Utilizing smart grid and roaming

The concepts of smart grid and roaming are visualized in Figure 27.

The main idea is to enable an electric car owner to go from e.g. Copenhagen to Rome or any other European city without having to worry too much about recharging.

At the same time even thousands of vehicles travelling the same road should not over load the electrical grid or increase the use of fossil fuels for electricity production.

Last but not least the vehicle owner should be free to choose not only the type of vehicle he drives, owns or leases, but also be able to select between several suppliers of energy for the trip and be free to use a credit card option, a flat rate account or any other means of payment.

This will require a number of different functions to work simultaneously.

The car may be bought or leased from an Electric Vehicle Service Provider (EVSP) who takes care of the battery and recharging as part of the leasing scheme. In the future there will be many such service providers and their pricing and service levels will differ from each other.

The driver may also choose a more flexible form of ownership where he uses one or several kinds of Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) to recharge his vehicle. He may not want any account at all but may wish to pay cash at each recharge.

To accommodate everyone the EVSE and EVSP need to communicate effectively through standardized channels. For this purpose a clearing house should exist. This will be the "invisible" backbone of the EV recharging system.

To maximize the amount of renewable energy supplied to electric vehicles and to avoid overload in any parts of the electric grid the electrical grid managers called DSO's also need to be in the loop. Through continuous communication and negotiations with EVSE and EVSP they will ensure the crucial link to the renewable energy production sector such as wind farms or solar arrays. The grid will become a sort of market place where thousands of energy producers and consumers act intelligently to optimize the use of energy. This is what we call smart grid.

If all this works as intended the vehicle driver will be able to use his vehicle across borders just as easily as using his mobile phone. This is what we call roaming. At the same time the amount of renewable electricity is maximized and the grid is not over loaded.

Watch a film about Utilizing Smart Grid And Roaming here.

Figure 27: The Green eMotion framework for electromobilty