Understanding Impacts and Creating a Roadmap for Future Electrification
Today, utilities are navigating how to meet state/city requirements for accelerated deployment of charging stations as well as understanding the grid impacts of those deployments.
Near-Term Needs – Assessing Grid Impact of Transportation Charging
Difficulties arise as transportation expands out from residential charging. Vehicle batteries for light-duty vehicles are getting larger to meet range requirements, chargers are getting larger to accommodate desires for faster charging. As electrification expands into commercial operations, truck fleets will have an increasingly larger impact, charging stations of all sizes will become more ubiquitous, and our distribution chain will evolve to accommodate electrification – adding charging requirements for ports of entry, through distribution centers and to last-mile deliveries.
Understanding where these “localized” loads will be occurring and how charging patterns may change is essential to understanding the impact on a utility’ grid. To capture this expansion and assess the full impact of electrification across all transportation sectors, project load increases will need to incorporate not only light-duty vehicle charging between residential and public chargers, but also incorporate the project load increases from commercial operations as well.
Quanta Technology has developed a process to localize and predict the impacts of future electric transportation loads for specific cities, across states, or for multi-state, utility territories. In addition, the process can incorporate the potential of electrification of building technologies as well, such as air source heat pumps
The methodology is based on a ground up approach of identifying and projecting adoption of chargers at all buildings, facilities, and depots that are expected to incorporate a range of chargers, from level II to super-fast devices. Because Quanta can localize loads, substations and feeders that are potentially “at-risk” can be identified in order to ensure a seamless adoption of vehicles and allow utilities to be viewed as leaders for vehicle integration.
- Transportation Electrification
- Quanta Technology has developed a methodology to project future “Impact” of EV fleet/vehicle charging loads and localize the impacts to specific substations in order to determine whether substations are “at risk” due to vehicle electrification impact
- Technology Electrification
- 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
Link to Transportation Electrification Technology Assessment and Testing
Integrating Electrification Trends into Future Planning and Roadmaps
For utilities, electrification will evolve into how electrification going to impact our future mobility of people, products via supply chains, and approaches to new building construction as well. Electrification will be occurring across the entire transportation sector – light duty vehicles, medium-duty delivery trucks, short-haul trucks, metro buses and even ridesharing. New distribution facilities will be constructed to accommodate advanced automation, robotics, forklifts inside facilities along with charging bays for multiple classes of trucks and even accommodations for drone activity outside of the facilities.
Construction for airports, rail stations, metro-bus depots will integrate electrification into their designs while retail stores, apartments, and office buildings will be required to dedicate significant numbers of parking areas to be “charge-ready” to incorporate multiple charging stations. Charging habits, which today occurs mainly at residential homes, will change as vehicles are produced with larger batteries for increased range and fast-charging stations become more and more ubiquitous outside the home.
Today, Utilities have been examining electrification from a singular, mutually exclusive impact analysis perspective. As electrification grows, the topic moves away from simple, device (charger) impact and begins to examine entire business and transit processes
“Impact” evolves to “mobility” – meaning that utilities will need to examine processes of their large clients, inclusive of the flow of freight/goods as well as people. Areas of analysis include:
- People moving from home to work and shopping – how will this impact charging habits?
- Freight moving from ports through distribution centers to points of sale – what are the charging needs to support this flow?
- Electrification of Ride-Sharing, Metro Bus Activities, how to electrify?
- Vehicle ranges getting longer, chargers outside of homes getting faster – will this shift vehicle charging away from homes and towards centralized charging?
Quanta Technology has been creating tools to assess these pathways – examining electrification from a grid impact and now extending analysis to flow or mobility as well
Future Roadmaps – Long Term Visions
- Grid impacts of stand-alone facilities will evolve into mobility of people as well as freight/cargo
- As electrification integrates into key account business processes, utilities will need to understand how loads flow between buildings and facilities in order to respond to their client needs
- Quanta Technology is creating roadmaps to help utilities navigate the impacts as electrification integrates into future processes and supply chains
Key References
Major IOU, Midwest US, Electrification Assessment, January 2019: For the Midwest utility, Quanta Technology examined electrification impacts for the utility territory. For the study, electrification include transportation, residential and commercial building technologies, industrial facilities, and agriculture. The assessment examined technologies, growth and penetration through year 2050, adoption and impact on distribution system, methods to accelerate adoption, and recommendations on business opportunities generated by electrification trends.
Major IOU, Southeast US, August 2019: For the Florida utility, Quanta Technology examined transportation electrification load growth assessments for commercial and residential sites. The study examined growth potential through future years and identified expected sites for EV Charger installations, including commercial businesses, sites of potential fleet operations, and key areas such as ports. Growth was linked to individual substations in the targeted territory.
Major IOU, Mid-Atlantic US, September 2019: For the Washington, DC area, Quanta Technology examined transportation electrification load growth assessments for commercial and residential sites. The study examined growth potential through future years and identified potential sites for EV Charger installations, including commercial businesses, and sites of fleet operations. Projected growth was localized and linked to substations and substations were assessed for potential risks due to electrification load growth.
Major IOU, Midwest IOU, March 2020: For an entire utility territory in a single state, Quanta Technology examined transportation electrification load growth assessments for commercial and residential sites. The study examined growth potential through future years and identified potential sites for EV Charger installations, including commercial businesses, and sites of fleet operations. Projected growth was localized and linked to substations and substations were assessed for potential risks due to electrification load growth.