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Good News / Bad News about Electric Vehicles

Nov 17, 2009

No one knows better than I do the struggle to sell the Smart Grid to ordinary folks. My mother-in-law won’t let me come to Thanksgiving dinner next week unless I promise I won’t talk about substations.

But something happened this week that I believe will help sell the Smart Grid to ordinary folks. At the same time, it will also increase the pressure on utilities.

I’m talking about the Electrification Roadmap announced Monday by a new coalition that includes such heavyweights as Nissan President and CEO Carlos Ghosn and Frederick W. Smith, Chairman, President and CEO of FedEx Corp.

Their roadmap outlines a vision for a fully integrated electric transportation system in the U.S. It documents the challenges, but also offers policymakers and business leaders a framework for overcoming them.

This could be a true inflection point for the Smart Grid. Electric transportation is something the public wants; it will take a significant infrastructure upgrade to make it happen; and it can only happen if everyone gets really good at standards.

Why This Matters

Tell the average consumer that you want to raise rates to put in a Smart Grid to improve system reliability and you'll get at best a blank stare (if not a glare of protest). Even the promise of more renewables is not enough to get many Americans excited, especially if it means rates will go up. But tell them "freedom from foreign oil" and they get it right away. No blank stares.

So we need to position electric transportation as one more converging mega-trend (along with renewable integration, demand response, etc.) that makes the Smart Grid indispensible because you simply cannot get from here to there without it.

But there is a hitch. If we do manage to sell that concept, then the onus is on utilities to deliver. Unfortunately, most utilities haven’t even thought about an EV strategy, much less the tools and technologies required to implement one. My friend Joe Miller of Horizon Energy Group had it right when he compared the task to upgrading a moving train. Utilities have to incorporate new approaches and new technologies and still keep the lights on 24x7.

SGN ET Channel and Primer

To help you ramp up quickly on electric transportation trends and technologies, we have loaded up our Electric Transportation channel with expert analysis, white papers, studies, videos, product announcements and press releases. And we’ll keep adding new material as it becomes available.

We also asked Alex Zheng of Horizon Energy Group (and an SGN contributor) to recommend essential Web resources related to EVs. His primer follows:

Consulting Resources

· The Brattle Group

· Pike Research

· GreenOrder

· Boston Consulting Group

Government and Non-Profit

· Pew Center on Global Climate Change

· Pacific Northwest National Lab

· Oak Ridge National Lab

· National Renewable Energy Lab

· DOE Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

· Fuel Economy on EVs

· Argonne National Lab / Idaho National Lab

· UC Davis

· University of Delaware

· Rocky Mountain Institute

· EPRI Electric Transportation

Websites / Blogs

· EV World

· Auto Blog Green

· Wired Autopia

· GM-Volt Blog

· Calcars

· Electric Auto Association

Utility Resources

· Plug-In Austin. Building a Market for Gas-Optional Hybrids

· SoCal Edison Joins Plug-In Hybrid Development Consortium

· Plug-in Hybrid Development Consortium

I urge you to use these resources to get up to speed and to make electrification a priority. It’s not just a trend somewhere on the horizon – it may show up in your region sooner than you think.

And be sure to check out our Electric Transportation channel. Here’s a sample of the kinds of things you’ll find posted there:

· News: Heavy Hitters Form Coalition and Roadmap to Promote EVs

· Video: The Race for the Electric Car

· Special Report: Bottling Electricity: Storage as a Strategic Tool

· Blog: V2G a Smart Grid Blessing or Curse?

· Press Release: Mercedes-Benz Debuts ML450 Hybrid

Talk Back to the Author

Current Comments (10)

Leave a Comment

some utilities are on it

Agreed, utilities need to get on the EV ball. I recently visited Southern California Edison's EV Tech Center. It's been on task for a while now. See: http://bit.ly/1EPvBY

Mary Catherine O'Connor - 11/17/2009 - 15:34

BEVs not EVs

By 2040 we will all be driving BEVs (BioElectrics). The VRAD(c) process is capable of converting the US waste stream into four times the oil we consume today. I sugggest www.vradenergy.com/funding.html as a primary read on the subject.

Herman P Miller III, PE - 11/18/2009 - 08:59

Actually, there's no need for such urgency

The additional power gen needed to service PHEVs in 2020 is only going to be 6%. This could readily be provided without building new plants, simply by running some of the peakers at night. IN fact, doing so would obviously help amortize the plants and would be a good thing all around.

Likewise with handling demand on the feeders. Assuming that recharging occurs after sundown, the additional load would not exceed current capacity. According to a fellow I talked with from EPRI recently, the only anticipated problem would be a scenario in which commuters in a given neighborhood with an undersized feeder, arrive home after rush hour and begin recharging all at once. This, however, would hardly be an insurmountable problem, and could be addressed without great difficulty, in several ways.

The real issue here is that there so many hungry vendors looking to impose "solutions" on ratepayers, where problems don't actually exist, or where cheap and easy adjustments are sufficient.

Our current economic system does not sustain the concept of securing Eternal Life for every industry and every product. So, there's this industry push to impose onerous rate increases and unneeded carbon taxes, for their own "survival."

David Engle - 11/18/2009 - 09:01

EVs

The only item that will make it go even faster will be to stop the subsidies and writeoffs to oil. When gas hits $8-10 a gallon like Europe it's a done deal to plugin.

Jim stACk - 11/18/2009 - 10:25

No lose to time

There should be a legal requirement of, at a minimum, user-set time-of-day control for EV charging, obviously permitting anything more sophisticated; wouldn't want to bolix that!

Pete Cann - 11/18/2009 - 11:53

PEV's

Great article, Jesse. Electric Transportation makes so much sense for our kids and grandkids that I came out of a happy retirement to build a smart charging of PEV's business. HQ'd at the Center for Automotive Research, home of the world's fastest electric car, the Buckeye Bullet!

We need to stop subsidizing oil and petroleum products and institute policies which encourage clean, sustainable, and secure transportation options, via electricity.

richard d. housh - 11/18/2009 - 12:01

EV charging

Timers won't be sufficient, or even adequate. It will either be a clever car maker like Toyota or a consumer products company like Apple that builds the right kind of charging interface. Utilities and their typical vendors are too rooted in how things have always been done to come up with the right combination of ease-of-use and leveraging what;s already well known about the cost of producing electricity at various times of the day and night.

Jack Ellis - 11/18/2009 - 13:18

Missing link!

...the promise of more renewables is not enough to get many Americans excited, especially if it means rates will go up. But tell them "freedom from foreign oil" and they get it right away. No blank stares....

The NIMBYs will fight this tooth and nail!

Until we get the political will to recycle nuclear fuel and accept the large capital investments required to develope huge wind farms and acre after acre of solar panel fields this is nothing short of a pipe dream.

Bill Alden - 11/19/2009 - 08:14

Selling

Selling “ordinary” folks on smart grid in a package with electric vehicles makes great sense. Experienced resources for informing and demonstrating to the public how the coming wave of EV technology will impact us are few. Perhaps surprisingly, one of the most successful and experienced groups with this skill set is not a university, nor located in a major city. Rather, it is grassroots and rural based, located in the “Apple Capital of the World and The Buckle of the Powerbelt of the Great Northwest”.

Since 2005 members of Wenatchee, WA-based Advanced Vehicle Innovations (AVI) consortium have launched numerous innovative vehicle electrification & education projects. The consortium, led by the Port of Chelan County, is comprised of over a dozen public and private entities. AVI organized the first series of conferences dedicated to vehicle electrification in the Northwest (2005); introduced the first PHEV to WA and performed the first in-state conversion of a hybrid into a PHEV; purchased (and operate) the first PHEV schoolbus in WA; and coordinated one of the largest multiple conversions of Priuses into PHEVs for a DOE study conducted by Idaho National Lab. AVI members have delivered dozens of presentations to service clubs, utility and fleet associations, business interests, and environmental groups. They demonstrate electric vehicles at County Fairs, Earth Day events, wine-tastings, schools, and in parades.

Currently, AVI members are making plans for a vehicle charging system connecting three small cities; beginning to integrate EV and PHEV training into automotive courses at Wenatchee Valley College; and collaborating with local farmers and the Tree Fruit Research Commission on electrification of agricultural vehicles and mobile equipment. The region’s public transit district, LINK, will deploy four battery-electric 22-passenger buses on selected routes in Wenatchee in 2010. On May 25-26, the Port of Chelan County and AVI will host the 6th PowerUp! Summit on electrifying transportation. Info at www.plugincenter.com

Ron Johnston-Rodriguez - 11/20/2009 - 12:03

EV INFRASTRUCTURE

An EV is 2.6kW. IF everyone charges once a week at hom e hwhen their charge runs down then the cumulative peak from EV's will only be 15% of the EV's in use. !)% of EV's by 2020 woiuyl dbe good going -it won't happen overnight. By this stage parts of teh network will require updating becasue of age and new equipment can incorporate extra capacity if required. Also teh car electronics willl be very sophisticated, so whilst teh meter uin the home may have time of day tariffs, teh DSM may be provided by a home HAN talking to teh cars electronics, of possibly even teh utility taling to teh cars electinics directly without need for a HAN. You don't invsest underuncertainty when by waiting you can get the right answer. An interesting issue is a damning review by the Auditor General in Victoria Australia of their SmartGrid prohram, which essebtially said that the investment was rushed when the technology was immature, that it was not delivering teh benefits expected and was likely to priduce a large increase in costs to the customer. So you don't want that with EV's!

Antoin Breathnach - 11/21/2009 - 08:08

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