Inspiration
The world is experiencing an energy revolution. We are transitioning from a carbon economy to a renewable one however we lack the storage capacity to fully utilize renewably generated energy. This is coinciding with a global transition to electric or hybrid vehicles. Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) is an emerging technology where electric vehicles (EVs) are bidirectionally connected to the grid. V2G vehicles are paid to send or receive power to the grid from their vehicle's battery for select purposes such as peak shaving, valley filling, and crises. Already, America has experienced deadly blackouts in 2021 such as Texas' grid failure. We can save lives by increasing the grid's storage capacity and V2G could have helped prevent Texas' meltdown..
What it does
Project Delorean models the market viability of a residential V2G fleet. It takes a series of inputs such as one's zip code and EV type and uses this to calculate the profitability of a residential V2G fleet and an individual vehicle in the fleet. Similar to sunroof.com, Delorean's purpose is to inspire people to both create aggregated residential V2G fleets and to convince individual EV owners why they should participate in V2G.
How we built it
Project Delorean is a web application using nodejs. We parsed hundreds of thousands of data rows to calculate the approximate availability of an asynchronous residential fleet over a 24 hour period and used this data with one of PGE's TOU (Time-of-Use) plans to calculate the annual and monthly reimbursement to the fleet.
Challenges we ran into
Our project is larger than what we could do during the hackathon. Around 8:00 PM as everyone got tired we realized we needed to reduce the scope of the project to have a working product for the demo. We are proud of what we have created but we also know that we will be working a lot more to make Project Delorean shine.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our calculations are based on hundreds of thousands of rows of data. Everything we calculated is grounded in real-world statistics that we parsed. V2G is an emerging technology and people are still determining how large of an industry this is going to be. We are adding an educated voice to that discussion but more importantly, we are convincing Americas to help the grid.
What we learned
We gained significant knowledge and experience working with nodejs, developing a large-scale web app, and applying publicly available data in unique ways.
What's next for Project Delorean
Currently, Project Delorean only models peak shaving for PGE serviced communities. We plan to expand our scope so our tool is compatible with all service providers across California. We also plan to implement other V2G models such as frequency regulation and demand response.
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