Global pressure on reducing carbon emissions is continuing to mount from governments, industry, consumers and academics and one initiative to help reduce carbon emissions in transport is the electric car as announced two weeks ago (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8001254.stm). As part of the UK government’s strategy to promote low carbon transport, it plans to encourage consumers to buy electric or plug-in hybrid cars. These plans are expected to include funding to boost the number of charging points and other aspects of the infrastructure required to support electric vehicles.
However, a major concern that must be addressed is whether the existing energy grid infrastructure is able to withstand the pressure that electric vehicles would potentially place on it. To support such requirements, there must be an energy distribution network capable of providing energy on demand, i.e. a smart grid. The smart grid enables better knowledge of current and forecasted loads and provides intelligent and rapid decision support to address peaks and troughs in energy demands – such as those entailed by widespread adoption of electric vehicles.
Electric cars provide a great opportunity for helping utilities balance the grid as one of the biggest constraints with electricity is storage. Imagine hundreds of thousands of electric cars, each with their own batteries, some of which could charge during low demand and low price periods. They could reinject electricity onto the grid during high price, high demand periods thus acting as a small distributed generator and this would benefit both the customers and the utilities. A smart grid would be required to handle the transformation of distributed generation.
If the electric car is to become a part of the future of transport, smart grid infrastructure must be seen as a prerequisite for meeting the transformation of growing energy requirements that will inevitably follow.
