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

As part of the 2nd EV Li-ion Battery Forum organised by Dufresne last week, a group of experts discussed during an interactive workshop the key industry requirements for EV charging and possible forms of implementation. cars21.com summarises the areas where representatives of OEMs, utilities and software providers see the challenges.

Between 25 and 26 August 2010, The EV Li-ion Battery Forum in Beijing assembled a number of different stakeholders in the electric vehicle battery field. Their presentations and ensuing discussions shed light on infrastructure requirements and their implications for the industry from different perspectives.

The OEM's perspective

Mr. Steven Cai, Engineering Group Manager at General Motors US, presented GM's strategy for introducing the range-extended electric vehicle VOLT and their approach to tackle the current lack of charging infrastructure.

Companies with market-ready electric vehicles cannot wait for the roll-out of infrastructure to be in place. GM has therefore invested in the Volttech system, a range-extending technology that was deliberately developed to allow the market introduction of electric vehicles without infrastructure being in place. This technology overcomes the first hurdle of limited infrastructure and has the added benefit of alleviating the phenomenon of range anxiety, which is considered a major stumbling block for customers to convert to electric mobility.

A second point raised by Mr. Cai was the need for global standardisation. As GM plans on introducing the VOLT not only in the US but quite soon in China as well, the need for standardised charging facilities becomes apparent. Uniform requirements for all major markets would allow for low production costs as customisation of components becomes unnecessary.

Standards: state-of-play, needs and challenges

However, so far, a variety of standards reign over the different markets and the current landscape of standards is divided in 4 major regions: China, Europe, Japan and U.S. While in all of them AC single phase prevails for low moderate charge power, the regions quite differ in other aspects:

• China: DC for high power fast charge.
• Europe: AC 3-phase for moderate and high power fast charging. The EU position on DC charging remains for the moment unclear, however the alliance of German automotive OEMs and other EU mandates are planned to require Type 2 charge couplers.
• Japan: DC for high power fast charge. This Japanese DC standard has already acquired some international acceptance.
• U.S.: DC for high power fast charge. In California, furthermore, cars are only eligible for Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) credits if they use the SAE J1772TM standard for charge couplers.

While AC charging strategies are quite similar in the different markets, with Japan and the U.S. having already achieved harmonised standards for AC charge couplers and charge controls, the case of DC charging seems much more complicated. For one, the U.S. desire for a single charge receptacle that would combine AC and DC charging, contradicts Chinese and Japanese strategies, while every one of these markets has unique propositions for communications and control of DC chargers.

A lack of standardisation, however, has some practical implications:

• OEMs need to package different charge receptacles and have different vehicle controls;
• the number of vehicle sheet metal openings for China and Japan are different than for the US;
• Infrastructure cannot be shared;
• costs are higher (vehicle and infrastructure) with no benefit to customers;
• consequence of not harmonising DC charging are much more costly than not harmonising AC charging;

The call for standardisation is, however, not unanimous. Some voices point out that global standardisation would determine some technologies to be pursued while excluding others, impeding innovation in the process. Experts discussed at length the distinction between standardisation of hardware and standardisation of communication protocols.

The utility's perspective

Mr. Schauer, Senior Technology Manager for Innovation, Research and Development at Verbund AG, Austria's leading energy provider, emphasised that the implementation of a large-scale EV charging infrastructure will necessitate the implication and innovation of many different stakeholders, not just the power companies.

Different business models are likely to evolve:

• single businesses that have one area of focus: power providers, infrastructure providers, vehicle component suppliers, EV manufacturers;
• intergrated businesses that will supply the infrastructure for the whole value chain;

Mr. Schauer raised the very pertinent question of who is going to pay for the EV infrastructure that the industry and governments are calling for. Will the OEMs pay for public charging facilities? Will the customers pay for private charging poles at home? Will the governments, who after all, also provided the infrastructure for motorised transport some decades ago, invest in a nation-wide charging network?

Fact is, nobody knows so far and many different scenarios are under discussion. Fact is also that the players on the field of electric mobility are different from those in the traditional automotive sector. So new players, new rules?

The software provider's perspective

One of these new players are the software companies providing the means for vehicle to grid (V2G) communication and smart charging. Joby Lafky, Senior Director Of Product Partnerships GRIDPOINT (USA), has no doubt that EVs are coming and that utilities must prepare to integrate them.

The integration of EV charging, however, will not be handled with simply producing more power. Electric vehicles are going to stress the electricity infrastructure and the grids in their weakest moments: at peak time. The slow charging of one electric vehicle consumes as much energy as an American single family home. Typical usage patterns, established in several EV trials, see electric vehicle owners coming home after work and plugging-in their vehicles right in the middle of the evening peak load. Studies of early EV adopters show that they are clustered in specific neighbourhoods, thus augmenting the local strain on the electricity grid.

Only intelligent systems will be able to handle and balance out these intense and locally concentrated loads. One approach would be the Vehicle to Grid (V2G) energy flow, using the EV’s large storage battery to discharge the battery power into the grid when extra power is needed.

A coordinated population of EVs would give therefore utilities the ability to store surplus energy for later. EV owners, however, might not be very welcoming to this concept as they fear to have their battery depleted the moment they want to leave home.

Further problems in this concept are a shortened battery life as well as objections by OEMs who would have to bear the battery warranty costs while the power utilities only reap the benefits.

An attractive compromise approach, however, could be Active Load Management. In this case, central coordination of vehicle charging provides significant grid stability without drawing power from the vehicle. Unlike reverse energy flow (V2G), dynamically adjusting the rate of vehicle charge would not impact on the battery life and be a lot easier to accept for vehicle owners as the charge level of their vehicle’s battery never declines while the vehicle is plugged in. The intelligent system would also allow to better handle and level out energy flows from renewable energies such as wind power for instance.

These different positions make one thing very clear: electric vehicle charging infrastructure is a multi-faceted problem that will need to involve a wide range of different stakeholders in order to find an innovative and generally satisfying solution. 

The next EV Battery Forum will take place in Europe 12-14 April 2011 and in China 6-8 September 2011.