Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Driving Integration: Regulatory Responses to Electric Vehicle Growth

INTEGRATING ELECTRIC VEHICLES

New sources of concentrated load growth from electric vehicles can pose challenges to the distribution system and to electricity customers — affecting grid reliability and increasing electricity costs — but they can also provide considerable benefits.

Buy it: Grid purchases. Make it: Distributed generation. Eliminate it: Energy efficiency.

A wide range of market actors have roles in EV integration onto the grid — and coordination amongst many of them will be required to enable optimized, smart charging behavior.

However, state electric utility regulators and policymakers have the particular opportunity to bring these stakeholders together to proactively design the policies needed to avoid these risks and unlock those benefits from using EVs as grid assets.