January 26, 2012, 11:07 PM EST

Your first thought about electric cars and the power grid might be that the vehicles are going gobble up more energy from grid and might cause blackouts. But the truth may be quite the opposite. Last week Nissan, makers of the fully electric Leaf, announced plans to partner with ABB to test the feasibility of creating an energy storage network from used batteries. Rather than dismantling and disposing or recycling the battery’s individual components after the vehicle’s life Nissan or another company could buy the old battery and use its remaining charge capacity to storage energy for use on the grid.

In many ways this idea is nothing new. However in the past the idea of using vehicle batteries for energy storage was based on doing so while they were still part of a vehicle. Vehicle to Grid, or V2G, technologies imagined an advanced smart grid that took advantage of millions of potential electric vehicles that would be plugged into the grid during the day.

The basics behind the idea are that typically a person would charge their electric car ove…………… continues on Power Engineering Magazine