Utilities, Regulators Pledge to Prepare Power Grid for EVs

Electric utilities, energy regulators, fleet operators and manufacturers are launching a first-of-its-kind initiative to prepare the power grid for the rapid deployment of electric vehicles by 2030.

On Monday, the Electric Power Research Institute, an independent nonprofit energy research and development institute, is announcing EVs2Scale, a three-year initiative designed to assess precisely where electric vehicles will show up to charge on the grid. The initiative will bring together more than 500 parties, including Amazon, the Energy Department, automakers, and charging providers.

“We need the utilities to have more confidence in when and where those loads are coming,” said Britta Gross, EPRI’s director of transportation who spoke with Bloomberg Law ahead of the announcement. “This has to happen at a very local level.”

The initiative comes amid intensifying interest in executing the Biden administration’s goal to have 50% of all new vehicle sales be electric by 2030. The market will hit that goal, a BloombergNEF report found last year. That will require nearly 35 million electric vehicles on the roads and plugged into charging stations.

Utilities commonly handle new service requests from new houses, data centers, or warehouses that can take many months or years to build and plan for a power supply.

But cars and large vehicle fleets can be procured much quicker, and their owners expect to immediately have access to the power to charge the battery.

“We’re rapidly rolling out thousands of electric vehicles to help us reach net-zero carbon by 2040,” Udit Madan, vice president of Amazon Transportation, said in a press release announcing the initiative. Madan said Amazon will “continue to work to give utilities the tools and information they need to successfully electrify the transportation sector.”

Coordinating With Customers

Xcel Energy, a Minneapolis-based utility with a footprint spanning eight states, has been tracking new vehicle registrations by ZIP code, said Brett Carter, the company’s executive vice president and a chair of the EVs2Scale initiative. Today, new registrations are about 10% electric and are expected to grow tremendously, Carter said in an interview.

Most electric vehicles will be charging at or near homes and can use low rates to charge overnight using cheap excess wind power. But plenty of charging will be necessary during the day and times of peak demand, including commercial fleets such delivery vehicles and rental cars that require fast-charging so they can be available for the next customer, Carter said.

That will require coordination with fleet owners to anticipate power demand and efficiently plan upgrades where they’re needed most, he said. State regulators will likely consider quicker approvals of utility investments and cost-recovery mechanisms such as a rider on customer bills, instead of a rate case that can take many months.

“Today, it’s easiest for us to plan based on buying habits that’s taking place,” Carter said. As EV adoption ramps up, “it will get to a place where we won’t be able to plan it so specifically. We’re going to have to be prepared for a much broader system saturation.”

In addition to Xcel Energy, the initiative includes nine other utility advisers, including a co-chair from Pacific Gas and Electric in California, as well as ComEd, National Grid, and Southern Co.

Mapping the Grid

The Evs2Scale initiative plans to produce maps showing the data at an unprecedented level of granularity, Gross said. Utilities will be able to zoom in to a 0.28-square-mile area with aggregated and anonymized data that will allow them to identify which one or two feeder circuits are impacted currently or will be in the coming years.

Gross said she expects an initial version of the map to publish in one or two months and be publicly available online.

“Do we have a line of sight to how big the loads are at the feeder level so we can actually start planning the investments and talking to regulators about the magnitude of the loads on the grid?” Gross said. “Distribution feeder circuits all around the country are going to be impacted, probably pervasively. But that can be addressed.”

The US power grid has adapted to spikes in demand before. Wires, substations, and transformers were deployed to meet the rise of kitchen appliances and air conditioning in the second half of the 20th century and to accommodate the build-out of data centers in recent decades.

With EVs, “we’re seeing it already,” Gross said. “We’ve got to get on top of this challenge.”

A fact sheet lists trade associations representing state utility commissioners, investor-owned utilities, public power utilities, rural electric cooperatives, and the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, an office created by the bipartisan infrastructure law to facilitate collaboration between the departments of Energy and Transportation.

The Energy Department will combine “the technical expertise of the DOE national labs with EPRI’s knowledge of the industry and data to accelerate decision-making towards a clean, reliable, and accessible EV future,” said Michael Berube, the agency’s deputy assistant secretary for sustainable transportation and fuels.

Last week, in a separate announcement, the joint office launched an Electric Vehicle Working Group, which will make recommendations to both agencies’ secretaries on the “widespread adoption of EVs across the country.”