How about a hydrogen scooter that drives, powers your phone and plays music? Sounds pretty perfect, right? The Delft Car as Power Plant project could actually make it happen.
TU Delft TV shot a short documentary on the Car as Power Plant project. (Photo: TU Delft TV)
In the Car as Power Plant project today’s commercial cars are being modified to deliver energy to the grid. “We already altered a Hyundai car to deliver up to 10 kW,” says Carla Robledo, a postdoc in the Department of Process & Energy.
Lightweight electric vehicles
They also wondered about lightweight electric vehicles, like scooters or small cars. Can they be used for such purposes? Well, since it’s a smaller system, the fuel cell can be up to a hundred times smaller and this takes some puzzling. “We then thought, why not couple it directly to loads and simulate patterns for driving and for vehicle-to-grid as well as vehicle-to-load.”
Vehicle-to-grid is the system in which plug-in electric vehicles like the hydrogen scooter communicate with the power grid to sell demand response services by either returning electricity to the grid or by throttling their charging rate. Vehicle-to-load is mostly interesting for off-road situations or for recreational purposes such as camping where people have to deal with insufficient power.
‘Besides driving, we will also be able to charge our phones or play some music’
To simulate these patterns, TU Delft alumnus Lotta van Leeuwen conducted a performance analysis at Robledo’s power plant. “We wanted to know how the scooter would react under different load patterns. So we connected our phones directly to the scooter to test it in a driving mode and vehicle-to-appliance mode. We then measured different parameters during the operation of the scooter and looked at how the whole system degrades and which mode of operation would degrade the most.” Surprisingly, the vehicle-to-appliance mode degraded most, though it was using the least power.
In the future, says Van Leeuwen, it would be great to study the mechanisms that cause this degradation. “Now the scooter is designed for driving purposes only, but if we want to use it for other purposes in the future, we will need to have a different energy management system. Maybe then, besides driving, we will also be able to charge our phones or play some music.”
TU Delft TV shot a short documentary on this project. Make sure to watch it below.
TU Delft TV / TU Delft TV is a collaboration between Delta and the Science Centre. The crew consists of TU Delft students.
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