Engineers at Edison's EV Testing Center (Photo: Hurst)

As a perfect storm builds for electric vehicles, some utilities are way ahead of others when it comes to readying the grid–and their customers–for a large-scale deployment of the paradigm-changing EV.

It’s the 240-volt elephant in the room (or 120-volt if you are plugging-in via a standard 20-amp wall plug). What would happen if everyone ran out tomorrow and bought an electric car or plug-in hybrid vehicle? Wouldn’t we just be shifting our carbon emissions to coal-fired power plants and threatening the stability of an already taxed North American grid? The short answer is no. There aren’t enough electric vehicles in production today to have any measurable impact on electricity demand.

And if you ask the engineers at Southern California Edison’s Electric Vehicle Technical Center, the long answer is also no.

Of course, the impact of EV-charging depends on regional variations in energy supply, the time of day vehicles are charged and what kinds of chargers are used.  But industry insiders argue that even if there were all the EVs and plug-in EVs the market demanded, the net impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions would still be a positive one.

A recent study by the Electric Power Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council concluded that by 2050 the widespread adoption of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles could reduce annual vehicle emissions of greenhouse gases by more than 450 million metric tons.

If EVs take off as many industry analysts predict, utilities will have to come to terms with providing electricity to thousands of new cars and trucks every day. And some utilities have already been thinking about this for a long time.

One of SCE's hybrid bucket trucks. (Photo: Hurst)

During early market development, when the number of plug-in electric vehicles is still relatively small, large utilities like SCE expect little impact on overall utility rates and grid performance. But avoiding spikes in electricity demand as a result of charging patterns is an important policy objective for SCE, particularly in what Edison International chairman and CEO Ted Craver admitted was “an extremely peaky system.” Southern California Edison normally runs at about 45-50% of its capacity.

But on a recent tour of Southern California’s Electric Vehicle Tech Center, Craver and director of Electric Transportation Ed Kjaer emphasized that while they provide electricity to 15 million people across SCE’s sprawling service area, there is plenty of capacity for EVs if they are incorporated into a smarter, more efficient system. “Grids need to evolve from unidirectional to multidirectional,” said Kjaer.

Advanced batteries and smart technology

Facing a likely onslaught of electric cars in Southern California, Edison is focused on how they can use the electricity they currently have on the grid to power the necessary infrastructure of electric car-charging networks. In short, the system is in need of more storage and more communication via smart meters, appliances, houses and grids.

SCE’s Electric Vehicle Technical Center is currently testing automotive-grade Lithium-Ion batteries for use in stationary applications in the electric grid. The company plans to begin field testing the batteries soon for several different applications such as small home storage devices and large central plant uses at SCE substations connected to wind farms.

The batteries under study–as well as those that would be studied should SCE be awarded federal grant money it has applied for–can be used to stabilize demand and smooth the spikes created by distributed generation. SCE envisions the day when people come home, plug their car into their house and–depending on the time of day and the home’s energy load–the car’s batteries either begin to provide energy for the house or the house’s batteries begin to charge up the car.

But the research is not just on energy storage, SCE has also researched and implemented new metering rates that encourage customers to use energy more wisely. By establishing three metering rates (standard metering, time-of-use, metering, and plug-in vehicle metering). By sending customers more accurate “price signals” SCE believes they can balance demand — and balance the demand should there be a large-scale transition to EVs. (Continued on page 2)