Filed under: Emerging Technologies, EV/Plug-in
V2Green to announce smart charging deal with utility
V2Green, a Seattle start up, is writing software for power companies to manage the charging of electric cars. There are not that many electric cars right now but V2Green thinks there will be between 500,000 and 1.5M by the year 2015 from companies like Tesla and Chevrolet. V2Green is currently generating revenue from a number of tests and will announce a deal with a utility later this month. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer interviewed the CEO and co-founder of V2Green, David Kaplan, about the need for and potential future of smart charing. Here are some quotes from that interview:"The driver may simply come home, plug the car in at 6 p.m. and you just need it to have a full charge by 8 a.m. the next day ... That's a 14 hour window in which we can decide to get you an amount of electricity that may only take three, four or five hours to deliver. Our system can juggle that sort of calculation across thousands and thousands of cars to create a smooth load profile for the grid operator, so they are not experiencing power spikes or having to bring on back up sources of generation."
"I am doing this because it is a business. There is money to be made here ... It is a longer-term build business than something like a typical technology business, no question about that. But when this market kicks in, it is going to be a very significant hockey stick."
A hockey stick? OK. Now, what do you think of Kaplan's comments?
[Source: Seattle PI]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
why not the LS2LS7? 9:46PM (10/06/2007)
As a person who has talked about this issue many times (including in the Dog & Lemon article below), I'm obviously behind it.
If it's done right, and they don't charge too much for the technology, it should be universally adopted and very useful and profitable.
The only real issues with this is that it's one of those solutions that is most valuable only if it is universally adopted. So you have to get way out front of it and do everything you can to keep the costs down so companies don't opt out.
Realistically, you should be able to get the utilities themselves to foot the entire bill for this technology, since it will help them make more money with less cost outlay.
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why not the LS2LS7? 3:28AM (10/07/2007)
Oh, and I don't think this business model really applies to the Chevrolet Volt (mentioned in the article), as the Volt is just a regular 110V device. As such, it doesn't take any more power than a hair dryer.
There would be a use for the device in this case too, in case you owned two electric cars but only had one power circuit to your garage. In this case, the two cars could alternate charging to keep from overloading your branch circuit.
However, the utilities may not be interested in paying contributing money for this use case, as their electrical grid can supply enough power for every house in the neighborhood to charge two electric cars at once. At least in any neighborhood I can imagine.
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Mikael Johansson 4:12AM (10/07/2007)
I think he is a very clever guy. In some decades, there also will be millions of second hand batteries we can install in our homes. All these batteries have to communicate with your utility to buy and sell electricity in the most effiency way.
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rgseidl 9:01AM (10/07/2007)
v2Green and the utilities working with them are betting that after a century of little progress, we will now finally see high-capacity, high-power, long-lived batteries become the primary power source for a new generation of cars - which must still be affordable for the mass market. Utilities would love to supply consumers the energy they need to be mobile. So far, the oil industry is doing its level best to ignore that possibility.
However, BEVs that perform like conventional cars don't appear quite as far-fetched as they once did. Unfortunately, the energy density of even the best batteries on the drawing boards today is some two orders of magnitude worse than liquid hydrocarbons. Factor in the superior efficiency of electric drive and, the weight savings of an electric motor plus power converter compared to an ICE + transmission and you're still down by a factor somewhere between 3 and 10. So, either you accept short range on grid electricity - on option for commute vehicles - or you throw in even more batteries, which drives up weight, bulk and cost. HEVs and PHEVs do take the sting out the range vs. cost issue, but at the expense of considerable extra complexity.
It' true that GM, Ford (by way of Volvo) and Citroen have all shown concept PHEVs with useful grid electricity range recently. Toyota, perhaps because of problems with its Li-ion battery supply chain, has been far more cautious in the near-term expectations it is setting for its own PHEV development. However, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that PHEVs are in fact not yet a reality.
In that sense, V2Green's efforts will indeed tale many years to come to fruition, if they ever will. Still, for the utility sector, the cost of developing the required control hardware and software is peanuts compared with the possible upside. And we all stand to benefit from the development of new personal mobility choices that may change the cost, national energy security and global warming equations.
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bioburner 5:10PM (10/07/2007)
No more power than a hair dryer. I wounder how many people run their hair dryers for 7 hours at a time? This technology is critical if we wish to avoid overloading the grid at 5pm when everyone with a EV plugs in their cars to charge them up.
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Bill 8:40PM (10/07/2007)
Surely there'll be a 220V option for the Volt.
I haven't noticed any grid failures when the Thanksgiving turkeys are roasting in the oven for several hours.
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bioburner 7:22PM (10/08/2007)
Whow BILL you and your family only eat a cooked meal on thanksgiving? The article addresses the INCREASED electrical load to the grid caused by adding the chargers for BEVs and PHEVs. Cooking thanksgiving dinner is not an INCREASE since most people eat a cook meal in the evening.
Never seen a grid filure-guess you don't live in southern California. Rolling blackouts (failure of the grid to keep up with demand) were all over the news during the summer of 2006.
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