As more and more vehicles start plugging into the electric grid, utilities will need to manage the plug-in connections, or risk overloading the system. Seeing an opportunity to address that basic challenge, last year smart grid company GridPoint acquired startup V2Green, which had developed smart charging software for electric vehicles. Now less than a year after that acquisition GridPoint is set to launch its most advanced tool yet for utilities looking to track and predict loads from plug-in vehicles. GridPoint’s customers won’t be able to get the upgrade until September 4, but we saw a preview of the software this afternoon at the Plug-In 2009 conference in Long Beach, Calif.
Called “Smart Charging 3.0,” the new software is coming out just in time for the charging infrastructure buildout from ECOtality subsidiary eTec and several strategic partners, which won $99.8 million in grants from the Department of Energy last week. According to a release from GridPoint this week, the company has been working with the Idaho National Lab and eTec for more than a year on “electric vehicle performance and fast-charge systems.”
The big change from earlier versions of the Smart Charge system, GridPoint’s Seth Bridges explained to us, is that utilities will now have visibility into plug-in vehicles’ charging needs, patterns and storage capacity over a wider window of time. In addition to being able to scroll back over the past hour, day week or month of data (previously, graphs displayed only the last minute), utilities will also be able to view a forecast based on past patterns — when wind power capacity can be expected to peak each day, for example, and how power demands from vehicles usually vary over a 24-hour period.
