Mobile Storage Vehicles - MSVs

History is so strange. Imagine if electricity, not gas combustion, had turned out to be the predominate technology one hundred years ago. Don't you think that we would have moved a little further along in battery storage over 100 years of automobile history if we had relied on batteries for transportation? You bet we would have. But we all know how things turned out - electric-powered cars lost out to gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine-driven autos, and the rest is history. Now here we are in 2008 wondering how we are going to move all these people and goods around when gasoline gets more and more expensive (these price drops will disappear, just watch) and when gasoline combustion produces CO2 as part of the exhaust process, which in turn heats up our planet making it ever less livable. We do indeed have a big problem.

But it's not too late to change things. One of the most amazing things about human beings is the massive brains we have (another amazing thing is how little most of use those massive brains, but I digress). When we get things wrong, we can always put our brain to work and we can fix what's broken and move on. At least, that's the way its always worked out so far. Now, however, we face a huge systemic crisis. We are debating how to back up historically bad management at three auto companies that probably deserve to fail, when we should be debating the future of the electricity and the transportation industries, which history tells us are two separate industries, but which technology and innovation could make into one.

A Paradigm Shift

What if fixing Detroit so it could make more internal combustion vehicles were the wrong thing to do? What if it would be better to reshuffle the deck of facts that we all share and develop an entirely new paradigm concerning personal transportation and electricity production, distribution, and consumption?

Let's look at our current paradigm for personal transportation.

1. Manufacture cars on spec - new models developed every year with slight modifications (even though cars are designed to last longer and longer)
2. Distribute cars to a large number of locally-owned franchised dealerships
3. Sell cars with incentives including special financing, discounts off of retail, and capital leases
4. Personal Responsibilities.
a. Qualify for car loans, arrange loans for finance companies, credit unions, etc.
b. Re-sell cars at used car lots - no, make that "pre-owned dealer showrooms."
c. Repair cars when they break-down
d. Maintain cars to keep them running
e. Fuel cars at gas stations located along roads
5. Tax fuel as public policy (or don't tax - keep it cheap - as public policy)
6. Insure private drivers against liability and property claims

Remember the excitement about getting to drive when you were about to turn 16? Remember the let down soon thereafter when you realized how expensive it was to drive? We only rebelled against the complexity and expense at the beginning, if we did at all. Later, we accept this system as the "way things are" and don't bother to challenge it.

Mobile Storage Vehicles - MSVs

But when you introduce electricity into the equation - plug in hybrids, or PHVs - it changes the situation dramatically because it opens up a new set of options, enabling a new paradigm for transportation: cars as Mobile Storage Vehicles or MSVs. If cars are viewed not only as transportation, but also as mobile storage units - extensions of the electric utility system - they gain a complementary purpose: as battery banks, they store energy and thus change the dynamics of the utility operating system. And they're rolling powered vehicles that provide an alternative to current transportation options: if the utility owns the PHVs and leases them as MSVs, then all bets are off. We are into a new paradigm. But most or all the discussion to date of PHVs or electric vehicles envisions them under the old paradigm of personal ownership.

Our electric utility infrastructure is currently under extreme duress, as growth in consumption demands more of a system that has not kept up with growth. We are a few years or months away from more dire circumstances, depending on whom you listen to. A key aspect of the electric utility system is that power is produced and added to the grid as it is consumed, to keep the grid at a constant voltage level. Electricity cannot be stored economically, so this real-time production/consumption solution has remained since the grid's beginnings one hundred years ago.

PHVs offer a potential solution as MSVs - electricity can be pumped into millions of PHV batteries at night when it is cheap to produce and then released back onto the gird in the afternoon, at peak times when it is most expensive. In this manner, PHVs offer a potentially economic storage solution that has always eluded utility planners.

But let's take this one step further. Imagine if electric utilities were to place massive orders for fleets of PHVs using their substantial credit, bolstering car manufacturers under government guidance. Imagine then if they deployed those vehicles to their electricity customers as part of their electricity service provisioning. Your electric bill would now comprise part of your transportation budget, and by cooperating with the electric company to help store and release cheap electrons as part of the usage contract, your transportation budget would shrink. And the electric bill would be subsidized as well. By redefining how we look at both electricity and transportation, we'd be making better use of our limited budgets. We need to be more creative with regard to our problems.

Assumption Change No. 1. Asset Ownership: The vehicle is no more a capital asset to be owned by a citizen than is the electric meter on the wall - its a part of the contract for electricity.
Assumption Change No. 2. Fuel Options: The vehicle no longer needs to be refueled. No more need for a gas station. The vehicle processes energy into and out of its batteries, according to the dictates of the utility. The driver keeps a net metered accounting of the energy consumed and the energy given back, in a contract with the electric utility. We would need to adjust to a new rhthym of daily vehicle use.
Assumption Change No. 3. Sales: Not owning the vehicle means no more car distributorships, no more used car lots - you simply return the PHV to the utility at the end of the contract and get a newer model in return. The old car can be reprocessed at the plant and its materials re-used.
Assumption Change No. 4. Long Distance: Rather than assume that any car can make the drive cross country, we use urban short-distance PHVs with nightly recharges and a much smaller pool of cars for long-distance road travel. For most of us, this would mean a different approach to car ownership - we might shift to driving only PHVs most of the time and then renting gas cars for infrequent long-distance travel, in which case we might get just what we like/need for a road trip. With much less use of gasoline as a fuel, we would likely see cheaper gas and it would make sense to lease big comfortable SUVs (or RVs) for those long summer vacation trips, or a more economical car for a more frequent, but shorter inter-city business trip.
Assumption Change No. 5. Massive investment in nuclear and coal plants: Right now, spending a lot of money on additional generation and transmission lines appears unavoidable because that's the only solution our current paradigm (no storage) points to. But with storage, consumption curves are smoothed out and our current amounts of generation are adequate to meet new demands of growth. All that money that would otherwise go into new power plants could go into building new fleets of electric cars. All that money currently spent on gasoline and gas-powered cars could go elsewhere.

Still think it would be a bad thing if Detroit car companies were placed under new management? I don't any more. This scenario is quite feasible, but we'd have to start looking at our old problems through new eyes. We'd have to let go of cherished delusions. We'd have to be more creative about how we solve problems. We'd have to learn to use our limited tools and our limited money more wisely. We have a long way to go, but we can still get there.