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02.12
Electric Vehicles
the Focus of Upcoming IEEE Conference in South
Carolina
By Chris McManes
The recent IEEE Power & Energy
Society’s Innovative Smart Grid Technologies
Conference in Washington, D.C., featured a
number of paper and panel sessions on electric
vehicles. It offered a preview of what to expect
at the upcoming IEEE International Electric
Vehicle Conference.
Set for the TD Convention Center
and Clemson University International Center for
Automotive Research in Greenville, S.C., 4-8
March, IEVC promises to provide attendees with
the latest research and trends in EV technology.
Plenty of EVs will be available for people to
see and ride in, and there will be a tour of the
local BMW automotive plant.
Dr. Julian Weber, BMW’s leader
of Innovation Projects E-Mobility, will deliver
the opening keynote address on Monday, 5 March.
Weber is in charge of BMW’s i3 and i8 EV pilot
fleet.
For an overview of the IEVC
program, see
http://electricvehicle.ieee.org/program.html.
IEEE Fellow Dr. Saifur Rahman,
the Joseph Loring Professor of electrical and
computer engineering at Virginia Tech’s Northern
Virginia campus, was a panelist at the Smart
Grid conference and will be chairing a session
on electric vehicle infrastructure at IEVC. It
is a subject he knows well.
Rahman, a member of the IEEE-USA
Energy Policy Committee, said that adding a
million EVs spread around the country would not
disrupt the grid at the transmission level
because excess capacity exists.
“The problem is if you put two
electric vehicles on the same transformer on the
same street feeding my house, your house and
another neighbor’s house, then you’ve got a
problem — just two,” Rahman said.
Lee Stogner, vice chair of IEVC,
chaired the “Electric Vehicles and Smart Grid”
panel in Washington. In addition to Rahman,
other participants included M.L. Chan (LSIS Co.,
Korea), Phil Krein (University of Illinois) and
Mladen Kezunovic (Texas A&M).
The thrust of the panel was to
look at what effect the charging of an EV
battery cluster would have on the power grid,
particularly as it is being upgraded to take
advantage of modern computer, communication and
control systems. The latter is the basic concept
behind Smart Grid.
The major advantages of EVs over
gasoline-powered vehicles are lower operating
costs — particularly as gas prices continue to
rise — and reduced carbon emissions.
“The benefits, the whole reason
we’re looking at this really, is because the
electrical system offers us such significant
benefits,” said Krein, a past PES president.
“Electric motors have very high power density,
excellent control capability and a lot of
ability to operate a car in whatever way people
want.”
Stogner began the session by
showing a slide comparing gasoline with a
lithium ion battery, typical for an EV. It
showed that a gallon of gasoline equals 135 mega
joules of energy, which equates to 21 lithium
ion batteries. The gas weighs 2.7 kg and each
battery weighs 340 kg.
“You’ve not only got to get
energy out of this fuel source — [the battery] —
you’ve got to carry it with you down the road,
which further impacts the efficiency of that
transportation system,” Stogner said. “So, we
have a great beginning in this world of electric
vehicles. We’ve got some good, tough technology
on the shelf already, but we have some
challenges.”
Rahman elaborated on why just
two EVs — he cited the Chevy Volt — charging on
the same transformer would cause a load problem.
“Two will add 18 to 20
kilowatts,” he said. “That is not a problem is
we can manage other loads that are fed by the
same transformer, like the electric water
heater, clothes dryer, air conditioner, electric
oven. All those 240-volt loads are 5 kw or
higher, so that could be a concern.”
Kezunovic, who’s serving as IEVC
program chair, echoed Rahman’s point during the
Q&A session.
“Early [EV] adopters tend to
live in clustered areas,” Kezunovic said. “My
street has six or seven homes, and God forbid
all these retired people on my street and me and
the two coaches across the street decide to buy
[EVs and charge them at the same time], we’re
going to have a problem on that particular
feeder. … There’s the issue of the immediate
ability [of the power company] to serve the
customer.”
Rahman is conducting research to
see how these other loads can be managed so that
charging an EV “becomes invisible to the power
company.” He added that it’s not practical to
expect your local power company to upgrade the
transformer to meet the increased demand.
“It’s a cost issue for them,” he
said.
Making an EV non-disruptive to
the power grid doesn’t entail, for example, not
taking a hot shower, not cooking with your
electric oven or not cooling your house while
charging. One key, Rahman said, would be to
delay charging your EV until later at night
after everyone’s gone to sleep, unless, of
course, you need to use the vehicle before the
next morning and you don’t have a sufficient
charge.
“If we can make [charging]
invisible to the homeowner and the power
company,” Rahman said, “then we can have a huge
market penetration without changing your
lifestyle.”
Stogner said that if engineers
can design a high-energy-density battery that
will allow you to drive 300 miles on a charge,
“then all of a sudden, the discussion changes in
terms of which car you buy the next time you
need one.”
Chris McManes is IEEE-USA’s
public relations manager. IEEE-USA is a
financial cosponsor of the IEEE International Electric Vehicle
Conference.
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