San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) announced a pilot project integrating electric cars and energy storage systems with California’s wholesale energy markets.
We don’t know the details, but there will be a group of energy storage systems and electric vehicle fleets at five separate locations, available for California Independent System Operator’s (CAISO). The first step for EVs is remote control of charging to avoid electricity peak demand.
Electric cars on the SDG&E territory
There are over 13,000 plug-in electric cars in SDG&E’s service territory and, since the number of EVs is growing, charging power will be an important factor one day.
“The project currently aggregates stationary storage systems together with the charging demand of EV fleets at five separate locations throughout San Diego County. The assets are remotely controlled using software that both balances the participant’s charging needs, and identifies opportunities to provide demand response services at the grid level. Demand response is when customers don’t charge EVs or consume energy at peak hours, which alleviates stress on the grid and helps make sure adequate resources are available for the entire region. The project achieves this by correlating charging activity with wholesale energy prices. By agreeing to not charge in certain high price hours, the aggregated resource is paid the marginal energy price in those hours, similar to a conventional generator. The pilot project will end in late 2015.
Besides being among the first to integrate electric vehicles into California’s energy markets, the project is identifying both barriers and best practices for future, large scale integration and interaction of dispatchable distributed energy resources with wholesale markets, and creating tools to evaluate growth opportunities for those resources.”
Read more: Inside EVs