Electric Vehicles: Southern California Edison Prepares

Phil Carson | Jul 20, 2010

 

I shy away from gambling, except on games of skill at which I excel, which indeed are few. The reason? I have a tendency to pick the wrong horse.

This weakness was in evidence at a recent conference where two, simultaneous briefings were held, one on consumer behavior, the other on electric vehicles. I picked the former, which turned out to be deserted for the latter.

We've covered a range of electric vehicle (EV) related topics here in recent months, including how CIOs think about electric vehicles, how public policy is "driving" EVs, smart charging innovations, vehicle-to-grid issues and potential EV impacts on the grid.

Having heard Doug Kim, Southern California Edison's director of EV readiness, on a recent Electric Drive Transportation Association webcast, I thought I'd dial in closer to see what a "first responder" is doing.

The upshot is that Southern California Edison (SCE) has studied the situation and believes it will see slow, incremental uptake of EVs in its service territory over the next few years. Due to viral buzz (my attempt to update "word-of-mouth"), this uptake is likely to occur in clusters, possibly requiring upgrades to neighborhood transformers.

SCE will attempt to track market adoption through an outreach program that uses its website, bill inserts and a relationship with EV manufacturers to connect with EV buyers.

Connecting with EV buyers will allow the utility to communicate its three-step advice: understand charging options, which may require work by a third party at your home; understand your charging rate options from SCE, which will help you analyze them; and have any needed infrastructure installed before you bring a new EV home.

(The utility plans to provide an online bill-estimation tool to help calculate the impact an EV might have on your utility bill.)

SCE offers a "standard residential rate," a "whole house 'time-of-use' rate" and an "electric vehicle-only 'time-of-use' rate," all with differing per-kilowatt-hour charges. The latter requires a separate meter, provided by the utility, but the work must be done by a third party and paid for by the homeowner. 

"These options underline the importance of understanding one's charging options and rate plans before the work is done," Kim told me.

SCE does not get involved in home retrofits to accommodate charging technology, nor will it be involved in public charging stations, at least until the California Public Utilities Commission rules on the question. Third-party vendors have received federal stimulus dollars to build charging infrastructure in certain target markets and the auto manufacturers have established relationships with those vendors, according to Kim.

"Certainly the cars represent incremental loads on our system and they are somewhat unique from what we've seen in the past," Kim said. "Depending on what level charging customers use, the load impact on our side - say high, Level II charging - could be the equivalent of a whole house load.

"That's a pretty significant load and we've done a lot of analysis over the past year around what we think is going to happen - the number of cars, when customers will charge them and at what level.

"All that planning suggests that the impact on the utility system will be on a very localized level," Kim said. "We'll see a pretty small number of cars in the early years. We expect this market will evolve over time. In the first two, three years, we see the impacts as local, affecting neighborhood transformers and lateral feeders.

"The degree to which you can forecast that clustering will be very beneficial," Kim concluded. "That's why we place such importance on our customer outreach program."

Despite intuition, which tells us that Southern California will be an early adopter area, what do SCE's studies tell us?

First, the utility studied regular hybrid adoption patterns after Toyota's Prius hit the market in 2000. General statistics on American car buying reflected that half of the Prius' sold worldwide were sold in the United States. Of all the cars sold in the U.S. 12 percent were bought in California. Further, 26 percent of hybrids bought in U.S. were bought in California.

A direct survey of 3,000 SCE customers showed that roughly half of respondents are interested in purchasing an EV. More than half of those are willing to charge during off-peak hours.

If just under half would not be willing to charge during off-peak hours, how would that impact the utility? 

"Part of our customer education is to clearly communicate the benefits for consumers of charging during off-peak hours," Kim said. "We see room to improve on the number of customers willing to charge overnight."
 
"There's a strong need for all key stakeholders to work together in this space - the manufacturers, the utilities, the infrastructure vendors," Kim concluded. "It's a brand new market."

Phil Carson
Editor-in-chief
Intelligent Utility Daily
pcarson@energycentral.com
303-228-4757