This is very cool — one of the many challenges to making the electrical grid more efficient is figuring out a way to store electricity. The current grid does not, but you can see there might be production and cost efficiencies in being able to store electricity made when it is cheapest or most efficient to do so in an inexpensive and accessible manner for use when it is needed. One of the ideas for that storage is called Vehicle to Grid (V2G) and researchers from UD helped to develop this.
The City of Newark is the first city in the United States to put this idea to the test. University of Delaware Associate Professor of Marine Policy Willett Kempton has the car in the picture and there are currently plans for a total of six in the near future. It is interesting that this news would be released today, when Governor Markell talked about the creativeness of Delaware’s past economic history. While this technology is certainly in its infancy and will need more testing and much larger scale testing to determine its long-term viability, this is exactly the kind of thing that we ought to be figuring out how to nurture here.