of a near-total nuke shutdown. There are already some talk of bringing a few of them back online, however, especially given the looming threat of rolling blackouts this summer.


maybe
By Chernobyl68 on 6/5/2012 12:14:21 PM , Rating: 2
I think it would be good for as emergency power source for the home, for blackouts or storm damage and such. But otherwise, I don't think I'd want something unnecessarily cycling the expensive battery on my hybrid. You can get a cheaper battery system for this that doesn't have the constraints of being light and transportable installed.




RE: maybe
By mcnabney on 6/5/2012 1:32:33 PM , Rating: 2
I am also curious how efficient the inverters are which will turn the stored power back into AC.


OK - NOT a pretty neat idea
By Dr of crap on 6/5/2012 12:25:12 PM , Rating: 2
The electric "grid" is 99.99% reliable.
Reference the post that said 10 years ago, re-read that 10 years ago, when the power went out. Yes maybe in a storm the power might go out. I haven't been powerless for more than a few minutes for years. Have never lost a freezer full of food, ect...

So this using the car to power the house at peak time - really? I don't think that would work to good in the US. And I'm sure you could NOT run the average suburban house for 4 days off of the car! Might be nice IF the power went out in a storm, but I then want a gas powered generator so that I had UNLIMITED power backup.

Is someone REALLY going to pay all that cash for the ability to run your house from the car for a few hours?




RE: OK - NOT a pretty neat idea
By PaFromFL on 6/5/2012 5:06:23 PM , Rating: 2
99.99% reliable? Where I live in FL, it is common to lose power for hours at a time several times a year. During hurricanes, it is not uncommon to lose power for a few days. One time my power was out for eight days. I don't think electric cars make much economic sense (yet), but I am interested in a powerful portable generator I can drive to a gas station.


Somewhat Off Topic: What about Boats?
By Mitch101 on 6/5/2012 12:28:33 PM , Rating: 2
Been looking at buying a boat and gas prices are high but I have to wonder why hybrid tech hasn't made it over to boats?

A long time ago I knew a guy with an Electric boat and he used to say his boats got .11 cents a mile compared to $1.30 or so back then. I would have thought it had progressed since then but maybe Im not looking in the right place.




By spamreader1 on 6/5/2012 1:58:28 PM , Rating: 2
Weight (and proportion) directly effects boat performance. for a slow going deep draft boat it would probably be fine, but for most recreational boating it would be hinderance.


Making money
By captblue1 on 6/5/2012 1:01:44 PM , Rating: 2
Great idea. Charge the battery during off peak hours and sell it back to the grid during peak hours. Thats my idea of going green.




RE: Making money
By Solandri on 6/5/2012 5:42:42 PM , Rating: 2
Problem being that if everyone buys EVs and plugs them in overnight, overnight electricity usage is no longer "off peak", and there is no longer any need to shift power from the evening to the daytime hours.


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