This summer saw the official announcement from the US Dept. of Defense of their plans to catalyze the entire automotive industry with an intent to purchase 200,000 zero-emission, all-electric vehicles capable of feeding their excess capacity into the grid.
In addition, the White House just stated:
This week, Air Force officials unveiled a plan to establish Los Angeles Air Force Base as the first Federal facility to replace 100% of its general-purpose fleet with Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEV’s). This is the start of a broader Department of Defense (DoD) effort toward large-scale integration of PEV’s into its fleet. Lessons learned from this project will help DoD and other agencies understand operational implications of fleet electrification, while demonstrating cutting-edge PEV technologies, such as vehicle-to-grid (V2G) systems.
What does this mean for the energy industry? This marks a fundamental transformation for the 21st century power grid. The future is clean, reliable, fast-response pockets of energy all around us – taking the form of electric cars while they’re plugged in. With EV’s carrying as much power as a house consumes in a week, the interactive relationship between cars, homes and the grid itself is certain.
REV’s involvement with the two most advanced and interactive vehicle-to-building-to-solar roofs-to-grid projects with the US Army-TARDEC, plans are underway for creating new levels of energy resilience and independence from dirty, slow and volatile sources of fuel. Like the Army brought us the internet, so will they bring us the energy internet.
So back at the ranch, our project work with the Army has brought visits from industry experts from major utilities in Japan, government policy makers from Netherlands and Denmark, utilities from Sweden, the British High Commissioner from the UK, and powertrain developers from Australia. With federal regulations in the US now ruling a new pay-for-performance payment incentive for fast-response storage for the grid like EV’s, the economic case for the AutoGrid Network has likely just doubled. REV is still one of the only companies working at the intersection of the automotive and energy industries, and we look forward to being the much needed technology hub between renewable energy, electric cars and the power grid at large.
Feature: The Future of Transportation on Global TV News Hour
November 2, 2011
“A paradigm shift powered by the imagination of an artist, the soul of an engineer, and the passion of an entrepreneur”
Source: The White House and REV Technologies
