Future of Charging: Electric Vehicles
Don Chandler, Senior EV Specialist
The current environmental trend is to move off oil and off gas as sources of energy which means electrifying everything. As described in previous articles, we have limited resources of land, and money. By electrifying everything, we add to the limited resources of sustainable energy, power and time. Urban planners are making better use of land resources with higher densities and reduced driving distances to accommodate a growing population. The construction industry is trying to reduce cost through pre-fabrication, reduce energy use to net zero, and electrify energy use in buildings. Transportation is being electrified at an exponential rate with electric vehicles at the forefront. These changes are putting more demand on our electrical grids for both production and distribution. Efficiency and flexibility are driving adaptation to these changes.
As the pandemic has shifted our land use to include more ‘work at home’, we have reduced some of our demands on transportation, but increased our energy use at home. We still use our vehicles, however, and with more electric vehicles coming 'online' we need to charge them, just as we do our laptops and cell phones. We are used to filling our gas tanks weekly at gas stations and the paradigm shift to charging daily at home takes getting used to. Cars require a lot of energy and can demand up to 25%-200% of our current overall home electricity use.
As homes become more efficient in energy use with net zero designs, our cars will become the major demand on our residential distribution of power in the local grid. The electrical power capacity of our homes are built for peak demand, just as our highways are built for rush hour. Without controlling our demand use, the existing infrastructure will soon be overloaded. By introducing flex time and work at home, the demands on our highways became more manageable. We need to do the same with our power use for charging.
Fortunately, our homes make inefficient use of the available power now with uncontrolled peaks, and our cars are flexible in when and how fast they charge. This allows us to flatten the curve of electrical demand through a variety of smart charging approaches and mine less copper as a result.
We can share the use of our cars. We can simply charge slower, just as the tortoise did with the hare. We can shift the time at which we charge from dinner hour to later at night. We can schedule our use of shared charging stations. We can charge until the utility demands we slow down during peak events or when the cost of sustainable energy is optimal. We can share the available power to average the use over a number of vehicles taking advantage of the laws of large numbers, variable distances travelled, and arrival times. We can charge whenever there is capacity in the building by monitoring the other loads and controlling and sharing the charging. These approaches vary in their convenience, cost, peak demands, and efficiency. A combination of these approaches optimizes the use of our limited resources.
AES’ EV charging designs use some of the smartest energy management systems in the world that reduce the utility costs on our bill. The future will see more integration of smart sharing of power with other flexible building loads like smart lighting systems, heat pumps, dryers, and water tanks. This will flatten the demand curve of the building distribution further and ultimately allow the utility distribution grid to adapt to the changing times with only minor adjustments by selling more energy with existing power distribution capabilities.
At AES, we understand that moving to a better future means recognizing the many ways that innovative green solutions will draw on our existing electrical grid and the potential impact of those increased loads; it means working with governments, utilities, private companies, and individuals to develop new ways to build and support the electrical infrastructure required to meet new demand. We look forward to continuing to be part of this exciting endeavour.
