LIVE FROM DISTRIBUTECH 2: Let's talk EVs

In electric vehicle news today, researchers at Indiana University think Obama's "one million electric cars by 2015" dream will be shattered by car manufacturers who won't rev up supply because they don't think the American consumer will answer with matching demand.

The timing of this study's release is most interesting to me because I spent a good block of time today at DistribuTECH talking to ABB and ECOtality about their electric vehicle (EV) plans.

ECOtality provides EV charging systems. Last month, at the turn of 2011, ABB announced a $10 million investment in ECOtality. ECOtality, in turn, is leading the EV Project, a DOE-funded program to develop electric vehicle infrastructure with the deployment of 15,000 charging stations in 16 cities.

Murray Jones, vice president of global e-mobility at ABB, called this "range ready infrastructure" in our meeting today, which I found most intriguing---that someone is building out a basic highway charging infrastructure for EVs for a good road trip. Fleets of EVs are one thing. Distribution systems are circular, without a lot of miles traveled, and with a return trip to a central charging area. That may be how some businesses work, but that's not how the average American lives. Putting charging infrastructure along the road---at restaurants and retail outlets---and really developing an infrastructure to ease the mind of the consumer certainly seems like a step forward to getting the second wave of EV adoption, beyond the early birds that love that electric car for its ecology marketing or as a second car that cuts down on gas costs.

"We're building up a connected highway," said Jonathan Read, president and CEO of ECOtality, when discussing the EV Project that ranges across the West from Seattle to San Diego and has extensions into Arizona, Texas, and three cities in Tennessee. The ultimate goal of the EV Project is to take the lessons learned from the deployment of these first 8,300 EVs and related infrastructure to make it easier and faster to put in more---to Obama's one million and beyond.

To put those EVs on the road takes more than car companies or even consumer demand. It will take a ready, willing and enabled power utility. That's where ABB comes into the game.

Read added, "In each market, we have to work with utilities, and no one know utilities better than ABB."

ABB and ECOtality believe that those EVs on Obama's horizon are coming, and they want to work to make EVs a real asset to the grid rather than a "drag on it," as Read noted. Allen Burchett, senior vice president for strategic initiatives in North America for ABB added that it's obvious that EVs will have a major impact on the electricity distribution network, but, if utilities have more control over the timing of personal charging, it can be a positive impact, relaying on the intelligence of the charging infrastructure.

As for the Obama dream of a million EVs, Read believes that there may be as many as 1.5 million by 2015, exceeding Obama's vision. Perhaps those naysayers at Indiana University are wrong after all.