The Current - April 2010
Articles In This Issue:
- Clean My Ride: Maryland innovators prepare for the age of the electric car
- Saft Plant Powers Electric Cars, Tanks and Satellites
- Battery of Options: UMD Energy Research Center creating powerful fuel cells
- Baltimore Begins Electric Bus Service to Reduce Congestion, Pollution
- Solar Gains, Better Meters, and Political Setbacks: General Assembly produces mixed results for clean energy sector
- CETI Celebrates Grand Opening, Signs New Tenants
- Roundtable Talks Planned about Electric Vehicles
- Energized About Plug-in Vehicles
"THE CURRENT" NEWSLETTER SERIES IS MADE POSSIBLE THANKS TO PEPCO HOLDINGS INC:
ADDITIONAL FUNDING FOR THIS ISSUE OF THE CURRENT COMES FROM BALTIMORE ELECTRIC VEHICLE INITIATIVE (BEVI):
CLEAN MY RIDE
Maryland innovators prepare for the age of the electric car
After waiting in frustration for years to take delivery of an electric vehicle (EV), Jill Sorensen now speaks with gusto about automakers’ imminent rollout of EVs and her work to make sure Maryland becomes EV-friendly.
“I’m very hopeful for 2011,” said Sorensen, founder and executive director of the Baltimore Electric Vehicle Initiative (BEVI).
Sorensen began her quest to buy an electric car around the same time she founded BEVI in 2007. She approached manufacturers about ways she could become an early adopter of their EV products. She even campaigned – unsuccessfully – to become one of the test drivers for Volvo’s C30 electric car.
“I wanted and expected my electric vehicle in 2009. I didn’t get one and I was so disappointed. But my name is now on the waiting list for a Nissan Leaf,” she said.
Sorensen, however, is trying to do more than acquire one electric car. She is trying to prepare Maryland to embrace fleets of EVs, and reap environmental and economic benefits from them.
Working in conjunction with electric utilities, automotive companies, state and local government officials, engineering firms, solar installers, fleet managers, educators, entrepreneurs, and others, BEVI has initiated a dialogue about issues arising from the expected arrival next year of mass-market, highway worthy electric cars. They include how to manage EV demand on the electric grid, how to create appropriate EV charging stations, business opportunities arising from EVs, desirable tax incentives for EVs, affordable transportation options with EVs, and maximizing the environmental benefits of EVs.
“We have started to think strategically, in a civil engineering way, about how does a city or a region position itself to accommodate electric vehicles,” Sorensen said.
Maryland utilities are already exploring options to ensure that the EV owners engage in “smart charging.”
“We know that Maryland is a high-prospect area for adoption of EVs giving its proximity to Washington, DC, and the strong environmental interest here,” said John Murach, director of business planning and corporate performance for BGE.
Charging a single EV could consume as much electricity as a typical household uses in a day. Consequently, utilities are looking to employ smart grid technology to ensure that an EV plugged in at a residence or elsewhere will recharge overnight and not during peak-demand hours.
Some utilities across the country, Murach added, “are looking at things like ways to incent EV customers to charge when a large component of renewable energy is especially available. Those customers may want a purely renewable option” in order to have a carbon-neutral car and not just a car with zero tailpipe emissions.
Meanwhile, officials at the Maryland Energy Administration are soliciting “creative ideas” for creating EV charging infrastructure in public places. The MEA recently created a $1-million grant fund to assist companies, public-private-partnerships, or others who want to create charging infrastructure in parking garages, retail centers or elsewhere.
MEA officials are particularly interested in creating charging infrastructure at truck stops. Federal law dictates that long-haul truckers must take regular breaks.
“If they pull into a truck stop and have to take a break for eight hours, they want air conditioning in their sleeper cab. They want TV and Internet and other amenities,” said Chris Rice, a program manager at MEA. “They keep their trucks idling to generate electricity. An idling big rig, on average, consumes one gallon of diesel fuel per hour.”
Charging stations at truck stops, Rice said, would enable truckers to run their air conditioners, microwaves and other appliances off electricity rather than diesel.
Creating the necessary infrastructure to support EVs means doing more than building hardware.
“You are also going to need a new variety of trained technicians,” said Luis MacDonald, founder and CEO of Autoflex, Inc. “You are going to have to reeducate people in the industry on how to service these vehicles, and you are going to need to have qualified folks to install the charging stations.”
Industry officials, he said, are already collaborating with the Community College of Baltimore County to establish one of the country’s leading EV technician training programs.
Heightened interest in EVs, MacDonald notes, is creating opportunities for Maryland businesses.
“The next three to five years is going to be a huge window of opportunity when you are going to see at least a dozen manufacturers come onto the market with EVs,” he said.
A Baltimore-based, fleet-management company, Autoflex managed the largest, single deployment of EVs in America when it equipped U.S. Postal stations in California and Washington, DC with 500 Ford THINK electric vehicles 10 years ago. Autoflex is also responsible for deploying nearly 1,000 low-speed EVs to various sites around Maryland, including Johns Hopkins University, the Maryland Science Center, and Harbor East.
Now Autoflex is planning to launch a car-sharing service in Baltimore that includes only electric cars. It is also positioning itself to install recharging facilities and begin supplying commercial vehicle fleets that are electric.
“This is pretty big,” MacDonald said. “My company has been hanging its hat on this industry for years. We have made a great investment in it. So we are excited about getting a return on investment,” he said.
PJM Interconnection – the regional transmission organization for the Mid-Atlantic’s electric grid – is also interested in fostering a particular business application for EVs, Murach said. Specifically, it would like to augment electricity available through the grid at peak-demand hours by tapping into the electricity stored in EVs.
“There are almost 260 million passenger vehicles across the United States,” Murach said. “The long-term vision is that 70-80 percent of that fleet is electrified. That is going to give you a tremendous amount of energy storage riding around in those cars.”
The state has already shown that it capture jobs in the electric vehicle sector, Sorensen said. General Motors recently unveiled a $129-million plan to build electric motors and related electric drive components for the Volt at its White Marsh plant, creating approximately 200 jobs.
“I think we could see some micro-enterprise opportunities, civil engineering opportunities, and opportunities for wind and solar power developments to serve plugin electric cars,” she said. “I see a range of green economy jobs that will find a welcome home in Maryland.”
SAFT PLANT POWERS ELECTRIC CARS, TANKS AND SATELLITES
At a high-tech facility in Cockeysville, Jim Miller and his “bunch of nerds” are designing and producing some of the most powerful lithium ion batteries in the world.
Miller is general manager of the Saft Batteries Space and Defense Division, which is headquartered in Baltimore County.
Employing about 170 engineers, scientists, production experts and administrative staff, the facility holds the distinction of having helped develop one of the most widely used batteries in hybrid vehicles. Saft, working in partnership with automotive supplier Johnson Controls, has secured agreements to supply lithium-ion batteries for the Mercedes S Class 400 hybrid, design and test lithium-ion batteries for the prototype Saturn Vue Green Line plug-in hybrid sport utility vehicle, design a battery system for the Dodge Sprinter plug-in hybrid test fleet, and support other hybrid developments in the United States, Europe and Asia.
“I believe in the Western World we are the largest developer and supplier of lithium-ion batteries, with the most active programs,” Miller said.
Work on the Saft-Johnson Controls projects, however, has since moved off to other sites, and the Cockeysville facility has turned its attention to powering different kinds of vehicles.
“We tend to work on advanced stuff, and the military tends to be an early adopter of that,” Miller said.
The Cockeysville facility has developed lithium-ion systems for everything from night vision goggles to tanks, destroyers, underwater craft used by Navy Seals, and mysterious devices used on black operations.
It has landed multi-million dollar contracts to develop lithium-ion systems for satellites launched by NASA, the European Space Agency, Intelsat, and others.
It has also developed a lithium-ion battery for the Kinetic Energy Recovery System used in some Formula One racecars. The system harnesses energy generated through braking to power the car and lower its fuel consumption.
“It is not often in our careers that we are doing things that nobody else in the world can do,” Miller said. “All technology leads are only for a short period of time, but it’s cool while it lasts.”
Developing those systems requires the expertise of a wide range of scientists, engineers and information technology professionals.
“People tend to think of batteries as the lead acid battery that starts your car or the batteries in your flashlight. But those are very simple batteries,” Miller said. “A battery in a laptop is a half or one-third electronics. And if you are building a battery for space, there is structure, dampening pads, electronics, controllers, and more. It has to survive the vibration of leaving the Earth’s atmosphere and then function for years. So it’s a very technical device that involves a lot of engineering disciplines.”
That effort, however, has left the Saft facility developing some of the most powerful lithium-ion batteries in the world, Miller said.
“Our highest powered products are pushing 20 kilowatts per kilogram,” he said.
By comparison, the batteries used in hybrid cars are about one-quarter as powerful.
Fuelled by Saft’s technological developments and explosive growth in demand for lithium-ion systems, the Cockeysville facility has experienced double-digit revenue growth annually despite the recession.
“We recently rented 20 percent more space. I’ve got four or five positions that I am recruiting for right now. And I know that once I get those filled, there will be four or five more,” Miller said. “I make the joke that it’s a great general manager that made the business grow by double digits, but I think it’s only a bad general manager that could stop the growth now. We are on the forefront of technology, there are more opportunities than you can shake a stick at, and the market is going the right way.”
BATTERY OF OPTIONS
UMD Energy Research Center creating powerful fuel cells
At the University of Maryland Energy Research Center, Dr. Eric Wachsman is leading a quest to build a better battery.
“We have a very large effort underway in developing batteries for transportation and other portable power applications,” said Wachsman, the director of the newly created center.
Founded last year, the Energy Research Center is a campus-wide, interdisciplinary initiative that involves faculty and students from the A. James Clark School of Engineering, the College of Chemical and Life Sciences, the College of Agricultural and Natural Resources, the School of Public Policy, and the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Physical Sciences.
The center’s mission is to help create a sustainable energy future by developing energy efficient and environmentally sustainable technologies and practices, educating the public about energy and environmental technologies, informing policy debates about sustainable energy issues, and improving U.S. energy security by developing indigenous and environmentally sustainable energy resources.
In the center’s first months of operation, that mission has included some significant advances and partnerships in battery and fuel cell technology.
“We have achieved world record power densities with solid oxide fuel cells,” said Wachsman, who has worked on fuel cell research and development for years.
Specifically, UMD researchers have developed fuel cells with power densities of two watts per square centimeter.
“That’s a lot of power when you start adding it up,” Wachsman said. “It translates into 40 watts per cubic centimeter. That’s enough for a light bulb. A typical engine is in the order of 15-50 kilowatts, depending on the type of automobile. So the fuel cell starts delivering comparable power densities to an internal combustion engine.”
The cells, he added, will run off of any liquid hydrocarbon fuel. “We can run it off gasoline, diesel, ethanol, and anything else you can think of. If you can put it in a tank, we can use it. So that has a lot of big, advantageous properties. It’s fuel-flexible and we have the fuelling infrastructure right now.”
UMD researchers are still working to lower the temperature at which fuel cells function, and have already reduced that temperature from 1000 degrees Celsius to 500 degrees.
But researchers are sufficiently excited about the technological development and its market potential that they have spun off a startup company and are actively seeking angel investors.
Wachsman, who previously spearheaded the creation of the Florida Institute on Sustainable Energy, predicts that solid oxide fuel cells could play a critical role in the evolution of electric cars.
“What I think is the future is we are going to have a fuel cell, series hybrid vehicle where rather than having a gas engine [to charge the batteries and extend the car’s range], we would have solid oxide fuel cells providing the electricity to charge the battery. They would provide the range extender for the car,” he said.
Meanwhile, other research teams attached to the Energy Research Center are developing other battery and fuel cell technologies.
Working in partnership with Ballard Power Systems, Inc. of British Columbia, center researchers are working to develop technologies that would enable Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cells to use conventional fuel sources. Currently, PEM cells can only use hydrogen, making them impractical for consumer use. PEM cells, however, have the advantage of operating at much lower temperatures than solid oxide fuel cells.
Other Energy Research Center associates – working under one of the very few Energy Frontier Research Centers established by the U.S. Department of Energy – are developing nanotechnologies to create advanced batteries and supercapacitors.
“We have developed some unique nano-structured electrodes that have the potential to increase the power density of batteries, which is important for their acceleration” capacity in automobiles, Wachsman said.
Research activities at the center extend to include biomass, wind, solar and other renewable energy sources; energy efficiency measures including building design and smart grid; nuclear energy; and energy policy.
“We have lived for a long period of time with cheap and easy energy supplies,” he said. “We are not going to have that in the future. We are going to use more and different types of energy supplies. Having this center, which brings all the different disciplines together, is critical because it allows us to look at all the different solutions based upon all the possible combinations of resources and demands.”
BALTIMORE BEGINS ELECTRIC BUS SERVICE TO REDUCE CONGESTION, POLLUTION
Organizers of the Charm City Circulator – a green transit service designed to reduce traffic congestion, parking problems and air pollution in downtown Baltimore – say their electric, bug-like bus is attracting far more riders than they anticipated.
“We are thrilled with the ridership,” said Sarah Husain, a transit coordinator with the Baltimore City Department of Transportation.
Expected to serve 1,100 passengers a day, the Circulator has attracted 1,200 people on average days and up to 2,000 people on peak days, Husain said. “And it’s not even tourist season yet, so we’re really excited to see what happens over the summer.”
Initiated in January, the Charm City Circulator will eventually put a fleet of hybrid electric buses on city streets, traveling three routes through the downtown core. In keeping with former Mayor Sheila Dixon’s “Clea Baltimore” initiative, city transportation officials opted to acquire DesignLine 2009 EcoSaver IV hybrid electric buses, rather than conventional vehicles, for the service.
“Essentially, the vehicle has a turbine that generates electricity as it is running, so about 25 percent of the time, the buses are running totally on electricity and generating zero emissions,” Husain said.
The DesignLine buses, which also have a diesel engine, get 8-10 miles per gallon, compared to 2 miles per gallon for diesel buses and 4 miles per gallon for other hybrid buses.
The hybrid electric buses, Husain added, also treat passengers to a smoother, quieter ride.
“You don’t get a lot of jerking or growling, and the buses can coast to a stop very gently. The interior atmosphere is really nice and so quiet that you can talk in regular volumes,” she said. “The bus also looks very cool, very different. It looks like a bug, so it catches people’s eyes.”
The Circulator’s first route began operations in mid-January. The Orange route comprises a loop between Hollins Market to Harbor East, passing through the University of Maryland BioPark and Inner Harbor.
As soon as the city receives delivery of additional hybrid electric buses, it will initiate two other routes. The Purple route will loop between Federal Hill and Penn Station, traveling St. Paul and Charles streets. The Green route will run between High Street, City Hall, Fells Point, and Johns Hopkins.
The Circulator, which has a $5 million operating budget and is funded through a tax levied on people using downtown parking garages, provides free transportation to all passengers.
“We basically wanted to remove all barriers to people riding the bus,” Husain said.
To date, she noted, that approach has attracted a wide variety of passengers. They have included tourists taking advantage of a cheap sightseeing option, downtown residents running errands, downtown workers traveling to meetings or luncheons, commuters who hopped the Circulator to work after parking in cheaper lots on the fringe of downtown, and “people who say, ‘I’m just riding this bus to see where it goes.’”
SOLAR GAINS, BETTER METERS, AND POLITICAL SETBACKS
General Assembly produces mixed results for clean energy sector
The 2010 session of Maryland’s General Assembly yielded victories for legislators striving to increase the state’s use of solar energy and its handling of net metering, but frustrated many other efforts to advance clean energy.
“The solar RPS [Renewable Portfolio Standard] bill is a significant piece of legislation,” said Donald Hogan, an attorney specializing in legislative issues and an advisor to the Maryland Clean Energy Center.
Early in the session, Governor Martin O’Malley introduced legislation that would accelerate Maryland’s required adoption of solar energy from 2011 to 2017 under the RPS. It also proposed to increase the Alternative Compliance Payment (ACP), a penalty that electricity providers must pay if they fail to meet solar energy requirements.
Legislators voted to increase the ACP and approved half of O’Malley’s proposed acceleration.
“I’m thrilled,” said Peter Lowenthal, executive director of the Maryland-DC-Virginia Solar Energy Industries Association. “It’s unfortunate that we couldn’t get more [acceleration of the RPS]. But it’s an election year so I think we were lucky to have gotten what we did.”
The bill, Lowenthal predicted, will enable Maryland’s solar energy sector to continue growing, although likely at rates lower than the 40-50 percent annual growth the sector has experienced in recent years.
Del. Sue Hecht, who represents Frederick County and this year founded the legislature’s Green Caucus, pointed to the passage of a net metering bill as the other clean energy breakthrough of the 2010 session.
The bill would require utilities to pay homeowners, businesses or others, who generate electricity through solar arrays or other devices, a market rate for surplus power they generate. It would also enable those individuals to collect payment in a more timely manner, Hecht said.
“It is a well upgraded net metering system that will allow people who are interested in generating their own energy to get real credit for it,” she said.
Solar power companies, however, question how the new net metering system will actually work. The bill tasks Maryland’s Public Service Commission (PSC) with setting a tariff for the surplus energy payments, Lowenthal said. Utilities, he predicted, will likely contest the tariff, triggering a debate between utilities and solar companies before the PSC.
“Most likely, we will have to raise money and hire a lawyer and go through proceedings that we are not accustomed to,” he said.
Amid election-year politics, the 2010 session ultimately generated “a lot of disappointments” on clean energy bills, Hecht said. “My biggest disappointment is we were not able to get a real PACE program through.”
Legislators debated a bill that would amend the Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) loan program. PACE programs are created by local governments and provide homeowners with low-interest loans to make energy efficiency upgrades to their houses. The bill would have permitted local governments to place a tax lien on any household that failed to make loan payments.
“The banking industry came out against this in full force,” Hecht said.
Bankers argued that governments should not branch into the business of home-improvement loans and should not usurp banks’ tradition of securing the first lien against any household that defaulted on payments.
Maryland legislators adopted recommendations about how to protect banks’ interests that had been devised by the County of State Governments, legislators from other states that have implemented PACE programs, and the White House. But the bill still died.
“I think it is a huge loss for energy efficiency,” Hecht said, adding that most jurisdictions cannot implement a PACE program without a lien provision to secure their financing. “PACE makes so much sense as a way to finance energy efficiency. We could have moved ahead the energy audit industry and the small construction sector, and it would have helped families.”
MCEC, however, did secure $1 million from the legislature to help fund the loan programs as well as consumer education programs. The Center will continue to assist PACE startups in some jurisdictions. Both Annapolis and Montgomery County have announced plans to start awarding PACE loans this year.
“We have the existing PACE legislation, flawed as it might be. We are going to go ahead and try to roll out some of these programs,” Hogan said. “I think if we can get some success stories in the state over the next year, people will start hearing about this program and they will start clamoring for it. Then hopefully we can work out a solution in the legislature next year.”
Maryland legislators debated several other clean energy bills during the 2010 session. Legislators passed the governor’s bill to create a $2,000 tax credit on purchases of plug-in electric vehicles, and the governor’s bill to extend an income tax credit for generators of renewable energy. The legislature, however, rejected a bill that would have enabled power lines from offshore wind farms to cross the beach erosion district to reach land. It also rejected a bill that would have granted Solar Renewable Energy Credits to solar thermal projects.
“The solar thermal bill really could have opened up an industry with a lot of good jobs,” Hecht said.
Legislators, however, are asking the Maryland Energy Administration to study the subject over the interim, meet with industry stakeholders, and generate legislative recommendations for the 2011 session.
Correction:
The original version of this story stated that Maryland legislators voted to leave the Alternative Compliance Payment (ACP) for the Renewable Portfolio Standard untouched. Legislators actually voted to implement Gov. Martin O’Malley’s plan to increase the ACP from 2011 to 2016.
CETI CELEBRATES GRAND OPENING, SIGNS NEW TENANTS
Officials from the Clean Energy Technology Incubator (CETI) at bwtech@UMBC are signing two new companies to incubator slots and assessing about two dozen other candidates in the wake of CETI’s Grand Opening.
Through the March 30th event, “we really wanted to get the word out to companies that we have this program,” said Ellen Hemmerly, executive director of bwtech@UMBC. The university, the Maryland Clean Energy Center and Baltimore County founded CETI late last year. “It brought a lot of people out and showed there is a lot of interest in this facility. We are very pleased.”
About 75 people attended the event, including public and university officials, as well as representatives from energy industry leaders, clean energy companies, technology firms, financial services firms, and economic development agencies. The event featured a roundtable discussion about “Opportunities and Challenges to Starting a New Business in the Clean Energy Market,” featuring panelists Tim Brennan, a professor of public policy at UMBC; Kathleen Turano, CEO of Plant Sensory Systems; Peter Kelly-Detwiler, senior vice president of load response for Constellation Energy; and Anne Eisele, chief of staff at the Maryland Energy Administration.
The event attracted numerous potential candidates for the incubator, said Bjorn Frogner, CETI’s Entreprenuer-in-Residence. Consequently, CETI officials are in the process of signing up two new incubator companies – Plasmonix, Inc. and Strategic Services International, LLC.
A spinoff of the former University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, Plasmonix, Inc. developed technologies that dramatically increase the sensitivity and speed of a broad range of diagnostic and biological assays for DNA and proteins. While previously used in applications for clinical diagnostics and homeland security, Plasmonix technologies also have applications in the clean energy field.
Strategic Services International LLC (SSI) is a diverse provider of purchasing, sales and advisory services for U.S. utility companies, Fortune 500 companies and a broad spectrum of government agencies. Specifically, SSI helps clients respond to the growing demand for alternative energy, energy conservation, and green information technology.
SSI is typical of many companies that are becoming active in the clean energy sector, Frogner said. “More than half the companies we are talking to are using other people’s intellectual property. They are seeing unique sales potential in it.”
CETI officials are now talking with other potential incubator tenants.
At the grand opening, Baltimore County Executive Jim Smith predicted that CETI will generate technological, environmental and economic benefits for the region.
“Through this incubator, we will leverage the research facilities and technical resources of UMBC’s world-class university community to create new, green jobs right here in Baltimore County,” Smith said. “And those jobs will support the discovery of new technologies that will further advance our commitment to a sustainable environment.”
ROUNDTABLE TALKS PLANNED ABOUT ELECTRIC VEHICLES
The Maryland Clean Energy Center, the Maryland Energy Administration and the Baltimore Electric Vehicle Initiative are organizing a series of roundtable discussions about issues and opportunities arising from the development of electric vehicles.
President Barack Obama has earmarked more than $2 billion for development of electric vehicles and stated that he would like to see 1 million plug-in electric or hybrid-electric cars on American roads by 2015.
That sea change in the multi-billion-dollar automotive industry could present Maryland with new issues, opportunities and questions, said Jill Sorensen, executive director of the Baltimore Electric Vehicle Initiative (BEVI).
For example, should automotive companies or local governments create public-access car-charging facilities? Should the state create tax incentives to bolster the EV sector? How can renewable energy companies partner with EV manufacturers and charging companies to create an even cleaner car? Can EVs be used to funnel electricity onto the grid during peak demand hours?
“The best way we know to thoughtfully evaluate this series of questions is open dialogue,” Sorensen said.
So BEVI, working in conjunction with the Maryland Clean Energy Center and the Maryland Energy Administration, is organizing a series of roundtable discussions about electric vehicles involving state and local government, utilities, automobile companies, fleet management companies, technology firms, clean energy suppliers, and others.
For more information, contact the Baltimore Electric Vehicle Initiative at 443-514-7122.
ENERGIZED ABOUT PLUG-IN VEHICLES
Pepco Holdings, Inc. (PHI) – the parent company of Pepco and Delmarva Power – is charging up its commitment to the environment by adding electric cars to its utility fleet. The company will purchase 10 Chevy Volt “electric cars with extended range” from General Motors (GM) to support a study of the effects of vehicle charging on the electrical grid. The cars will be driven by employees as part of a two-year demonstration to assess the impact of these vehicles on the electric system and to evaluate their commercial value to the company’s fleet.
The regional market that includes Pepco and Delmarva’s service territories was chosen as one of “three key initial markets” because the jurisdictions we serve have “progressive local and state government leaders and utility partners who are crucial in bringing electric vehicles to market,” according to GM’s announcement of its Volt program.
Two charging stations have been installed at Pepco, where Chevrolet’s new Volt plugged in for a quick “fill-up” before its debut at the Washington Auto Show in January. More charging stations are being installed in various locations at Delmarva Power and Atlantic City Electric, the PHI utility serving southern New Jersey.
The company’s foray into plug-in hybrid vehicle technology is a part of PHI’s Blueprint for the Future—a plan to modernize the current electric grid into a smart grid that will provide even more efficient and effective service to Pepco and Delmarva customers.
Once in service, the smart grid will support electric transportation by allowing the company to monitor and balance system loads as plug-in vehicle technology is adopted by its customers. “In a way, it’s the world of Thomas Edison meeting the world of Bill Gates,” said PHI Chairman, President and CEO Joseph Rigby in a speech to the Energy Bar Association in December 2009.
In its continuing commitment to energy efficiency, carbon reduction and energy independence, PHI already has hybrid vehicles in its fleet, including some hybrid bucket trucks, and will be purchasing plug-in hybrid electric bucket trucks when they become available.
PHI utilities has been actively demonstrating new vehicle technologies to federal and state regulators:
- Pepco participated in the Washington Auto Show in January 2010, with a display that included one of its hybrid bucket trucks and its Ford Escape plug-in hybrid.
- Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley was able to test drive Pepco’s its Ford Escapeplug-in hybrid when it was on display at the December 2009 inaugural MBE University initiative to support Maryland’s minority- and women-owned businesses.
- Atlantic City Electric sponsored an event in December 2009 during which its Ford Escape plug-in hybrid was on display for area legislators.
- Pepco’s Ford Escape plug-in hybrid was on display during the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon in October 2009 on the National Mall.
PHI has pledged to work with state and local regulatory and legislative agencies to collaborate on the planning of charging infrastructures. In fact, PHI participated in the development of the Maryland Energy Plan, which also supports developing an electric transportation infrastructure.