Preparing the grid for EVs

Open for any sort of non-technical discussion regarding EVs
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LukeSkinner
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Preparing the grid for EVs

Post by LukeSkinner »

Hi folks, my name is Luke Skinner and I look after R&D for for three electricity distribution (poles and wires) businesses in Victoria - CitiPower, Powercor and United Energy.
One of my jobs is trying to prepare our businesses for the increase in electric vehicle volumes by making sure enough energy can be carried along the grid to supply them all. Without these preparations, I fear that we may slow down EV growth rather than enable it.

One of the problems that I have is that I don’t know where the EVs are on our grid or how many there are, so I don’t know what parts of the grid to strengthen first.

To help me with this problem, I’m looking for 20 EV owners that live in or around Melbourne or anywhere in western Victoria to be part of a small experiment. The experiment would require no effort on your behalf. We simply need to know where you are connected to our grid, we will monitor the energy patterns at that spot for a while and hopefully identify a pattern that tells us where other EVs are. With this information we can get an idea of volume trends and start work to ‘beef up’ those parts of the grid to make new EV connections as fast and as painless as possible.

If you live/charge in these locations and are passionate about EV evolution, please respond via this forum or direct to lskinner@powercor.com.au.

Thanks in advance for your help folks.
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weber
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Re: Preparing the grid for EVs

Post by weber »

Hi @Luke. It's great that you're doing this. But we want to be good network citizens, so if you just tell us when you'd like us to charge our EVs, there may not be any need for any network upgrades. All commercial EVs have a built-in timer that let's us plug in as soon as we come home but only charge between say 11 pm and 6 am. I assume charging between 9 am and 3 pm would be good too, to soak up all that solar power, if the car happens to be home at that time, or can charge at work. Of course it wouldn't hurt to have some price signals to encourage us to set those timers appropriately. :)
One of the fathers of MeXy the electric MX-5, along with Coulomb and Newton (Jeff Owen).
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Adverse Effects
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Re: Preparing the grid for EVs

Post by Adverse Effects »

LukeSkinner wrote: Fri, 30 Nov 2018, 06:01 One of my jobs is trying to prepare our businesses for the increase in electric vehicle volumes by making sure enough energy can be carried along the grid to supply them all. Without these preparations, I fear that we may slow down EV growth rather than enable it.
a good start would be stop pulling the copper off the poles and replacing it with aluminum

been seeing it happen a lot lately

but that is just my opinion
If you don't have time to do it right,
When will you have time to do it over

Help those who help themselves first
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brunohill
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Re: Preparing the grid for EVs

Post by brunohill »

I think a win/win approach would be encourage businesses that already use a large amount of power, (infrastructure already there) that have car parks (for employees or customers) to install car chargers. Employees could set timers for peak solar production times and nightshift workers could charge on offpeak times. I am sure that they could be encouraged by what tariffs they pay and then claim they are only doing it because of their environmental conscience. Maybe they could claim a government subsidy as well.
francisco.shi
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Re: Preparing the grid for EVs

Post by francisco.shi »

This is true. We have a 1Mw transformer at work to supply the factory and a 1500m2 roof. But the power we use is not continuous. If we went and put solar panels on the entire roof we could feed 250kw of solar power to the grid without having to upgrade any part of the network or have 5 fast chargers going non stop during the day with solar or 20 fast chargers from the grid. We don't even have that many car park spots.
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