Smart Grid and infrastructures to support E.V deployment

Electric vehicles received numerous grants last year, with a $2.4 billion federal investment. But to develop E.V at a huge scale, an infrastructure is necessary, especially to load batteries. Nevertheless the issues are: how many infrastructures do we need ? We can figure out people will need a charge station at their home, but they will also need station at their workplace : who will pay for this?  The driven miles per day average is 40 miles per driver but how people will do if they want to travel further? Some stations are needed on the road and we have to figure out who will pay for this, who will own them, what model will be the most efficient and economical. Like solar energy, cars manufacturing, Smart Grid, E.V infrastructures will surely need some federal grants. The transportation is an old and heavy industry and it will be difficult to make changes.

Educate the customer but not only…

As the E.Vs have been developed for a long time, only a few people have one and available information is limited. The E.V makers notice the fact that people like the concept of electrics cars but have no clue of how to use one, how much it costs, how far they can go, how to load them. E.V makers have to educate customers. However they also need to respond to the customers’ expectations and there’s a critical need for an efficient infrastructure.

Indeed, like in a gas station, the time spent in an electric station should be short. A vehicle that needs 6 to 12 hours of charging to drive for 1 or 2 hours won’t be attractive to most of the people. The automobile stands for freedom of movement, so electric cars will never catch on, unless they have at least a recharging time comparable to the one for a gasoline car. Currently two solutions exist to reduce the time necessary to load E.V. The first one is “Fast Charging”. Some of the manufacturers of electric cars and batteries are pushing faster recharging times. Combined with an elaborate infrastructure of charging spots, this would largely overcome the problem of limited autonomy. However what seems to be forgotten is that they can lead to a fabulous amount of peak demand. If you charge an electric car with a battery capacity of 25 kWh during 8 hours, it needs a power output of 3,125 watts. If you charge the same car within only 10 minutes, it needs a power output of 155,000 watts. Obviously, fast recharging times, even if they are used only by a relatively small amount of drivers, will only be possible with a massive extension of our electricity generation capacity.

The second one is swapping batteries allowing drivers to roll up and swap out a spent battery for a freshly charged one. Better Place, the leader company, demonstrated 60-second battery changes in Tokyo three months ago. However, battery swapping in electric cars could be expensive and impractical on a number of levels. Car manufacturers don’t like the idea because it would homogenize their cars and service stations would have to stock a huge variety of expensive batteries.

Utilities, which role are they playing?

Providing the electricity, utilities will have an important role in the deployment of E.V. But this role should depend on each state and each utility. For instance in California, Investor-Owned Utilities (IOU), which represent almost 75% of the total electricity production, follows the decoupling model, disassociating utility’s profits from its sales of the energy commodity.  This means they can’t make more money in selling more electricity from E.V. However, building more infrastructures and owning them would allow having a stronger control on the electricity flow on the grid and retrieving more grants from the Californian State.  Those power companies could expect to own the load station and rent it to other companies or individuals. They need to manage it all the more so that power companies can make sure that a concentration of cars in a relatively small area won’t overwhelm the grid.

Furthermore, the electricity consumption for electric cars is twice the home consumption. For utilities, this addition of electricity demand could affect the grid especially during the peak periods. Customers will also see sensitive effects on their electricity bill. They will need to change their behavior and have access to programs to manage their consumption out of the peak load. In the same way it will prevent the construction of new power plants in translating the consumption out of the peak. Some utilities like PG&E have already planned to apply “Time of Use” for customers having electrics cars.

Vehicle to Grid (V2G), a new kind of storage.

Called vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, the idea is to take advantage of the electrical storage capacity in the vehicle’s battery during hot afternoons,, when demand is highest and most costly, to avoid blackouts. During these periods, energy is worth several times more than overnight when vehicles are recharging. It is also possible to provide power to a home or businesses on occasions of high electricity demands to avoid high energy prices and help prevent outages. Pacific Gas and Electric company (PG&E) became two years ago the first utility to publicly demonstrate the power of electric vehicles to supply homes and businesses with electricity.

However, this model is complex and several issues have to be solved before. Indeed, the amount of electricity available might change dramatically during the day and a distributed storage is very difficult to manage. Moreover the stations will have to work with two ways of electricity flow as traditional technologies used for stations are just built to load cars but not to redistribute energy on the grid from batteries. Experts in the panel during the TechConnect conference in Anaheim last week, said they could see an eventual utilization of this model in 10 years.

E.V and E.V infrastructures: chicken and eggs?

Which of the E.V or the E.V infrastructure should be built first is not a critical question anymore. E.Vs are expected to arrive on the market at the end of the year with the Nissan’s Leaf or the Chevy Volt. Thus infrastructures will have to be ready to support E.Vs.

Moreover plug-in hybrids are also expected to be on the market soon, like Fisker’s Karma planned for the beginning of next year. Plugs in hybrids have smaller batteries than in fully electric cars: a battery capacity of 5 to 25 kWh, compared to 10 o 50 kWh for a fully electric car. Plug-in hybrids have both an electric motor and a gasoline engine and could drive to a better transition to a large scale E.V deployment.

sources

pannel: “Creating infrastructure for EV” at TechConnect World conference -  06/24/2010

“Who killed the electric grid? Fast-charging electric cars”: Low tech magazine –  03/19/09 – http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/03/fast-charging-electric-cars-off-peak-grid.html