James Bushnell with the Energy Institute at Haas wrote about a study he co authored looking at whether electric vehicle owners are willing to accept a monthly payment to participate in managed charging. The study offered payments ranging from $0 to $40 per month to give the utility access to controlling when the EV charges. Less than 5% signed up even at the highest payment.
While this study was useful in revealing that flat payments will not induced much customer participation. But that does not mean that pricing cannot be used to enhance participation.
To start, here’s two important observations:
- Clearly TOU pricing is working for EV owners because they start charging at midnight. It is the observation of this incremental response that triggered this study. We can use that knowledge to construct more effective incentives to manage EV charging.
- Customers do not trust their utility and in many places, the utility is doing its best to undermine that trust even further. Of course no one want to let the utility control their EV in some nefarious way. Customers either want to maintain control, or turn that control over to an agent who they trust more or they can switch from.
The solution is to have different sets of TOU periods with staggered starting and ending times. The utility is easily able to have set different starting and ending times so as to smooth the load curve. (Agricultural customers already have a range of tariff options, including picking different peak pricing days.) The first TOU offering could run from 8 pm to 1 am, and the next could run from 8:30 to 1:30, etc. The utility could set the least desirable (e.g., 10 am-3pm) as the default and then offer a limited set of specific start time periods within each circuit as alternative options. Customers could even bid for specific slots. In this way customers maintain control over when they get the lowest prices for charging.
Another option is to have the EV car companies manage the charging. Consumers who buy from that company buy choice (rather than through a mandate as it is with the electric utility) are more likely to trust that company, and may feel that they can switch to a different company if they are unsatisfied. (There might even be third party vendors who can step in.) They would partner with the utility on distributing charging across a neighborhood circuit, maybe even using versions of the shifting TOU period schedules described above. The response would be coarser than direct utility control but it likely would achieve the majority of the load shifting benefits that are needed.
Economics Outside the Cube 
BEV’s are generally smart enough to interact over 4g/5g networks to talk to apps on users phones. PHEV’s perhaps a bit less. The app’s provided by the car manufactures are pretty terrible and rarely improve. Improvements to the app might well requires car software updates that the manufacturer is desperate to avoid. So that makes it tough for traditional car companies to respond to regulatory requests for features (lack of motivation and technical competence).
One could jump in with a third party app that talked to the car over an API (over 4g/5g). There is some real technical risk that the app will aggressively poll the car’s charge status (to be helpful) and then run down the car’s battery.
Oh. Many EV’s require a data subscription of $10-$15/month to use the 4g/5g radio that allows the app to control the car.
It’s also not helpful that the standard L2 charging connecter (J1772) is “dumb” and can’t get any data from the car.
The next place to add some smarts is the L2 charger. Plenty of these are technically obsolete. These L2 chargers would be easy to upgrade if connecting them with an outlet was easy and sensible. But the correct (safest) way to connect a L2 charger is by having it hardwired into a dedicated circuit. This means the average man now needs an electrician to pull off a charger upgrade. Then you need the average homeowner to get their L2 charger connected to the Internet and the app on their phone. For some this is easy, for others this is a huge task.
Once the L2 charger is connected then you need to configure it in some meaningful way that deals with energy policy and user wants vs. needs for charging to be completed by a certain time.
I had been waiting for the last few years for PG&E and the other IOU’s to deliver at home EV sub-metering. But this has pretty much been a bust. Very few chargers support the protocol (vague) and the market design made it the customers problem to find a vendor who is willing to connect their fancy L2 charger to a sub-meter data provider (and pay that vendor too).
I’d like to see more attention to “smart” submetering where preferential energy rates can be offered to customers who can comply with the program needs. The “new” PG&E EV2-A rate of $0.23/kw for off-peak charging from midnight to 3pm is pretty good. Perhaps raise the rate to 0.25 for dumb charging and lower the rate to $0.20 for smart submetered app charging.
I’d also like to see some effort to court Tesla to build the submetering features into their next gen L2 home charger. They should also be allowed to run a private data broker service to allow their charger customers easy access to these preferential rates. That should provide enough competitive anxiety to get the other charger vendors to figure out the data broker situation too.
The current CPUC design for the sub-metering does not really address the value in giving the utility control over the start time/stop time/rate of charge. I’d like to see this in the hands of the utility, except that they are terrible at customer facing software and web-sites. And the sub-metering effort is almost 10 years old with rather pathetic progress.
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Karl, A rather bleak portrayal of the current EV managing charging environment. The question then who is best positioned to solve this since isn’t optional when we reach a high penetration of EVs. History tells us that the utilities are not well motivated and are trailers, not leaders. We wouldn’t have had widespread use of either natural gas combined cycle plants or solar PV if we hadn’t had deregulation. Allowing other providers spurred the needed technology development and adoption. Solving this also likely will require regulatory agencies outside of the CPUC to accept more responsibility for addressing this–“breaking silos.”
Ford and GM have run pilots with PG&E and I have not seen assessments and lessons learned. Those types of experiences will help move forward.
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