The B2B platform for full-electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles: Industry News

US DOE awards $620 million in a second round of funding towards the development of various energy storage projects that will extend the life time of used EV lithium batteries and will highlight how to integrate larger numbers of EV’s into the grid.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) released a list of 32 R&D projects to be awarded grants that will demonstrate how smart grid technologies and systems will improve the efficiency and resilience of the electrical grid. These projects will have an impact for the energy storage technology for EV’s and the impact that charging points will have on the grid.
One project looks to recycle current lithium batteries towards usage in the utility scale energy storage sector. The DOE allocated over $4 million to the Detroit Edison company for its Advanced Implementation of A123s Community Energy Storage (CES) Systems for Grid Support program. The project focuses on utilizing and integrating end of life lithium batteries from EV’s into part of its CES system. The success of this demonstration could extend the life-cycle of current EV batteries which will eventually lead to lower lease and purchase costs of plug-in vehicles increasing the incentive of customers to migrate from combustion engines to EV.

Anticipating the rise in plug-in EVs the DOE allocated over $193 million to monitoring projects in New York, New Jersey, California and Texas. Monitoring current grid activities, the projects will establish simulations on the impacts that a much larger EV fleet will have on the grid. They will look into how to integrate and assimilate future charging stations into the grid. One such project, the Southern California Edison company’s, will demonstrate an integrated, scalable Smart Grid system that includes all of the interlocking pieces of an end-to-end Smart Grid system - from the transmission and distribution systems to consumer applications like smart appliances and electric vehicles.

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Secretary Chu announced the funding on Tuesday, 24 November, in Columbus Ohio with the intent of creating a smarter and more efficient energy grid that will be able to integrate the new technologies of the future, EV’s. The 32 demonstrations are pioneering projects that will act as ‘models for deploying integrated Smart Grid systems on a broader scale’. This funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be leveraged with $1 billion in funds from the private sector to support more than $1.6 billion in total Smart Grid projects nationally.