Canada has lagged behind the United States as a plug-in vehicle (PEV) market, both in terms of PEV availability and sales.  However, as reported in the Pike Research Electric Vehicle Geographic Forecasts report, all Canadian provinces are expected to have some PEV availability by 2013, and the country will experience a growth spurt in PEV sales over the next few years.  Pike Research projects that most sales of PEVs will occur in Canada’s largest cities, with Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver anticipated to have the highest concentration of PEVs.  (Tesla made a splash by recently opening its first Canadian dealership in Yorkdale, Toronto.)

In anticipation of increased PEV sales, Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia are each funding deployments of electric vehicle charging stations:

Quebec’s Circuit Electrique is the first to get EV charging equipment out and ready, with this program sponsored by Hydro Quebec.  The Circuit Electrique will feature a network of 120 public charging stations; as of December 2012, over 100 were in operation.  Drivers pay just $2.50 per charge, no matter how long the car stays, although the program’s operators anticipate that PEVs will not park at the stations for too long, something that has been a problem with some public charging spots in the United States.  Drivers access the units with a prepaid card.  The charging stations use Aerovironment hardware.  For now, the stations are concentrated in greater Montreal and Quebec City.

Earlier this year, the British Columbia government launched an extremely ambitious program to support deployment of 600 public EV charging stations by April 2013.  The province will provide a rebate of up to C$4,000 (US$4,036) for570 Level 2 chargers and a C$25,000 (US$25,230) rebate for up to 30 DC chargers.  The stations must be available for public or fleet use and networked.   The province expects to collect data from station usage, much as the DOE has from the Ecotality and Coulomb chargers funded by U.S. stimulus money.  Installation is to be completed by March 31, 2013.

The Ontario government is providing C$80 million (US$81 million) for public EV charging deployment.   The government is awarding funding based on an RFP process.   In addition, the non-profit Plug’nDrive Ontario has partnered with Hydro Quebec to support EVSE buildout across the two provinces.

In some ways, Canada is now going through the same phase of the EV charging equipment market that the U.S. did a few years ago, when the DOE launched its initial EV charging programs.  While this helps ensure the availability of public charging to support the emerging PEV market, it also has a distorting effect on the EV charging market, as manufacturers end up focusing on the government-fed demand, thus delaying the task of finding a true business case for public charging.  The United States is exiting this phase now, and equipment manufacturers are being hit with the cold reality that companies are much less likely to deploy a station for public use when they have to pay full price.  Companies in Canada should take heed and make sure they look beyond this temporary market bump.

“Fast” DC electric vehicle chargers that can charge up to 80% of a battery electric vehicle (BEV) in under 20 minutes are starting to sprout up in the U.S.  Consumers are expected to be willing to pay up to the price of a movie ticket to wait minutes instead of hours to charge a vehicle.

While the convenience is nice for BEV drivers, fast charging has the potential to strain the grid or incur high “demand charges” for pulling power off the grid at peak times.  If vehicle charging puts a business into the demand charge penalty zone during a peak time, the cost could be hundreds to thousands of dollars in a single day.  Demand charge avoidance is necessary for operating DC fast charging stations, which can draw more than 50 kilowatts of power from the grid, or between 7 to 15 times as much power as “slow charging” a vehicle.

Ever since the first DC chargers were announced, the potential for using batteries to reduce the grid impact has been considered by several vendors.  That potential is becoming reality as electric vehicle services company 350Green is deploying DC chargers in Chicago that will be supported by lithium ion batteries.  350Green will install 280 AC and fast DC chargers in the Chicago area as part of a smart grid hub that is being developed in the city in partnership with South Korea.  Furthermore, the company has grand aspirations for tying batteries with vehicle charging across the country, and has expanded its business to include a battery assembly plant.

The project also includes equipment from Chicago-based lithium ion battery cell manufacturing company AllCell Technologies and the Illinois Institute of Technology, according to 350Green CEO Mariana Gerzanych. 350Green will open a battery plant in Chicago in August that is targeting grid energy storage applications beyond vehicle charging.  Supporting EV charging is “just the tip of the iceberg” for creating services for the grid, according to Gerzanych.  In addition to supporting fast DC charging, 350 Green is looking to use the battery systems to sell power back to the grid through ancillary services, and the company will sell battery packs to other grid services companies.

Gerzanych says the company is “cell and chemistry agnostic” in assembling its packs, which gives it flexibility in sourcing from multiple vendors.  She expects to assemble 3 megawatts of batteries during the first year, with production starting in August.  350Green has been working on energy storage for 2 years, and other vendors are likely to offer battery systems optimized to support BEV charging soon.

350Green shopped the battery plant to several states and cities, according to Gerzanych.  Chicago won because the city provided incentives that eliminated the higher cost of operating within the city limits.  350Green recently installed its first DC charger in California (pictured above) using equipment from Efacec.

A proposed settlement to make amends for energy price-fixing during the Enron era is causing shockwaves around California’s electric vehicle charging industry.  The settlement between the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) and NRG Energy, which was announced on March 23, would require the energy company to spend $100 million on building out EV infrastructure and pay $20 million in cash to the CPUC.

The settlement is based on energy market manipulations committed more than a decade ago by Dynegy Inc., which at the time was a co-owner, along with NRG, of a portfolio of power generating plants that NRG later acquired in full.

More than half of the infrastructure investment would go towards installing 200 commercial EV charging stations.  NRG would install the stations in the San Francisco Bay area, the San Joaquin Valley, the Los Angeles Basin and San Diego County, all areas expected to see significant penetration of EVs during the coming years.

The DC charging stations, which enable battery electric vehicles to fully charge their batteries in 15 minutes or less, would be owned and operated by NRG, which would receive all of the revenue derived from their usage.  An obvious question is, How does opening up retail locations to distribute one’s services and generate revenue constitute reparations?  This is akin to a petroleum company being ordered to open up more gas stations because they were overcharging customers.

The dissatisfaction with the settlement was a frequent topic of conversation in the hallways at the EV Infrastructure USA conference in San Diego last week.  Competing EV charging services companies are unhappy that the “penalty” would give the company first-mover advantage in fast DC charging in many key locales throughout California.  California currently has only one installed DC charging station.

Earlier in the week EV charging services company ECOtality filed a motion for public review of the CPUC settlement.  The filing points out the potential hindrance to competition through the “monopoly-like benefits” and asks, “Does [the settlement] carry the potential to impair competition among different developing business models?”

Of the remaining funds, $40 million would go towards wiring homes, multi-unit dwellings, and public locations, such as schools and hospitals, to make them ready for the installation of EV charging stations.  While this aspect of the contract at first glance might appear to serve the public interest (for those who happen to plan on buying a plug-in vehicle in the next few years), the ECOtality filing points out that “the settlement would confer exclusivity on NRG at the ’make ready’ sites for 18 months before competitors would have access to the use of these sites.”

The nascent EV charging infrastructure industry is as much about the land grab for prime locations as it is about technology and business models.  EV charging vendors see great value in forging relationships with real estate companies and retailers before EVs become commonplace.  An amendment to the agreement that would not inhibit competition would open up access to the pre-wired sites to competitive bidding amongst EV charging services companies.

EV owners could benefit initially if the infrastructure is put in place earlier than if the market were left to its natural evolution, but the benefits may be short-lived if competition is reduced.  Many industry folks believe that the NRG settlement is unlikely to be approved if additional scrutiny and public review are permitted – which in this case seems only appropriate.

The failure to reach the sales targets for the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf has led to considerable finger pointing about so-far disappointing attempts to mass market plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs).  PEVs have increasingly become fodder for politics as every misstep reinforces what opponents call their inevitable failure.

But the real problem was in the original lofty expectations for PEV penetration by both the auto makers and the government, which were unreachable given the cost of the vehicles.  As we’ve said all long, the government’s projection of 1 million PEVs on US roads by 2015 was too aggressive given the short timeframe to get new vehicles to market and the nascent state of the technology .  (You can listen to the reasons why in this recorded webinar.)

The automakers failed to consult their history and economics textbooks when projecting how many PEVs they could sell during the first few years of production.  Hybrid vehicles are the closest recent precursors of today’s PEVs, and they didn’t sell in close to the numbers that auto manufacturers hoped to achieve.

The below chart shows the actual sales figures for hybrid sales in the US from 2000 to 2006, compared with the actual sales of PEVs in 2011 and then Pike Research’s projected sales through 2017.  As we can see in the chart, during the first full year of US sales of the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight 9,350 hybrids were sold, while PEV sales in 2011 were near double that.  When you consider that PEVs cost much more than a hybrid and require significant changes in consumer education and behavior (e.g.,understanding the charging of the vehicles), the PEV launch can be viewed as a relative success.  Lest we forget, the US light duty vehicle market was actually smaller in 2011 (13.7 million) than it was during the 2000s, which makes the PEV launch that much more impressive.

Pike Research forecasts that during their respective first seven years on the market, PEVs will outsell hybrids (in the corresponding years of their launch) every year, and by a whopping 90 percent in total units sold throughout the seven year period.  Despite a higher price tag (that must and will come down), PEVs have many advantage over the hybrids from more than a decade ago: Gasoline cost about half as much in the early 2000s as it does now, and it’s unlikely that we’ll ever see $1.30 gas again.  Thus, the potential for saving money by plugging-in is much greater than was switching to a hybrid during the previous decade.

• The twin motivators of national energy security (for both military and economic reasons) and reducing global greenhouse gas emissions are much stronger now for governments around the globe.
• The selection of vehicle models and number of automakers participating will be much greater for PEVs than it was for hybrids.
• PEVs have the potential to benefit the grid by helping to offset the variability of renewable energy generation, and business models that pay for that benefit will evolve.

All of these reasons add up to PEVs successfully taking hold in the market, while not reaching the stratospheric sales originally envisioned.