U.S. Air Force photo by Sarah Corrice

U.S. Air Force photo by Sarah Corrice

Vehicle to grid technology is easy to explain. Parked electric vehicles plug in to recharge, but can also feed juice back into the grid when they have plenty and there's a grid demand for more. But demonstrating a real, working version of the concept is much harder.

Better leave it to the Air Force.

Perhaps surprisingly, the U.S. government's leader in electric vehicle tech is not the EPA nor the Department of Energy, but the Air Force. "As the largest energy consumer in the federal government, this program simply makes good sense," says Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James. "Pursuing this vehicle-to-grid pilot program was an easy decision for us."

One crown jewel of that effort, which started in 2011, is Los Angeles Air Force Base, where every vehicle is plug-in electric. It's the largest EV fleet on a federal facility—the 42 vehicles include Nissan Leafs, VIA plug-in hybrid vans, Ford C-MAXs, and Chevy Volts. All these cars use vehicle to grid technology. Altogether, the Air Force says, the EVs can provide more than 700 kw, enough to power 140 homes on a summer afternoon.

The cost savings from using a vehicle-to-grid network help the Air Force to offset the other higher costs of using electric cars. "PEVs currently have a higher first cost, and this together with costly battery replacement make their life-cycle cost uncompetitive," say researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, who studied the Air Force fleet as a vehicle-to-grid pilot project.

The fleet at LAAFB shows that vehicle-to-grid work. But, as is often the case with renewable energy vehicles, it's not always the engineering that's the biggest challenge.

"Early experience suggests that technically such a vehicle to grid scheme is feasible; however, any such project also must confront many policy hurdles," the Berkeley researchers concluded. They cited high regulatory barriers and complex interconnection requirements. "Tackling these problems and capturing sufficient revenues from the market to move the economics of PEV operation poses a tough challenge."

U.S. Air Force photo by Sarah Corrice

U.S. Air Force photo by Sarah Corrice

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