Electric Vehicles as part of the Grid

I am working on a book about what we learned about operating electric utilities, and where I think that journey will ultimately lead...for those who continue the journey. This is an early excerpt about how electric vehicles fit into that future.

Electric vehicles (EVs) have arrived, even though there is a stubborn and hostile contingent of the population that claims they will never have anything to do with one. In 2022 EV sales hit nearly 6% of the total vehicle sales (double where they were at this time in 2021) and there is nothing to suggest that the surge in sales is over. Prices are coming down. Range is growing. The charging options are increasing, and even a non-car person must notice that the best designs and most clever technology is going into the EV offerings of each manufacturer.

All of this is happening as EVs are viewed only through the lens of transportation options, but EVs will soon be much more than a transportation option. EVs will become, once more electric utilities get in the game and offer non-volumetric, cost-based retail rates, fixtures of the grid itself. For the homeowner or small business owner, an EV will become a transactional device that will facilitate exchanges between the electric utility and the EV owner. This dispersed set of battery storage resources will also dramatically improve the efficiency of the grid generation assets. The impact of the coming of the EVs really cannot be overstated.

With modernized retail electric rates, and slightly improved EV chargers, an EV will be capable of entering a matrix of available retail rates, and the user’s transportation needs, to find a solution which will result in taking energy from the grid to store in the EV batteries at a near-zero energy cost. Conversely, if the EV is plugged into an advanced smart charger, and if the EV owner so chooses, the utility will be able to buy energy back from the EV when the utility needs additional resources. This transaction is generally called Vehicle to Grid (V to G) and all the technology we need to deploy this system already exists. That’s right. Your new EV can generate revenue for your home or business! TVA can expedite the availability of these modernized retail rates in the southeast by pricing their wholesale power accordingly. There is not a technology problem, there is only the love of the status quo that separates us from having the electric rate environment we desperately need.

Beyond a new revenue stream for the EV owner, EVs will also transform the grid and help dramatically reduce carbon emissions associated with electric power generation. EVs will perform this magic by reshaping the problem that vexes the utilities and creates a large amount of their carbon emissions. Everyone in the electric utility fraternity knows about the big problem they all share. The problem is that each day the grid must deliver the precise amount of energy required to satisfy the demand of the loads connected to the grid, and that demand, when expressed as a simple graph depicting demand vs. hours of the day, is not a neat flat line. Rather, it is actually a daily sine-wave with the peak of the wave lasting about 12 hours and the valley of the wave occupying the other 12 hours. It is the up and down shape of electric power demand, which has existed for the last one hundred years, that makes the generation of electric power so inefficient.

Up until recently, grid connected batteries simply didn’t exist on any significant scale, so energy storage doesn’t exist on any significant scale. As a result, utilities must follow that sine wave of daily demand up and down, starting generation assets as load increases, idling those assets as load eclipses the capacity  of those units and starting larger units (and if the happen to be starting something like a coal fired unit that was idled 12 hours earlier due to declining load, the starting routine is quite medieval – tons of fuel oil are dumped into the boiler and set ablaze to get it ready to burn coal) resulting in massive carbon emissions, as well as financial cost, every single day. EVs as part of grid can begin to solve the problem. They can utilize the massive excess capacity that is available each night, thus allowing the utilities to keep generation units running, especially non-carbon emitting units like nuclear assets, and renewables, thus stabilizing the grid and reducing the sine-wave daily load shape. Thus, the amateur “analysis” of the carbon emissions density of EVs, wherein some “expert” alleges that all kWh used to charge an EV is directly associated with increased greenhouse gas emissions, is completely and totally wrong, just like so much of what one finds on social media. EVs functioning as grid appliances, as described here, will not only erase the greenhouse gas emissions of today’s internal combustion engine powered vehicles, they will also act to erase smokestack emissions from the generation of electric power, by improving the daily load shape the grid must supply.

At the same time, a charged EV will also become the standby power generator for the home, small business, or even a neighborhood, when a critical mass of EVs is in place in a neighborhood. Indeed, that EV that you are snarling at as you cling to your ancient internal combustion transportation device, is set to make your life better from many different perspectives.