The idea of electric vehicles donating power to a planned supergrid brings a wan smile to the faces of those struggling to get batteries to provide adequate range without unpredictable parasitic drainage of power at the behest of a third party.
By contrast, secondary use of a vehicle traction battery at destination, controlled by the driver, has great attraction. Increasing in popularity, this has led to "hotel facilities" such as lighting and refrigerators on sea going leisure boats, tugboats, buses and so on being provided silently and cleanly by the traction battery with no need to start up a primary or secondary conventional power source.
Working vehicles such as motorised cranes and utility repair vehicles can run power tools and lifters without a noisy conventional engine annoying local residents and polluting.
The case is even more compelling in military applications. Here, use of the traction battery for power when stationary also means almost no heat or sound signature for an incoming missile to lock in on and silent watch, all a matter of life and death.
A superb presentation on this was given at the IDTechEx event "Future of Electric Vehicles" recently in San Jose, California. Zoran Filipi of the University of Michigan described work backed by the Department of Defense and the Automotive Research Center. After describing hybrid vehicle developments, he moved the auxiliary power opportunity forward into Vehicle Centric Energy Systems VCES as shown below.
Basically, military microgrids are feasible now, whereas the family car donating useful energy to a planned smart grid is a distant dream. Military vehicles have substantial state of the art batteries intended for secondary power when the family car does not.
Microgrid - feasible with military vehicles
Source: ARC
Alternative energy will play an important role in powering not only forward bases (field installations including Middle East forward command operations supported by mobile grids as in Afghanistan) but also fixed installations (critical deploying bases such as Fort Bliss) or even Detroit Arsenal. Such microgrids may be feasible in civil applications long before a national smart grid is allowed to drain them.
He has been looking at mmaximizing the benefits of energy efficiency, energy independence, GHG reductions and power reliability while minimizing both the capital costs and operating costs. He said that increased electrification of military vehicles will continue, additional requirements compared to commercial vehicles.
Microgrids enable synergy between the liquid fuel and the electric energy path, including the renewables. Primary challenges to be addressed are understanding of critical phenomena, utilization of the physics-based models for system-level studies, and leveraging of component-in-the-loop and internet-distributed integration for concurrent engineering and assessment under real-world conditions. To that he added heat rejection modeling and thermal management, the framework for optimizing design and the scheduling and regulation of the microgrid in the island operation as aspects also needing attention.
There has been a great deal of development of hybrid military vehicles over the last decade as shown below. These are best able to provide all electric auxiliary power when stationary.
For more attend: Future of Electric Vehicles Europe 2011
