Smart Grid Library » PHEV

This is Progress? Same Old Guzzlers, Same Old Market Assumptions

Christine Hertzog — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:21:01 +0000

The latest electric vehicle (EV) or plug-in hybrid EV (PHEV) announcements from Detroit deliver good and bad news. While the Chevy Volt may not actually give the average driver 230 miles per gallon, it is certainly much better than the current fleet. I’m pleased with that news. However, recent announcements that GM and other manufacturers – traditional and new – are introducing electric SUVs makes me question if they learned anything from the recent bankruptcy debacle.

There seems to be this shared fantasy amongst car companies and industry watchers that since the cost of electric charging will be less than the cost of gas tank refills, these SUVS are “economical” options for consumers. Well guess what. Unless you can fully rely on electricity generation through your personal microgrid, sooner or later you will be buying electricity from a utility or an electric charging station, and it is going to cost you money and time.

Even with Time-of-Use (TOU) pricing and software to program a car to only charge when electricity is cheapest, charging fees will still add up. At the recent National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC ) summer session, discussions about electricity prices had a recurring theme – in the future, electricity will cost more in every region of the USA.

There is also a set of unspoken assumptions made about the drivers of electric vehicles that don’t model real life. Apparently, EV drivers have no social life because once they are home every evening after work, they won’t drive again until it’s time for that morning work commute. EV drivers are also assumed to be exceptionally well-organized and always charge their vehicles when the rates are cheapest – model citizens of rational behavior.

And finally, cars are still seen as consuming electricity, but not as storage devices that could actually sell electricity too. An electricity-sipping vehicle might possibly make more money for its owner than an electricity-guzzling vehicle, but Smart Grid infrastructure and regulatory policies must be deployed to support full bi-directional electricity flow

We desperately need a new way of thinking about electric vehicles. A good start would be with new standard metrics. Using miles per gallon won’t tell the full story of an EV car’s energy costs and potential profits. What are the miles per kilowatthour (KWh)? This metric is like mpg – and consumers can determine their costs based on energy prices in their region. What is the potential amount of KWh that a consumer can negotiate to sell back to a building or utility and still make it to their destination and/or cheapest charging option?

We also need new market models. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you drove a car off a lot, and instead of it instantly losing a couple thousand dollars in value, it was going to earn you money as an energy storage device? Software that projects these potential earnings could help justify the purchase of an EV, but it needs to be independent of the car manufacturer to be considered credible.

The bottom line is that real energy economy comes from smaller EV vehicles, not electric SUV behemoths similar to the ones that currently roam our highways and suburban roads. Exchanging one form of energy guzzling for another isn’t smart and any car manufacturer that bets its product line on electricity guzzlers will be looking for another taxpayer bailout in a few years. We can’t afford to continue using today’s market models for EVs either. If consumers have options to make money from the EVs as electric storage devices that can sell electricity during peak demands, they’ll embrace the technology.

I’ll be at the Green Software Unconference on Wednesday, August 19th in Mountain View, CA to facilitate discussions about the Smart Grid. Join me there to continue this conversation. http://greensoftwareunconference.eventbrite.com/

O Give Me a Home where the Electric Vehicles do Roam

Christine Hertzog — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 19:35:46 +0000

Electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs) were a hot topic at last week’s National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) summer session. There were many interesting discussions, and it’s important to be aware of them as regulatory commissions will influence decisions about the Smart Grid infrastructure that must be built to support the anticipated proliferation of EVs and PHEVs.
EVs and PHEVs can play several roles in the Smart Grid. They may not only take electricity from the grid or from a building, but they can also be used to return electricity under certain conditions. Their strategic importance as collective energy storage can help set the agenda for the construction of new power generation sources – how much new energy is needed for peak demand, and how much of that peak demand could be intelligently managed with storage.
But underlying all these questions is something of a more fundamental nature: How to manage billing for consumers with roaming EVs/PHEVs that need to recharge? The answer has significant implications for regulatory agencies, utilities, manufacturers and consumers regarding the infrastructure for EVs and PHEVs, the design of batteries (speed of charge and discharge), the use of EVs and PHEVs in electricity demand projections and changing load shapes, the software to manage EV/PHEV billing, and the costs of electricity to consumers.
With today’s current grid, if you drive your EV or PHEV to a friend’s house and plug in there to recharge, your friend will get the bill for the electricity you consumed to recharge your battery. My friends are generous to a fault, but I’m not accustomed to asking them to reimburse me for the gasoline used driving to and from their homes, and my EV/PHEV shouldn’t ask that of them either. Here are a three options that could help form that infrastructure and handle this billing question.
1. Street side charging stations that activate charging with a credit card. The upside – it’s simple and convenient. The downside – it’s hard enough to find parking in many urban areas – try finding a parking spot with a charging station. Wild card – impacts the electricity demand in a utility footprint, and seems to be set up to mostly draw electricity from the grid, not deliver it back to the grid. Bottom line – requires lots of buildout of hard infrastructure like streets, sidewalks, additional electrical lines. Who pays for that?
2. Utility billing software that uses the car’s Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) as the unique identifier. The upside – your EV/PHEV roaming charges appear on your utility bill. The utility may offer great EV rate plans if you agree to let them use your car for energy storage and only recharge at certain times. The downside – utilities’ software systems are not set up today to accommodate anything other than a meter, and roaming often crosses utility boundaries. Deploying these sorts of solutions will incur utility costs that need to be recovered. Wild card –just how scary-looking is that utility billing system. Can it be modified without sending electricity rates sky-high for expensive cost recovery? Bottom line – less hard infrastructure required, but lots of soft infrastructure needed in the form of software.
3. Third party companies that manage the roaming charge processes and negotiates with utilities to set up rate plans for EV/PHEV owners. The upside – reduces the software burden on utilities, they only worry about the millions of meters out there, not the additional millions of cars. These third parties may become energy aggregators that can offer wide scale storage management. The downside – these companies don’t exist, or haven’t come across my radar yet. Wild card – Would utilities work with them? Bottom line – costs are off-loaded from utilities and ratepayers, risks and rewards stay with EV/PHEV owners and these aggregators.
Your local regulatory agencies will have key roles in influencing the options outlined here as well as other possibilities. As much as they don’t want to pick winners and losers in different technologies and services, they will work to keep electricity rates low for consumers.
In the meantime, many people are involved in defining standards for interoperability and security that includes these scenarios. The Smart Grid will have the intelligence and the bandwidth to accommodate millions of EVs and PHEVs, and we’ll give the same amount of thought to where and when we drive as we give to our mobile phone calls – our behaviors and bills will be based on our local or national charging/discharging plans.

Micro Grids Need Easy Energy Storage

Christine Hertzog — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:23:55 +0000

The future Smart Grid will be a highly sophisticated and bi-directional network of electricity and information. It isn’t one huge and monolithic grid, but rather a collection of networks that have some interconnection. Homes, neighborhoods, and campuses can all be smaller Smart Grids “nested” within a larger utility network.

What makes a home its own micro grid? It takes the following (and presumes that the utility has smart meters and the complex systems in place to support a two-way flow of electricity and communication):

An alternative energy source of electricity production like solar panels on your roof
An energy storage capability – the home battery
Internal communicating technology that has contact with all appliances that use electricity – could be a wired or wireless technology
HEMS (home energy management system) software that manages home electricity use and communicates with the preferred utility in real-time about pricing and billing

Let’s talk about the micro grid’s home battery. This is an energy storage device that doesn’t look like the batteries in a flashlight. Based on today’s technologies, it will be much bigger – say the size of an average refrigerator – that will evolve over time into a more compact unit (remember the incredible shrinking cell phones?) It can store the cheapest energy – whether you create that through your own generating capacity or buy electricity from the utility at the lowest price point. It kicks into action based on the agreement you set up with the utility. You might voluntarily disconnect from the utility grid when electricity is expensive to purchase or when your generating capacity can handle your home load. The utility may ask you to disconnect when this type of demand response program eliminates the need to fire up a peaker plant, or to mitigate the loss of transmission or distribution capabilities due to planned or unplanned events (maintenance vs. accident). Your home is its own “island”, which is a term used by utilities to describe this distributed generation concept. How long your home remains islanded from the larger grid is based on your utility agreement as well as you home battery duration, your management of that stored energy, how much electricity you can continue to generate on your own, and the cessation of conditions that caused the utility to island your home.

I like this entire concept, but want to emphasize that the battery needs to be managed by the HEMS system. I want the home battery management system integrated to my HEMS software so that I have one terminal (internet-enabled TV, computer, whatever) that tells me the health of my home battery, how much capacity it has for energy and power (its duration), how long it will take to fully recharge again, and recommend if I should buy power from the utility to recharge it (and at what cost) rather than use my own generating capacity. Thus when it is nestled in a standard home utility closet or garage, it must be regularly updating its status with my HEMS software so I don’t discover that the battery isn’t working properly during a power outage.

Energy storage is a key component of the smart grid whether we’re talking about utility-scale storage or home-based storage. The simplicity by which any energy storage solution is managed is a key contributor to its adoption rate by homeowners – especially those of us who like plug and play instead of interpreting technical installation manuals.

There is a lot of conversation about whether or not the home battery drives away every morning – is it an electric vehicle (EV) or plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) instead of a stationary device. That’s the topic of next week’s blog.