Brock   : How does industry convince consumers that the Smart Grid will be able to handle EVs on a mass-adoption scale?

  Lefevre   : The consumers, the people I know who even have a glimmer of buying a PEV are not really concerned about whether the grid can handle it or not. They have no real understanding of how power gets to their house. All they know is that you plug in a lamp and turn it on and it works. They just accept it. It’s there and if it goes away during a power outage, they’re not particularly concerned about it because they know it will come back on sooner or later. The potential impact of EVs on the grid would probably not enter significantly into their decision to buy a car.

What concerns them most is cost, conveniences, and range anxiety. As for cost, the industry is currently working on that: Consumers get tax breaks and other kinds of incentives. Surveys show, however, that customers aren’t willing to limit when to charge. They don’t want utilities telling them that they have to plug in at night. They want to come home at 6 p.m. and plug in, something that concerns people in the industry who worry about clusters. For example, at 6 p.m. customers still have air conditioning on and could be drying clothes all of which puts excess draw on the power source.

One of the areas people talk about for maintaining the charge in the car is battery swapping. One goes into a battery swapping vendor and exchanges a depleted car battery for a fully charged one. Whereas consumers in the U.S. are rejecting this idea, users in China are finding the exercise necessary. Because a large portion of the population lives in high-rise units that do not provide assigned parking spaces, battery swapping is the logical choice. Another interesting thing that consumers are saying is that they only want to plug in when they need to. It’s like gas. If they go to their electric car and turn it on to see the battery is half charged, they don’t feel much like plugging in. Many will wait until it gets down to a quarter charge and then plug in.

Consumers are voicing other concerns: They say there aren’t enough charging stations and charging times are too long. This brings up the subject of charging levels. Level 1 is 120 volts, 5 to 15 amps. This level is suitable for a Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid. The consumer plugs in and waits ten hours for a full charge. However, it would take much longer for a fully electric vehicle, such as a Nissan Leaf, to reach full charge.

Level 2 is 240 volts, 20 to 30 amps, and that’s much faster. Depending on which battery is being charged it can still take from three to eight hours, still a fair amount of time. However, surveys have indicated that most Leaf and Volt owners do not purchase the level 2 charger. They apparently are satisfied with running their cars without a fully charged battery.

The thing about Level 1 and Level 2 is that operational standards have been established by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and vendors know how to meet those standards. The fact that Level 1 and Level 2 standards exist is a very big deal.

Level 3, which means a very fast charge, will be of vital importance but at this time nobody knows what Level 3 really is. There are no standards at play but fast chargers are definitely showing up. Fast chargers will not be installed in home situations, only at outside locations. People are expecting that a fast charge will charge an EV in a matter of minutes similar to the time it takes to fill their gas tank at a regular filling station. Even a fast charge will likely take longer than that.

The burning question becomes, “How can utilities gain the confidence of consumers?” There are, in fact, a lot of things that can be done. Energy providers can reach consumers by forming partnerships with automobile distributors that offer the Nissan Leaf or Chevrolet Volt or EVs from other manufacturers. Utilities can work with these distributers to educate the consumer about such concerns surrounding range anxiety or batteries for example. The Electric Drive Transportation Association (EDTA), the preeminent U.S. industry group dedicated to the promotion of electric drive, maintains a portal. In addition, the EDTA GoElectric Drive website – goelectricdrive.com – offers a tremendous amount of information that is very useful to consumers.

  Brock   : Once acceptance begins to ramp up in a big way, what regulatory and policy issues must be addressed in order to successfully provide power?

  Lefevre   : The regulatory people aren’t particularly concerned. What they are carefully watching are issues around transmission lines particularly the shortage of lines yet to fully integrate renewable energy into the grid.

On the policy side, China has a national strategy to become the largest supplier of electric vehicles in the world. The country expects to have 25 million cars on the road in 2015 and they want 10 per cent of those to be electric. The European Commission has a Green Cars initiative, funded with 5 billion euros, to accelerate the development of EVs. The United States has earmarked 3 billion dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 to promote electric transportation. The U.S. funding has been used in several ways. Of particular importance is the support of battery research and the deployment of charging stations in many places throughout the nation.

During the current Congress, two major legislative events have taken place in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the Senate.

In the House, the proposed legislation is called, “The Electric Drive Vehicle Deployment Act of 2011 (H.R.1685).” The major element of the bill is that the Department of Energy (DOE) should select ten deployment communities to put up electric vehicle infrastructure, e.g. charging stations. There will be tax credits for people to buy electric vehicles and grants to develop some of the infrastructure. The selected communities will have to put up matching funds, but there will also be bonds, loans, and loan guarantees. This is a fair-sized deal.

The bill called for US$300 million to develop these ten deployment communities. The legislation was inspired by a document entitled “The Electrification Roadmap,” which came out in November 2009. It is the brainchild of a number of high level corporate people at companies that include PG&E, Nissan, the battery manufacturer A123 Systems, and the charging system deployer Coulomb Technologies. The point of the exercise is that electric vehicles will be in the field some time and when they arrive, communities will be able to handle the specific needs. If the vehicles are allowed to enter the market naturally without some preparation of the areas, they run the risk of shooting themselves in the foot as it will take decades to come to anything like a significant level of deployment. To this end, “The Electrification Roadmap” recommended putting a fair amount of money into deployment communities to encourage people to buy electric vehicles and to use the entire infrastructure. It is hoped that two things will come of this: One, usable data on consumer behaviour; and two, the take-up by the early adopters will motivate the rest of this community to purchase electric vehicles. They will see that it makes sense to take advantage of the infrastructure. Further, it is hoped that other communities who see the success
will emulate the deployment communities using private capital. Overall, the idea will be the driver to get electric vehicles on the streets more rapidly.

In the Senate, a similar bill (S.948) was introduced by Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore. In congress Alexander is one of the biggest promoters of electric vehicles.

It is unlikely that these bills will be acted on in this Congress but it is encouraging that they have been introduced in a bipartisan manner.

  Brock   : What technological challenges must be addressed to successfully provide and store power for EVs once adoption takes place?

  Lefevre   :
Batteries: Battery technology is one of the long poles in the tent. The price of a battery right now is $900 per kilowatt hour. The industry wants to get it down to $500 per kilowatt hour by 2015. The thing about batteries is that electricity has been around for a long time and people have been working on batteries for all that time. There simply isn’t anything like Moore’s Law for batteries. According to Moore’s Law you can double the number of transistors on an integrated circuit every two years. But battery improvements are very incremental. There is no history showing that technology will be able to double the energy density every two years.

However, there is some headway out there. In February 2012 at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Summit, Envia Systems unveiled a Lithium-Ion battery that achieves 400Wh/kg at $150/kWh. These values are well beyond the current state-of-the-art and offer the possibility of making a family-size automobile available at $20-25,000 without subsidies. Envia Systems believes that these batteries will be commercially available in 2015. There is some skepticism that this can be accomplished since there have been highly publicized breakthroughs in the past that have not actually come to pass but the available information is encouraging.

Intelligent on-board power management: The IEEE Control Systems Society had an interesting article about this called “Battery Management Systems,” published in Control Systems Magazine in June 2010. This is another piece of intellectual property that IEEE is working on that will help improve the EV and EV battery performance.

Storage: Storage is another big deal for renewables. Among other things, the industry talks about having stationary batteries that grab solar energy during the day and feeds it to the electric vehicle at night. Think about that: Solar energy is DC and batteries are all DC, so this should be relatively easy to do. You don’t have to convert AC electricity, which comes out of your wall plug, to DC to charge the battery. Everything is very nice and convenient. However, batteries designed to accomplish this task are quite expensive at the moment. Tesla and their partner SolarCity have a commercial product that is interesting.

Wireless charging: At this point it’s interesting to bring out one piece of research that is going on – wireless charging. It is possible to charge batteries wirelessly and there are some people who think that it will be possible to wirelessly charge these batteries while they are in a moving vehicle. It sounds fantastic, but some R&D folks are looking at it.

Power Electronics: We need to work on things like power electronics, motor drives, and other electric machines. For example, as you go to more and more electric kinds of vehicles, you might combine the alternator and the starter into one unit, making it smaller and more efficient. Then you could think about electromechanical power trains and vehicle controllers. There is a company called Hybrid Electric Vehicle Technologies (HEVT), Inc. that makes electrical control units that are based on artificial neural networks. Think about that, we’re talking about some very high-tech stuff. Ali Emadi, a founder of HEVT and a member of IEEE, is recognized as one of the best researchers in the world on Hybrid Electric Vehicles.

  Brock   : Thank you Dr. Lefevre for your valuable insights about EV policy and various storage options. We look forward to continuing this dialogue in the future on other EV-centric topics.

  Lefevre   : You are welcome, Jon. The pleasure is mine.

About the Author

Jon Brock is president of Desert Sky Group LLC, an advisory firm based in Denver, Colorado providing independent and unbiased advice and consulting services to the utility and energy industry. Jon also serves as EET&D Magazine’s EnVision 2030 contributing editor and is the chair of the Smart Grid RoadShow. EnVision 2030 interviews and presentations are focused on the long-term evolution of the Smart Grid and grid-related technologies.