Georgia can power electric car grid

Source: AJC

With our leaders seeking new paths to growth sectors, I’d submit that Georgia has an opportunity staring us right in the face.

By 2015, analysts are predicting nearly 1 million electric vehicles will be on the nation’s roads.

Our state is offering a number of incentives to fuel this growth with the standing $5,000 tax credit for purchasing vehicles and tax credits for the building of charging stations. In Atlanta, the Metro Atlanta EV Readiness Task Force was organized to help plan a charging infrastructure in the city.

It’s an exciting vision, really — a whole new generation of clean, energy-efficient plug-in electric vehicles capable of running for long periods from a single charge at home overnight.

Then when parked at the office, school or curbside, they could instantly and easily plug in for a recharge or someday even provide excess power to the electrical grid. This vision is bringing into focus a major obstacle to the development, deployment and adoption of electric vehicles on a large scale.

The fact is the electrical utility grid, as it exists today, simply can’t support large numbers of vehicles. In general, our electrical grid system doesn’t even know when a consumer has lost power until they phone the utility to tell someone.

There are a number of innovation hubs across the country focused on the drive trains, batteries and other features to improve the performance of these cars. What is missing is a focused effort targeting the “charging infrastructure” required to make electric vehicle use feasible. This is a leadership opportunity that Georgia can grab and run with. We can take the lessons we learn locally and turn them into a national example while making our state into a incubator for new companies in this field.

What would be the focus of this effort? One of the early assumptions about electric cars is that people would recharge the batteries overnight while their car is parked in their garage, paying for this electricity on their normal monthly utility bill. There’s just one problem with that scenario: A lot of people don’t or can’t park the car in their garage.

For many people, it might make more sense to charge cars up in a more central location, such as an employer’s or a MARTA station’s parking lot.

But this, too, raises questions: Who gets financially charged for that electricity? What if you travel outside your utility company’s service region — how do you pay for that electricity you use? And how do all those cars recharge their batteries during the day in what is already a peak usage period for electricity, especially if they are geographically concentrated at work or transit stations?

The answers to these questions all start with getting increased intelligence and information flowing side by side with the electrons.

So what makes our state well-suited to address the electrical grid and charging infrastructure challenges?

First, our local business community is already organizing around the issue with dozens of partners participating in the Technology Association of Georgia’s (TAG) Smart Grid Society. Leveraging Georgia Tech and its world class research and engineering expertise is critical to addressing this challenge.

Georgia is home to more than 230 automotive-related manufacturing companies, so we clearly have a concentration of partners locally. All this will be complemented by Georgia’s 42 electric membership cooperatives and providers like Cobb Energy and Southern Company.

Also, Georgia Power has already begun work with auto manufacturers to research the impact of electric vehicles on the grid, and is helping to develop industry standards for electric vehicles.

The U.S. government has already committed billions of economic stimulus money to support electric transportation roll-outs across the country.

Georgia has won some of this funding to electrify at least 85 parking spaces at three or more different truck stops. With the right, focused effort around charging infrastructure, Georgia could possibly attract even more stimulus funding.

Making sure Georgia is in on the ground level for this new part of the green ecosystem will be central to accelerating economic development, creating new high-paying jobs and entrepreneurial innovation locally.