Towards improving renewable resource utilization with plug-in electric vehicles

Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) represent both a new challenge for and a huge potential resource to the smart-grid. The secret to effective integration of renewable energy generation into the smart-grid is integration of enough storage to deal with the intermittency of the generation. However, there are several barriers to integrating enough storage to effectively harness renewable energy in the system such as cost, storage density, etc. In this paper, we propose to leverage PEVs as the storage mechanism in the smart grid to enable the effective integration of renewable energy sources into the smart-grid. Using the city of Las Vegas as an example we demonstrate the potential for integrating PEVs to act as a storage component of the smart grid to support the integration and efficient use of renewable energy. Our results show that using PEVs as a storage system we can achieve 10% generation with renewable sources at 80% efficiency by 2015 and 95% efficiency by 2030. For 20% generation, we can achieve a 77% and 90% efficiency, respectively.