At the Green:Net conference in San Francisco, John Clark of GridPoint and Richard Lowenthal of Coulomb Technologies discuss how the largest obstacle for next-generation electric cars is standards. The executives believe that standards in IT infrastructure and the power grid are necessary for any successful large implementation.
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Video: IT and power grid standards are key to revving up electric cars
Takeaway: John Clark of GridPoint and Richard Lowenthal of Coulomb Technologies discuss how the largest obstacle for next-generation electric cars is standards. They believe that standards in IT infrastructure and the power grid are necessary for any successful large implementation.
March 26, 2009, 1:19 PM PDT | Length:00:04:26
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About Bill Detwiler
Bill Detwiler is Head Technology Editor of TechRepublic. Previously, he worked as a Support Tech and IT Manager in the social research and energy industries.
Transcript
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>> What technical obstacles do you see that have to be resolved and what partnerships are needed to get there?
>> In terms of technical obstacles a number of things that are certainly underway, standards for communication between Smart infrastructure in the grid and between Smart vehicles in the grid. Various, certainly leveraging all the activity that's going along, going on with regards to the overall Smart grid. It's a rollout of communication networks by utilities, Smart meters and how all of those pieces are going to have to interact. I'd say when you have multiple providers of say Smart infrastructures as well another sort of technical hurdle that maybe these guys can address is gonna be the interaction between them in terms of you know if I'm a Coolum assumed spelling subscriber but I want a but I'm near a Better Place charge station how is that going to work? And might there might be software in the background between the 2 of them or a 3rd party that makes all that possible. A number of things that I think we're all working towards figuring out what the eco system is going to look like.
>> I'll mostly reinforce that idea. It is really about standards that we need at Coolum we spend our time traveling to all the automakers around the world from China, to Detroit, to Japan, to wherever, to Brazil and finding out what their cars are going to do and we need to make a charging infrastructure that will work for all of those different vehicles. So for us it's kind of all about standards and it starts with the interface, the electrical interface of the car which we're doing pretty well in the United States, but in fact as we did that with SAE we didn't bring in the European community, so they're all off going on in a different direction. So, so standards like that are tremendously important. The next one of those which we were just discussing today with the SAE standards committee was for DC charging where we can charge cars in minutes instead of hours and we have no standard there yet and it's quite important so that we can build a charging infrastructure, so that if, if you want to charge while you're parked here in the parking lot at this center there'll be a station that'll fit your car. So it starts with those standards and then John is absolutely right, we need subscription standards. We want the ability basically to have roaming, so that somebody that is one of our subscribers and has one of our key phobes in their pocket can charge at a Better Place charge spot and then we'll do cross billing to work it all out, but the primary goal being a simple system for the driver that they only have 1 system to understand. Already we have to do inter utility roaming, basically. There's 3,000 utilities in the United States. There's 5 within or 3 within 5 miles of my home. So already with a system like ours we make it so you don't have to have a relationship with each utility which you don't want to have, but then of course the next thing is inter service roaming. So I want to agree there with John and along with that goes the pricing mechanisms and all of that which we need to agree on, agree with, with each other about and finally the other one I would say is clarity in the roles of the utilities, governments and the private sector, because we're kind of launched off and doing this with the private sector of course governments and utilities being important players, but the utilities haven't quite figured out if this is their business or not, if they want to have Smart meters and do this all with Smart meters, and so we don't know exactly yet where they're going. We're all a little bit uncoordinated and running in our own way because the cars are coming very quickly, so those are the things we need. Really kind of I would say a coalescence of our industries is the most important obstacle.
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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Techologies ====
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