Читать книгу Digital Transformation: Evaluating Emerging Technologies - Группа авторов - Страница 14

This research project endeavored to shed some light on what utilities might (or should) do to effectively integrate EVs into the grid in ways that reduce market barriers (for EV adoption) and maintain reliability at the lowest cost to ratepayers. As the project team began disaggregating the range of issues and decision-making factors informing the business challenge posed to utilities, it became obvious that two tiers of decisionmaking needed addressing.

The first decision point is defined by the current state of the market and utility strategy needs. The EV market adoption is already underway, but options for Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) tactics are limited by the lack of commercial availability of bidirectional charging equipment. Specifically, outside of pilot projects, most consumers only have cost-effective access to unidirectional charging equipment; they cannot export power from their vehicles to the grid yet. This means that utilities witnessing significant EV growth in their distribution territories are limited to grid-support tactics that rely more on behavior change. Until bi-directional chargers become widely available, utilities must find ways to incentivize their customers to avoid charging during summer peak hours, especially during heat waves. At present, there is a viable solution: dynamic pricing tariffs that vary the cost for power during peak and offpeak hours, respectively. Today, utilities in twenty states (including Oregon and California) have made dynamic pricing programs available to customers with EVs.

Having determined that applying the hierarchical decisionmaking methodology would be unnecessary to address the first decision-point, this research team decided to focus its efforts on supporting a near-future decision point that will emerge with the commercial availability of bi-directional chargers. Additionally, while there are many potential services that could be provided through V2G approaches, our team focused on one use case: the summer peak grid support.