In order for vehicle-to-grid integration to become both economically and environmentally viable, there must be many more electric vehicles on the road than there are today. But electric vehicles are often more expensive to buy and produce than gas-powered cars, and while California is home to more electric vehicles (about 600,000) than any other state, EVs still represent only a small share of total vehicles. By 2030, California aims to have 5 million EVs on the road. For a transcript, please visit https://climatebreak.org/ev-charging-vehicle-to-grid-integration-with-scott-moura/
For a transcript, please visit https://climatebreak.org/ev-charging-vehicle-to-grid-integration-with-scott-moura/
Ethan: Welcome to Climate Break, bringing you stories about innovative climate solutions being developed at UC Berkeley and around the world shared by the experts themselves. I'm your host, Ethan Elkind, from the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at Berkeley Law. We're talking today about electric vehicle charging systems and how we can make them better. Most of us have probably seen or even used today's typical EV chargers. They basically function like gas pumps. You hook up your vehicle and start funneling power into it. But what if we could make chargers smarter and along the way improve vehicle battery life and reduce greenhouse gas emissions? To learn more, I spoke with Dr. Scott Moura, who is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering here at UC Berkeley. Through his lab, he's working on just such a pilot project. It's called SlrpEV, or the Smart Learning Research Pilot for Electric Vehicles. He told me how it works.
Prof. Moura: So you drive up. On the box, there's a QR code, you scan with your phone. It takes you to a web app. And then after you've registered, it provides you with two charging options. Regular, scheduled. Regular is just like your normal charging experience. You plug in, it starts charging immediately, and then it's done when your vehicle tops out before you leave and there's a price per hour rate for that. The slightly more interesting one is scheduled. Scheduled you indicate, when you plan to depart and how much added miles you want. And you can set default so you don't have to pick out every time. That now gives us flexibility to optimize how we charge the vehicle, and it optimizes the charge schedules such that you're guaranteed to have those added miles when you plan to depart.
Ethan: These two charging options are key to Moura’s research SlrpEV uses statistical models based on a wide array of variables to analyze driver choice. Maura says this attention to the preferences and needs of drivers sets his pilot apart from others.
Prof. Moura: Consumer behavior. That is what's definitively different here, is we're now taking the behavior of people in terms of do they prefer regular or scheduled? And it is now part of our model, It's part of our system. And we're trying to really more deeply understand that so that we can present this menu of choices to options that better reflects how different people value EV charging and how do you price that and schedule charging in an optimal way, given a model of human behavior.
Ethan: Power grids can often be energy inefficient, wasting renewable energy when it's available or failing to store it for future use. Optimizing charging schedules can lower costs for drivers and help reduce strain on the power grid, leading to fewer blackouts and cheaper electricity prices.
Prof. Moura: If we can better understand when people are flexible with their EV charging, it now becomes a flexible resource that we can use to lower emissions by aligning EV charging in moments that there are lower carbon electricity generation resources on the grid.
Ethan: Moura is alluding to a process known as Vehicle-to-Grid integration, with smart charging EV batteries can be charged when renewable energy is abundant and energy demand is low, say at noon on a sunny day. Then in times of high demand, energy stored in these batteries can be funneled back into the grid. The result is clean, renewable energy on demand. This concept may seem simple, but significant hurdles remain. Technology is certainly one hurdle. Policy is another. Lawmakers can often be slow to respond to changes requiring swift reforms. Moura says that for his research to be put into practice, changes in policy must be made.
Prof. Moura: There's a specific policy that I think we need to overcome, and that is in many cities, to get a permit to install EV charging, you need to have sufficient electric capacity to support all the chargers running at full power. Now, with software controls, that is unnecessary and quite expensive, because it means you may have to do a large infrastructure upgrade. So what I would like to see is cities adopting a policy where with software, if you can ensure that the maximum power is within the electrical charging infrastructure, that would dramatically lower the infrastructure costs. Dramatically. Which would help proliferate EV charging in these public and workplace settings.
Ethan: Charging aside, battery performance represents another opportunity to encourage EV proliferation. Batteries represent the most expensive part of an electric vehicle, which are otherwise often cheaper than gas cars when you factor in long term savings on fuels and maintenance. Moura says EVs could become more cost competitive with gas cars sooner if the capacity and lifespan of their batteries improve.
Prof. Moura: Batteries are electrochemical systems. And so the key to what we're doing is we're embedding mathematical models into electrochemistry, into the control system. What that does is it means you can better see inside what's happening with the battery and operate it closer to its performance limits because you're now using knowledge of the electrochemistry so that you can charge them faster, get more energy without degrading it.
Ethan: Under certain conditions, EV Batteries may perform poorly or even get damaged. At E-Cal, Moura is developing techniques to monitor, manage and improve these systems.
Prof. Moura: Right now the way we operate batteries is – do imagine a little old lady, but not the little old lady from Pasadena, who is very good and fast driver, but someone who's very conservative driving, to like a racecar driver who has a super accurate model in their mind of how the vehicle, of the vehicle dynamics and its limits and they can operate at right at its performance limits. So that's the paradigm that we're moving to with battery controls.
Ethan: In addition to developing smart charging and improved battery performance, Moura’s lab is working with ARPA-E, an agency funding research and energy technology to make vehicles more energy efficient on the road. The project uses a framework called Infrastructure to vehicle communication.
Prof. Moura: So imagine a world where traffic lights broadcast to your vehicle, their schedule for when they're red or green. Now you can think about your own commuting and there's probably roads that you drive down fairly often, and you've got a good sense of the timing, right? And you probably think about that when you drive, how fast you go, when you get out of a traffic light and you know, to try to catch the green wave. So how do you actually embed that into an automated vehicle? If you can do that right, then you can avoid stopping.
Ethan: By minimizing braking and accelerating, vehicles don't have to switch gears as often or as quickly. This increases fuel economy and reduces emissions, including toxic air pollution and greenhouse gasses.
Prof. Moura: We also focus a lot on tailpipe emissions, but a lot of the emissions also come from the road in the tires and the brakes. So if you can reduce the amount of braking, and also if you're doing this with electrified vehicles, with this regenerative braking, you also eliminate emissions that come from the brake pads and in the tires from that perspective, which have health impacts that we're only beginning to understand in science. So it's not just tailpipe emissions, it's brake and tire emissions as well, which are non-trivial. They, in fact, are a significant part.
Ethan: Recently, we've unfortunately seen that extreme weather, rising sea levels and other phenomena caused by climate change disproportionately affect low income communities and communities of color. Before our conversation closed, Moura emphasized the importance of including marginalized groups in climate discussions and solutions.
Prof. Moura: All of us in UC Berkeley are really trying to think about climate equity also, and the fact that those who suffer from climate change are often those who don't have resources to address it and more for those who have creative ideas and solutions and the best understanding of these problems often come from nontraditional backgrounds. So it's absolutely tremendous to get involved with these groups and make it an institutional part of what we do day to day.
Ethan: For more interviews with climate experts discussing groundbreaking research, you can visit our website at climatebreak.org. We've gathered resources there to help you remain up to date on the latest climate change solutions. I'm your host, Ethan Elkind. See you next time on Climate Break.