Mar 23 2010

California Utilities: Ground Zero for Electric Vehicles

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

Though it's nice to be wanted, California utilities will nonetheless have to brace themselves for an onslaught of new demand as green-minded customers begin buying electric vehicles in a serious way, according to a new industry study.

The report, “Assessment of Plug-in Electric Vehicle Integration with ISO/RTO Systems,” prepared by a group of 10 electric grid operators across the United States, estimates that a million plug-in electric vehicles will be humming along U.S. roadways in the coming decade. Collectively, if all decided to recharge at once, they could require the equivalent resources of several large nuclear power plants to juice up their batteries.

To estimate where new demand will hit hardest, the report looks at past sales of the Toyota Prius hybrid. Not surprisingly, California led all other states with 124,000 registrations from 2000 to 2007. Florida was a distant second with fewer than 21,000.

Within California, the Los Angeles metropolitan area accounted for nearly 53,000 registrations, while the Bay Area came in at 43,000. The Bay Area alone represented 8.4 percent of all U.S. sales.

Looking ahead, the report estimates that private and government purchases of electric vehicles in the Bay Area will exceed 90,000 by 2019, behind Los Angeles (119,000) but ahead of New York (54,000).

To service these new electric cars just in the San Francisco metropolitan area, if they all plug in at the same time, would require 500 megawatts of new generation, equal to a very large gas-fired power plant. That prospect will present PG&E and other utilities with a considerable challenge.

“There is huge momentum here,” PG&E’s Andrew Tang told the New York Times.

They key to making the transition run smoothly is finding ways to stagger vehicle charging and to concentrate it during off-peak hours at night.

The report proposes the adoption of dynamic pricing to give customers incentives to shift their charging time to off-peak hours, as well as emergency load curtailment – in effect, the ability to stop charging cars temporarily to prevent a system overload.

Managing a broadly distributed smart charging infrastructure will require increased communications capabilities along with traditional electric infrastructure—transformers, wires and the like. Or as PG&E’s Tang has emphasized, it will require a smart grid. That's one reason California utilities are leading the national push for smarter electric infrastructure.

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