How a "smart charger" could ease the transition to electric cars

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Imagine all the folks on the waiting list for the Chevy Volt or a plug-in Toyota Prius plugged in their cars at once. The result? Blackout, as the world's largest machine (otherwise known as the electric grid) is overloaded.

What's needed is a device that can sense when there's sufficient capacity to juice up an electric car and when there's not—a so-called "smart charger" (which would, of course, be a key component of a "smart" grid).

And that's exactly what engineers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash. have created. "If a million owners plug in their vehicles to recharge after work, it could cause a major strain on the grid," said PNNL engineer Michael Kintner-Meyer in a statement. "The Smart Charger Controller could prevent those peaks in demand from plug-in vehicles and enable our existing grid to be used more evenly."

The hand-size Smart Charger will do that for them, once programmed with a few key instructions (like how much you're willing to pay to juice up or times when it would be convenient). The charger would also connect to the overall grid wirelessly (like many "smart" meters today) to determine when it was a good time to charge. A previous study out of PNNL had shown that there was more than enough spare electricity generated to handle a switch over of 70 percent of U.S. personal cars from internal combustion to electric engines. But most of that spare capacity is at night or other times when people are not up and about and plugging in their new electric vehicles. Enter the Smart Charger.

Ultimately, such smart chargers will need to be built into every electric vehicle, but that's still years off. So it's likely that the smart charger will hook into whatever cord links your home socket to your new vehicle. Charging your car this way (presuming variable pricing for electricity) could save consumers as much as $150 a year in costs. The charger itself will be "low cost" according to Kintner-Meyer, although an exact price has not been specified. Image 1: Scientist Michael Kintner-Meyer (front) and his team at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (from left: Nathan Tenney, scientist; Frank Tuffner, engineer; Vilayanur Viswanathan, engineer; Richard Pratt, engineer) developed the Smart Charger Controller to manage peak demands in the electric grid once a mass of electric vehicles hit the road. The Controller tells an electric vehicle's battery when to start and stop re-charging based upon existing stress in the grid. COURTESY OF PNNL

Image 2: PNNL developed the Smart Charger Controller (pictured) to manage peak demands in the electric grid as more electric vehicles hit the road. The Controller tells the car's battery when to start and stop re-charging based upon existing stress in the grid. The Controller's interface screen allows users to understand what the Controller is doing at any particular time during the charging cycle. COURTESY OF PNNL

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-...tran-2009-05-01

[Ban Hammer 13,364]

oh joy - switch to electric cars, phase out coal plants, and watch the cost for electricity leap up!

[jundp 191]

We could switch to wind power or solar power, which has worked in other places. It's cleaner and renewable.

[Ban Hammer 13,364]

We could switch to wind power or solar power, which has worked in other places. It's cleaner and renewable.

it's not a base load generator.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

We could switch to wind power or solar power, which has worked in other places. It's cleaner and renewable.

it's not a base load generator.

We just charge cars when the sun is out, and the wind is blowing...wait, why not use the sun to heat steam, and run the car on steam, or put a sail on the car, and let the wind move the car...I guess we really don't need batteries, and battery chargers, unless you want to drive in the dark..just thinking like a nOOb...

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

The ultimate in green "technology":

[Texanadian 10]

I'd like to know how much power it takes to recharge the battery on an electric car. If it's 1500 watts, I don't see what the problem would be. Especially at night when people have their TV's, computers, lights turned off.

People in the south run their residential and commercial air conditioners all afternoon long non stop for hours on end in the south. Seems to work just fine. Average house air conditioner runs around 5,000 watts. Multiply x 20 million people in Texas alone. Figure the average house runs their A/C from 12-14 hours a day during the summer. All the malls and large businesses running their at the same time too.

Edited May 6, 2009 by Texanadian

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

I'd like to know how much power it takes to recharge the battery on an electric car. If it's 1500 watts, I don't see what the problem would be. Especially at night when people have their TV's, computers, lights turned off.

People in the south run their residential and commercial air conditioners all afternoon long non stop for hours on end in the south. Seems to work just fine. Average house air conditioner runs around 5,000 watts. Multiply x 20 million people in Texas alone. Figure the average house runs their A/C from 12-14 hours a day during the summer. All the malls and large businesses running their at the same time too.

A golf cart batterry stores around 200 amp hours. Say four batteries, that's around 28 volts, so that works out to around 5.6 Kilowatt hours for a full charge. Those electric cars probably have some multiple of the capacity in a small golf cart, let's say 10, and that puts the total daily load at about 56 Kilowatt hours, about twice the load of the air conditioner you mentioned, running at 50% load for the same time period.