Empowering a reliable, cost-effective electricity grid today while paving the way for a renewable future

Extreme heat is stretching the United States' electricity infrastructure to maximum capacity, and the reported disjointedness of the country's three electric grids has made it more difficult to deliver wind and solar power as reinforcements.

Willett Kempton, professor of marine science and policy at the University of Delaware, led the development of a way to use electric car batteries to make grids more stable and resilient. Kempton advocates using electric storage through V2G technology to make electricity more reliable at a lower cost today and to enable the grid to use more renewable energy in the future.

Kempton, associate director of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology for UD's Center for Research in Wind (CReW), pioneered technology for vehicle-to-grid (V2G) vehicles, which are capable of absorbing excess energy when demand for power is low and returning some back to the electric grid when the demand for power is high.