This is a worthwhile exercise. Since power grids often cross States-Provincial borders, a national approach will be required to arrive at the most stable, reliable and efficient power grid(s), specially when transportation and HVAC electrification will multiply.

When more and more Solar and Wind (variable) energy will be fed into power grids, enlarged grids (with all their complexity and potential downfalls) will become a necessity. This will force higher compatibility and standardized design.

All States and Canadian Provinces electrical energy suppliers and distributors should participate.

Shouldn't the central governments or agencies be involved?

John: please explain. I don't see anything in the article about hydrogen, unless this is an experiment designed to fail.

We need standards for signalling the status of the grid.
Ideally, these would be global, or at least Eu or US (or NAFTA) wide.
Thus, you could signal: "Lots of excess power", or power cost is now Xcents / KhW, or whatever, to tell vehicles when to charge.

An ideal PHEV would know how much it as expected to drive tomorrow, the current electricity cost and the expected price every hour until it HAD to start charging.

Thus, it might know that it needed 10 KwH by 8 am, and that, based on weather etc, the best time to start charging would be from 2 - 5 am when the price could be expected to be 6 cents / KwH.

This would be better than just kicking off a charge when the night rate starts.

You could do a LOT of load balancing if you could work out the minimum amount of information a system needed to recharge itself.

The same would apply to other time non critical tasks such as dish and clothes washing, and water heating.

The main thing would be to prevent large scale hacking.
What you don't want is someone broadcasting that power is 2 cents / KwH at 5.30 pm.

The numbers I remember are that you can rely on about 40% of your wind generating capacity as base load, provided that the farms are spread out over a large enough geographical area to compensate for local weather conditions. Throw in the storage capacity of a million PHEV's and I'm sure that could increase.

And with solar soon to become cost competitive (based on calculations done for me on a thread a couple days ago), this could easily be used to supplement baseload because over a large geographical area it is very consistent.

Stan:
Hydro's considered peak load because they can turn it on and off whenever it so pleases them, and the fuel is free, so it makes no sense for them to use their energy (stored water) when prices are low. You could use it as baseload, but they don't for the same reason they use nat gas for peak load.

Lulu:
Would you be willing to buy electricity for your car for $.10 per kwh for your car during the night, and sell it back to them for $.20 during the day--exactly.

Allowing the utility to drain your battery would depend on the number of discharge cycles your battery could take.
You probably don't want to fully discharge it every day - that would mean approx 3650 cycles over a 10 year period, and I am not sure how many battery types can take that.

As LuLu says, you are already doing them a favor by taking the electricity when they have excess, so leave it at that - unless you have a 4k cycle battery.

You would want a Huge area to get 40% coverage from wind.
30% is a figure I have heard, and you will get long times when there is very little wind for days on end - weeks even. Thus you cannot use wind without at least 80% coverage from an alternative source, like gas / coal / nuclear.
Solar has a daily cycle, so you can't use that. Solar thermal might do it.
Denmark has got to 20% from wind, but only because they can get hydro on demand from Norway.
Most people do not have huge hydro resources nearby.

I suppose the best thing you can say for wind is that it might make the gas last a bit longer.
- which is something, but alone it won't save the planet.

The skyhooks are hard to source, however.

"Skyhooks are hard to source!"

True - but lucky you don't need them for windpower to about 3 km.It is only a question of 'smart' design - to go with the smart grid! He He.

@ Neil ... The bit on hydrogen as the "fix" is hidden in the report. It works for politicians who only need to convince enough of the uninformed, but those who take even a slight look at the technology involved realize the hydrogen highway runs on fairy dust and magic beans.

PHEVs and BEVs will mostly be charged at night during off peak times, so integrating them will be no problem at all.What we need to see is a program to produce and integrate home power generation into the electric grid.

@ Lulu ... I'm with you on this ... If I get a battery for "smart-grid" load transfer, it will be a heavy clunky cheap battery that stores my home generated power, not the ultralight hi density expen$ive one that powers my car.

"Skyhooks are hard to source!"

Not really.

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:High_Altitude_Wind_Power

We're going to need to add storage capacity for renewables -- wind and solar.

Actually, the skyhooks have been tested.  Just not at full scale.

Demand management is great on a time scale of hours (days for ice-storage A/C) but it only goes so far for energy storage; at the end of the day you've got to have enough energy coming from somewhere to get folks home, cook dinner, etc.  What DSM and V2G can do is provide rock-solid stability of the grid in the face of generator fluctuations on the scale of minutes.  This eliminates the need for physical spinning reserve and fast-varying generators; the remaining generation can be optimised for efficiency rather than fast-ramp capability, and everybody wins.

"This is where Detroit would have been 8 years ago..."

I sometimes wonder what might have been, but I feel more confident on what probably would not have been. That list of negative things that probably would not have happened grows longer every day.

I do think that we have made much progress on the PHEVs, renewable energy and other important matters and that was by design. It may have not been what most people wanted, but what people wanted was not important from the beginning.