The electric vehicle market is growing with each passing month. Gone are the days where heads would turn when you finally saw a Tesla on the road or when it seemed bizarre to see EV-only parking spots in parking garages. Today, customers can choose from several dozen different commercially available EVs, and while they still aren’t necessarily affordable to all families at their current price points, now alongside more luxury models from Tesla, BMW, and Mercedes are more affordable options from Hyundai, Toyota, and Chevrolet. In lockstep with more frequently sold EVs has been the growth in Charging infrastructure across the country, jumping from 16,000 public EV charging stations (43,000 total connections) in 2017 to nearly 25,000 charging stations (79,000 connections) in 2020.
As the prevalence of EVs on the roads continues to grow, utilities have flipped the script. Whereas the new power requirements for charging EVs was once considered a challenge (how are we going to make sure we have enough electricity to charge all those cars?), they are now seen as a prime opportunity for transformation (with all those EVs plugging in each day, how can we use that to make the entire Energy Grid more optimized?).
As the word salad (alphabet soup?) of a title for this article previewed, V1G charging and V2G charging are two of the mechanisms by which utilities are investigating how EVs will be able to benefit all power consumers, while V3G is the term I completely made up to imagine what might come next! So, what can a planned and deliberate EV charging program from a utility do now (V1G), in a few years (V2G), and in the fantastical future I imagine (V3G)?
Note: This article was inspired by the valuable paper recently put out by the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) on ‘Guidelines for Selecting a Communications Protocol for Vehicle-Grid Integration.’ If you want to learn more about this hot topic, I highly suggest checking it out!
V1G- Vehicle to Grid Integration
V1G charging is possible today, and it represents the base way by which utilities can leverage EV fleets to enhance the entire grid.
The basic idea behind the opportunity for EVs to be an asset rather than the burden is that utilities may be able to observe the daily charging habits of EV drivers at home and find a way to adjust how and when the batteries are charged. If a driver typically comes home from work, plugs in the car, and doesn’t need to drive it again until the next morning, it may be beneficial to have the car not start charging until the middle of the night (when demand is lower) rather than right away in the early evening hours (commonly known as peak demand, when aggregate demand reaches its highest point thanks to everyone being home, cooking dinner, operating appliances, etc.).
If the utility operator can automate this process of delaying when the car is charged and ensure it still gets fully charged in time for the driver to leave in the morning (with, of course, the customer having the option to override this at any point if they so choose), then less power would need to be generated to meet the peak demand levels. The utility benefits from not needing to build out an extra power plant to meet growing demand, by reducing congestion on the transmission and distribution infrastructure, and even by shifting the charging of the EV to a time when there may be more available renewable energy on the grid (e.g., wind energy can be more prevalent later in the evening).
Meanwhile, the customer who is allowing the utility this access to adjusting their power demand benefits as well. V1G programs are essentially a type of demand-side management strategy, which many utilities compensate customers for their participation. By agreeing to ‘shift’ their energy use to the less in-demand hours, utilities can offer financial incentives, cheaper energy prices, and other benefits. These programs are similarly used by some homes with smart thermostats, or even in households who sign up to receive email or text alerts when demand is getting too high and agree to consume less power during those times. V1G charging is just another method of this demand-side management, but the appeal to utilities is that as EV drivers grow in numbers, their collective demand they’ll be able to shift will be even greater and their ability to optimize grid delivery services, as a result, will magnify as well.
Note that the use case for V1G can be Residential AC Charge Management or Workplace AC Managed Charging, both of which come with their own communications protocol, challenges, and opportunities. See the aforementioned SEPA paper to learn more.
V2G- Bi-Directional Charging
While V1G is available in certain areas today by power providers (but not by the Orlando Utilities Commission—ahem—please step up!), V2G is still a bit further off but is actively being experimented with and developed. Whereas V1G only allows the utility to interact with the EV charging by shifting when the car is charged, V2G makes utility operators salivate because it takes advantage of another asset EV drivers bring: their car batteries. If enabled, V2G would allow the utility to also pull energy from the car battery to the grid when it was needed. Instead of simply shifting when the EVs were charging, utilities and the drivers could work together to intentionally charge the EV battery during the times when energy is abundantly available and cheap (e.g., during the middle of the afternoon when solar power is available in excess of what the power grid can physically use at the moment) and then send that power from the car battery back into the grid at a later time when the energy systems are more strained and electricity prices have risen (e.g., those early evening peak demand hours previously mentioned).
In this instance, the impact of V2G can theoretically be orders of magnitude greater for utilities and customer alike. For instance, a challenge with installing new renewable energy is that the economics can sometimes be difficult for individual projects when instances arise where more clean energy is generated that can be used by the grid (e.g, very sunny or windy days) and that excess energy ends up being curtailed, wasted, or sold at a loss. But if there was a massive, readily available source of energy storage (say, tens of thousands or more EVs plugged into chargers) then that clean energy could be stored temporarily until the demand rose and it was needed. Once again, this ability would prevent utilities from having to build out extra power plants (which would almost certainly be carbon-emitting fossil fuel plants) just to meet those occasional power demand spikes, so it would be an economic undertaking for them. From the customer perspective, their incentives would be even greater than with V1G because they could quite literally buy the power from the grid when it was cheap and then sell it back to the grid operators later when the prices rose. Rather than the utilities providing an incentive program for customers to participate, V2G would allow individual EV drivers to serve as market participants and earn money back directly.
The reason you don’t readily see V2G deployed on the grid today is because of several hurdles that remain. For one, EVs today are not always built with bi-directional charging capabilities (save for some reported Tesla models) that would enable moving energy in two directions. Second, the EV battery is the most expensive part of the car and they come with a limited lifetime in usable ‘cycles,’ or times in which they are charged and discharged. Many EV drivers would understandably be reticent to ‘spend’ some of those cycles if the compensation were not great enough to outweigh the earlier retirement of their EV battery. So, the battery technology needs some improvement in lifetime before widespread V2G implementation would be feasible. But again, the fundamentals are readily apparent and the paradigm of customers being just the endpoint of electricity might soon be over as they get set to be full-fledged buyers and sellers!
V3G—What Could That Even Mean?
So, if we have V1G already and V2G is on the way, let’s not stop there! What might the completely made up V3G look like in the future? Yes, I made up this term, and it doesn’t even make sense in the syntax (V1G is for one-direction charging, V2G is for two-direction charging), but the point of this last part is to put on our creative hats and imagine a sci-fi futuristic tilt and what EVs 50 years from now could do for the benefit of the grid?
In a 2007 paper, the National Energy Technology Library evaluated what the 21st-century grid must have, so for evaluating this future of EV integration, we should keep in mind the need for a grid “that can 1) be self-healing, 2) engage the consumer, 3) resist attack, 4) provide power quality, 5) accommodate all generation and storage options, 6) enable markets, and 7) optimize assets and operate efficiently.”
To allow for engaging of the consumer, enable markets, and optimize assets, what about an EV that wasn’t just taking power from the grid and then sending it back like the plain old V2G? In my V3G car, I see a vehicle that can generate power via highly efficient solar panels; perhaps tap into the idea of power-generating roads via friction, pressure of tire on road, and solar panels; or even can take food and other organic scraps and turn them into biofuel for power generation! Are all these ideas completely impractical today and been debunked due to inefficiencies, weight issues, and unworkable economics? Yup. But in 100 years? Who knows!
What about resisting attacks and providing self-healing? Maybe the V3G EV can be an asset to find against the ever-present cyberattacks that are dominating concerns in the utility industry today. How? Maybe with so many EVs plugged into the grid they can all be used as nodes with access to data from localized parts of the grid in a way that helps to monitor activity and protect instantaneously against cyber threats? Or maybe they can simply act as sensors and monitors to identify weaknesses and parts of the grid that need to be addressed in a type of predictive maintenance asset? Does any of this make sense with the grid and technology we have today? No. But Star Trek predicted iPads decades before they were thought to be possible, so why can’t I do the same for V3G?
What can an EV offer that other traditional grid-based assets can’t? Mobility. So perhaps EVs, as they move across the grid from charge point to charge point can tap into some sort of locational or GIS database in a way that helps predict the upcoming load curve. For example, if there are more cars than usual parked and charging in a parking garage, then maybe some artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities can tap into that to recognize there will be higher demand downtown and less in the suburbs where those cars typically get parked. This type of instantaneous information can help optimize the generation and distribution of power by the end of the century, surely.
Another idea that seems to go hand-in-hand with the EV future is the idea that transportation will similarly become more and more automated. Some futurists have even foreseen a future where parking spaces don’t even need to exist, but autonomous EVs simply roam the streets awaiting their next rider and deliver them to where they need to be. Surely these autonomous EVs would have even more grid-asset capabilities than EVs operated by their owners. Perhaps they would be able to most easily optimize the where and when of power was needed to be stored and sent back into the grid in a hyperlocal sense and they could simply drive themselves to those needed places at the precise right time to discharge their batteries?
What else could V3G be? You read through my fantastical imaginations of how EVs and the grids of 50+ years from now might cooperate, so tell me what you’re thinking! This exercise isn’t one rooted in practicality or figuring out what could work, it’s about tapping into that inner five-year-old who comes up with a drawing of a rocket car submarine because you want to see it and doesn’t allow himself to be limited by what seems practical (heck, Tesla is run by the same man who made reusable rockets when we were told that was impossible!).
In conclusion, please consider this my entry into EVs’ sci-fi futures, my petition to Orlando Utility Commission to finally work in a V1G program, and another recommendation to see the great work on vehicle-to-grid being done by SEPA.
If you enjoyed this post and you would like to get the newest posts from the Chester Energy and Policy blog delivered straight to your inbox, please consider subscribing today.
To read more insights into ways you can leave the climate better than you found it, see these articles: 2019 Chevrolet Bolt: Review & Experience from an Energy Analyst Finally Making the EV Leap, Road Tripping Through Time: Tracking Gas Prices and Fuel Efficiency of Cars to Determine What Era of American Drivers Got the Most Bang for Their Buck, and It’s a Bird, It’s a Lime, It’s Dockless Scooters! But Can These Electric-Powered Mobility Options Be Considered Sustainable Using Life-Cycle Analysis?
About the author: Matt Chester is an energy analyst in Orlando FL, studied engineering and science & technology policy at the University of Virginia, and operates this blog and website to share news, insights, and advice in the fields of energy policy, energy technology, and more. For more quick hits in addition to posts on this blog, follow him on Twitter @ChesterEnergy.
