Just selling older EV/PHEV battery packs for buildings and homes could add up to a lot of storage. 10 kWh times one million homes provides a LOT of distributed storage and could take a lot of load off the grid for summer air conditioners.

Solar thermal home heating can easily be done in the southwest U.S. saving lots of natural gas to make fuels. However, natural gas is SO cheap the people will not invest in this.

Li ion will be at about $350/kWhr in 2012. That's less than half of what EPRI used as their price assumption. The cost I quote is for vehicle batteries too, which have high energy and power density requirements. Personally I think the renewables industry is missing an opportunity to get involved with battery development that is tailored to their specific needs. Because the volume and power density requirements for stationary applications isn't as severe as the vehicle applications. Meaning there are a number of existing alternative chemistries that don't work for vehicles, but are perfectly suited for stationary. For instance solid electrolytes which are typically too resistive to allow for the high current densities that the vehicle applications require, could be fine for stationary applications. This would allow the use of high energy electrodes such as sulfur cathodes and silicon anodes, which are also being developed for vehicles, but with many more intrinsic hurdles to be overcome. Stick a glass electrolyte between these and see what happens. You'll get low current, but high energy. Since your not volume or mass constrained as when you have to haul the battery in a vehicle, you just adjust the electrode area to give you the needed system current level output and call it a day. The thing with stationary therefore is just to get the cost down, but sulfur and silicon are by definition dirt cheap vs. the transition metal oxides and hard carbons used in the vehicle batteries. So that should help. That and large volume production facilities like they are now building in the US and which are beginning to come online.

I tend to think of air conditioners in the summer in the southwest U.S. when considering peak demand. I have read that the power consumption then can be three times the nominal demand. Distributed storage could help with turn on current for all those non synchronized air conditioners.

This is a good way to begin the practical discussion of how to implement distributed energy and storage systems. The storage component functions in small neighborhood grids to load level and provide backup should one (or more) neighbor have an outage.

But more than likely, intelligent neighborhood grids can handle up to 10 percent localized failure of stand alone CCHP systems. Of course with distributed energy the is no single or central power source - the entire community contributes to their own and neighbor's power requirements.

From a social point of view this means that low income, not-for-profit, educational and city services in distributed energy communities will receive locally produced energy for little or no cost. This eliminates the tax collection/accounting/subsidy/rate award structure of present centralized energy systems.

Community, responsible for community.

Looks like the future is now...

DOE is supporting a number of municipal CHP energy projects - there are 2-3 business installations in Oregon. What we need to see is a demo 25kWh Rossi-based system able to produce absorption AC heat AND enough remaining heat to power a Stirling-type genset. IF the overall efficiency was 60% or more - it would be significant.

Such a device may be viewed as disruptive. However, should the maximum heat output (kWh) be capped (there are ways) at some relatively low number - these low power systems will not significantly threaten traditional or alternative energy products.

It is time to build a couple prototypes and put them in real field tests. Distributed energy must be seen as a way to unburden the established grid/centralized power structure. It relieves pressure to build more power plants of all kinds AND lowers cost to home owners and small business.

It also eliminates need for some percentage of foreign oil and drastically improves energy security.

I could see utilities and home owners working on installing decommissioned PHEV batteries and putting UPS banks in garages. There is a program in California that puts a turn off box on air conditioners. If there is a heavy load it might delay the turn on of your air conditioner in exchange for a lower power rate.

With UPS in your garage, the air conditioner can turn on when the thermostat tells it to and the UPS provides the turn on surge current. Commercial air conditioners are synchronized so that you do not have thousands of them turning on at the same time. This is not the case with home air conditioners, maybe with the "smart grid" this could be a feature.

If utilities offering Smart Grid with the AC Propulsion-type V2G capability - were to slash cost of a kWh by 50% - they might get some takers. Which would help expand the adoption rate.

Question is, WILL utilities be willing to take the risk to do so? Or just sit back and clip the coupons from increased overnight energy sales?

That's bad news for the grid; large fleets of cars reliant on quick charging make demand spikes even worse.

What we need is fleets of EVs in commuter and personal service, charging mostly at night but plugged in most of the time. These can be used as schedulable demand and increase system reliability.