How to make range anxiety worse

By Brian Clegg

I read with interest a piece on ‘V2G’ – vehicle to grid. The idea is that, as we should all be aware, the one big problem with using wind and solar power is that it isn’t consistently available. The wind drops. At night (and in fact on quite a few dull days in the UK), solar isn’t great. So while it is a wonderful thing to get as much as our electricity as we can from these sources, we need a balancing mechanism to keep the electrons flowing when the environment conspires against us.

The most important green balancing source is nuclear, but it is also sensible to have some electricity stored away in batteries. These can be big provisions at power stations. But it’s also possible to make use of distributed batteries – including those of plugged-in electrical vehicles. To quote that piece ‘EVs could serve as a vast network of mobile batteries, storing excess energy and feeding it back into the grid when demand surges.’

That’s great. But here’s the thing. One reason I have a plug-in hybrid is that sometimes you don’t have the time to wait. We have a distant elderly relative and closer children who occasionally need us NOW. I know that with my plug-in hybrid we can be on the road in five minutes, even if we’re low on fuel. With an EV on a home charger, at best you know that you could be on the road in a couple of hours. But what if you are part of a V2G scheme, and there has been a sudden surge of demand. Could I come to my electric car and discover that instead of a 200 mile (real) range, I’ve only got 20? Even without the emergencies, I would be too happy if I’d charged up overnight for my holiday drive to Cornwall, only to find I had nowhere near enough kilowatt hours on board.

With any such scheme, you have to ask ‘What’s in it for me?’ I can see from the article that EV owners would get financial compensation. But that doesn’t help if your car’s been sucked dry when you need it. I could be wrong, but I couldn’t see any significant consideration of this in the article, or the paper it’s based on. Electric vehicles have the potential to be great – but we need to be a little careful when making claims of this sort. Range anxiety, exacerbated by poor supply of charging infrastructure and inflated vehicle ranges, is a real concern for many drivers: this would surely only make it worse.

This has been a Green Heretic production. See all my Green Heretic articles here.

Image by Eren Goldman from Unsplash

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.