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SMART MOVE: If carmakers want to fill garages and driveways with electric cars, they're going to have to figure out the best way to keep all of those batteries charged (without taking down the electrical grid).
Image: © JYESHERN CHENG, COURTESY OF ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
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It will take years before there are enough electric cars and gas–electric hybrids on the road to put much of a dent in the output of the electrical grid. But once they do roll out en masse, these vehicles (and their drivers) will have to be smart about when they recharge so that utilities can avoid spikes in grid demand and drivers can avoid spikes in their electric bills. This puts carmakers and utility companies on the spot to develop a uniform technology that lets cars communicate with the grid, and vice versa.
Ideally, drivers will be able to program the start time for charging, the rate they want to pay, and the time needed to complete charging, says Nancy Gioia, Ford Motor Co.'s director of Sustainable Mobility Technologies and Hybrid Vehicle Programs. "As electric vehicles hit the road, you need to predict what technology you need to have out there to be able to use the extra capacity in the system at off-peak hours," she adds.
A common scenario depicting how so-called "smart charging" will work: Electric vehicle (EV) drivers return home from work in the evening after having used some portion of the battery charge during the day. They plug into an outlet (most likely in their garage, if they have one) and use in-car controls to set a timer that dictates the period when the battery actually draws juice for its recharge. If drivers get home at 6 P.M., for example, they might want to wait until 9 P.M. to avoid overburdening the electric grid—and possibly to get a better price for the electricity.
"The reason we want to have vehicles talking to utilities is primarily so we can make sure that we don't make any peak loads worse than they are today," says Britta Gross, General Motors's manager of Hydrogen and Electrical Infrastructure Development. Utilities do not want EVs adding significantly to peak demands, she adds, because the peak defines how many more power-generation plants utilities have to build.
"Some utilities will have very advanced technology in homes, but others won't for some time to come," Gross says. "We have to make sure the vehicle works in that sort of broadly defined environment." Although GM's OnStar in-car communication service seems well suited to become a part of any smart-charging system that must connect with utility companies, Gross points out, "we haven't talked about is how this relates with OnStar."
OnStar is like a help desk for drivers, using Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite and cellular technology to connect both the vehicle and driver to accident assistance operators, driving directions and other services, wherever they are. "Everyone is in agreement with what the physical connector will look like, but until we have common standards," she says, "it doesn't make sense to go too far down the road."
Ford, on the other hand, expects its SYNC in-car communications system will play a big role in tying in with home owners' smart meters to determine how much vehicle batteries need to be charged, how long it will take, and when to charge them, Gioia says. Ford claims that more than one million of the vehicles it has sold have SYNC systems.
Whereas OnStar and SYNC may be important as stepping stones to smart charging systems, the technology will not take off until utility companies and EVs have a single, standard protocol for communicating. (Imagine the mess if different car companies each wanted to send data to and from utilities in their own way.)
"We have the technology but need to create standards to make sure it can connect with all of the smart metering technology out there," says Mark Duvall, director of Electric Transportation at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), a Palo Alto, Calif.–based group of energy researchers funded primarily by the electric utility industry. "If we do these simple things there's more than enough capacity in the electrical system to charge all of these vehicles with very little additional investment in the grid."
The Society of Automotive Engineers's (SAE) Hybrid Task Force began working early last year, with input from carmakers, utilities and suppliers, to develop a standard that will connect any vehicle to one of hundreds or even thousands of different smart-metering systems or other external devices that want to communicate with plug-in vehicles, says Duvall, who is also co-chair of the SAE task force. "It's a step-by-step process," he says, "one that I hope we'll be able to finish in the next 18 months or so. I would personally like to see the things that we are working on here start to show up in new vehicles in the next few years."
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15 Comments
Add CommentBy the time it's a problem, I will have many very efficient solar panels.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet's just hope they turn off these rediculously wasteful street lights after 22h00.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot only will solar panels be cheap but they produce electric at peak power needs so far more valuable. Now add the valuable peal power from the EV and one can make a nice piece of change. Ev's will save the grid, not burden it.
For solar farms PV panel are now under $1/wt which in a few yrs is what retail will be.
Should lithium air batteries live up to their promise of ten times the energy density of current lithium ion technology then this may all take off more rapidly than expected.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article is negligent in not identifying the substantial quid pro quo that electric cars with substantial batteries can offer the power utilities. Deferring their charging is only one side of the deal. Vehicles, even only partially charged, may offer a smart grid energy when the grid is under stress from peaking demand. Selling this premium value energy back to the grid can help smooth out not only the variable demand but also the less reliable supply from some renewable sources. It will drop the cost of our utility power supply.
A simple algorithm for electrical energy value is one relating the price to an inverse of the frequency delta from nominal (the lower the frequency, the lower the spinning reserve, the more valuable the energy). Substantial electric car ownership and the consequent massive distributed energy storage thus created will only achieve its potential energy cost saving if such a simple spot market is created.
Sorry, I have to disabuse others here of false optimism on the Solar PV front. The recent report in this magazine showed a Credit Suisse analysis of the "levellized cost of energy" from different sources (rolling up the cost of installing and maintaining the sources indefinitely etc.). Solar PV was the worst by some margin.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOf course, you could just build more power plants to make energy cheap and abundant, then this wouldn't be a problem.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd, please, spare us the solar power utopia rhetoric. You'll never be able to make a solar cell efficient enough to get around the basic limitation of 1 kW per square meter. That's all the sunlight hitting the planet folks. You can't get any more than that. You're going to need 25 square meters of perfect sunlight just to run your car at cruising speed, and a 100 square meters for peak power. And that's with 100% efficient solar panels and a perfectly transparent atmosphere.
Most cars are parked most of the time while their owners work. The PV (photovoltaics) on top of the garage or carport at home could save up energy while they are not in use. A battery-swapping system at home?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSimply creating more supply (sic) does not solve the variable demand situation. The cost of power from a power station depends on what fraction of its capacity is used. Cost is optimized near 100% capacity, below that cost goes up. Further, turning power stations on and off is not a quick matter. Spikes must be anticipated leading to extended periods of sub-optimum generation. "Peak shaving" with smart loads that can defer demand until a more opportune time can help (e.g with EV charging). Also stored energy in pumped hydro can be turned on with a four to ten second turn-on time can help plug the supply deficit at that time. Massive battery storage from EV could reduce this to under one second, virtually eliminating the need to have power stations run with large amounts of reserve capacity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEnergy storage is the all important "warehousing" that allows supply and demand to be matched thereby creating an optimally efficient market with the lowest cost energy.
We ran into a problem with "cheap" nuclear power - what to do with the radioactive materials when we finished using them, and it is still unsolved as we build more nuclear plants. What is is the cost in energy to make the batteries, and what do YOU do with them when they no longer store or produce energy? Or shall we pat ourselves on the back, feel good, and overlook the problem...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRecycle. Simple. Sell the dead batteries to the supplier (Legislate that they have to buy back.). They have lost none of the high value raw materials They're just a bit muxed ip, that's all. And they are not radioactive nor particularly poisonous. (Cadmium's a thing of the past.) They need energy to turn these materials back into new batteries but that can be factored in. This embodied energy is a reasonably small fraction of the total they can store within their cycle life.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt just needs organizing.
Toyota pay $200 for the small (NiMH) batteries used in their hybrids, "to ensure they are properly recycled".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPreventing plug-in spikes maybe simple. Each car needs to recharge in a randomly selected time within the allowed daily time frame.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor example if recharging takes 4 hours and allowed time frame is from 6pm to 7am then the car would pick a random start time from 6pm to 3am.
This would cause all plug-in times to be distributed smoothly.
The international standard for electric vehicle plug ins and battery swaps HAS been designed, is open for ALL car manufacturers to get on board when they realise otherwise they'll be left behind and go bankrupt, is being deployed in Israel, Denmark, Canberra Australia and San Franciso, and is called "Better Place".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGet on board or be left behind.
I'm not sure how SCIAM views many links to things (and may be concerned about spam),
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisso google
"Better Place" + battery swap movie
...to see a movie on how it works. It's like a car wash that you drive through, it is automated, and then you are on your way FASTER than you can fill up your petrol guzzler.
Also, its V2G, which means it can sell back to the grid. You charge during peak supply and sell back in peak demand, and it makes you some money while helping backup the future renewable grid. Too Easy. And because "Better Place" maintain ownership of the battery, you don't have to buy another $4000 battery every 4 or 5 years. Even better.
And when on a per km basis the electricity only costs the equivalent of 80 cents per litre fuel now, EVEN BETTER!
Unless some miraculous new quick charge super-cap like Eestor comes online faster than Better Place, they **will simply be** the paradigm shift countries make in the coming decade.
Deutsch Bank have already called Better Place THE game changer.
The revolution is coming. Get ready.
Instead of using fossil fuels as the source of electricity why don't we invest our focus and money on alternative energy sources like solar, wind, fuel cell, hydroelectric forces that could generate the same electricity needed to power these cars. This way when you use these cars, the electricity flowing into it is not cutting out the middle man. that is, the flow is not coming from a likely fossil fuel burning source.
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