Will electric vehicle charging blackout neighborhoods?
One reader's comments on my column from Friday greeted me on Monday morning, as I prepared to write about "community energy storage." The two were closely linked, thus a two-part column for today and tomorrow.
To set the stage, last Friday I wrote about electric car programs in Hawaii and Houston.
Hawaii is mandating that state and county government fleet managers purchase electric vehicles (EVs), alternative-fuel or hybrid vehicles. By the end of 2011, public parking lots must have one vehicle charger per 100 spaces. (It's not yet clear whether such vehicles will actually become available in Hawaii in sufficient numbers, given similar mandates in mainland states.)
Houston is adding 25 electric cars to its fleet this year. A pilot program has installed 10 charging stations around the city, and Houston and partner Reliant Energy will examine usage data to determine whether to expand that network. (So far, usage of the charging stations has been minimal because few citizens own electric cars, but Houston and Reliant are publicizing the possibilities.)
Howard Scott, managing director of Cognyst Advisors, a market research and business development consultancy, responded to my column with several very cogent thoughts on the impact of widespread EV adoption. I'll try to connect Scott's points with recent news reports on EV adoption and conversations I had last week on "community energy storage."
One challenge posed by EVs is their possible impact on distribution components, Scott wrote. Most of us are highly influenced by friends, families and neighbors. Thus, EV ownership and charging is likely to take place in geographic hot spots, Scott suggested, leading to "significant localized jumps in electric usage to charge the vehicles."
That remark echoed a point in yesterday's The New York Times titled, "Cities Prepare for Life With the Electric Car," which noted that Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) is "preparing 'heat maps' of neighborhoods they fear may overload the grid in their exuberance for electric cars."
The article noted that EV maker Tesla Motors asked one San Francisco-area buyer of its $109,000 Roadster how he learned of the car and why he bought one. The customer's response: "three other guys on my block have them."
Chalk one up for our tuned-in reader, Howard Scott.
"Pockets of large usage will suddenly appear [with EV adoption] that push the limits of the electric plant," Scott wrote to us. "Suddenly, distribution transformers, capacitor banks, local substations, etc. will be undersized.
"This makes a great argument for the smart grid," Scott continued. "The utilities will need the ability to locally disconnect usage to reduce peaks on local distribution infrastructure."
"I suspect that the greatest challenge being posed by electric vehicles is not with the charging stations or even the availability of the vehicles themselves, but with the challenge to over 3,000 U.S. electric utilities that will suddenly face unplanned demand and will need to expend significant financial resources, staff resources and planning resources to deal with that demand," Howard concluded.
Back once more to yesterday's The New York Times:
"If you just allow willy-nilly, random charging, are we going to have neighborhood blackouts?" -- a rhetorical question posed by Andrew Tang, an executive at PG&E who is tracking electric vehicle sales in northern California in order to avoid that scenario. Tang told the Times that a single electric car might consume triple the electricity of an average home in San Francisco.
PG&E is planning to launch a "smart charging" pilot later this year that allows the utility to control the demand at charging stations in order to avoid the specter of neighborhood blackouts.
Another option, according to some, is distributed energy storage. Because I've prattled on long enough in today's column, in tomorrow's column I'll outline a project led by American Electric Power (AEP) in Ohio, which will demonstrate the feasibility of what AEP calls "community energy storage," via a new generation of technology from International Battery and integration help from S&C Electric Co. Buffering the grid from demand hot spots such as those outlined above is one intended benefit.
Meanwhile, we'd love to know or readers' insights on electric vehicle adoption, localized "hot spots" of demand, distributed storage and related implications for the smart grid vision now experiencing labor pains.
Phil Carson
Editor-in-chief
Intelligent Utility Daily
pcarson@energycentral.com
303-228-4757
Comments
Its the Utilities Business
I have a very difficult time justifying the real concern over the increase in load for the utilities infrastructure.
As we all know it is the utilities business to deliver power. We have had 100 years to get good at it. With all the excess capacity in the distribution system and the phased in (at best) growth of this revenue source, I do not see this as anything but a typical individual case issue.
Comparing the load of a Level I charger to the engineering basis peak demand for homes under 3500 sqft does not seem to have any notable effect.
Level II chargers are the equivalent to changing the engineering basis peak demand to an electric heated home in the north east with a similar diversity factor.
Level III chargers require service entrance upgrades and would have special handling by the utility.
I am frankly surprised that any utility representative would show concern for this new significant revenue stream.
Will Electric Vehicle Charging Blackout Neighborhoods?
The quesion regarding the adequancy of the electric grid to serve a national fleet of electric electric vehicle was answered in part by a 2006 DOE study done by PNNL:
"If all the cars and light
trucks in the nation switched from oil to
electrons, idle capacity in the existing electric
power system could generate most of the
electricity consumed by plug-in hybrid electric
vehicles. A new study for the Department of
Energy finds that "off-peak" electricity
production and transmission capacity could fuel
84 percent of the country's 220 million vehicles
if they were plug-in hybrid electrics."
This study study, however, only considered aggregrate national averages, and did not examine the local issues described here. The devil is in the details.
Merwin Brown, PhD
Director Electric Grid Research
California Instiute for Energy and Environment
University of California
Charging electric vehicles
Has anyone ever done an analysis of the electrical power requirements of the vehicular population? Could the existing electrical infrastructure power more than a fraction of those vehicles?
Ian L. McQueen
Good point
Ian,
Thanks for the thought -- just what is the aggregate electricity need to convert the entire U.S. vehicle population from gas to electricity? In answer to your question, I don't have a number, but I'll keep an eye out for credible calculations.
Seems like that calculation would be a solid reality check on grandiose claims for the gas-to-electric conversion, at least it would help us get our arms around the magnitude of such a challenge. I can see that conversion happening eventually, but the moving pieces are daunting -- battery technology, charging stations, the utility piece, the private sector investments, adoption of the cars by not just the public but by trucking companies that transport huge loads. The latter is a major challenge.
One thing the electric car does generate - to glance at the comments today - is a lot of conversation.
Regards, Phil
EV Charging
If utilities attempt to disconnect customers who are charging their vehicles, we're going to see a sequel to Who Killed the Electric Car?", and this time the villain won't be GM.
Broadcast prices and require each vehicle to have an intelligent, on board charger that uses those prices to decide when to buy. That takes care of the bulk power supply problem without requiring owners to abide by a complicated utility tariff they won't understand. For local transformer loading, watch billing data, which should be much easier now that everyone will have an interval meter that calls home at leat once a day. Do the same thing to keep an eye on substations. FP&L instituted a transformer load management project back in the late 1970s so this is not a new idea (I was there at the time). Utilities ought to know how to do this.
Utilities need to considers simpler, common sense solutions that don't require a lot of expensive infrastructure, don't create angry customers, and leave room for others to provide innovative solutions. Unless, of course, they want to play the heavy in a Michael Moore movie.
Electric car leasing?
Jack,
Thanks for weighing in. Yes, utilities can handle local transformer loads - I have the feeling from the PG&E example that, right now, utilites view electric car charging like a bit of a shell game, in that they don't know which shell the big loads are hiding under.
I'm wondering if electric car adoption will require a municipality such as Houston or a small state like Hawaii to buy a fleet of, say, 50 electric cars, put in the infrastructure to serve them at some rational level, then make them available for one week test drives. Use a lottery system to keep it democratiic.
Seems like that would generate a lot of buzz and interest, without consumers having to take the plunge.
How to finance that? Local government could partner with the local utility and automakers and charging station entrepreneurs. No, I havent' done the math...
Adoption will be inhibited by the monster-sized vehicles on the road today, so the electric cars will have to beef up on size and safety, while the Hummers etc. will need to slim down.
Phil
EV charging
If you have to stop and charge during the Peak Time Of Day you have the wrong EV or you shouldn't drive a pure electric, maybe a plugin hybrid, Range extended.
The Nissan LEAF will go 100 miles all electric , for 80% of the population that's more than the 30-40 they drive a day. The Tesla family S sedan goes 300, if you drive more than that you should have taken high speed rail or fly.
Everyone should be able to charge at home Off Peak. There are battery swap stations like Better Place is using so you never have to charge during the Peak Time Of Day.
In fact may of us will sell during the peak with V2G Vehicle to GRID. If the price for selling is set high during Peaks everyone will sell. If it's very low at night off Peak we will all charge off peak. If not you will pay 10 times more than off peak. It's simple put the cost where it belongs.
300 mile-range or fly?
I'd just point out that, in the West here, 300 miles is nothing - I routinely put in 500 to get to the Utah canyon country, and there's no affordable air service. Plus, air travel has a massive carbon footprint, but we won't go there today.
One thing I do not know - has any manufacturer attempted to deliver four-wheel drive level torque in an electric car?
Phil
Electric Charging Stations
Phil,
Again, it appears to be a chicken and egg thing. If you do not have a charging infrastructure, the adoption of electric cars will be slower. If you get the electric cars and the utilities are not ready, you potentially have reliability problems. I think that Utilities will need to be heavily involved in the adoption of these cars or risk unforseen brown-outs/black-outs where they least want them. Today, Nissan Leaf's approach to home charging stations is to work with local electricians to install relatively dumb stations. This could potentially keep the Utilities out of the loop until it is too late. I think the Utilities should be the ones offering the services to install the charging stations so that they can manage and be aware of what happens. The most advanced charging stations on the market today are networked charging stations. There is software developed where the networked stations can prioritize who gets the power and when, preserving the integrity of the grid. Think of the issue of everyone coming home at 7PM and plugging their cars in to be recharged. If five people in the same neighborhood have done this, you could potentially see issues with the distribution system. It of course gets worse with the more people in the neighborhood who have an electric car. If all five home charging stations were linked in a network managed by the utility, there could be intelligence to reduce the power to all of them or at least to provide some level of prioritization. PG&E is right to be looking at this seriously and I hope others utilities are considering it as well. The cars are coming. The clock is ticking. We will not have a smart grid implemented before they get here so some action needs to be taken.
Utility of the future coming soon?
Scott,
This comment of yours struck me: "I think the Utilities should be the ones offering the services to install the charging stations so that they can manage and be aware of what happens."
Yesterday Howard Scott wrote in and pointed out that asking the utility's permission to charge at home is a non-starter, but I can see a notification requirement to the utility, then the utility offers authorized third parties to do the home charging installation.
I think for utilities, it would make sense to focus on affluent, early adopter communities such as Silicon Valley and put in complete systems - home charging stations, work charging stations, combined gas/electric filling stations, just to see how a whole system would behave.
As much as I hate to see gel-haired 20-somethings in $100,000 Teslas tooling around for their lattes...
Phil
Utility of the Future
Phil wrote:
"Yesterday Howard Scott wrote in and pointed out that asking the utility's permission to charge at home is a non-starter, but I can see a notification requirement to the utility, then the utility offers authorized third parties to do the home charging installation."
EVs need to be treated like any other home appliance. A utility's permission should not be necessary, any more than permission or an authorized installer is necessary to install air conditioning. It may be appropriate to modify residential service tariffs so that EV owners pay something toward the cost of required infrastructure upgrades (assuming they really are necessary), though whether these upgrades are really necessary is still to be determined.
Currently i do not need my
Currently i do not need my utilitiy company to approve the use of a new flat screen TV, or even a hair dryer. If I plug in a very large appliance that impacts the power quality of my neighbors, an industrial sized wood chipper, a commercial kitchen, a large vehicle charger, etc. I will likely be asked to either unplug the device or to pay for the upgrades required to properly supply it.