Social interactions will define success of Electric Cars

This was the post I started writing a couple days ago until the first paragraph just metastasized to fill up the page. Once we have more than a few electric cars in town, then those cars will be potentially the biggest stress on the grid.

The peak stress on the power grid starts during the afternoon, during heat-of-the-day air conditioning and work, but it continues through the early evening. Offices are still turned on. Programmed houses are kicking in with their air conditioning in preparation for their owner’s arrival. Families are cooking dinner. The power grid is still working nearly as hard as it can.

Now let’s posit the electric cars coming home, drained from a day of driving. Perhaps they were doubly drained, used to carry their office buildings during the afternoon brown-out. What will people want from their cars next….

• To sit in the garage overnight, slowly charging.
• To be ready to drive 15 miles in twenty minutes when I go get one last kid from athletic practice.
• To be at least half charged and ready for anything in two hours when the baby sitter arrives and mom and dad head out for an evening on the town.
• To quickly get to at least a 40 mile range in case I get an emergency call from the nursing home, and thereafter just be sure to be ready for the morning commute.
• To get a charge for 15 miles by 8:15 when I head to choir practice at church. Better make that 25 lest we stop for coffee afterward.
• It's two hundred miles to the beach and we plan to take full advantage of the expensive week-long rental by getting there tonight! Kids, grab your bags, we are leaving in 20 minutes. Oh, and the car needs a full quick-charge, no matter the expense.

Gasoline handles all these scenarios. Many of them involve discretionary electricity purchases during the early evening peak. We will never solve these problems at the level of machine-controls. We need time of day pricing, to allocate the scarce resource. Just as many restaurants offer Monday-night specials, we need day-by-day pricing, to encourage people to choose when to schedule their evening activities. Electric cars will require live power pricing, by the minute, and by the day.

Let’s consider driving the electrical car further into our lives, and further into our infrastructure. Sometimes I will want to charge my car when I am not at home. This will require that cars identify who they are at the plug.

• When parking downtown, I want to plug in my car. I may want to choose between a quick visit, for a cup of coffee, and an all-day back-to-school shopping event.
• The Green Garage™ offers locally generated wind power for re-charging at its own special rates that vary with the wind. Having been burned once, I want to check prices before I leave the car.
• When I go over to your house for dinner, I want to plug in. Being a polite guest, I of course want the charges to go onto my own bill.
• The whole family gathers in the next town for Thanksgiving dinner. All cars are drained, and need to recharge over the next five hours except for the college kid, who arrives at the last moment, and leaves as soon as he can. Grandpa decides to overrule all normal agreements and cover all the charges for cars plugged in at his house.

The technical feat of creating amazing batteries and lightweight materials, however astonishing and inspiring, will be undone without the capability easy interaction with the lives and aspirations of those who drive the cars. Electric cars will require powerful intuitive systems interfaces, able to learn their owner’s tastes and habits. These systems can only interact with the power grid through simple standard economic interfaces.

Electric Cars will not be useful for Demand-Response

If a performing electric car were to arrive today, with adequate batteries at reasonable cost, it could well push today’s non-transactive energy infrastructure over the edge. Usually I write about intelligent building agents; when I write about the power grid, it is to discuss transacted energy purchases between those agents and an intelligent transaction grid. Today, I am going for those transactions on that grid, but leaving out the building. But first, a little on the building with cars.

There a lot of hopeful scenarios in which peak shaving is enabled by commuter cars plugged into office buildings. Peak shaving, initiated by what are called Demand-Response (DR) signals from the grid, is when buildings lessen their electrical demands to avoid peak periods of energy use. The story goes that we will go to work, and plug in our cars. When the DR event arrives, the building will run off the combined car batteries, reducing demand on the grid.

DR is very important for today’s grid, because the power supplied at the peak is the most expensive and usually the dirtiest to generate. I have seen numbers suggesting that as much as 17% of the grid’s capacity is used for less than 120 hours per year. If we manage peak electrical use, we have effectively grown the power grid for free.

Cars and their batteries, however, will never be an effective peak shaving tool for office buildings. Leave aside for the moment all HR-related issues associated with employers paying for commuting costs, and look at the people. Peak load occurs in the afternoon, and extends into the early dinner hour.

If I live some distance from my employer, will I be willing to end each day with a low charge on my car? Only until the first day I run out on the way home, perhaps because of an unanticipated need to attend a school event for my children, or to attend to a medical issue for my parents, or even to pick up some supplies for a social event. In any case, the first time it happens, I will resolve to park away from the building thereafter.

If I live close to work, I will arrive with my car already charged up. DR participation, always in the afternoon, will leave me always wondering whether I am subsidizing the company. The first time I am turned down for a raise, this thought will begin festering into a general resentment of my employer. Sub-vocal mutterings with phrases such as “blood-sucking leeches” come to mind.

Whether I live far away or whether I live close in, sooner or later I will leave early to head off for a summer (most DR events are during warm weather) weekend at the beach and find that despite my plans, my employer and its building have drained my car.

No, we cannot turn to electric cars to solve the DR needs of our office buildings. Not if actual people are involved. Perhaps if we make sure that our grid is intelligent and two-way transactional we can see a way past this.

I will try to write soon on what intelligence is needed, in grid and car, for more realistic use of more than a few electric cars.