I was reading an article on the prospects of using electric vehicle batteries to help smooth out grid demand, especially in California. That got me thinking.
For this to work, the car charger would have to control somehow if it was providing power to, or asking for power from the battery in the car. How does this happen? I’m not asking how the electronics talk to each other, I mean how do we control which way the electricity goes.
My first thought is the electricity would flow towards the side with lower resistance (or voltage or something like that, I’m no electrical engineer.) But then I thought about my wireless headphones. They are an example of one battery charging another and the charging cradle will happily drain its battery down to a very low state in order to charge up the actual headphones. Perhaps the wireless headphone thing is a bit of smoke and mirrors and the battery in the charging cradle is actually “stronger” even when it says it is nearly depleted…
Anyway, how do we control which way the electricity flows?
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Other people have already given good answers, but I’ll also add that at the most basic level, Kirchoffs laws state that you can basically combine power sources together based on the net flow. So if you have 10 amps going left, and 5 amps going right, and 2 more amps going right, you can treat that source like (10-5-2) 3 amps left. But in this case you have to use other devices to force the electricity to flow in the direction you want.
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