Tags: #ev-technology #charging-infrastructure #ev-home-charging #power-grid #power-companies #vehicle-to-grid-v2g
I’m one of the co-founders of Grid Rails. I joined up with a couple of partners that I had met earlier in my career to come up with the new company, and in my current capacity, I’m leading the enterprise.
We are a software-as-a-service company that works with load serving entities, or utilities, to give them the capabilities to better manage how distributed energy resources connect to their network. We provide capabilities to help them balance the local grid, and we facilitate the ability for them to manage how incentives are provided and how those different devices that connect are paid for the participation they have within the local grid.
When you think about what an electric vehicle is doing, it has the ability to pull energy from the grid. That’s where its supply source comes from, so that’s how we fill our vehicles.
When we think about being an active participant in the local grid, what we want to be able to do is receive signals from the grid that tell us when it should be charging, and possibly when it shouldn’t be charging. This allows us to better regulate the amount of energy being pulled across the grid at any given point in time. It allows the EV to get the benefit of being charged, but also to respond to either price signals or demand signals that are impacting what’s available from the grid.
It just gives you a better balancing mechanism, so that you’re not creating congestion. If you think about it like a service pump for gas-powered vehicles, if too many vehicles try to get into the gas station at the same time, it gets really busy and it becomes hard for those vehicles to pump gas and get in and out efficiently. It’s a similar mechanism for electric vehicles.
They’re valuable because they’re such large storage devices. If you think about when a consumer has storage at their home, they might have 15kWh of energy capacity in a physical, non-mobile battery solution. But when you think about an electric vehicle, it could have ten times that or more.
So they consume a lot of power and they hold a lot of power. If you can better utilise them to balance the grid, then you’re going to get a lot more benefit out of the overall deployment of electric vehicles as part of a load-balancing solution that allows the grid to operate more efficiently.
They can also, when they’re better orchestrated, prevent things like grid congestion from occurring, where there’s too much demand being sent down to a local area and the utility is not able to serve it, or serve it efficiently.
I can’t tell you the exact number, but it’s a large number that’s growing pretty aggressively. There’s significant capacity sitting in the driveways and moving around in these little mobile energy plants that are driving up and down our streets, plugging in when the driver wants them to plug in.
But they’re doing that without any kind of oversight or direction. There’s very limited influence on when vehicles charge coming from the local utility. Sometimes they might have a charging programme, or they might have rates that cause the consumer to not want to charge when it’s convenient to them.
The flexibility we’re talking about is adding additional capabilities where those utilities can think about how to better encourage the consumer to participate in the local grid. They can actively think about when consumers should charge their vehicles and when they should receive incentives because, perhaps, power prices are less expensive than expected. That incentive can be passed on to the consumer when they make the behaviour necessary to charge their vehicle, or make it available not to be charged for a short period of time.
If the vehicle is participating, then it’s active. It’s in a more controlled state, if you will. Its role is about not just being part of the demand side, but actually being part of the solution.
Those are exactly the types of things they need. They need the ability to send a signal to tell that vehicle what to do. They need to have the owner’s permission, and they need to know exactly where that vehicle is within the grid that they’re operating and have access to today. From that standpoint, they have what they need to be able to send economic signals to the vehicle so that they can, in turn, send electrons to and from that vehicle.
Most of the electric vehicles manufactured today do actually have the ability to speak to them. On our platform at Grid Rails, I was on it this morning and I could see my vehicle. I could see the current state of charge, whether it was plugged in, the energy flows to it, how much energy it had consumed, how far it had driven, how many times it had been charged or discharged and the miles driven.
All that information is already available for electric vehicles. What we don’t have is a good connectivity layer – something that sits between the utility and the vehicles and does a great job of helping everybody understand what’s going on.
It needs to make it really simple for the utility to say, “Hey, wait a minute, there’s something happening on the grid. Power prices are going up. It would really be better for the utility and the customer if we didn’t charge right now. So let’s just take 30 minutes and wait, and then let’s try charging again.”
Or the inverse: there is more power available now. Maybe we have all this renewable energy coming from solar or wind. Instead of telling the people generating the power to stop producing it, let’s tell the vehicles to start charging right now, even though they’re not scheduled to.
Get as much of that energy at this lower price into the vehicles, save money for the utilities, save money for the vehicle owner, and then everybody benefits.
That’s where we’re going. If you think about the world today, oil prices move up and down during the day. The rates gas companies or gas engines are paying fluctuate, even during the course of the day. It’s obviously not as much as electricity rates fluctuate, but it does change.
In our world of electricity, it is so much more dynamic that it just makes sense that you would get different rates. Most charging stations already have dynamic pricing, at least here in the States. If I go to a charger at different points in the day, I’ll pay different rates. There’s a rate card and it tells me all that.
But what they don’t do is override that structured, time-of-day rate based on what’s happening on the grid. It should get a little more expensive or a little bit cheaper. There are ways to fluctuate that, and that’s what I think we’re talking about with this next generation of EVs and next-generation chargers.
That’s where you get people really engaged, because it just makes more sense to go and do this right now because our prices are cheaper.
If a local charging station has access to a solar array, wind, hydro or something else, should they be allowed to charge a lower rate because now they have more energy that they could potentially not be using?
Why turn it off or let it go to waste? Let’s put it in the cars. That takes demand off the grid when people get home.
Some of it is regulations. In each of the countries and jurisdictions we’re talking about, you’re going to have regulatory bodies that haven’t caught up with the idea of flexibility.
Some of them, as I look at tariff structures and talk to people who are influencing them, just haven’t thought about it. They haven’t got out of their traditional utility mindset to come up with an idea of how we treat consumers like consumers and really leverage some of these consumer behaviours and incentives. Sometimes that’s the software and technology that brings it together. That’s one of the reasons we built Grid Rails, because that intersection isn’t there.
The people working in that space today still think, “I have to decide for tomorrow what I’m going to do today, and I need to tell everybody.” I’m like, why? Our operating system works in real time. If we said, “Hey, you know what? It makes sense now to go make this change,” you tell everybody about it. You go into our system or send us a message, it keys it off and everybody knows.
For the next 60 minutes, the rates are going to change. Or, if you participate, you’re going to get this incentive immediately to go and do something right away. How do we take that real-time behaviour and make it something that’s available to utilities, like we do in other parts of our lives?
As consumers, we want things just to work and we don’t want to think about them. That’s how we designed our system. If you’re plugged in, it’ll work. If you’re not plugged in, we’ll tell you to plug in. If you can’t plug in, okay, you’ll get the next event. Make it dynamic.
The coordination just happens. They’re all on a platform that’s taking those signals. The idea here is that the consumer gets to put their thresholds for what they’re interested in or not interested in. If the economic value isn’t there for them, then they may not participate. And that’s okay.
If I need to go on a road trip and I don’t want to be unable to charge, I can opt out. But if I’ve got the time, I’ve got the opportunity and my vehicle is available, why not take advantage of that?
I think about other parallels, like a refrigerator. It’s plugged in all the time and it uses power when it needs to use power. Our EVs should be the same. There are times when my refrigerator is quite cold enough and it doesn’t have to run. I could not send it power for a few minutes. EVs are the same way. When you get to that scale, you start to have a tremendous amount of impact and capacity.
You need something that’s going to orchestrate that. I love the word “orchestration” because an orchestra is a very large body of different instruments that are all tuned in different ways, but when they come together, it’s perfect. It’s beautiful. It works together.
That’s the orchestration we need for the energy system. It needs to work together. Everybody is doing different things and operating on different levels, but if it’s orchestrated, it can work together in a fashion that creates the output you’re looking for.
It’s a key part of it. In our neck of the woods, where you have an EV connected to the home, the EV uses about as much power as the home does over the course of a year.
If you think about it, every time I add a vehicle, I’m adding a home. That’s a lot of load. Obviously, you don’t have to drive a lot to have a pretty significant impact. So, yes, it matters to have that all being managed efficiently.
Vehicle-to-grid is interesting, but it’s not necessarily the most important thing that EVs do, or could do, in the future.
I think it would be a nice feature. It’s nice to be able to say, “Okay, I can reverse the energy flow from my vehicle to my home.”
But for a lot of consumers, I buy a car to be able to drive. I have static storage to be able to back up my house. I see those as two very different technologies.
If, in certain situations, I could let my vehicle be the backup for my house, I think that would be a nice addition. But that is not the reason I would go and purchase an electric vehicle.
If I think about a busy household with multiple people living in it, I wouldn’t want the household to be dependent on me not being on the road to be secure.
So there are reasons why I think it’s nice and I think it could be complementary. But from my standpoint, it’s not the highest-order value.
That’s something that has been debated for a while, and everybody wants a part of this game.
In my view of the world, I think the utility should own the customer relationship because we’ve made the utility responsible for energy delivery to that home. That’s who we look to.
We have different structures in the US around how that works, and I know other countries have different structures too. Even in the UK, you have some competition for retail power that is independent of the poles and wires, and independent of the generator.
We have these different constructs, but whoever is responsible for the integrity of that energy being delivered to my home is the person I want to have access to the devices that can give me the best rates and the best everything.
I’ve met many auto manufacturers that think they should be energy companies. Does my pool company want to be an energy company? Does my refrigerator company want to be?
It doesn’t make sense to me. Make the things you make and stay in your lane. Let the energy companies make energy companies. They’re the ones that I’m going to look to actually support me.
I don’t want to call my car manufacturer to figure out why the lights aren’t on in my house.
I think the UK is doing great in driving adoption and participation and driving competitive deregulation.
In a lot of ways, I think they’re doing better than the US in a number of different areas. I probably need to research the question a little more to figure out how we would think about the US adding to that.
The US energy market is so complicated. There are so many participants and it’s so fragmented that it’s not always a great use case for how things should be done.
I think it’s simpler to regulate.
The one area might be that charging prices are too high in the UK. That could be something where we have the ability to have a little more competition for charging infrastructure.
It’s still not as simplified, but if you place a charger in a location that has lower-priced electricity, you get lower prices for that vehicle. Charging companies aren’t allowed to be electricity companies in most cases, so they’re just passing through the rates with a slight markup, I believe.
Again, though, I think it varies pretty dramatically by region in the US.
That’s an interesting question.
I don’t know that the economics anywhere would support it actually being a source of revenue or margin, really adding a contribution to the household.
But I do think that if it’s operated intelligently, you can significantly reduce the cost of ownership, quite simply through the cost of fuel.
I can’t imagine buying an EV and being able to earn money off it because they charge and discharge like that. That would be a lot of arbitrage against the utility.
I think the utilities are working pretty aggressively to make sure that you don’t arbitrage in that way.
It’s one thing to be able to charge a battery and discharge the battery to prevent yourself from having to buy more power. But they wouldn’t want you to charge when prices are low and discharge to the grid or the home at high prices and earn that arbitrage margin.
And I don’t know that we as consumers would want them to, because then that would be a cost that would be rate-based back to us and actually drive prices for the average person higher.
I think there’s balance. It’s more symbiotic between the vehicles and the grid.
I would hope that we see a massive proliferation in charging locations. I think that charging will ideally become more transparent to us.
I think about inductive charging, where you just park your vehicle and it’s going to inductively charge it, versus having to get out and plug it in.
If you can start to do that, then I think you’re going to see this fluctuation between when and how vehicles charge become less of a thing. We just move and the vehicle charges when it makes sense.
The vehicles are also more intelligent and they know what our charging needs are. I think the network is more intelligent and knows what our charging needs are.
And then the last thing is charging is just going to get faster. We know all the technologies are moving to make it faster.
Conductive charging is not as fast as plugging it in, but I think some of these technologies come together. If I need a fast charge, I plug in. If I need a passive charge, I just do it inductively.
The two are complementary, and then it works depending on where I am and what signals I’m getting from the grid, the utility and the operators in the market.
We’re looking to be this layer that allows the utilities and the devices connected to the grid to be well orchestrated.
We see ourselves at the centre of measuring how energy is moving across the grid and how the devices are participating in that energy movement.
We also see ourselves being core to how that’s settled, meaning how that is paid for.
We become that rail that the utilities, consumers and others participating in the grid are utilising – to not just see how electrons are moving, but actually the financial side of all that.
It really came out of the fact that I’ve been part of multiple different energy companies in my career.
My co-founders have all been part of utilities, grid aggregators and virtual power plant management companies. Collectively, we saw this hole in the market where it was too difficult, there was too much friction, not enough consumer engagement and the wrong tools to bring it all together.
That’s what led us from being participants and rolling out things like residential storage in the US. The three of us rolled out residential storage as the first static storage product line for solar about ten years ago.
That’s where we came together originally, but we’ve come together again because we see similar problems in the way that electrons are being measured, managed and compensated.
The second half of it. I’m old enough that I’ve had a couple of careers now.
The first was telecommunications, with a little stint in financial services, and then I came into energy about 17 years ago.
I’ve enjoyed all the careers. They’re different and interesting for different reasons.
But at the core of everything I’ve done has been services. I’ve always been somebody who builds consumer services with a core technology platform.
It was telephones, then internet services and satellite services, then cellular services, then financial services, and then energy services.
It’s something that’s run deep. I really believe in the consumer relationship, the consumer experience and building services that consumers want to participate in.
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