Episode 196 - Using Scientific Research to Improve the Grid

Grayson Brulte:

Hello, I'm your host, Grayson Brulte. Welcome to another episode of SAE Tomorrow Today, a show about emerging technology and trends and mobility with the leaders and innovators to make it all happen. On today's episode, we're absolutely honored to be joined by John Halliwell, Electric Power Research Institute. John will discuss EPRI's research work and the important revisions he's leading for SAE J1772 standard. We hope you enjoy this episode. John, welcome to the podcast. 

John Halliwell:

Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here today.

Grayson Brulte:

It's great to have you here because the world is going electric. Dylan went from acoustic to electric, and now the world's going from internal combustion to electric.

A little bit different, but similar nuances and the feedback from certain pockets of society, certain pockets. Oh, Dylan, that's a disgrace. You can never go electric. And we're seeing similar things happening on the consumer side with vehicles. To kick things off, John, what is EPRI and what role does the organization play as society shifts towards electric vehicles?

John Halliwell:

Yeah, that's a really good question to start with because I think a lot of people aren't familiar with EPRI. We've been around 50 years as of last year. EPRI is an independent, non-profit, energy research and development organization. We do that for the benefit of the public. And our mission really has 4 key pillars and that is advanced, safe, reliable, affordable, and clean energy.

So those 4 things are what kind of drive our research in the public interest. We've had a focus team for electric vehicle, electrification of vehicles since the 1990s. Early on, that team was very much focused on viability of the vehicles that, could you even make a vehicle electric? And why would you want to do that?

And would it provide benefits to society? Now we've shifted much more towards, we've seen the vehicle side mature. The products are out there. Consumers can choose those. Now, it's much more a focus on How do we adapt our electric system to meet those energy needs as vehicles move to electric?

We expect this to be widespread. It impacts the electric grid in the smallest town or the largest city. It's something that, is a system wide impact. And that's where we're really focused these days, helping utilities with that focus. 

Grayson Brulte:

It's a really important focus to focus on. Years ago, I was the co-chair of the Autonomous Vehicle Task Force City of Beverly Hills. And we ran a planning scenario where if it's 100 degrees in Beverly Hills, and every Home has their air condition a full blast and they plug in their electric car, could the grid withstand it? And the answer to this, the answer was no. We really weren't prepared for it. In your research, how much do you study the energy grid in the impact of various scenarios if X percent of the population put electric vehicles and they all plugged at the same time?

John Halliwell:

So there's a couple of views of that. So one is the bulk system that is looking at generation. So how much energy we produce. And that, even if you look at studies that say we're going to electrify, very large percentage of our vehicles, 50, 70, 75%, the impact on total energy consumption is there, I think it's, I've heard numbers of 25%, so an increase in energy consumption of 25%.

That's one aspect. So there's matching generation to that. And we've seen that happen before in the United States and in North America in general, that, that was. If you look at homes in the 1940s, almost no one had air conditioning, and if you looked at homes in the 1970s, almost everyone had air conditioning, certainly into the 80s.

That transition drove a lot of, needing to beef up the grid, larger transformers, bigger wires. So it's in the DNA of utilities to do that, to follow the societal changes. Our habits of, do we use electricity to heat or do we use gas to heat? Or do we use oil to heat?

There's different regions of the country have different mixes of what consumers use, and those change over time. And so utilities really have to stay on top of that. And as I mentioned, this one is different in that it is system wide. So you don't, EVs aren't going to show up in one town.

They're going to show up across the grid and they can be. at the most rural house. And they could be at the apartment house in the downtown of a city. And so that's a challenge for utilities in terms of planning. We have to make sure our wires are transformers, the substations The transmission lines behind that ultimately the generation behind that all that is capable of producing the amount of energy.

We need the second part of that is energy. I'm sorry power. So we talk about energy. That's like the total like, the power, like the immediate need. And that's much more time dependent. And if a car sits idle for a lot of time, like most consumer vehicles spend the bulk of their day parked somewhere, and if you can charge them while they're parked, that can be done at fairly low power levels.

That is very low impact on the electricity system. If you need to do that quickly, like you're on a trip to your grandmother's and you want to stop and get fuel quickly. Now we're talking fast charging. That has to be done at high power, and so that's going to have a bigger impact on the local distribution system in that area.

So that's part of what utilities do. It's in, like I say, it's part of their DNA. They've, they figure out what we do as consumers, as businesses, how is that going to impact their wires, their transformers, the generation mix. And they're constantly looking at, how to make sure those meet our needs.

It's a huge effort. It's lots of software, lots of tools that go into that. And that's certainly an area where EPRI has been very focused is things like the tools that help inform those processes.

Grayson Brulte:

You have to demand models, especially if you're putting them near an interstate or a freeway let's call a well-traveled road from a demand perspective, how about from a hardware perspective, is the hardware available today, is it designed to handle this fast charging that consumers are going to demand, especially for those longer trips? 

John Halliwell:

So far, utilities have been able to accommodate things on their system. So there is a timeline. So if you're a utility and somebody shows up and says, I need, some amount of capacity at this location.

That location might be next to a power line. It might have a substation a quarter mile away. Where it might be at the end of a very long, single distribution feeder that's fully loaded by all the consumers along that line. So those two scenarios would be very different. In one case, the utility could say, sure, we can accommodate that.

Here's our timeline. They do some planning and make that happen. If it's at the end of that long distribution line, maybe they need to bring a line in from another location. They might need right of ways to get to that property. So there can be some long term elements to this. The challenge for those on the path charging locations, like along an interstate, they may be in a rural spot where there's just not, not a lot of distribution capacity now, and they may need very high power at those locations.

You're concentrating lots of vehicles, using high power. That's a bigger challenge for utility. It's not something they're not used to doing. It's just in the past. If you think about building a big box store. That store's function, it needs electricity to function, but electricity is not the main thing.

And, those probably take a year or more to develop, like getting land acquisition and you talk to the utility and say, okay, I'm going to need, 500 kilowatts of capacity here. in a year. The difference with an EV charger is it's business is electricity, like that's the product. And I can show up with charging equipment in weeks.
And that really is a challenge for utilities that have a planning process that, maybe had months in the past. And now you have entities that say, hey, I would like power here in a month. And so we have been out there really beating the bushes to say to everyone you need to engage your utility as early as you possibly can.

A lot of our projects are focused on developing those tools that help connect to the customers who might be adding capacity. Back to the utility so they can start seeing that future picture. Where are those big demands going to be because that they're, some of these have long timelines.

They're also, regulatory utilities are regulated monopolies. And so how they expand their capacity oftentimes is well defined. There's a process. There are rate cases. There's testimony and a process that's followed through regulators and how. The system is upgraded. So those things also have to, to the processes have to be followed or the regulators have to look at the process and say, hey, maybe this isn't working with this new technology.

We may need to modify those processes. So we're seeing that's happening now. This is. Even though we're more than a decade into having EVs really, we're starting to see that, that, that curve and scale where lots of people are going, wow, this is, this looks like it's really going to happen.

Like we really need to take this seriously and get on the ball. So I think that's the biggest challenge is like those really high loads. At a location that doesn't have a lot of capacity. How does the utility respond to that and not be the stick in the mud, right? You don't want, the utilities don't want to be the one hindering a technology, but they do have processes and things that have to happen.

So the customer that's coming in has to understand that power doesn't drop out of the sky. There's generally, there's a wire going somewhere to make that happen. And that wire has to be big enough and have the capacity behind it to, to look, to deliver for the load. 

Grayson Brulte:

And then you have the issue. It's not in my backyard issue because I don't want to see a wire put that underground and then you have to go for permitting to get micro trenching and there's all those regulatory hurdles there when you have it, there are the utilities looking at putting in micro grids or battery storage backup to deal with those demands.

Perhaps it recharges the battery, say two, three, 4am at night. And then say five o'clock people are commuting home. It can use the battery storage to get that extra capacity. It might need to help balance it out. 

John Halliwell:

So that can vary, and it depends somewhat on how utilities regulated. Part of EPRI's research, we are working with utilities, and we have a program that looks at microgrids.

We have a program that looks at energy storage. Energy storage can be done at what we call like the bulk system. So really large energy storage that might be more like at the generation plant. And then you could have energy storage that might be at your home. So that, at the end of the wire.

And those are very different in terms of how they impact the electricity system. So we have programs looking at that. And I think It's an all in right now for utilities. Like these are all tools in the toolbox. Some of that is also, like I say, approach. So if a utility has a rate that, that sort of structures how they would like you to consume energy.

And power, then they may allow that to take precedence. So you as a customer, if you're going to have a high bill because of high demand, maybe you go buy a battery system to mitigate that loading on their system. So you're trying to manipulate your energy consumption and your peak power demand to match what the utility is put out through their rates.

And so both of those approaches may occur. You'll have utilities putting in tools to support their side of the system. You'll have customers who may put in battery storage or, other forms of local generation to meet those peak demands. And that's varied across the country. We've seen fast charging stations installed without storage locally, and we've seen, large solar farms and storage being paired with those.

So that I think all approaches are on the table. I think, and again, I say, 10 years in, we're still probably, I think it's less than 2 percent of the vehicles on the road or EVs. So we've tapped a tiny proportion of the consumers in the U. S. So we're early in on this. And I think that to recognize that how these approaches develop is going to change over time, we'll get best practices, and we'll see that develop.

Grayson Brulte:

I could tell you from a, an EV owner perspective. I have a software in my car, and I set the charge after 9pm because the rates are cheaper. And when I wake up in the morning, it's good to go. 

John Halliwell:

So there's a case where you, as a consumer, follow the guidance that a utility's already laid out through their rates. And in commercial settings, as consumers, we're not used to this, but as a commercial customer, almost all electricity rates include both an energy component, so how many kilowatt hours, how much energy do you consume a month, but they have a peak demand charge. So that's, how many kilowatts did you use at the highest point in a month?

And that may be averaged over 15 minutes or an hour, but both of those have an impact. So the energy relates back to how much did I run a generator? That peak demand determines how big a pipe did I give you? Like how big is the transformer? How big are the wires? And the bigger the transformer, there's more copper.

There's more cost. And so to reflect that in the commercial side, utilities have traditionally had that energy component to your bill and that power capacity component. And so those vary with time. So different utilities, that peak demand time or how much they charge you per kilowatt for that peak power, maybe at a certain time of day.

For many utilities, they have their largest peak between around 6 and 9 p. m. We get home from work, we take a shower, we turn on the TV, we, we turn the air conditioner down if it's hot out, we turn the heat up if it's cold. So There are patterns in our energy use that those rates are built around that, like the how we've used energy in the past helps determine how to share the cost of that system.

And so the EVs can be disruptive in that they'll change that load shape. They might move that demand. If everybody comes home and plugs in their car, they may drive that peak demand in the early evening even higher. And you're a good citizen. You've set a timer and it starts a little later. So there, that's, there's some really simple things that drivers can do that sort of are grid friendly. And those can be done through things like time of use rates or rates that reflect a demand charge or, there's lots of approaches. 

Grayson Brulte:

From the consumer perspective. It's not talked a lot about, it's easy. It's programmed into the car, don't turn on until after nine. It’s actually funny, I'm down to 9:01 pm 'cause that's when the cheap rate starts.

But so I have it down to that and then you, I charge every two weeks and boop and in a way it goes and it just works great and it. Once you program it, it works. Oh, you have to program it. I said, but your TV remote, you have to program that your smart devices, you have to program that. And then once you do it, it just works.

And then it becomes a really big beauty. So EPRI does really fascinating in depth research on electrification and you have a vetted product list. What is the vetted product list and what impact does it have on the industry? 

John Halliwell:

This goes back. It has roots that are probably three or four years deep. We worked with a group of utilities. Utilities are putting together programs where they might offer incentives or deploy equipment, and they're interested in how can they vet that equipment? So what we were seeing happening is, utilities were taking this on and other organizations even to develop what that would call a qualified product list.

So where they've gone out and maybe screened equipment for various criteria. And so we see this developing where, there's maybe 20 or 30 of those lists. If you go out and do an internet search, you'll find literally dozens and dozens of these qualified product lists. And so you think about it from a vendor's perspective, someone who makes charging equipment.

They're having to fill out questionnaire after questionnaire, and we started to look at this and thinking just there's just a lot of repeated effort. If you think across a lot of utilities that there's over 3000 utilities, if even just a few hundred of those start developing these lists, it's a huge challenge for the vendors that make equipment.

The other is just all that effort going into somebody qualifying equipment at each utility. And it just looks like there's an opportunity here, EPRI is a, the public good side of our research to say, can we do something to address that? And so we can't tell you I can't say as EPRI, here's what you should buy.

That's just not the way things work. But we can go out and say, hey, vendor, do you meet this qualification or not? Do you meet this qualification or not? Do you meet, requirements, criteria? We list those out and we ask the vendors through a questionnaire process. Do you, or don't you meet that requirement?

And for us, it's really a criteria because we're not really requiring, we're just asking the question. An example would be. Open charge point protocol is a language that charging stations can speak, and some entities want to require that to say, hey, you have to use this language in your charging equipment.

So we have a question that says, is your system, do you comply with the open charge point protocol? And they can say yes or no. So every doesn't make a judgment about whether that's required. We, in turn, take that and generate what we call like a filtered list. So for an organization, we can say, Oh, you're going to require that.

So we'll filter on that item. And so we start out with a list of all the equipment and all this, all the questions we've vetted with that equipment, and then we can filter that down for an organization based on their own requirements. All of that material is public. We'll share a link with you that we could, we can, carry into this conversation.

The checklist that the vendors fill out for each product is online. How they answer those questions is in our published list, so you can see, what vendors say they do or don't comply with. And that way, we do the legwork of the vetting and then leave the sort of final decision about what is a requirement for an organization for them to decide.

And that way, a vendor can fill out this questionnaire, go through the process of answering those questions, and they don't have to do that a hundred times. Now, if we can get a hundred utilities to use the list, then, one shot, we cover that. It's still a work in progress. We stood the list up, I think it was January of this year was when the first version of it went online.

We have been refining it through the year. We now have about, I think, two or three utilities that are formally using it and several that are informally using the list. And we're working each week to try and increase that number. We started out with one of the California utilities. Southern California Edison is a is one that we've worked with this list. We have some other California utilities that sort of in, in because they use the SE list, they're in turn using our list. We've had Georgia Power, the utility in the southeast has started to use our list as well. And so we're working to add more organizations.

We've talked to some of the state DOTs related to some of the federal money that's coming out. If we can do screening. to help those programs. Our goal isn't, this is not a profit maker for EPRI. Again, this is just a, the focus is really that public good. And can we, here's something that's getting repeated again and again, can we help streamline that process and then in that way help make this just a lower friction for all the vendors and for entities that are deploying hardware. 

Grayson Brulte:

Could this eliminate buyer's remorse where if an entity bought the wrong piece of equipment? Oh, this didn't meet this. Now we can't get a refund. We have to go back to the drawing board. Does it help eliminate some of that buyer's remorse?

John Halliwell:

Some of the criteria around things like what protocol the charge stations use, I use that as an example. And the, if Charging companies. This is all new technology. These companies are new. Companies may leave the market. And so if you have equipment out there that speaks a proprietary language, how would you deal with that?

So if I insist that my vendors use a common language. Then there's more flexibility, potentially in the future and how that equipment could maybe be transferred somewhere else. So some of the thought is around that, like not having, avoiding obsolescence of equipment if you can or stranding equipment for whatever reason.
So I, hopefully that helps by screening some of these criteria. And again, it really comes down to what the organizations want. What are they looking for in terms of the screening? One of the key screenings we do that, it's the only one we require to put something on the list is that equipment be listed by a nationally recognized test lab.

So that's a safety. The listing of a product for safety. And so that is the one thing we've said, like to be on the list, we want you to be NRTL listed for the application. And so beyond that, we leave all the questions to the organizations as to what they need. 

Grayson Brulte:

I'm just going to ask you a question from an organizational standpoint. I'm really curious and update ability. If the hardware or software could be updatable, is that something that you see the individuals looking in their search criteria? Is it possible to either software update this or perhaps replace a component and eventually update the hardware without having to replace the whole mechanism?

John Halliwell:

So within our list, and again, you can go out and take a look at all the criteria we're screening on. We did work with an industry group. We invited vendors to come and talk about what criteria should be on this list. really try to focus on criteria that are clearly yes, no answers.

Like it's not up to me to make a judgment. We really want answers that are, clean and clear. One of the questions we ask is the firmware in a charge station remotely updatable. So that is one of our screening questions, and we have the vendors attest to that. So we're not, we're not digging into a lot of documentation.

Now, some things we can verify, like NRTL listing. We can contact the NRTL and make sure the proper paperwork is in place. Some things on the list we have just the vendor attest to. And that's made clear if you look at our screening criteria. That checklist actually describes what we ask for from the vendors.

So yes, we do have questions around things like software updatability. Can the equipment be installed to meet Americans with Disabilities Act requirements, ADA requirements? So that's one of the questions we ask. Can your equipment support that? There’re some things you can't screen ahead of time. So how something gets installed in the field, we can't control.

So someone could be on our list and you could mis install equipment, even though it's designed to support ADA, for example, and it's mounted at the wrong height or has something, an obstacle in front of it. that could defy that. So we've tried to keep the list focused on those things. You can vet ahead of installation to help organizations sort of screen equipment the way they want to.

Grayson Brulte:

It's very comprehensive list and staying on the updatable. How often is the list updated in terms of equipment that you actually have on the list? 

John Halliwell:

So we've been working with vendors to add them to the list. Generally, it takes us a few weeks. So we have roughly a pace of about once a month. We update the list.

Our aspirational goal was to try and do it about every three weeks. We'll see if we can get there. It took us a while to get our process and the flow down in terms of gathering the data from the vendors, verifying that data and then updating the list. But right now, roughly once a month is how often we're updating it.

And that was one of the challenges we could look at, like the list of other organizations. Once they start doing this, they realized there's a lot of work in maintaining these lists. And so what would often happen, an organization would do some screening, but then that list would become stagnant from that point.

And one of the things we see is like there's lots of great new products coming into the market. So we don't want to see somebody have a static list that says, yeah, you can only use what was made two years ago. Like here's EPRI is doing this list that. Is really getting the newest stuff from the vendors and keeping it up today.

So that was one of our goals was to try and keep this list very dynamic to support. We need all the tools in the toolbox. We need. That the new ideas coming in and how charge stations can be built. I really want, we want to see all that stuff come to the forefront. So having a list that's dynamic and kept up to date frequently really supports that.

Grayson Brulte:

And all that equipment is built with standards. Standards make the world go around. Standards enable electric vehicles to be charged. You and your colleagues at EPRI, you're involved in standards development. What role do you play in standards development? 

John Halliwell:

So EPRI has a long history of being active in standards, certainly on the utility side, things that maybe consumers aren't even familiar with, the things that happen on poles and the wires out there, there are lots of standards around those.

EPRI has done that pretty much since our inception. I think it's just a natural thing. If you're doing something in the public benefit, standards really are targeted to help, help that, right? Having a standard charging interface where you don't have, 10 unique couplers out in the field, there are real benefits to society from that.

So it's kind of part of what we've done from the very beginning. We don't advocate, so we really focus on the technical side of things. We help inform the technical side of the standards. How does that standard function? How does it interact with the grid? A lot of our focus would be about, like, how does an electric vehicle interact with the grid?

And are there standards needed for that behavior? If vehicles can be good citizens on the grid, think about that they, their impact to the grid is mitigated up front. Like you mentioned, setting a timer, could we get car dealerships to set those timers in the, there, there are some things you can do that, that are really simple that maybe don't require a standard, but then there are other things where you really need a standard to drive the industry.

The challenge here, there are dozens of car manufacturers. There are hundreds of charge station manufacturers. And so those are products developed by different engineers in different locations, different parts of the world. And one day they get plugged in together and they have to function seamlessly.

So the challenge is, how do you write a document to make that happen? That, and that's I, that's a part of my job. I really enjoy because I do see that benefit. Of having standards for equipment, it's a really important aspect. Standards aren't forever. You can think back, I can think about how many different connectors we've had at, say, on our computers.

How many think about the old DB 15 connector that used to go to your monitor? The USB A with the big square connector. So there are, standards have a lifetime. Their recognition is that they help at a point in time in the market. And, how products can interact.

And again, in this case, where you clearly have an area where that it's not going to be one manufacturer making these pieces. It's always going to be different companies. And so that, that challenge of pairing up two different products and they work together seamlessly. That really cries out for a standard.

Grayson Brulte:

It does because consumers get dongled out. I need a dongle for this, dongle for that. They get confused. And I'd say they get dongled out. And we've seen that with EVs. In your opinion, what is the best way to address the interoperability issues with electric vehicles and chargers? 

John Halliwell:

Having clearly written standards is probably the basis for that. Like you, again, somebody different is going to design the charger and someone else is going to design the car. What is it that ties those design efforts together? It's going to be the standards document. So it's got to be written really clear, what are you required to do?

What shall you do? Those really key words what we call the normative elements of a standard. If the pin in your connector is too big to fit in the socket. on the other part of the system, you can't, it doesn't even matter if they communicate correctly, right? They're electrically or physically incompatible.

So there's a whole layering. There's like physical compatibility and then basic electrical performance and then communications and control that gets layered on top of that. And all of those require.
I think probably the next level is how do you make sure things follow those normative requirements? So that's one that in the EV space, I think we still have a ways to go some way that equipment is certified or, measured against that level of compliance. And I think the industry is still working through that.

But I think that's the key, like a well written standard that's clear. That really tells you what's normative, that I know what I need to do. And the language can't be vague and it can't give you too much leeway. SAE, it's a, it's an interesting challenge for SAE International. When you develop a standard, you don't want to hinder product development.

I don't want to hinder, creativity and advancing the art. So how do you write a standard where you don't hinder the advancement of the art? So it's always tradeoffs. The more you put in that standard, the more you've locked down and said, okay, no more. No more tinkering.

This is what we're going to do. The connector can't get smaller next month because this is how it has to be sized. And the connector needs to do this. And so that's, that, that tension between future development and making things interchangeable and intercompatible. I think that's always going to be a tension.

And eventually somebody may be leapfrogged. Like you'll see something new comes out. And that's what. Probably obsolete. The connectors on our laptops have gotten so much smaller than, computer from 15 years ago, and there's some great advantages in that. And so we'll see that same thing, I think, in the space we will.

Grayson Brulte:

But it's large-scale infrastructure. If you look at just a gas station, no matter what gas station you go in the United States, Okay. It's going to work. You're not, Oh gosh, what connector is this? Do I need to get a dongle? No. It's just, you put it in your car, you put the gas in there and we have to get there with, in my opinion, with EVs.

John Halliwell:

Getting down to, if you had, one, one interface is great. Certainly from the consumer perspective, simpler is better. But the gas stations, there is, there are diesel pumps and there used to be leaded gas and unleaded gas. And then there's E85. And can my car handle that? There are still some things as consumers.

We've just had more time, I think, to absorb that. And, if you get in an EV, to me, the driving experience is wonderful. The cars are quiet. They have really quick acceleration. Where they're really different than the traditional vehicle is that fueling side. And so that, that's where I think consumers are, it's probably the scariest part of this.

A car is a big investment and can I make this work for my lifestyle? So you know the fact that they're right now, multiple charging standards out there. Yeah. That's a challenge. If we, if we can narrow that down, that certainly from the consumer perspective is simpler and simpler to me is probably always better.

Grayson Brulte:

You're right, one of those is the SAE J1772 electric vehicle charging standard. Is it being updated to reflect the changing market as the automakers shift towards the NAC standard?

John Halliwell:

So it's interesting because we had just finished, it's really five years in the making, we had just finished a major update to J1772 and that's actually still going through the SAE balloting process right now.

So I think it's passed at the hybrid committee level, hybrid EV committee. It now goes to what's called the Motor Vehicle Council. That predated the announcements from a lot of the OEMs about transitioning to the NAX coupler. What now is covered by another SAE committee, J3400. So J3400 is looking to standardize that Tesla proprietary interface under the name North American Charging Standard.

That's a work in progress. But what it does is it leverages what's in J1772. So they're not rewriting all the requirements. It's really about changing the physical coupler but building on all of the electrical behavior and the communications technologies that are already developed. So it does reference back to the J1772 document.

There probably will be a need to go back and look at J1772 next year and just make sure again. Making sure these documents are clear, they're concise, that there's no ambiguity, the standards get updated. Usually, most of the SAE standards, if they're very new, probably once or, once a year, maybe every other year, committees are looking at these standards and saying, okay, have we learned things in the field that need updated?

Certainly, J3400 will probably drive some of those conversations, but the hope is we're building on. What's already been done with J 1772. We're not introducing new communications protocols. We're really changing that physical interface, but trying to stay with the existing, electrical and communications behaviors.

Grayson Brulte:

I'll give you a hypothetical. Let's say every North American manufacturer that sells vehicles in North America decides to go the J 3400. What happens to J 1772? Does it say there's a reference document? Every manufacturing and electric vehicle from this date forward is going to only use the NAAQS standard. What happens in that standpoint? 

John Halliwell:

Since it's done through reference, I think the J1772 document would remain. Then it comes down to one of the things that we didn't address this time around that probably needs to be looked at in the future is Where you flow energy from the vehicle back to the grid or back to an external load and so that vehicle to the exporting of power.

That's something that J 1772 will have to be reviewed for some of the other standards that are linked to that have already been updated. It's a work in progress. So with J 3400, I think you're going to see. People deploying the hardware. We're going to learn some lessons from the field.

And then we'll go back next year and we'll start working on those documents. So I won't be surprised if you see J1772 reopened. The task force going back and looking at the document and saying, okay, we need to clarify this or adjust this language. I think that goes on through the full life of a standard.

Particularly in one that's this complex. We have so many entities. Interacting. So it's a real challenge to make sure that language is clear and that the messaging, carries across all the different vendors. So I don't see it going away. I think it's going to be, it's still the basis for what's referenced in J 3400.

And part of that was so you don't go back and rewrite, right? Reinvent the things you've already settled and made work. So in a sense, this was Tesla's coupler, which is proprietary. Becoming more of a standard coupler across brands, but also Tesla moving toward using more of the standardized way of doing the control of that interface. So it's a little bit of both things happening at once. 

Grayson Brulte:

When you're developing a standard, this is just a general curiosity, electric vehicle, the mileage vehicle, I plug in my credit cards on file with my car, just it just charges my card on file. So you get to, they're called payment rails. When you're developing a standard since electric vehicles, you have to pay for the energy.

Do you get down into that layer of what the, let's call it the payment rail should look like, or is it just pure technical from a hardware perspective? You could shed some light on that for our listeners. That would be really incredible. 

John Halliwell:

Yeah. So some of that's divided across there. If you're not familiar, there are organizations that focus on standards. They're called standards development, organizations, sometimes nicknamed SDOs. So ANSI, the American National Standards Institute, SAE International. ISO, which is the International Standards Organization, the Inter International Electro Technical Committee, IEC. There, there are lots of these standards bodies and each has different focus.

SAE generally focuses on those things that directly impact the vehicle. So the protocol that where you communicate with the vehicle is in one of the SAE standards. And when you think about a charge station that's now communicating back to something external in general, SAE hasn't looked at that.

So that's been done in one case through a, the open charge alliance, an alliance of companies that have joined together and develop the open charge point protocol. And so that's a language that supports that sort of back office operating a charge station. And that's not an SAE document.

But the SAE standard needs to support that. And the OCP document needs to recognize what communications elements are in the SAE standard. So there's a handshaking that has to go on through those layers. I mentioned you have the physical interface that has to fit, and then you have the basic electrical function what voltage goes on which pin and you know how much current can flow those.

Those have to be standardized. You're going up to a higher layer now. Now I have a charge station that's interacting with the outside world. And how does that happen with each of those layers? It becomes even more complex because you can imagine more players are involved and you're going from an electrical connection on a wire to something that maybe passes over the public internet. It's data that gets exchanged. And so different organizations have worked on different parts of that. ISO has developed standards related to that, the charge station to vehicle, but built in hooks to help support. One of the things is called plug and charge the ability.
Where you could just drive up, plug your car in, and there's an automatic identification system that allows the car to charge. Tesla has done that as a sort of closed proprietary system pretty much since their inception of their charging for their fast chargers. And consumers, some consumers really like that, the idea that I just plug in and things happen.

I don't have to fetch the credit card. But, those standards, the credit card standards are generally developed by the payment card industry, PCI. And they have a whole realm of standards and compliance requirements. There, there's a very strong concern, right? There's data being passed around that could financially impact someone if it's compromised.

So the very high standards about security and making sure that information only goes to the proper parties. So all those things are supported by standards and no one organization is large enough to, to cover all of that. So SAE again, focuses very much on what touches the skin of the car or is inside the vehicle. And there are other standards bodies doing a lot of that work on the communication side. 

Grayson Brulte:

In other words, you have to be a very good politician then to navigate this. 

John Halliwell:

You certainly have to think about how standards come together that you're taking a group of competitors in a room and trying to decide on a common way to do something.

And, you can imagine that can have its friction. So someone, it's easiest if you do things my way. So there's always that tension in the standards body about, how things come together. Ultimately, I think, it's what the tide raises all boats, right? That people recognize the value of a standard is that it can make the consumer experience clean and clear.

And that in, in a sense makes this technology more viable for the consumer. Hopefully consumers don't have to know about a lot of this, right? One of the examples I always use is our payment cards, like the cards we use at ATMs. You can travel the world now with that ATM card, put it in a machine, and be handed cash in a foreign country.

And the elaborate system that goes behind that, and all of the standards that were developed, as a consumer, I really don't want to know about it. I do the fact that I can securely go get money in a foreign country. And I think well written standards are that way. They hide in the background.

They, they're there and supporting me as a consumer and the activities that make my life better. But they're very much, hidden. And I think well written standards, that's how they play out. That, you get a good experience, things work well. 

Grayson Brulte:

In standards of plumbing in your house, you don't think about how the water went down the sink or any of this. It's just plumbing that works. You just want it to work plain and simple. 

John Halliwell:

But you can imagine the difficulty if you went to a big box store and every fitting was different. It's already a bit that way, right? There's so many different plumbing standards out there, but they're generally like what hooks onto the bottom of your faucet.

That's pretty common. So those are those places where somebody worked really hard to develop, the shape and the thread pitch and all those things for that mechanical standard. We benefit from being able to go to a store, grab a sink, put it in our kitchen and have a plumber install it without them having to go make five trips to find the right connector.

So yeah, there, there are some definite benefits for that, that, getting those standards in place. 

Grayson Brulte: 

We all benefit from that. How about on the larger class six and class eight for heavy duty chargers? Is it a different type of, it's different standard for those types of products since those vehicles will take more energy than your traditional passenger consumer vehicles?

John Halliwell:

So it really depends on application, the certainly a bigger vehicle will consume more energy to move the same distance. And if it's hauling a lot of weight, then it will use even more energy to cover that distance. So there's a sense that, a class eight truck is going to have a higher energy demand than a light duty passenger vehicle.
But it still comes back to the driving, how it's used. Maybe that truck only goes five miles. It's, hauling stuff from a warehouse to a store that's nearby. And so you really have to look at each application. It may turn out there are Class 8 truck applications that actually don't use that much energy because the truck maybe sits idle most of the time.

So you really have to look at the application. But there's the general trend that like large vehicles are going to take more energy. The other thing is they generally operate from a location. Trucking fleets often have a yard where all the trucks go back to. If all the trucks go to that yard and that in one of them, so a takeaway maybe for your audience is, when you charge things, like when you fuel your car, there's not a time charge.

Like I don't pay, I don't, there's not a pump that gives me gasoline a little quicker that I pay a premium. Electricity is very different in that. The cost of delivering electricity is dependent on the amount of power. So delivering electricity at a slow pace, like a level one charger in a home setting is going to cost less than delivering 350 kilowatts at a fast charger, it's just physics, the wire size.

Transformer size, all those things have to be much beefier for that high current, that high power. So for electricity, something that fleets have to adapt to is now the fueling rate is something they need to think about. It's not, there really is a reason for maybe using that idle time on that truck to charge it at a lower power level.
So all those things come into play. I guess one of the things I was heading towards, so the fleets do tend to have a central location.

Passenger vehicles get distributed out there, maybe at apartment houses, single family homes. But. they're showing up in the grid in a very diffuse way.

A fleet might have 80 or 100 trucks at one parking lot in town. And so suddenly that one parking lot has a very large energy need and a very high-power capacity need. So I think that's the key challenge around fleets may not be that in just because the vehicles are larger, but also just the way they operate.

They may have very tight schedules. You think of delivery fleets, they probably leave at a certain time in the morning and maybe they do two runs a day. So you might actually have two times a day where there's a peak in power demand at that location as they operate their vehicles. Fleets do have the flexibility in general, they know what they're doing.

Unlike my family car, where I, what I do today, like commuting to work, that's probably pretty consistent, but I might make a trip next week that I haven't planned yet. A fleet generally has vehicles they know, this vehicle goes 50 miles every day. 300 days a year, this truck goes 50 miles every day.

I can pretty readily look at, okay, what's the energy need for that? How much power capacity do I need if I deliver that over five hours? So there's some knowledge in a fleet that probably isn't there for light duty passenger cars. And so fleet operators are learning to take advantage of that. Like, how do I schedule?

So from the utility side, I think the key challenge is it does concentrate. There's, there are probably going to be locations where there's going to be large energy and power demand that's not there today. Truck stops are at the edge of town most of the time. Sometimes cities grow and they're no longer at the edge of town, truck stops usually start out somewhere at the edge of town.
And those may not be places where the grid is very robust. So over time, we'll see, those areas have to build out. And, service the energy needs at those locations. 

Grayson Brulte:

We're going to have to update and prepare the grid. And EPRI, you have the EVs to Scale 2030 program. What role will that play in preparing the grid for both consumer EVs and for commercial electric trucks?

John Halliwell:

So this is the program we have with a number of utilities. It's really taking the thought of. If EVs are reaching scale in 2030, and I believe we define that as roughly 50 percent of new vehicle sales are EVs. And, what is the implication of that? So take a step back and from the science side of things.

What does that mean in the demand of kilowatt hours and kilowatts on the electric grid and where will that show up? So a lot of our focus is on developing tools and ways to share information. For instance, if you're a fleet operator, you probably haven't talked to utility about something you're going to do five years from now.
You know that you probably would normally develop your fleet internally, and you really wouldn't want to talk to anyone because there might be competitive advantage in terms of not letting anyone know what you're doing. There's a real need. If you're thinking in five years, I'm going to electrify my truck fleet.

Hopefully that information is going to flow to your utility. The electric utility will have some knowledge to say, hey. We've got this location over here that right now it might have excess capacity. You give me a two thumbs up. We can build you out in no time at all. Or it might be, wow, we really need to put that in our plans and think about how we're going to serve that load.

So getting those tools in place and like how does a fleet communicate with their utility? How do we make sure that. That the preparations are being made in a world where the fleets are competitive and may not want to share that information with just anyone. So we've really taken a look at those tools, planning tools for utilities in terms of how will fleets impact their grid, helping them scheme out, like what does a delivery fleet look like compared to, maybe a fleet that serves a plumbing company and that they're going to be very different in terms of the times of operation.

And the utility system's all about, making sure our generation and the wires are sized to meet those daily variations in our demand. And over time, those are changing. It's a really interesting and challenging time for utilities. There's just a lot of effort has to go into planning to understand those changes.

Grayson Brulte:

Planning's absolutely key. In your opinion, what is the future of EPRI? 

John Halliwell:

It's it was great you asked that question because I, maybe I don't think about that as much as I should. We get caught up in our day-to-day job. We have a long history like I say, now 51 years, we really try to bring unbiased scientific backing to what things happen with technologies.

How does that impact the electric system? Can we think about the, the technical side impacts? So I only see the need for that expanding, like what EPRI does, trying to bring that sort of a neutral view about how we bring energy to consumers and to society is, it just, it's needed. This is going to get more complex.

And if we're trying to bring in. Renewable resources and they operate very differently than a generation plant that we would have built 50 years ago. And so how do we back that up with the science, the knowledge to make sure we're, we're making good decisions based on the technical side of things.

And so that's every role. We really try to bring that scientific view. to these changes and how they might impact us and impact the grid and impact society as a whole. 

Grayson Brulte:

Scientific views are awesome views. You're looking at data and you're learning. I learned a lot from this conversation, John. I found it insightful and frankly, I found it awesomely interesting.

As we look to wrap up this insightful conversation, what would you like our listeners to take away with them today? 

John Halliwell:

The key takeaway I think, standards have a place and a time and I think we've seen that, like J1772 it helped. Bring things together in a way that probably wouldn't have happened without that standard, but they're they'll change over time.

I'm optimistic that I think Evie's are a technology that really brings some great benefits like I'm an Evie driver and I really I gained benefit just from the experience of the vehicle driving. I love quiet. Like the, I'm a big fan of the quietness of an EV. Enabling that technology by really doing the science work, understanding how we develop our grid to support those. That's exciting to me. And I think that's something that EPRI will continue to do and will continue to be a part of the standards development world, just because that always supports, those new technologies and in a sensible way. How do we do things where we benefit all of society? 

Grayson Brulte:

Standards benefit society. Standards bring industry together. Today is tomorrow. Tomorrow is today. The future is EPRI. John, thank you so much for coming on SAE Tomorrow Today. 

John Halliwell:

Thank you very much for the invite great talking with you and appreciate the opportunity.

Grayson Brulte:

Thank you for listening to SAE Tomorrow Today. If you've enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, please kindly rate, review, and let us know what topics you'd like for us to explore next. 

SAE International makes no representations as to the accuracy of the information presented in this podcast. The information and opinions are for general information only. SAE International does not endorse, approve, recommend, or certify any information, product, process, service, or organization presented or mentioned in this podcast.