Will Smart Meters Play Traffic Cop for EV Integration?

By John Gartner

 

Utilities are in the midst of their biggest customer hardware upgrade in history, deploying millions of smart meters during the next few years. These intelligent devices will provide customers and utilities with far greater control over energy consumption to enable them to reduce peak power demand.

 

Smart management of electricity consumption will be all the more critical when battery-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles arrive. Plugging in an electric vehicle at the "wrong" time can undo the peak power savings from dozens of smart meters. 

 

The role that smart meters will play in coordinating power demand with electric vehicles and charging equipment remains largely undefined. Utilities want to determine vehicle charging based on the minute-by-minute health of the neighborhood grid as well as the capacity of individual transformers (some of which can be overwhelmed by plugging in just two vehicles).

Utilities will likely prefer that those controls reside on their side of the fence, as opposed to onboard the vehicles, and will choose to build intelligence into the smart meters or in the charging equipment, or a combination of both.

 

Standards Still in the Works

The standards for messaging and communications between vehicles and the grid are still in development and are being largely driven by the ZigBee Smart Energy Profile alliance and the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), which are coordinating development efforts so that the vehicle and grid-specific protocols will be able to interact. Overseeing the process are the federal agencies FERC (the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) and the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). 

 

The multitude of standards won't likely be finished until late in 2010, and while they provide guidelines on what and how information is to be shared, they don't specify the roles for each type of participant. Smart meters are expected to "run the household," from a power perspective, so it can be reasonably argued that they play traffic cop for vehicle power consumption as well. Since the standards are still in process, the smart meters being rolled out today don't have that capability, which means they would have to be remotely upgraded, replaced, or not conflict with other hardware taking over the task.

 

Smart charging equipment is being developed with the intelligence to handle the EV-grid communication tasks without the need for smart meters. This creates the potential for redundancy or contention for control when a residence features both devices.

 

Some of the technical specifications and operating guidelines to smooth the conversation between Smart Grid and EV hardware will be further studied through funding provided by the $3.4 billion in Smart Grid money announced by the DOE in October. The majority ($2 billion) is dedicated exactly for "Integrating and Crosscutting Across Different Smart Components of a Smart Grid," including the interaction between PHEV/EVs, charging equipment and smart meters.

 

Utilities may decide that smart meters should play a central role in electric vehicle integration, or that they should stay out of the way and focus on their many other responsibilities.

 

John Gartner is an industry analyst with Pike Research, a market research and consulting firm that provides in-depth assessment of global clean technology markets.

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