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Utilities plan for electric cars
July 22, 2008

While electric cars have always been something of a curiosity, current conditions (pun intended) suggest that they might finally stick. When a few cars run on an alternative fuel, there isn't much resource or infrastructure displacement, but if hundreds of thousands or millions of electric cars take to the streets, will our electrical distribution be able to handle it?

GM is partnering with a whole bunch of utilities to plan for the wave of new Volts (Should we call them Voltswagens?) which the automaker hopes to have rolling off the lines within two years. There are others in the works as well, including the hot Tesla and more mundane plug-in hybrids. Perhaps it's wishful thinking to believe that there will be enough electric cars to make a difference (I certainly hope there are. I'd like one myself.) but it never hurts to look ahead. The conventional wisdom about electric cars is that most people will charge them at night when electrical demand is at its lowest.

Anything that manages to displace a significant amount of oil will have to get that energy from somewhere else. So power plants will have to work harder and consume more fuel, even if our existing plants do have the capacity to do it at night. The electric utility industry is in flux lately as companies aren't really sure what kind of plants they should be building. Hopefully growing electric power conservation efforts will free capacity for this new generation of vehicles.

Posted by Peter Welander on July 22, 2008 | Comments (0)