How to Successfully Navigate the Transportation Transformation
Electrification is the biggest lever society has for meeting decarbonization goals. Utilities play a pivotal role in enabling electrification by designing the grid with the flexibility and resiliency to quickly mitigate load spike impacts. To do so, utilities need an understanding of both where the load increases will be and how to best accommodate them.
Why Quanta Technology?
Quanta Technology has the breadth and depth of experience to help. Our knowledge is practical and acquired from impact analysis and technology evaluations. We understand utility operations and utilize powerful tools and testing labs to help assess impacts to the grid, which will guide our design of a viable road map to help prepare your organization for the future of transportation.
Quanta Technology can help you enable transportation electrification on your grid by identifying the:
- Types of users and their visions, plans, and budgets.
- Load types and characteristics.
- Impacts from these loads on the electrical system.
- Mitigating solutions and technologies.
EV Transportation Requires Unique Solutions and Approaches
- How to achieve collaboration among fleet owners, EV charging developers, utilities, regulators, city officials, vehicle manufacturers, etc. for most efficient technology (e.g., need for fast charging) and integration solutions?
- How to locate where, when, and how big loads will be from fleets (road maps) (e.g., heavy-duty fleet chargers can be 150x the size of light-duty vehicle chargers)?
- How to disaggregate load data to specific feeders and substations?
- Who pays for interconnection, tariff, and upgrade fees if customers are mandated to electrify?
- How to manage the burdens of costs, tariffs, interconnection fees? These may “box” utilities as a barrier, truncating one of the largest opportunities for utilities in decades.
- What is the expected pace of adoption? Energy justice and decarbonization may mandate utility customers to electrify, increasing the speed of implementation.
- What are the best solutions to manage these new loads?
Technology electrification (view offering)
Quanta Technology realizes that electrification is not just vehicles, but also includes building technologies such as air source heat pumps – our processes also estimate the penetration and load impact of building electrification.
Managing EV Electrification Opportunities and Impacts
Perform a bottom-up analysis to identify site locations.
- Utilities are challenged to “disaggregate” regional data.
- First is finding the facilities, which is accomplished by utilizing industry code data.
Forecast adoption and estimate loads.
- Fleet centers are not all the same.
- How many chargers?
- Size of chargers?
- Charging profile of individual center?
- Fleet adoption pattern?
Map facility loads to feeders, substations, and transmission to determine impacts. Quanta Technology can:
- Link loads to grid points via least-distance algorithms.
- Add new EV loads to current load and measure against maximum capacity.
Evaluate mitigation and DER deployment options and compare benefits against infrastructure upgrades. Quanta uses proprietary tools that allow our team to optimize mitigation for both utility and facility solutions.
Offer regulatory support to gain acceptance of the optimal solution approach. Modeling becomes the basis for helping utilities gain approval for optimal infrastructure and DER solution approaches.
If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, please see Quanta Technology expert Richard Fioravanti’s panel session “The Role of Grid-Edge Devices and Systems in a Self-Driving Grid” during the IEEE ISGT 2023 Conference.