Is the Big Apple ready for electric vehicles?
Sort of.
The people of New York appear ready to embrace the electric era when the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt arrive later this year and other automakers start to catch up. But the city doesn't seem particularly interested in making the changes needed to adopt the infrastructure before EVs start selling in considerable numbers.
That was the consensus from the panel gathered to discuss the issue at the New York Academy of Science. The event, "The Road to Widespread Adoption of Electric Vehicles," sought to begin answering questions posed by the impending arrival of the EVs slated for production between now and 2012.
And though the discussion was limited to New York, it could apply to many major metropolitan areas.
Early adopters aside, New Yorkers aren’t exactly the target demographic for electric vehicles. Most of them don’t own or need a car thanks to the city’s expansive public transportation system. Beyond that, they tend to live in apartments. It's not like you can run an extension cord down the fire escape, so charging the battery is pretty much out of the question at this stage of the game. Even those New Yorkers who do own cars, and have a place to park them, drive an average of 9,000 miles a year. That's about 60 percent less than the typical American.
Of course, there will be early adopters who'll buy an EV no matter what it costs or how impractical it might be. A McKinsey study (.pdf) found as much as 16 percent of new cars sales in the city could be EVs by 2015 . That works out to about 2.5 percent of all vehicles in the city, or about 50,000 cars. The study found these early adopters, as you'd expect, are willing to purchase an EV even if the technology or infrastructure requires some changes to how they use their car. Such changes may include, for example, switching from street parking to a parking garage where they can plug in.
Bearing in mind that the number of these early influencers remains small, the study recommends that policymakers focus first on issues early adopters care about -- basic EV education, charger installation and, to spur adoption, incentives like access to carpool lanes when driving solo. That last suggestion is a contentious one, with people arguing over the merits of such policies, the impact on congestion and so forth.
The Obama administration has committed more than $4 billion to foster the design, manufacture and purchase of electric vehicles through things like loans to automakers and tax breaks for consumers. And the city of New York, like others, is moving to cut greenhouse gas emissions. New York's sustainability plan, PlaNYC, calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 by 30 percent over 2005 levels.
The mayor's office has not yet responded to a request for comment.
But where are the funds for street-side charging stations? That investment likely will start with forward-thinking businesses. Such technology could lure customers -- "We'll charge your car and validate your parking.” That isn't much of a departure from, say, coffee shops offering wifi or hotels providing concierge service via iPod.
“I think this is going to grow very organically," said Britta Gross, director of global energy systems and infrastructure commercialization at General Motors. "When we launched the EV1 in California, there were a lot of retailers that put in charging without being asked to do so. They saw the movement, they wanted to be a part of it and they built it to attract customers to their location. So the notion that this stuff is going to grow up is absolutely validated and there is precedent for people getting on board that say we want to be part of this."
But let's also consider many New Yorkers who own cars commute each day to one of the Jersey, Rockland County, Westchester County, Long Island or Connecticut suburbs. So while they won’t be able to "fuel up" at home, they can do so at the office parking lot while sitting in a cubicle all day.
"If you park on the street at home, presumably you are parking somewhere else during the daytime when you work," Gross said. "That is the place where the next focus should be."
We're already seeing some cities -- San Francisco and San Jose come to mind, along with Phoenix -- begin rolling out public charging stations. Nissan is working with Ecotality to bring 11,210 public chargers to four states. Better Place promises to bring such infrastructure to Israel, Hawaii and elsewhere. But much more needs to be done.
You might think the planners at ConEd would be up nights worrying about the impending load on the power grid. Truth be told, they aren't all that concerned. The biggest reason is we aren't going to see electric vehicles in considerable volumes for many, many years.
"There needs to be some scale. There needs to be enough of these vehicles to really matter," said Joseph P.Oates, VP of energy management at ConEdison. "A system as large as ours -- 13,000-plus megawatts at peak -- it will take a lot of electric vehicles to make a significant dent or substantial contribution to demand growth moving forward.
"Just by the nature of our system, every year we make updates and if the capacity needs to be increased a little bit -- make a wire a little bigger, make a transformer a little wider -- we can do that. What concerns us is if there is an overnight step change in the demand of these vehicles."
Even Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Nissan and one of the loudest EV evangelists, doesn't expect electric cars to comprise more than 10 percent of the market by 2020. That number grows if you include plug-in hybrids, but even then the last study we saw said cars with cords will comprise 30 percent of the market by 2030. For what it's worth, automakers sold about 10 million cars in the United States last year.
That said, automakers know their cars won't be worth the steel they're made of if the grid can't handle the influx. General Motors, Ford and Nissan, among others, are working with utilities to prepare the grid and lay the groundwork for the technology that will allow the cars to communicate with the grid and vice-versa.
We've covered this ground before in conversations with Mark Duvall, director Electric Power Research Institute, but it bears repeating. Duvall told us 10 million electric vehicles -- about 4 percent of the 246 million vehicles in the United States last year -- would need less than 1 percent of the juice generated in the United States. Each of those cars would draw about 700 watts. Put another way, he said, in one year three plasma TVs use about as much power as a Ford Escape plug-in hybrid.
That said, Duvall concedes the grid may need improvements at the local level — new transformers, for example, or overhauled substations — to handle a big influx of electrified vehicles. But such an investment brings the long-term benefit of a more efficient system with more integration of renewable energy sources and the reduced need for new peaker plants, which run only at times of high demand.
The conventional wisdom is EV owners will plug in at night when demand is lower. But Oates said that could pose a problem.
"The challenge for us is that we have all this copper cable underground that are sending power out to transformers," he said. "Those large cables rely on cycling. If they are at a high load for a period of time they can carry a certain amount of electricity but if they don’t cool down during the night, they will start to lose capacity. They need to be cooled to maintain the capacity. If we didn't cool them down, the next day they couldn't carry as mich and we'd have to put more cables in the ground. They will fail sooner or they will fail catastrophically when you need them most."
Of course, improving the system takes time and money, and we have to begin preparing now for the inevitable influx of cars with cords.
"The stuff out on the street is easy to do but a new substation takes five years to build," Oates said. "And what if this step change happens in a particular part of Manhattan? And then that network, which is independent of the other networks, has some infrastructure changes we need to meet pretty quickly. We have to watch the signposts to make sure we are ready.”
Policymakers would be wise to do the same.
Photo: Jim Merithew / Wired.com. Tony Posawatz, vehicle line director for the Chevrolet Volt, uncoils the cord that plugs into the car to charge its 16 kilowatt-hour battery.
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