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A new study from E3 shows big potential cost savings for utilities with smart chargers.
Ditching the combustion engine for an electric vehicle is a good first step for cutting transportation emissions. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that owning an electric car on its own is not enough. When and how you charge the car makes an enormous difference, not only for reducing CO2 emissions, but also for helping the power grid withstand the coming electrification wave.
We know that not all charging is created equal. Location, for example, is an obvious difference-maker. In places with ample renewable energy such as hydro-dominated Washington or solar California, electric vehicles produce vastly less climate pollution over their lifetimes than gasoline cars. In places with fossil-fuel-heavy grid, the climate benefit is still there, but much smaller.
The matter of when to charge is, similarly, about aligning EV charging with the supply of renewable energy. As Heatmap has noted before, it makes sense for solar-heavy states to encourage EV owners to charge at midday when clean energy generation peaks — that would help to level out California’s duck curve rather than make it worse. That’s easier said than done, though, since not everyone’s workplace has electric vehicle chargers. Besides, the simplest form of the EV lifestyle is to plug in upon returning home from work and errands in the evening, the very moment when electricity use spikes and solar energy is dropping off for the day.
Charging’s place and time are both important for maximizing the climate good EVs can do. They are also matters of growing importance for electric utilities that must learn how to balance the coming acceleration in electricity demand without seeing their costs spiral out of control. According to new research by the group Energy and Environmental Economics, smarter ways to optimize the when and the how of EV charging could save them an enormous amount in upgrade costs.
E3’s researchers ran case studies, including one that modeled the EV-heavy territory of Southern California Edison, to find out how different approaches to widespread EV charging affected how much extra costs the utilities incurred. The researchers considered three approaches to charging. In the first, “unmanaged,” drivers plug in as soon as they get home and the vehicle charges until full. In the second, a “passive managed" scenario, the EV doesn’t necessarily charge to full immediately, but instead waits until off-peak hours when the price of electricity drops. The third, “optimized,” used Rhythmos.io’s software to imagine a system wherein a car can detect the exact moments to charge to place the least strain on the grid.
The differences were stark. E3 used California’s official Avoided Cost Calendar to measure the added costs to SCE under each scenario. Whereas unmanaged charging cost the utility $984 per EV added to the system, optimized charging dropped that figure to just $407, a 60% reduction. (The middle-ground scenario came in at $686.)
Much of these savings are attributable to avoiding the wear and tear and possible overloads that electrical transformers would suffer in a world where everyone tries to charge their EVs all at once. (The transformers that form that backbone of the power grid are rated to specific currents and voltages they cannot safely exceed, which is one of the limiting factors on how much the system can handle.) It’s a particularly pressing matter in this age of transformer shortages, when it can take years to get a replacement for a broken or outdated one.
Although the financial and resilience benefits of optimized EV charging are clear in E3’s findings, they’re far from simple to achieve in the complex moment-to-moment reality of the grid. E3 study coauthor Eric Cutter told me it starts with communication — utilities could give EV drivers a forecast a day in advance, for example, telling them when clean energy will be in good supply and prices will be low.
“They could say, ‘Tomorrow is a sunny day, so please charge during the day,’ or, ‘Tomorrow is a cloudy day, and it happens to be very hot and humid, so the air conditioners are going to be ringing, so please don't charge in the evening and charge late at night,’” he says. “And they could make that determination each day as to what's going to be the most beneficial for the system.”
But much of this work will be automatic and algorithmic. For optimized charging to work, all drivers have to do is leave their EV plugged in and be okay with whenever the system decides to send them electricity. The software will decide which cars get which levels of charge, and when, to minimize strain on grid infrastructure.
That raises another question about trust. People who don’t like the local power company — and there’s a lot of them — might not want to allow that entity to decide when their EV gets to charge. They also might not trust that they’ll have enough battery range when they need it. To combat the first issue, Cutter said, perhaps drivers will sign up for a charging management system run through their car’s manufacturer, since drivers often have a better opinion of Honda or Ford than they do of their utility. And to fight the range anxiety problem, he says, some pilot programs have given customers a button to opt out of optimized charging.
“What the programs have found out is that customers want the button, but they never use it. It's very, very rare,” he says.
The number of EVs in America, especially in markets outside California, has yet to reach a point where a smarter way to charge has become a necessity. Although their sales share is rising, EVs accounted for just 8.1% of cars sold in 2024; only California has seen the energy demand from electric vehicles exceed 1 million megawatt-hours, though the numbers are rising fast. Even with EVs and electrification facing stiff political headwinds, utilities across the nation are already at work on plans to handle the influx of EV demand.
“Ten years ago when we were talking to utilities, a lot of them would say, ‘We're not worried about EVs. Come back to me when that's 5% of adoption or 10% of load.’ But not anymore. I don't think utilities anymore are waiting until that level of adoption to start thinking about how they need to plan for them.”
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From Kansas to Brooklyn, the fire is turning battery skeptics into outright opponents.
The symbol of the American battery backlash can be found in the tiny town of Halstead, Kansas.
Angry residents protesting a large storage project proposed by Boston developer Concurrent LLC have begun brandishing flashy yard signs picturing the Moss Landing battery plant blaze, all while freaking out local officials with their intensity. The modern storage project bears little if any resemblance to the Moss Landing facility, which uses older technology,, but that hasn’t calmed down anxious locals or stopped news stations from replaying footage of the blaze in their coverage of the conflict.
The city of Halstead, under pressure from these locals, is now developing a battery storage zoning ordinance – and explicitly saying this will not mean a project “has been formally approved or can be built in the city.” The backlash is now so intense that Halstead’s mayor Dennis Travis has taken to fighting back against criticism on Facebook, writing in a series of posts about individuals in his community “trying to rule by MOB mentality, pushing out false information and intimidating” volunteers working for the city. “I’m exercising MY First Amendment Right and well, if you don’t like it you can kiss my grits,” he wrote. Other posts shared information on the financial benefits of building battery storage and facts to dispel worries about battery fires. “You might want to close your eyes and wish this technology away but that is not going to happen,” another post declared. “Isn’t it better to be able to regulate it in our community?”
What’s happening in Halstead is a sign of a slow-spreading public relations wildfire that’s nudging communities that were already skeptical of battery storage over the edge into outright opposition. We’re not seeing any evidence that communities are transforming from supportive to hostile – but we are seeing new areas that were predisposed to dislike battery storage grow more aggressive and aghast at the idea of new projects.
Heatmap Pro data actually tells the story quite neatly: Halstead is located in Harvey County, a high risk area for developers that already has a restrictive ordinance banning all large-scale solar and wind development. There’s nothing about battery storage on the books yet, but our own opinion poll modeling shows that individuals in this county are more likely to oppose battery storage than renewable energy.
We’re seeing this phenomenon play out elsewhere as well. Take Fannin County, Texas, where residents have begun brandishing the example of Moss Landing to rail against an Engie battery storage project, and our modeling similarly shows an intense hostility to battery projects. The same can be said about Brooklyn, New York, where anti-battery concerns are far higher in our polling forecasts – and opposition to battery storage on the ground is gaining steam.
And more on the week’s conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Carbon County, Wyoming – I have learned that the Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project.
2. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – Anti-offshore wind advocates are pushing the Trump administration to rescind air permits issued to Avangrid for New England Wind 1 and 2, the same approval that was ripped away from Atlantic Shores offshore wind farm last Friday.
3. Campbell County, Virginia – The HEP Solar utility-scale project in rural Virginia is being accused of creating a damaging amount of runoff, turning a nearby lake into a “mud pit.” (To see the story making the rounds on anti-renewables social media, watch this TV news segment.)
4. Marrow County, Ohio – A solar farm in Ohio got approvals for once! Congratulations to ESA Solar on this rare 23-acre conquest.
5. Madison County, Indiana – The Indiana Supreme Court has rejected an effort by Invenergy to void a restrictive county ordinance.
6. Davidson County, North Carolina – A fraught conflict is playing out over a Cypress Creek Renewables solar project in the town of Denton, which passed a solar moratorium that contradicts approval for the project issued by county officials in 2022.
7. Knox County, Nebraska – A federal judge has dismissed key aspects of a legal challenge North Fork Wind, a subsidiary of National Grid Renewables, filed against the county for enacting a restrictive wind ordinance that hinders development of their project.
8. Livingston Parish, Louisiana – This parish is extending a moratorium on new solar farm approvals for at least another year, claiming such action is necessary to comply with a request from the state.
9. Jefferson County, Texas – The city council in the heavily industrial city of Port Arthur, Texas, has approved a lease for constructing wind turbines in a lake.
10. Linn County, Oregon – What is supposed to be this county’s first large-scale solar farm is starting to face pushback over impacts to a wetlands area.Today’s sit-down is with Nikhil Kumar, a program director at GridLab and an expert in battery storage safety and regulation. Kumar’s folks reached out to me after learning I was writing about Moss Landing and wanted to give his honest and open perspective on how the disaster is impacting the future of storage development in the U.S. Let’s dive in!
The following is an abridged and edited version of our conversation.
So okay – walk me through your perspective on what happened with Moss Landing.
When this incident occurred, I’d already been to Moss Landing plenty of times. It caught me by surprise in the sense that it had reoccurred – the site had issues in the past.
A bit of context about my background – I joined GridLab relatively recently, but before that I spent 20 years in this industry, often working on the integrity and quality assurance of energy assets, anything from a natural gas power plant to nuclear to battery to a solar plant. I’m very familiar with safety regulation and standards for the energy industry, writ large.
Help me understand how things have improved since Moss Landing. Why is this facility considered by some to be an exception to the rule?
It’s definitely an outlier. Batteries are very modular by nature, you don’t need a lot of overall facility to put battery storage on the ground. From a construction standpoint, a wind or solar farm or even a gas plant is more complex to put together. But battery storage, that simplicity is a good thing.
That’s not the case with Moss Landing. If you look at the overall design of these sites, having battery packs in a building with a big hall is rare.
Pretty much every battery that’s been installed in the last two or three years, industry has already known about this [risk]. When the first [battery] fire occurred, they basically containerized everything – you want to containerize everything so you don’t have these thermal runaway events, where the entire battery batch catches fire. If you look at the record, in the last two or three years, I do not believe a single such design was implemented by anybody. People have learned from that experience already.
Are we seeing industry have to reckon with this anyway? I can’t help but wonder if you’ve witnessed these community fears. It does seem like when a fire happens, it creates problems for developers in other parts of the country. Are developers reckoning with a conflation from this event itself?
I think so. Developers that we’ve talked to are very well aware of reputational risk. They do not want people to have general concern with this technology because, if you look at how much battery is waiting to be connected to the grid, that’s pretty much it. There’s 12 times more capacity of batteries waiting to be connected to the grid than gas. That’s 12X.
We should wait for the city and I would really expect [Vistra] to release the root cause investigation of this fire. Experts have raised a number of these potential root causes. But we don’t know – was it the fire suppression system that failed? Was it something with the batteries?
We don’t know. I would hope that the details come out in a transparent way, so industry can make those changes, in terms of designs.
Is there anything in terms of national regulation governing this sector’s performance standards and safety standards, and do you think something like that should exist?
It should exist and it is happening. The NFPA [National Fire Prevention Association] is putting stuff out there. There might be some leaders in the way California’s introduced some new regulation to make sure there’s better documentation, safety preparedness.
There should be better regulation. There should be better rules. I don’t think developers are even against that.
OK, so NFPA. But what about the Trump administration? Should they get involved here?
I don’t think so. The OSHA standards apply to people who work on site — the regulatory frameworks are already there. I don’t think they need some special safety standard that’s new that applies to all these sites. The ingredients are already there.
It’s like coal power plants. There’s regulation on greenhouse gas emissions, but not all aspects of coal plants. I’m not sure if the Trump administration needs to get involved.
It sounds like you're saying the existing regulations are suitable in your view and what’s needed is for states and industry to step up?
I would think so. Just to give you an example, from an interconnection standpoint, there’s IEEE standards. From the battery level, there are UL standards. From the battery management system that also manages a lot of the ins and outs of how the battery operates —- a lot of those already have standards. To get insurance on a large battery site, they have to meet a lot of these guidelines already — nobody would insure a site otherwise. There’s a lot of financial risk. You don’t want batteries exploding because you didn’t meet any of these hundreds of guidelines that already exist and in many cases standards that exist.
So, I don’t know if something at the federal level changes anything.
My last question is, if you were giving advice to a developer, what would you say to them about making communities best aware of these tech advancements?
Before that, I am really hoping Vistra and all the agencies involved [with Moss Landing] have a transparent and accountable process of revealing what actually happened at this site. I think that’s really important.