Alef Arendsen

I had a pretty interesting day today. Starting at 5.30am (it was one of those days again where I wanted to be productive and somehow, I can only be productive late in the night or early in the morning, or at least, so it seems), I first worked at home for about 4 hours. That was the productive, but also quite boring part of the day.

At 10.30 however I had an appointment at one of the power grid companies in Holland. I’m not sure how this is arranged in the rest of the world, but the electricity providers and the grid providers are separate companies here (to allow for decent market mechanisms) and we were visiting a grid company. The goal was to see how this particular grid company could join our effort to promote electric vehicles and to find out more how they are preparing the grid (or at least thinking about prepping the grid) for the massive demand they’re going to expect when electric vehicles are introduced on a large scale.

The guy we met with came up with the following graphs, which gives some decent insight into what the consequences of introducing electric vehicles in Holland potentially could be. Nothing I didn’t know already, but I finally found the time to write it up in a blog entry now.

Peak loads in the Netherlands generally are seen at 6pm and are around 16GW currently. The best-case scenario we discussed was where the peak loads would to 18GW from now to 2025. This increase basically is only slight more than the expansion the grid companies do on a yearly basis, so there’s nothing troubling here. The worst-case scenario however would be a peak load of 36GW in 2025. First of all, this is all based on the fact that the government in the Netherlands has set a goal for 1.3mln electric vehicles to be on the road by 2025. If all of these vehicles would start charging by 6pm, the peak load would basically more than double (compared to what it is now).

The grid providers are very eager to start pilot projects to experiment with charging. The main question basically is: when do people start charging. If they all charge at 6pm, we’ve got a problem. If they charge during the night, it’s not such a big deal. The chart above shows the three different scenarios, with the worst case being a peak load of 22.5 GW (which is not even as worse as indicated above).

We also talked a bit about the standard plug for electric vehicles that has been decided upon some 2 months ago. This is definitely good news. We have make sure we don’t end up with the adapter hell we used to have with LPG cars in The Netherlands. I think my dad carried 4 adapters when he traveled through Europe with his car to be able to adapt to all standards in Europe.

Next, I drove to ECE (Electric Cars Europe) in Lochem, to talk to Hjalmar Engel a bit. I had never been at their site yet, so it was good to see some of the guys at work. After having talked through a lot of details, we took a 100% electric Lotus Elise for a ride. The torque of these things is simply awesome. I had been in electric vehicles before, but this is definitely impressive. 0 – 100 is less than 5 seconds and the same torque across the entire speed range! Good stuff.