Connecting EVs to the grid (Vehicle-to-Grid or V2G) to use the batteries as a place to store excess electricity and feed it back at times of shortage is a hot topic. This two-way flow of energy helps stabilize the grid, especially during times of peak demand. It’s a breakthrough that’s becoming increasingly relevant as more EVs hit the road and renewable energy plays a bigger role in our power supply.  But progress has been frustratingly slow.  There has been some progress on V2H or vehicle-to-home, which is simpler.  Several car manufacturers now sell vehicles with bidirectional charging capabilities.

In a CleanStart Perspectives webcast on September 5, hosted by Thomas Hall, Executive Director of CleanStart, two experts discussed how this technology is reshaping the way we think about energy and transportation. Kacy Marrs, a Sacramento entrepreneur known for his work in electric bikes, shared how he first learned about V2G back in 2016. At the time, the idea of using vehicles as mobile batteries was new and exciting, but the challenges of grid safety made it difficult to implement. However, as the technology has evolved, V2G is starting to gain real traction, with utilities, grid managers, and fleet operators recognizing its potential.

One of the most promising applications of V2G is in school buses, which sit idle for much of the day and during summer months. Vanessa Fiore, an expert in V2G projects from Canada, highlighted how school districts could use this downtime to feed power back into the grid, creating additional revenue streams and enhancing grid resilience. Kacy spoke about a project in Long Beach where electric school buses are being equipped with V2G capabilities, set to provide up to 2.5 megawatts of power to the grid.  The use case for V2G in school buses may be the strongest of all the possibilities because the payments to the fleet operators are relatively easy to calculate and easy to collect. This is because tapping school bus fleets may also be the easiest for CAISO to integrate into its grid management since it is almost like a stationary source.  V2G for the average individual’s EV may be much farther off. 

The technology has tremendous promise, but there are still hurdles to overcome—particularly when it comes to cost. V2G-capable chargers are more expensive than traditional EV chargers, making widespread adoption difficult. Fortunately, initiatives like California’s ZESPI grant, which offers up to $95,000 per charger, are helping to bring this technology within reach for schools and other fleet operators. However, approving applications to get the funding is moving slowly.

The webcast is available for you to watch in full on our YouTube channel.

You own an EV.  You live in a big apartment building with a big parking lot.  The lot has 4 Level 2 chargers, but they are usually full.  You are low on charge and need to make it to work.  You didn’t plug in last night. What do you do?

That dilemma is one of several a clever company in the Bay Area is trying to solve.  On August 22, Evan Kirchoff, CEO and Co-founder of Open Road Technologies, joined a Perspectives webcast to tell us about it. He starts with a very compact (8” tall x 18” on each side) but smart battery box that can hold 3.4 kWh and can charge at a 25 kW per hour rate (delivering those 3.4 kWh in about ten minutes).  Those boxes are stackable like AA batteries. Stack up 6 and put an electronics box on top and it is a 150 kW DC fast-charger that can be re-charged from an AC outlet at a rate of 1.5 to 10 kW per hour, depending on the voltage and amperage of the outlet.

How can they be used?   Go back to the apartment situation.  Think of that stack of 6 boxes on a wheeled cart, sitting in something like a Roomba home base charging station, plugged into a 220 V wall outlet.  Pull the cart out and roll it over to your EV.  Charge 15-20 kWh in ten minutes, giving you 60-80 miles of range. Boom!  Return the cart to its home base, run back to the car and zoom off to work.

How many stacks and how many home bases would you put in an apartment building parking lot?  It’s a lot simpler and cheaper than putting in L2 or L3 chargers, it doesn’t require special wiring and the home bases need a space only about 2 feet wide. It would be easy to put in a lot of them.  Inherently, there is no one camping out on them so they get more use. 

Or put a six-back in a stationary cabinet outside a roadside retail location and you have an instant 150 kW DC fast charger. Hello, Tesla?  Cancel my order for your super charger.  I have a better idea for my little shop.

Or for those with a nagging range anxiety, put a couple of the boxes in your trunk and you have an emergency 25-mile booster. 

Evan said they are targeting a very attractive price/performance spot in the market, much less costly than the alternatives and much less costly to install.  That is very important because the available fast DC chargers are ridiculously expensive..  

This session has been very popular on our YouTube channel.  Please take a look at it there.  For more information, look at this slide presentation from OpenRoad.  It is very good.

There are others that have developed portable battery packs to solve some of the same problems, but Open Road has come up with some nice features that put them in a class by themselves.   Keep an eye on these innovations. They’re not just about making charging faster—they’re about making it smarter, less expensive, more flexible, and more inclusive.

“Clean technology” often means “clean energy” to many.  But there are many more dimensions to it.  One of those is water.  It is simultaneously one of the most abundant, and most demanded commodities in our society.  It also is subject to constant innovations that allow us to use it more efficiently, recycle/restore used water to its natural state, and protect natural areas that rely on it. For inland cities like Sacramento, having direct access to freshwater can lead to a multitude of benefits, especially when the surrounding biomes are maintained. The Sacramento River is an unfortunate example of industrial interests overcoming ecological protection, but is slowly becoming an example of how science and clean-tech can revitalize our lost ecosystems. Even with these developments, water use management, hydro-electric generation systems, and resource preservation is still showing plenty of room for growth.

Traveling for roughly 400 miles, the largest river in California and its natural floodplain created an abundant habitat for a huge variety of aquatic and terrestrial life. At this time, it also hosted one of the largest Chinook Salmon runs in the entirety of North America. Humans have thrived by harvesting from the natural bounty of this landmark for over 12,000 years, with several native tribes maintaining the space for the vast majority of that time. In the mid 1800s, these tribes were pushed aside. 

Over the next hundred years, more than 10 major cities (including Sacramento itself) would be formally founded across the length of the river. These cities were prospering due to nutrient-rich soil and dense forests, but exploded into national relevance with the discovery of gold in a Coloma tributary of the Sacramento. The influx of people and commerce from the gold rush spurred the formal creation of the State of California two years after its discovery in 1850. Since then, the cities have rapidly industrialized, forming the core of the Northern Californian ecosystem. However, this tremendous growth came at a cost. 

As the vast forests around the Sacramento river were steadily converted into farmland and hydraulic mining efforts ramped up, the City of Sacramento grew into an agricultural giant.

Unfortunately, much of this work was set back by continued flooding. Repeated flooding from 1870 to the late 1900s led to the creation of many dams, levees, weirs, and more that would inevitably lead to huge changes in the river’s ecosystem.

After the flooding had largely been controlled and contained, more and more surrounding land was converted into agricultural space. Today, over 90% of the river’s forests have been removed, decimating local wildlife habitats. Additionally, the quality of the water itself has been severely affected by a variety of runoff sources, hydraulic mining, and siphoning to meet the demand by urban and agricultural spaces. Aggravated by several years of drought, these man-made changes to the environment of Northern California have led to the extinction of several species and the endangerment of many remaining ones. Estimated valuation of these losses shows more than $3 billion in annual ecological services and fishing revenue.

Sacramento and its surrounding ecosystem is in dire need of climate champions, and several groups have already begun to step up to improve our aquaculture industry. To highlight some of the more recent businesses and nonprofit organizations that are having an impact, we’ve included them below;

Sacramento Aquaculture Startups & Businesses

Macro Oceans, a seaweed biotech startup, announced the launch of their pilot-scale production in mid 2023. By repurposing seaweed through their novel methods, Macro Oceans creates sustainable alternatives for a wealth of different chemicals and products at scale. Their current frontrunner are their Hydrating Marine Polysaccharides, a perfect offering for a cosmetic industry that’s making steady shifts towards non-synthetic sourcing. Learn more here.  

Tsar Nicoulai is a Sacramento sturgeon caviar fishery that’s taken their sustainable practices to a new level. In 2019 they implemented an aquaponics system to take advantage of the nutrient-dense “wastewater” produced by their sturgeons, using it to feed crops, which then purifies the water and returns it to the fish. This system allows them to reuse more than 80% of their water, while simultaneously growing crops. By pioneering this technology, they’re helping to push Sacramento fisheries towards sustainable operation practices. Find out more on their website.

AquaBorne is a Sacramento startup that resides on the other side of sturgeon farming. Converting fish skins into “unique, exotic and sustainable aquatic leather.” Their innovative business practice makes sure that we aren’t wasting any part of Sacramento’s most valuable fish. Read more about their unique products here.

These three startups are just some of the many working on improving our local aquatics infrastructure, but there are gaps in current solutions that we at Cleanstart feel could be addressed by entrepreneurs. With several organizations, like the California Department of Water Resources , offering hundreds of millions of dollars a year in grant funding for projects- we encourage enterprising minds to engage with the following non-profits to find out about current work, and where you could create improvements.

**Join our upcoming Perspectives with Dr. Charles Hillyer, Director of the Center for Irrigation Technology at Fresno State, on frontiers in agricultural water management**

Non-profit organizations: 

River Partners have been doing restorative work across California for over 25 years. As a Californian nonprofit dedicated purely to the restoration of riparian ecosystems, they’ve been able to restore thousands of acres across many different riverbanks. With six ongoing projects in the Sacramento valley, they’re heading the charge on the rehabilitation that our river (and the species that rely on it) needs. Read more about their projects here.

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) have been hard at work mitigating the damage done to the Sacramento river for more than 15 years. Through a wealth of research projects they were able to fund the restoration of over 6,000 acres of floodplain, making their effort one of the most successful individual ecological restoration projects the United States has ever seen. Read more about their work and research here.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been making active efforts to restore the river since the early 2000s. In recent years, they’ve provided significant funding to research and business development in Sacramento fisheries. Some of the positive outcomes of that development can be seen below. Also, by partnering with the Winnemem Wintu Tribe in 2022, they’ve managed to partially circumvent the dams blocking Winter-Run Chinook Salmon from their original breeding grounds. Read more about that work here.

The Northern California Water Association (NCWA) has been protecting the water resources of Northern California since 1992. By connecting various leaders and directly addressing government authorities, they’ve organized several programs to combat the damage done to the water sources our lives rely on. Recently, they released their 2024 Strategic Priorities, many of which address the issues the Sacramento river is facing. Read more about the work they’re organizing here.

The Sacramento River Watershed Program (SRWP) is a group of thousands of people invested in the welfare of their namesake watershed, led by a board of 21 trustees from several organizations. They primarily support other programs with data collection and distribution, but also host biannual conferences on the state of our river. Find out more at their website.

This was one MeetUp you didn’t want to miss.  Most of the 30+ attendees said it was our best one ever—and we have had some great ones.  It was so good because we talked a lot about the context and the big issues of the next 20 years.  

Our speakers were Daveed Sidhu, a certified AI professional with years of experience, and James Frasher, Innovation Manager at SMUD, who has been examining all the ways AI could help and giving some of those a try.

Daveed began by giving us a detailed overview available in his slides.  They are packed with information and are a great background source.  His main point was that AI or machine learning are not all that new.  They have been evolving for decades.  What is new is the broader recognition of the potential and perils that AI can create across all we do.  

The upcoming challenge for the grid is electrification of the transportation sector and the buildings sector (to achieve decarbonization), not to mention all the power requirements of data centers to run AI software.  Daveed put the challenge this way:  US total electricity consumption is currently 4 Terawatt-hours per year and that could grow to 12 Terawatt-hours by 2045.  How are we going to cope with that?  But the crucial reality is that the power system – generators and power — are only running at about a 40% capacity factor (4 Twh of consumption served by 1300 GW of generation that has a theoretical ability to run 8,760 hours per year to make 11.5 Twh of electricity). 

So there is a lot of inefficiency in the current system.  That inefficiency has been the result of power demand varying dramatically over the day and over the seasons and the focus of utilities on serving that demand with enough supply, rather than considering demand to be something that could be managed to better match the generation available.  That may be a simple way of looking at, but it set the context.  Each part of the grid could be managed to make better use of it.  That is not just a matter of software.  To do its job, the software needs data and control points.  So there must be a lot more devices installed to monitor uses and supplies, plus new devices to get control over power flows so lines do not become overloaded.  Sounds like a big job.

James Frasher explained what SMUD is doing to take steps to understand what the best things are SMUD could do to meet these challenges. They are targeting 300-1200 MW of “virtual power plants” or combinations of controllable loads and customer-side generators in their Zero Carbon Plan for 2030.  They are looking at fleets of electric school buses as battery storage they could use (“Vehicle-to-Grid” or V2G), since the buses are used only a few hours a week, for example.  They are increasing the incentive for customers to install battery storage to as much as $10,000.   But he is also concerned about cybersecurity–that massive amounts of monitoring and control points could create huge vulnerabilities and opportunities for mischief.  Think about the ransomware attack on car dealerships today, but amplified to the whole power infrastructure.  

What about the power demand of all the data centers running AI models?  We have seen many prior forecasts of tremendous growth needed to run cryptocurrency platforms that did not turn out to be so serious.  Will the same apply to AI?  Will more efficient chips be used.  Will computing get away from microchips to something else.  All fascinating to ponder.

Everybody likes to peer over the horizon and see what the future may hold.  It captures the imagination.  This meetup was a prime example of that and the probable reason the attendees liked it so much.  It also means we should do more of this.  Please keep an eye on our schedule of MeetUps coming your way.