Tiny rewards can protect the grid from a surge in electric vehicles

A small financial reward can persuade many owners of electric vehicles to load their electric cars during night hours, even when behavioral thrusts do not have the same effect.

That is the discovery of a real world essay that demonstrated how monetary fashion incentives can relieve the demand for electrical networks of the maximum use hours. Such flexibility could be crucial since the number of people driving electric vehicles continue to grow throughout the world.

“Offering an incentive to change the load at the lowest activity reduced the load of peak hours clearly reduced by 50 percent, with a proportional increase in the loading of hours of lower activity,” says Blake Shaffer at the University of Calgary in Canada.

He and his colleagues enlist 200 electric vehicle owners in Calgary and randomly divided them into three groups. One received a financial incentive equivalent to 3.5 cents per kilowatt-hora or use of electricity equivalent to $ 10 per month, if they charged their cars at home between 10 pm and 6 am, a demand demand on the network is Usyley. A second group only received a behavioral push that consisted of information on the social benefits of loading its hours of electric cars. A third group acted as a control, simply monitored to track baseline load habits.

Surprisingly, the behavior thrust strategy was “completely ineffective,” says Shaffer. “Just ask them to do it for the goodness of their hearts did not show a strong enough effect.” But he suggests that the most frequent reminders beyond the initial warning could have the most successful leg.

In comparison, the financial reward significantly changed collection times, but only while people continue to receive money. Any issue of cutting reward led to immediately return to its old load habits.

“The analysis does a convincing job by showing how a small financial incentive can really affect the cargo behavior of electric vehicles,” says Kenneth Gillingham from Yale University. Such incentives may have seemed “easy money” because charging vehicles at night was not too inconvenient, he says.

This is important because “many grids would need substantial improvements” if the growing number of electric vehicles is loading earlier at night, the hours of demand from the door of the door, says Andrea La Nauze at the University of Deakin in Australia. His own research has shown how financial incentives can encourage Australian electric car owners to load the duration of the day, when solar energy is delivering maximum electricity to the network.

Meanwhile, some public service companies, such as Edison and Orange & Rockland in New York, have already begun to offer similar incentive programs for loading out of the peaks.