Smart EV charge management is promising, so why isn’t it more widespread?

Smart charge management for electric vehicles (EVs) has promising potential, but it has not seen widespread adoption yet. A new report aims to shed some light on the state of smart charge management across the US.

The report, Survey and Gap Prioritization of U.S. Electric Vehicle Charge Management Deployments, was conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and published with the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO). It includes findings from more than 100 managed charging programs across the country and more than 40 interviews with utility companies and stakeholders.

“EV adoption rates are rising nationally, but we’re seeing considerable differences in readiness levels among utilities,” said LBNL’s Doug Black, who served as the overall lead of the report. “We wanted to establish a baseline to understand the current state of smart charge management and then see what factors might be slowing the implementation of managed charging programs.”

EV charge management can come in a few forms. One simple example is a driver restricting their charging to certain hours, such as the lowest-priced period of a time of use (TOU) rate from a utility company. Smart charge management, on the other hand, involves calculating the charging needs of an EV, including how fast it charges and how much power is available, and negotiating these needs to prevent the battery from pulling too much from the grid at once.

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While smart charge management seems promising as far as its ability to lower charging costs and reduce demand, the research team found several “pressing” areas where advancements in technologies or standard practices are likely needed to facilitate more widespread adoption.

The researchers highlighted three key themes:

• Site-level smart charge management is underutilized: Many EV charging sites have capacity limits that can prevent EV adoption. Programming these charging sites with smart charge management strategies could “rapidly” enable greater access to EV charging and, in turn, wider EV adoption, the researchers said.
• Utilities lack the economic data needed to make the business case for smart charge management investments: Utilities need to understand the costs they might incur if they don’t implement smart charge management strategies, the researchers argued. For instance, without managed charging, they may need to invest in costly grid upgrades to accommodate growing EV adoption.
• Fragmented vehicle-grid integration standards are preventing widespread smart charge management deployments: There are no uniformly adopted standards for bidirectional communication protocols, which allow for electricity to flow between EVs, charging infrastructure, utilities, and the grid. Moreover, there is no requirement to comply with a standard and no certification process for manufacturers who might want to use one. This makes it “nearly impossible” for vehicle manufacturers to determine how to build smart charge management into their vehicles, the researchers said. As a result, there is a risk that companies may develop standalone solutions that do not work for every EV.

In response to these findings, the researchers also recommended solutions for each gap in smart charge management knowledge, practice, and technology level.

First, researchers recommend expanding smart charge management field demonstrations — particularly for “constrained distribution systems,” or charging sites with little additional capacity to generate electricity. These demonstrations could show EV owners and fleet managers that smart charge management is user-friendly, does not disrupt vehicle use, and can have financial benefits, the researchers said. They can also show utilities that smart charge management strategies are reliable technologies that can be counted on when needed and can be as cost-competitive as traditional charging.

Second, researchers recommend developing dynamic pricing mechanisms for EV charging. A standardized mechanism could communicate electricity prices from the grid to the customer, within customer sites, and to cloud entities that provide charging optimization services. This dynamic pricing can help address grid and electricity generation needs in real time, they said.

Third, researchers recommend creating systems that put the power to automate smart charge management scheduling in customers’ hands. Many utilities publish TOU rates that vary the cost of electricity over different periods of the day. But these rate changes alone could lead to problems with too many EVs charging at the same time. They also do not guarantee that EV drivers will change their charging practices.

Finally, researchers strongly recommended efforts to advance the state of smart charge management standards, communications hardware and networks, and technologies—with a particular focus on ensuring interoperability between EVs and charging stations. They also recommend quantifying the market and policy impacts of smart charge management programs, and sharing those results widely, to help accelerate adoption.

“One of our key findings was that both driver and utility confidence in these programs needs to increase to see wider implementation of smart charge management,” said Nadia Panossian, an NREL EV charging researcher who led NREL’s contributions to the survey. “One way to do that is for utilities to share their findings with each other. There are smart charge management programs across the country showing promising preliminary results— and in-depth exposure to, and analysis of, those results could help utilities see what’s possible.”

One specific example of a smart charge management is DTE Energy’s Smart Charge, which launched as a pilot project in 2023. The program, designed to manage load growth from EV charging, called 44 events from 2022 to 2023 resulting in a reduction of 14 MWh from 663 participants. DTE Energy has so far enrolled 1,575 electric vehicles in the program.

DTE Energy offers customers enrolled in the Smart Charge program a $500 EV rebate, which increases to $1,500 for low-middle-income customers who buy or lease an EV, for the ability to call up to five demand response events in the summer months. Customers also receive a $50 enrollment gift card and a $50 gift card upon program completion.

DTE Energy serves as the resource offtaker, program operator, and customer payment channel for the VPP. Vehicle manufacturers GM, Ford, BMW, and Tesla (via technology provider WeaveGrid) enroll customers.

In 2021, applied research and commercialization institute Pecan Street released analysis that showed utilities can save up to 41% on serving their residential electric vehicle charging loads by deploying smart charging technologies.

Pecan Street analyzed nearly 100 homes with EVs in Pecan Street’s research network and ran different simulations of grid and utility cost impacts for various charging technology adoption scenarios. The findings show an 18% cost increase for the worst-case scenario and a 23% cost decrease for the best-case scenario. The best-case scenario shifted a percentage of EV charging from peak times to overnight, while the worst-case scenario had more EV owners charging in the early evening.

Pecan Street said that higher capacity vehicle charging will play a significant role in the viability and adoption of longer range EVs but cautioned that done incorrectly, this type of EV charging could be a more expensive and less predictable load for utilities. It recommended that utilities take a proactive and deliberate approach to integrating smart charging technologies, along with demand response programs, and utility customer outreach and education.

Originally published by Sean Wolfe on power-grid.com