"Smart City San Diego" collaboration announced

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ttweed

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Full article in the San Diego Union. Some excerpts below:

San Diego could pioneer how plug-in cars are integrated into the electric grid under a collaboration announced Monday.

The effort unites city officials with professors at the University of California San Diego, technicians at San Diego Gas & Electric, researchers at General Electric, and business people with CleanTech San Diego.

Other parts of the collaboration, called Smart City San Diego, will work on smart grid technology, cutting through bureaucracy in getting vehicle chargers into homes, figuring out how companies can make money with clean power and determining how people in the real world act when they have electric cars.

The university will also work on research efforts, along with GE and SDG&E, to figure out the feasibility of using the large batteries that plug-in cars have to help manage the grid better.Called vehicle-to-grid, the idea is that there are short periods, sometimes just a few minutes, when electricity demand nearly outstrips supply.

The goal is to figure out how much energy can be saved by avoiding a conversion from direct current to alternating current and back to direct current.
 
Found this quote to be interesting:

For instance, the project will test different ways to charge electric cars at UCSD.

The goal is to figure out how much energy can be saved by avoiding a conversion from direct current to alternating current and back to direct current.

Photovoltaic panels make DC power. Batteries are charged with DC power. But the electric grid runs on AC. And every time you convert electricity from one type of current to another, you lose some energy.

In the UCSD test, some cars will charge directly from solar panels on car ports, while others will charge from batteries that have been charged with solar power. A third method will use the electric grid as a backup.
If you could build an inverter that would let you divert some of the high voltage DC coming from the array directly into high voltage DC for a charge, you'd avoid the typical 5% conversion loss from DC to AC. The conversion back to AC to DC is also likely about 5%.

The trick will be being able to do that while still being able to tie to the grid so you can supply the grid when you aren't charging cars.

UCSD is uniquely well positioned to be able to do research in this area - they have their own gas co-generation plant and have recently installed a lot of PV on the campus as well. I think they have at least a couple MW installed...
 
drees said:
UCSD is uniquely well positioned to be able to do research in this area - they have their own gas co-generation plant and have recently installed a lot of PV on the campus as well. I think they have at least a couple MW installed...
Ya, David, I worked there in facilities management for 23 years, and know the current Campus Energy Manager, John Dilliott. They installed a 1 megawatt solar electric system in the first phase, with another megawatt coming in the second phase. While I was there, the co-gen plant went in, along with the 3.8M gallon Thermal Energy Storage system. They are now building a methane-powered fuel-cell that will provide 2.8 megawatts of energy, using regional renewable methane from the Pt. Loma sewage plant to power it. This is all the result of the forward-thinking of Jack Hug, who was the Director of Facilities during most of my tenure there. When you looked at the meager budget for maintaining nearly 10M sq. ft. of buildings provided by the state, and the cost of the utilities to keep them operating alone, which was sucking up a majority of the budget, the need for innovative thinking and conservation was obvious. UCSD has led the way for state institutions in this regard.
http://blink.ucsd.edu/facilities/services/green/energy-conservation.html

TT
 
I work at UCSD and although I normally bike rather than drive our Leaf to campus, I'm looking forward to participating in some testing of the impending infrastructure if/when the opportunity presents itself. There are plans for EV Project chargers in various locations (eg. in parking structures) but nothing has actually happened yet. Which is a bit surprising since you'd think if any location would be relatively easy to move forward in from a regulatory/jurisdictional/enthusiasm point of view it would be here, and the goal deployment date of May is starting to loom larger. The information I received indicates that use of the EV Project chargers will require a campus parking permit along with some other level of payment...again with the monetization urge, which if handled poorly is going to adversely affect the long term EV-success curve. But perhaps the approach taken in this thread will be experimental enough that they'll be able to avoid that temptation for a while.
 
wsbca said:
I work at UCSD and although I normally bike rather than drive our Leaf to campus, I'm looking forward to participating in some testing of the impending infrastructure if/when the opportunity presents itself. There are plans for EV Project chargers in various locations (eg. in parking structures) but nothing has actually happened yet. Which is a bit surprising since you'd think if any location would be relatively easy to move forward in from a regulatory/jurisdictional/enthusiasm point of view it would be here, and the goal deployment date of May is starting to loom larger. The information I received indicates that use of the EV Project chargers will require a campus parking permit along with some other level of payment...again with the monetization urge, which if handled poorly is going to adversely affect the long term EV-success curve. But perhaps the approach taken in this thread will be experimental enough that they'll be able to avoid that temptation for a while.
UCSD has provided free charging stations on campus since the EV-1 days, and I hope they don't start charging for them now, although as EVs become more ubiquitous in the coming years, they might have to, simply because of the sheer volume of electricity they will have to supply. My wife and I are both alumni and "staff emeritus," so we have free parking permits for life, and still go to the campus frequently, so as soon as we reserved our Leaf, we started calling the Parking and Transportation folks about what they were doing regarding the EV charging infrastructure and haven't heard anything other than "we're working on it." What sort of information/communications did you receive as a current employee? It seems you have heard more than we have about their plans w/ the EV project, etc. Have they sent out email announcements? Did you inquire directly?

Thx,
TT
 
ttweed said:
.....as soon as we reserved our Leaf, we started calling the Parking and Transportation folks about what they were doing regarding the EV charging infrastructure and haven't heard anything other than "we're working on it." What sort of information/communications did you receive as a current employee? It seems you have heard more than we have about their plans w/ the EV project, etc. Have they sent out email announcements? Did you inquire directly?

There have been no announcements - I made a direct inquiry by email after getting referred from my contact in the Transportation Alternatives office to someone in the Sustainability group and got a personal reply. I'm not comfortable sharing the entire email here since it wasn't an official communication, but I'll PM you some info.

(The existing charging stations are mostly gone I think - the ones I remember near the old bookstore (just south of the newer Center Hall building) and just east of the Price center aren't there any more - there may still be one near the medschool where Club Med used to be)
 
wsbca said:
There have been no announcements - I made a direct inquiry by email after getting referred from my contact in the Transportation Alternatives office to someone in the Sustainability group and got a personal reply. I'm not comfortable sharing the entire email here since it wasn't an official communication, but I'll PM you some info.
Muchas gracias! I'm going to make some more inquiries on my own, too.

(The existing charging stations are mostly gone I think - the ones I remember near the old bookstore (just south of the newer Center Hall building) and just east of the Price center aren't there any more - there may still be one near the medschool where Club Med used to be)
Weren't they mostly the old induction type "paddle" chargers? The wrong connector for the Leaf anyway...
TT
 
ttweed said:
I'm going to make some more inquiries on my own, too.
I have found out from my sources that there will be 10 charging stations installed on campus in the first phase, scattered around according to the locations of the first users in the GE-leased cars. No word on how the electricity use will be charged.

There was a recent show on PBS about this initiative as well: http://www.kpbs.org/news/2011/feb/23/new-initiative-aims-put-more-electric-vehicles-loc/#c6905

TT
 
ttweed said:
ttweed said:
I'm going to make some more inquiries on my own, too.
I have found out from my sources that there will be 10 charging stations installed on campus in the first phase, scattered around according to the locations of the first users in the GE-leased cars. No word on how the electricity use will be charged.
There was a recent show on PBS about this initiative as well: San Diego Tours
TT
___________
I actually saw the Hotel Del PBS show during the San Diego Tours and was really impressed with it!
Now if they could only bump the charging stations from 10 to 20, we all would be happy!
 
My wife charged her Leaf for the first time on campus yesterday. She used the Blink on Myers Dr. by the loading dock at the old bookstore/Sunshine store (I am showing my age here, as 201UC has been otherwise occupied for many years now, and was formerly the Marine Corps mess hall for Camp Matthews back in the day). The only problem she had was that the EV space was occupied by a campus-owned Leaf that was just parked there and not plugged in. She managed to park illegally and get the e-hose connected, activated the Blink with her RFID, and got 30 minutes of charge to get her home. She probably could have made it home w/o the charge, but decided to be safe about her remaining range after running errands for her volunteer UCSD work all morning (and putting out many of her own dollars and time in the process). It would be nice if they didn't needlessly fill up the parking space with a car that wasn't charging. :?

TT
 
ttweed said:
The only problem she had was that the EV space was occupied by a campus-owned Leaf that was just parked there and not plugged in.

Yeah, that car is rarely plugged in, in fact I've only seen it connected once. I agree the placement/configuration is exceptionally non-conducive to use by anything other than that one vehicle - unfortunate, but sadly not surprising. There used to be a Zipcar in the adjacent spot but no longer.

There's at least one other campus-owned Leaf roaming around (also white, but with a mail services designation in addition to the campus logo) - I saw the mail services one on Genessee just yesterday, turning north on Hopkins, presumably there are some affiliated entities with mailcodes over there.
 
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