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Full article in the San Diego Union. Some excerpts below:
San Diego could pioneer how plug-in cars are integrated into the electric grid under a collaboration announced Monday.
The effort unites city officials with professors at the University of California San Diego, technicians at San Diego Gas & Electric, researchers at General Electric, and business people with CleanTech San Diego.
Other parts of the collaboration, called Smart City San Diego, will work on smart grid technology, cutting through bureaucracy in getting vehicle chargers into homes, figuring out how companies can make money with clean power and determining how people in the real world act when they have electric cars.
The university will also work on research efforts, along with GE and SDG&E, to figure out the feasibility of using the large batteries that plug-in cars have to help manage the grid better.Called vehicle-to-grid, the idea is that there are short periods, sometimes just a few minutes, when electricity demand nearly outstrips supply.
The goal is to figure out how much energy can be saved by avoiding a conversion from direct current to alternating current and back to direct current.