There is a chicken and egg situation with large scale adoption of electric vehicles. Electricity is everywhere (more or less) meaning electric vehicles could theoretically be recharged pretty much anywhere. All that’s required is to install appropriate electrical outlets for electric vehicles to plug into. That requires an investment of money, but so long as there aren’t a large number of electric vehicles the investment won’t pay for itself. Similarly the lack of an effective charging infrastructure makes electric vehicles less attractive than they could be. A charging infrastructure is required for electric vehicle adoption, and to have the charging infrastructure there must be enough electric vehicles.
Enter Coulomb Technologies and GridPoint. At last weeks Plug-In 2009 Show they jointly announced “the first ever smart grid enabled smart charging stations for electric vehicles.” The integrated solution offers municipalities and electric utilities the ability to manage vehicle charging load in the fact of “critical grid events”. One of the fearisms attached to electric vehicle adoption is the risk of overloading the power grid on hot summer afternoons where everybody’s air conditioners are cranked to the max. An overstrained power grid would have a blackout, or so the fear induced story would have us believe. Of course the truth in this story is the power grid does have occasional blackouts or brownouts on such days.
via Coulomb and GridPoint unveil smart grid enabled charging station for electric vehicles.
Related posts:
- Coulomb and GridPoint Unveil First Smart Grid Enabled Smart Charging Stations for Electric Vehicles
- Gridpoint to Play Traffic Cop for Vehicle Charging | Green Business | Reuters
- Sneak Peek: GridPoint Unveils Smart Charging 3.0
- GridPoint Unveils Smart Charging Software To Support Nissan and eTec’s Largest Electric Vehicle Deployment Project – AllCarsElectric.com
- GridPoint to Provide its Smart Charging 3.0 Software to the Largest U.S Electric Vehicle Deployment | Smart Grid
