Is the power grid ready for electric cars?

John W. Schoen Senior producer • Profile • E-mail

With all the talk about a new fleet of electric cars coming down the pike, Jacob in Denver is wondering: Is the nation's power grid really ready for all these vehicles?

What will be the electric companies’ response as thousands of vehicles are being plugged in and being charged? It reminds me of when corn was being harvested at extreme amounts for energy in the last couple of years and farmers could not afford to feed their livestock and everything farm- and corn-related jumped in price. Is our electricity bill going to go up even more?
— Jacob F., Denver, Colo.

Despite the breathless hype surrounding the coming wave of electric cars, the shift away from gas-powered transportation is not likely to overwhelm the nation’s power grid — even given the legitimate worries that this critical infrastructure is badly in need of an overhaul. There are a couple of powerful reasons, according to industry researchers.

The first one is that widespread use of electric vehicles is still years — or decades away. President-elect Obama’s energy policy, for example, targets 1 million plug-in hybrids by 2015.

Even if car makers switched their entire production runs to electric cars, it would still take many years to turn over the existing fleet of 220 million cars and trucks. The average age of cars on the road today is nine years — and rising. So the power industry has plenty of time to get ready.

Because they generate much of their power from onboard gasoline engines, plug-in hybrids aren’t big consumers of electric power from the grid. You can run a plug-in hybrid with about the same amount of power it takes to keep your two, 42-inch plasma TVs fired up (with set top converters), according to the Electric Power Research Institute. Keeping up with the installation of new air conditioning units is a bigger challenge, according to an EPRI spokesman.

There’s also a major difference between the supply of electric power and, say, the corn needed to make ethanol. Because large quantities of electricity can’t be easily stored, power companies have to build enough capacity for the peak load on the hottest day in August. But even on those hottest days, power demand falls sharply at night. Since most electric car owners will probably charge their vehicles overnight, when power is plentiful and rates are lower, the impact on your electric bill will probably be less than the latest video game player you’ve got in your den.

Of course, the capacity of the nation’s power grid will also have to continue grow to keep up with demand from a growing economy — once the economy gets going again. Lately, demand has been growing at about 2 percent a year — or a little less than the overall growth of the economy.

But before committing to building more coal- or nuclear-fired power plants, power companies today are looking at how they can serve the same number of customers more efficiently. Every megawatt of electricity saved (call it a “nega-watt”) is just as useful as a mega-watt of new capacity. New technologies — if widely adopted — could cut the growth of electricity consumption by 22 percent over the next two decades, according to an EPRI study. Some of the cheapest fixes — like replacing incandescent light bulbs with those squiggly compact fluorescents — can provide some of the biggest savings.

That’s not to say the nation’s power grid isn’t due for major overhaul. Unlike the technology now being engineered into the next generation of electric vehicles, large parts of the electrical distribution system operate on technology that’s been around for decades. By encouraging an upgrade to a so-called “smart grid,” the government could even save consumers money.

Competition among power producers, for example, was stymied in the 1990s in part because we don’t really have a national power system — just a series of “interconnected” regional grids. Until you can easily shop for power from providers around the country the way you pick a long distance phone provider, you’re pretty much captive to your local power company.

That smart grid could also help you save money with your plug-in hybrid, too. After tooling around town and topping off your car’s batteries, you could hook them up to the gird and sell power back to your local electric company — and make your electric meter run backwards. It could be that some of the extra power we’re going to need in coming decades will come from generators in millions of American garages.

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