Monthly Archives: January 2016

Four Cities Awarded £40 million “Go Ultra Low” Funding

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The United Kingdom’s Department for Transport has just announced that:

Nottingham, Bristol, Milton Keynes and London named as winners of multi-million fund to encourage drivers to go green.

Four cities have been awarded significant funds today (25 January 2016) to promote green vehicle technology after successfully bidding for a share of a multi-million pot created to support the take-up of plug-in electric cars across the United Kingdom”.

Here’s the video version of the announcement:

Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin said:

  • These Go Ultra Low Cities have proposed exciting, innovative ideas that will encourage drivers to choose an electric car. I want to see thousands more greener vehicles on our roads and I am proud to back this ambition with £40 million to help the UK become international pioneers of emission cutting technology.
  • The UK is a world leader in the uptake of low emission vehicles and our long-term economic plan is investing £600 million by 2020 to improve air quality, create jobs and achieve our goal of every new car and van in theUK being ultra-low emission by 2040.

Third in the list of winners is Bristol, just up the M5 motorway from us here in Exeter, who were actually bidding under the banner of the “West of England”. According to this morning’s announcement:

Bristol get £7 million to offer residents free residential parking for ULEVs, access to 3 carpool lanes in the city, over 80 rapid and fast chargers across the city and a scheme encouraging people to lease a plug-in car for up to 4 weeks to help them better understand the range of benefits that electric vehicles bring.

There’s no mention anywhere in OLEV’s announcement about vehicle-to-grid or distributed storage however. Perhaps that sort of thing is still not on UK plc’s shopping list?

Ultra Fast Charging of Electric Vehicles

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A recent news release from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne discusses what’s involved in “Charging an electric car as fast as filling a tank of gas”:

Electric cars will be competitive when they can be charged in the time it takes to fill the gas tank. EPFL researchers have found the solution to this problem without bringing down the power grid: intermediate storage.

Electric cars will only be truly competitive when it doesn’t take longer to charge them than it does to fill a gas tank. The storage capacity of batteries is improving exponentially, but the power grid is the weak link: how could it possibly charge thousands of cars at the same time? This is especially problematic in the case of ultra-fast charging, which requires more than 10 times more power. EPFL researchers have found the solution: intermediate storage.

It only takes a minute and a half to put enough fuel into the tank of a diesel car to run for around 1,000 kilometers. After being charged for the same amount of time, the best electric cars will only go six kilometers. The only way to make the charging process faster is to increase the power flow going in. But such a quick charge would require 4.5 MW of power – equivalent to 4,500 washing machines. This would bring down the power grid.

EPFL also provide this infographic to help explain the idea:

The release quotes Prof. Alfred Rufer from EPFL’s Industrial Electronics Lab. as follows:

We came up with a system of intermediate storage. With this buffer storage, charging stations can be disconnected from the grid while still providing a high charge level for cars. And this can be done using the low-voltage grid (used for residential electricity needs) or the medium-voltage grid (used for regional power distribution), which significantly reduces the required investment.

and goes on to explain that:

Intermediate storage is achieved using a lithium iron battery the size of a shipping container, which is constantly charging at a low level of power from the grid. When a car needs a quick charge, the buffer battery promptly transfers the stored electricity to the vehicle. The grid is not even used.

To prove the system works, the researchers at the EPFL Energy Center and Industrial Electronics Lab built a demonstrator together with their partners from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) and the Bern University of Applied Sciences. The demonstrator is a trailer holding the intermediate storage battery. It draws power from the low-voltage grid and, in the space of 15 minutes, provides the 20 to 30 kWh needed to charge a standard electric car battery.

If you’re technically minded the UFCEV team also provide a handy bibliography of academic papers and presentations covering the concept.

DECC Launches a “Consultation to Ensure Regulation in the Energy Sector Encourages Innovation”!

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This is such exciting news (to yours truly at least!) that I reproduce the United Kingdom’s Department of Energy & Climate Change’s announcement in full. From their headquarters in London:

Image courtesy of DECC

DECC has today launched a Consultation to ensure regulation in the energy sector encourages innovation.

DECC invites stakeholders to offer their views on how effective the current regulatory framework is in enabling innovation.

The consultation focuses on the activities of DECC and the Oil and Gas Authority, with other energy sector regulators undertaking parallel engagement exercises.

Lord Bourne commented:

  • Innovation has the power to transform the energy sector and the way we live every day.
  • We are committed to cutting red tape and creating industry environments that foster new ideas and give technologies a commercial edge.
  • Collaboration is key and I look forward to hearing the ideas from industry so we can ensure an innovative energy sector that works for hardworking families and businesses.

The Consultation on ensuring regulation encourages innovation will run for four weeks.

For more information and to have your say please email [email protected]

Rest assured that one way or another I shall be getting in touch with the innovation team at DECC before the deadline of 5 PM on February 11th 2016. Perhaps I’ll send them my past musings on the regulatory framework here in the United Kingdom? If you would like to do so as well all the small print is available from:

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/consultation-on-ensuring-regulation-encourages-innovation

which adds that:

In its Productivity Plan, the government required all departments to publish an Innovation Plan by spring 2016. The purpose of each Plan is to set out how departments and regulators are adapting legislation and enforcement frameworks to enable innovation in the form of emerging technologies and innovative business models.

This consultation enables stakeholders to offer their views on current regulatory activities led by DECC and the OGA and how they interact with energy sector innovation. Other regulators are conducting parallel engagement exercises, for which links and contacts are provided within the document.

A related document from DECC, published last month and entitled “Towards a Smart Energy System“, is also well worth a read. It explains some smart energy innovations that the authors would presumably like to see implemented:

A smart, flexible energy system would involve incorporating new forms of flexibility in combination, including energy storage, demand side response (DSR), smart networks,as well as increasing interconnection. It could also involve energy efficiency improvements which target peak demand. Combining these solutions in a whole-system approach would help us achieve the following benefits:

  • Defer or avoid investment in network reinforcement.
  • Reduce the need for a significant increase in reserve generation capacity.
  • Meet binding climate change targets with less low carbon generation.
  • Make the best use of our low carbon generation.
  • Optimise balancing of our energy system on a minute-by-minute basis.

It also summarises some of the associated regulatory “barriers” currently facing us here in the UK:

We have identified some potential barriers that mean new forms of flexibility such as DSR and storage may not develop in a timely or adequate way. This includes market and regulatory barriers, where we need to take a whole system perspective in some of our policies and regulatory arrangementin the future. Existing business models may also mean incumbents have incentives to stick with the status quo. Cultural inertia and skills gaps within existing energy companies may also be a factor in slowing the uptake of these technologies. The presence of these barriers shows that further action is likely to be needed if we want to realise the full potential of smarter energy system.

Energy and Climate Change Committee Discusses V2G

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Last year the United Kingdom’s House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee launched an inquiry into low carbon network infrastructure in the UK. Initially they sought written submissions of evidence, and are now televising live oral submissions to the committee. Fortunately these events are also recorded, and during the one that took place on January 12th there was much discussion of energy storage in general and electric vehicle batteries in particular. Here’s an extract:

Amongst a variety of other contributions you can hear the chair Angus MacNeil MP ask:

To what extent will electricity demand in future exhibit greater peaks and troughs due to the electrification of heat and transport? What changes will that make in demand?

The first expert witness to respond was Sara Bell, the Chief Executive of Tempus Energy:

I think that depends very much on how we manage that demand. Both the demands that you have mentioned are highly flexible, so that offers an enormous opportunity to match that demand to generation, and variable generation can be matched very successfully to that flexible demand. Every electric vehicle could be charged when we have excess renewable generation. There is a way, from an economic standpoint, of managing that sensibly.

The experts went on to discussheat pumps for bit, and then Dr Philipp Grünewald from the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University pointed out that:

Electric vehicles could play a very interesting role in helping to balance the system, because they have inbuilt storage, but another debate is ongoing on the extent to which you want to use that type of storage for the grid. We might come back to that.

to which Dr Jill Cainey of the Electricity Storage Network added:

On electric vehicles, it is more that the charging is the critical thing that you need to control, not necessarily using the battery device for the system services. National Grid has a project in which it has looked at that — at providing frequency response.

You may correctly surmise from the name of this blog that I don’t entirely agree with Jill on that point! “Smart charging” certainly has its place, but so might “using EV batteries for system services” in a rather different market and regulatory environment to the current one. The panel discussed that issue a bit later in the proceedings. Sara Bell again:

We have not even started the process of making the demand side flexible. Tempus Energy is the only electricity supplier that unlocks flexibility in customer premises. We go to our customers and we put control and sensor technology into their premises so that we can move their demand. Every time — and I mean every time — we go into customer premises, they are using electricity at times in a very expensive way, completely unnecessarily, because no supplier has ever rewarded them for their flexibility before, so why should they bother?

We are one small new supplier. If the whole market operated like this, we would unlock a great deal of flexibility, which would reduce the total system cost.

Jill Cainey again:

There are some issues with capacity now. That is why we have the capacity market. I guess Electricity Storage Network would argue that that incentivises particular types of technology for security of supply but doesn’t necessarily support the new innovative approaches such as demand side and electricity storage because of the way that market has been designed…

There are technologies and approaches, such as demand side response and aggregation — aggregators are providing demand side response as well. We need to facilitate those approaches to move forward. That is a market approach.

That we can agree on 101%, and I also agree with Dr Gordon Edge who is Director of Policy at RenewableUK who said:

I would argue that some of the time-limiting steps are not technology but the regulatory market approaches. We need to be thinking about how we make the market so that these things, when they are economic, just happen automatically. At the moment, there are too many barriers.

and with Stephen Goldspink who is Director of Strategy and Business Development at Siemens Energy Management, who added that:

Technology and solutions are already available, as my colleagues has already said, so it is about how fast we deploy those technologies and the regulatory barriers that need to be removed to deploy them. Energy storage, demand side management, energy efficiency — all these things can support this capacity margin issue and put us on the journey to low-carbon networks much quicker.

Angus MacNeil then said:

Thank you. I understand what you are saying about regulatory barriers, but we will leave that section there.

Hence so will we, for the moment at least.