The basic operation is this:
Install a larger battery with the exact same voltage, but 15x the capacity.
Then you send a constant CAN bus message into the car that says the HV battery pack state of charge is 61%.

Ford's software is such, that it wants to keep the battery 40% to 60%.
( actually, 58% to always leave room for regen )

When the car "sees" 61%, it says "Oh no, the HV battery is too high, I need to do something about that to get it back to under 60%... I know.... I'll turn down the ICE speed and turn up the traction motor torque!"

Well, you measure the pack separately ( secretly ) and never let the CAN message fall below 61% until your big battery is really empty... about 30 miles later.

You really won't get a lot more power ( horsepower), but you will get a lot more sustained battery assist. The max EV speed, and max EV acceleration remain unchanged.
-John

P.S. Keeping it that simple would work, but as you might guess, a CONSTANT message of 61% would stop regen recapture when you brake. You'd be using nothing but brake pads for those first 30 miles. So your BMS ( Battery Management System ) needs to be a little smarter. It needs to transmit a steady 61% when your foot is on the gas, and a constant something else ( 41%? ) when your foot is on the brake.

 

Yes but that assumes that the Ford engineers aren't helping with the project. Factory engineers have always helped even when there is a corprate ban. I.E. drag and stock car racing. ( I have personal knowledge of this back in the 70's)

 

There was an article about Ford and some hybrid conversion outfit in Lake Forest, CA officially teaming up to do PHEV. I'm guessing, but I'll bet they'll deliver their first proto to Southern Cal Edison, since that was the big announcement a month ago.

http://www.calcars.org/calcars-news/708.html

"The biggest news was quietly noted: "For this project, Quantum has
support from Ford Motor Company." While we have no details about how
it will work, this marks the first time that a car-maker is
cooperating with an outside integrator to to make-over its hybrid
into a PHEV"

 

I wonder about the safety of the LipoPolymer batteries in a automobile application. We in the RC community (cars, planes etc.) have been using these batteries for awhile and each battery comes with grave warnings with regard to excessive heat, damage to battery, overcharging, un-attended charging, puncture etc., with the possibility of resulting in fire and or explosion. I have seen videos of a 11.1 volt 3 cell battery exploding and for the size of battery it wasn't funny.

Roger

 

Where have you been, asleep..??

If we don't start investing, building some new nuclear power plants soon it will be too late, if it isn't already.

And just what might be the advantage of a plug-in hybrid with regards Earth Warming and continuing emissions from burning fossil fuels to generate electricity.

Yes, electric power plants can provide better overall control of their emissions but in the end those emissions will have the same effect.

Did I get this right? One of the proposed solutions is to compress and FREEZE the CO2 emissions into ice form and then store then deep underground "forever".

Gotta be one costly project.

 

Was Dixy completely wrong, as the media portrayed, in saying than electricity can be stored...

NOT..!

NYC is doing just that with their night time excess capacity. They pump water uphill so it can be used the next day to generate more electricity.

 

"Where have you been, asleep..??" is offensive, and the comments that follow are not pertinent to my post about off peak power.

Pertaining to the comments that followed:

Nuclear energy is not the only solution. Wind and solar power offer green solutions that do not create toxic waste that lasts a thousand years.

...maybe we can bury our nuclear waste and excess carbon dioxide together.

 

There are also a few large office buildings in NYC (and a few showing up elsewhere) that are making use of the lower off-hours rates by installing large storage containers which, at night, freeze water using the lower power rates and then during the day use this to run through the air conditioning system to supplement the cooling load.

This is basically just shifting some of the power load from day to night for the purposes of taking advantage of the lower electricity rates during the night.

And the power system has to have the total generating and transmission capacity to handle it at the single point in time where it has its heaviest load - during the middle of the afternoon on a late summer day. After that a lot of the generating capacity is either reduced to partial loads or shut down - pretty much wasted capacity. There is no such thing as storing electricity on the power grid - all electricity is made only as it is being used. The power companies would much rather try and make use of that unused capacity than to build another plant - cheaper and less of a headache to do that. Therefore they are very supportive of any way to load-shift or otherwise use that nighttime capacity.

Nuclear plants, for the most part, run at full capacity when they are running - they are either off or on (not quite as simple as that because it can be adjusted by the number of control rods that are used, but generally they are run at full or not at all). A lot of the natural gas plants are the peak capacity infill. They are easy to start up and shut down, so they are only turned on during the day when the capacity is needed. Coal plants are in between - their output can be adjusted by how much they fire, but they are more difficult to shut down and start up so they are run in between nuclear and natural gas. They run most of the time, but the output is adjusted as needed.

Therefore, with all of these power plants that are only rarely needed all at once they would love to make use of them at other times. That's why power cost is cheaper at night than during the day - it's an incentive to make use of that unused capacity.

 

Well, yes you can store electricity on the "grid". It is called a battery that is attached to the grid via inverter/rectifier. This is one premise of having tons of plug-in hybrids. The hybrids could have a power meter that runs both ways. During peak mid-afternoon periods, power could be taken OUT of the hybrid battery pack, and the owner would get a power credit, perhaps at a premium peak price, and that credit could be used to buy back cheaper power at night to re-charge.

 

High capacity energy storage is important to the success of wind and solar power. A lot of research is underway to solve this problem. Batteries appear to be promising, especially banks of high temperature batteries. Other storage technologies include flywheel, pneumatic, thermal, and even a type of spring.

Distributing the storage to high usage points on the grid, or even distributing the power generation lowers the demand on the grid. An important issue during peak demand. (On average, Peak occurs at 2 PM each day).

This is why residential solar is attractive. At peak load, residential power usage is down, but the solar system is at peak, feeding power into the grid at many points throughout the system