photos: green wombat
At a Silicon Valley alternative energy summit attended by 300 tech execs, local government officials and Sen. Barbara Boxer, PG&E (PCG) today demo’d the first plug-in hybrid car that can power the electricity grid. The modified Toyota Prius was plugged into a into a standard PG&E meter outside Advanced Micro Devices’s Sunnyvale headquarters. As the car’s lithium ion battery powered a bank of lights and a portable heater, the meter began to run backwards. PG&E envisions hundreds of thousands of plug-in hybrid cars being charged at night, when electricity demand is low, with power produced by wind farms and other renewable sources. Then on hot afternoons, when demand peaks and electricity rates soar, a plug-in hybrid parked at the owner’s workplace would feed the grid to minimize the use of greenhouse gas-emitting power plants. "At 
250,000 cars you’re reaching the equivalent of a small power plant," PG&E exec Bob Howard told Green Wombat as the blue Prius with yellow racing stripes was surrounded by television crews. PG&E is developing vehicle-to-grid technology that would identify where a plug-in hybrid car is being charged or providing power to the grid and then bill or credit the owner accordingly. For instance, you might agree to sell PG&E power from your car when electricity prices reach a certain point during the day. You leave your car plugged in at work and when that price point is reached, the grid begins drawing power from the car’s battery, leaving enough electricity for the commute home. "This makes the electricity grid more like the Internet," Howard says. "Our dream is to see something like this by 2012." Plug-in hybrids could also be used to keep a home’s lights on during a power outage and to help avoid blackouts.
The PG&E Prius uses a 9-kilowatt battery that lets it run longer on electricity while relying less on its gasoline engine. That means the car gets the equivalent of about 100 miles per gallon. The California utility paid $40,000 convert a standard Prius and expects that 
production models would cost $5,000 to $6,000 more than a conventional hybrid. However, the lifespan of the car’s lithium ion battery is a big unknown. PG&E’s best guess is that it would last between six and eight years before needing to be replaced. One PG&E official said that the utility might consider buying back old batteries, which still have storage capability, and using them as backup power sources. Monday’s event was the latest effort in a campaign to persuade automakers to put plug-in hybrids into production. General Motors (GM) has said it will begin selling a plug-in hybrid by 2010. PG&E has been talking to Toyota (TM) and other automakers about manufacturing plug-in hybrids and is collaborating with Ford (F) to develop a PHEV truck for the utility’s fleet. PG&E is also converting two DaimlerChrysler (DCX) vans. "We believe it is possible to merge the electricity grid with plug-in hybrid vehicles," Howard told the assembled tech execs.
Green Wombat 
Grid Connected Hybrids? C’mon. These batteries won’t take you very far anyway, so why would you want to discharge your battery for a couple cents per kWh? Plus, this requires office parks to invest in the infrastructure required to allow their employees to plug in their cars. I don’t really see this occurring on a wide-spread basis
If they had this awesome grid scanning capability read to go, then they would be using it for more important things like renewable distributed energy, which this really isn’t.
They would use said technology to allow citizens and businesses to invest in distributed energy projects. For example, A guy puts a solar array on his roof, that’s nice, but its a small scale project and costs more per watt than a nice big array on top of a warehouse or a vacant lot. So instead, you would allow people to obtain net-metering for projects not tied into their home, but still into the grid if they invested in them. Makes as much sense as this scheme, and is easier to manage, since the solar arrays or wind turbines aren’t moving around.
California Utility Showcases Car-To-Grid Technolo
Called as ?Smart grid? technology, the utility is working with a Toyota Prius that is equipped with a lithium-ion battery, trying to perfect a vehicle-to-grid system that could set up in public areas for recharging. The Prius and its Toyota parts sen…
The New York Times Adds East Coast?s First Plug-I
The New York Times, a renowned daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed internationally, has been chosen to receive the first ever medium-duty plug-in hybrid vehicle across the United State? East Coast which includes the state of Ne…
Comparisons, with numbers, would be go, for car produced KWh versus main plant KWh, vs backup plant KWh, for CO2/KWh.
Or its just a another Prius hype, of which we’ve had enough.