Podcast: This Smart Charger, More EVs

In this episode, we explore a groundbreaking smart charger that could significantly boost the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) by revolutionizing charging infrastructure, making EVs more accessible and sustainable for the future of transportation.

This podcast is sponsored by Mouser Electronics. 

Episode Notes

(2:25) - Smart Charger Paves Way for EVs

This episode was brought to you by Mouser, our favorite place to get electronics parts for any project, whether it be a hobby at home or a prototype for work. Click HERE to learn more about EV “hoggers” and why they’re causing issues for large-scale EV adoption!

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Transcript

Friends, have you been considering an EV? Are you concerned about if the electric grid that is really aging in the United States can handle your car and your neighbors? Well, you're not alone. Georgia Tech is trying to tackle this problem and they're trying to figure out how to take the load off the grid. So, buckle up, let's get into it.

I'm Daniel, and I'm Farbod. And this is the NextByte Podcast. Every week, we explore interesting and impactful tech and engineering content from Wevolver.com and deliver it to you in bite sized episodes that are easy to understand, regardless of your background. 

Farbod: Hey friends, welcome back to the pod. As you heard, we're talking about EVs today, specifically charging EVs. And before we get into it, I quickly wanna talk about today's sponsor, Mouser Electronics. Specifically, Mouser makes these technical resources that are sometimes super relevant to what we're talking about here on the pod. And this one is just right on the money. We're gonna link it in the show notes if you're interested, but here's a quick little recap. They're talking about EV charger hoggers. These are people that go to the station, they plug in their car, and even though it's like pretty much full, they stick around and then you pull up and you're at what 10% and you really got to get to work. And now you're frustrated because they don't know the etiquette that you're supposed to just get up and leave. It's a pretty interesting article because it doesn't just go into the technicals of why some folks take longer than others. You know, if you're using an EV that has not such great charging efficiency, but they also talk about the human aspect of it, how we're so used to gas cars where they you always charge up completely to full and when it comes to electric cars, when you hit 80%, it gets much slower when it comes to charging to 100%. So, you should probably get up and leave at that point. I just thought it was interesting. One of the reasons we love working with Mouser is, they work across so many different industries by being one of the world's biggest electronic suppliers. And occasionally they come across cool topics and then they decide to share it with us. So, this one was just super fitting. I really enjoyed it. Dan, you being in the electric vehicle industry, I don't know if you had any hot takes on this that you wanna share.

Daniel: This isn't even really from working in the EV industry, more so being a social media user.

Farbod: Oh yeah?

Daniel: Just you talking about like, oh, people charger hogging at Tesla superchargers. I saw some guy on Reddit saying like, PSA, this is how you deal with someone who's parked in a Tesla supercharger spot, but isn't actively plugged in. And I was kind of wondering like, why would someone do that? Well, apparently Tesla charges idle fees if someone's plugged into the charger, but their vehicle is not actively charging, but they're hogging the spot, right? So, this is trying to solve this issue. I saw this guy in Reddit say, most Tesla vehicles, if you hold the charger near their charge port, even if the vehicle's locked, the charge port will open. And then he's like, all I do is I just plug it in. So, then these people start getting charged like, I think it's 25 cents a minute that they're sitting there.

Farbod: Oh my God.

Daniel: Hard in the parking spot. And he's like, then the financial incentives just take care of themselves. So, I don't know. This is completely unrelated, but I just thought of this guy on Reddit that's a vigilante trying to get rid of charger hogging. But it is really relevant to what we're talking about today, which is like, in principle, like we've got all these vehicles, we want to charge them with electricity that works and it has been working and we've seen EV adoption go up. But if we expect EV adoption to continue to grow, there's more growing pains we're going to experience along the way. Some of those are related to this Mouser article that we just talked about that we're going to link in the show notes. And a lot of them, even with home charging, not just public EV charging, a lot of them with home charging or a charger that you might own or that businesses might own for their fleets, that there's a lot of issues with the way that those interact with the grid as well. And that's part of what we're talking about today.

Farbod: Exactly. And you know, you can't always rely on unethical life hacks from Reddit to just get over those options, right? Those struggles. So, let's segue into what we're talking about today. We're gonna go all the way to Georgia Tech, which I don't think we've ever been to on this pod. And it's my current institution of study. So happy we got to cover the Yellow Jackets. I think that's what they're called. I should know that by now.

Daniel: You should know this if you're a Yellow Jacket by now.

Farbod: I know, I know. Sports isn't my thing, unfortunately.

Daniel: It's a fine institution of which Farbod is now enrolled in. So, take this favoritism with what you will. I'm unbiased at least. So, Farbod starts showing Georgia Tech and I don't. You'll see where our loyalties lie.

Farbod: I’m only three months invested, so not too biased either. But that's a good disclaimer. I think before we actually dive into what's going on, broad strokes, Georgia Tech wants to tackle this EV charging problem. Now, what is the EV charging problem? That's the foundation I want to build here. So, we got to understand what the electricity usage is in America. And across the board, the average home is using about 30 kilowatts of energy every day, right? And when you think about EVs, apparently the average American is commuting about 40 miles every day.

Daniel: One second, just kilowatt hours.

Farbod: Kilowatt hours.

Daniel: Not just kilowatts, right?

Farbod: Yes, sorry, kilowatt hours.

Daniel: Energy versus power. No, I just, I know that there's some super smart person out there who's gonna start pulling out their hair when they see us use units of power instead of energy.

Farbod: Yes, sorry, 30 kilowatt hours of electricity a day.

Daniel: Boom.

Farbod: And then every EV, assuming you're commuting about 40 miles a day requires 11 kilowatt hours to charge up for the next day, right? Just roughly looking at those numbers. You're looking about 33% increase in electricity usage per home now. This might not be that daunting if it was what? 10-15 years ago, when EVs made up 3% of the cars on the road, but estimates are saying that by 2035, 50% of all new cars sold across the world is gonna be an EV. So, this isn't like coming, this is gonna be our reality where one out of every two people you know is probably gonna be driving an EV.

Daniel: Well, and I would mention, specifically to the US, we haven't seen, maybe compared to some other countries, the high level of EV adoption, especially in Europe. There's high EV penetration in their market there.

Farbod: Same in Asia.

Daniel: But also, yeah. Americans own way more cars than Europeans. Like, aren't there more cars in the US than there are people?

Farbod: Yep.

Daniel: It's insane to me. There's definitely more cars than there are drivers. And I'm contributing to the problem. For like five years, I owned two cars and I could only ever possibly be driving one of them. So just to say that like specific to some of these, let's call it like, peak power demand grid congestion problems. Even though in some parts of the world, EV penetration, EV market share is a lot higher. I think that there's still a lot more challenges to come. So just for our international audience who you might live in a country where everyone's on their bikes or the vehicles are electric. That's great. That's a future that I would love to get to. But there's also unique challenges to mass EV adoption in the rest of the world. And I'm obviously I'm very US centric because it's where we live. But thinking about the US, about China, where there's lots and lots of cars and lots and lots of people that drive cars, that there's, you know, I would say the EV total market by and large is still untapped.

Farbod: Definitely. Now it's, we already kind of cover that this is going to result in an increase in the amount of electricity that your home uses on a per day basis. But the problem doesn't necessarily stop there. When you think about when people are charging their cars, it's usually after they come home from work, like I say, 5 p.m. in America. Well, that's actually the time that pretty much everyone else is coming home and they're doing other things like turning on their TV, turning on their AC. So--

Daniel: Turning on the lights, because it's dark outside.

Farbod: Turning on the lights, exactly. So, you have all these things that are already placing a load on the power grid. Now you're adding like an additional 33% on top of that and like just frankly putting it out there, our infrastructure's not ready to accommodate it.

Daniel: And for all the people that work at EV companies and are excited about more EV adoption in the world, right, myself included.

Farbod: Hint, hint, Daniel. Yeah?

Daniel: If there's grid overload risks like this, if you buy an EV, or let's say, if your neighbor buys an EV, and they plan on charging their vehicle when they get home from work, and then they start complaining to you every day, they're like, yo, I can't plug in my vehicle in charge because there's so much grid demand my vehicle won't charge when I get home like that's gonna hinder the growth of this industry if it's not addressed. And even if that's a path that a lot of people want to take and it feels like that way like at least regulatory pressure right now. The market is speaking that way and then there's lots of EV companies who are excited about potential growth of this market, this is one of the bigger hurdles in the way.

Farbod: Absolutely.

Daniel: If everyone wants to own one and you want everyone to own one, but they can't all charge their vehicles when they want to, it's seriously gonna hinder the growth of that industry.

Farbod: For sure. So, like what do we do? Right? That's the million or even billion-dollar question and that's what these folks at Georgia Tech asked like how can we potentially solve this problem. And their goal is to you know mitigate this stress on the grid, but it can come with some other benefits. It can be cost savings for the average consumer in their home, all that. And the point of focus for them was on the actual charger, which I think is actually genius and relatable. And I'll get into that in a second. But basically, they were like, look, we can reduce the stress on the grid. We can minimize cost. We could even prioritize carbon-free energy. If you're the kind of person that's buying an EV, you probably care about going carbon neutral, carbon negative. And maybe you love the idea of solar powered or wind powered or whatever, and they could help you prioritize the energy source for your vehicle from those sources. And this all sounds promising, but the first thing that came to my mind, Daniel, I don't know if this came to your mind as well, was what happened with smart thermostats, right? Like we were just talking about heating your home, cooling your home, smart thermostats really became popular when I was a freshman, I think, in college. I think even our professor who taught HVAC was like, I have a Google thermostat. And then the economics of it totally makes sense because your Google thermostat could work with your, you know, whoever your energy provider is. And then they would say, have a smart schedule of some sort where you don't have your heat setting to what is super desirable for you during peak hours. And that would result in a tremendous amount of savings for you, a lower stress on the grid. And it's kind of like a win-win situation. And that's become something that I feel like I see everywhere now. Pretty much everyone has a smart thermostat around.

Daniel: We've got one in our house and we're even enrolled in like the off-peak energy usage program where like, I think we ended up like the last six months getting like a $40 credit against our power bill because of our enrollment in this program. So yeah, I like this analogy here around like we've already got the appliances and people are going to continue to want their appliances and they continue to want energy demand. But if you can add some level of intelligence somewhere in the consumption chain, right? Similar to a thermostat being kind of the control, adding some intelligence to that with context to the way the rest of the energy grid demand looks like. Is there the opportunity to optimize the user experience, optimize the cost, optimize the impact on the environment? All without them compromising on the actual function of the appliance itself, right? You know, you don't want your heat to not work at all. You don't want your AC to not work at all. But finding a way to compromise versus peak energy demand and the knock-on effects that that has, I like the analogy you drew there with smart thermostats.

Farbod: And I wanna use that context to now go back to EV chargers. I don't have an EV, but I feel like if I did and I came home and I plugged it in, it would be more out of habit than necessarily needing it to be charged in the next hour or two. Right? Like more often than not, when I come home from work and I park my car, I don't need it until the next day.

Daniel: Well, yeah, so let's say you have your average commute of 40 miles a day. Maybe it'll take a couple hours to charge two, three hours. Maybe it'll even, if you charge it really slow, it could take, I don't know, eight hours to charge. But even if you plugged in a second when you got home at 6 p.m. you don't actually need it to charge eight hours later by two in the morning. You're not gonna get up and drive at two in the morning. So, like you're saying, right, the habit here, people plugging in their vehicle room when they get home is just because they want it to be charged when they leave in the morning, not because they actually need it to charge the second when they get home, which also happens to be peak energy demand. So, I'm with you, there's a lot of, let's say, human factors associated with that, similar to the way that like when I go to bed, I plug in my phone to charge but I don't actually need it to charge to 100% by 2 a.m. in the middle of the night. I actually just want it to be charged in the morning when I wake up and I wanna use it again. So, I'm with you, there's like a lot of, like especially with the vehicle, you don't wanna like, when you're getting out is the most convenient time to plug it in, you don't wanna think about it again until you're ready to leave the next day. So, we're kind of setting ourselves up here, but this team from Georgia Tech is looking at algorithms to understand the stress on the grid, to understand where there's peak energy demand. They also have an understanding of when energy costs more, that's associated with the peak energy demand. They also have an understanding of renewable energy sources, understand when wind and solar are available on the grid. Also understand, like in a fleet or commercial application, trying to understand what the collective energy demand could be if you have a bunch of, I don't know, a fleet of 15 trucks. Because you're an electrician, you know, an electrician company and you've got 15 trucks that your company uses and they all come home at the same time. They all plug them in and then they drive their personal cars for their houses. Understanding what the energy demand of your fleet of vehicles could be. They've got all this different information and what they're trying to do is similar to like you said with a smart thermostat. They're trying to help the user control the charging demand control the flow of energy into that vehicle to optimize for low cost, to optimize for low impact on the grid, to optimize for better impact to the environment, and then also to understand the health of the battery. And then obviously, the main function there being the same way that a smart thermostat still makes sure that your home is the right temperature, makes sure that the vehicle is completely charged by the time you need to leave in the morning. So, kind of collectively looking at all these different factors that right now, if someone just comes back to their house and plugs it in and has a “not so smart charger”, that's just going to start charging the second they get there. And that, again, like we said, can help contribute or I guess exacerbate peak energy demand on the grid.

Farbod: Exactly. Now, like, the genius of this is understanding that what most EV users have plenty of is time, right? From the moment you plug it into the moment that you need it, there's a lot of time that you can leverage to do the charging. And some of the factors that these folks, the algorithm they made takes into account is, like you mentioned, the state of the grid. How much does energy cost? Is it during a period of time where the grid could be overloaded? It also takes into account customer preferences. So, like, let's say you are someone who actually does need their car by 4 a.m. instead of 8 a.m. It does take that into account. And this is something that is especially unique. It takes into account predictions of your household's power usage. So, we were talking about the 30-kilowatt hours that you use a day, maybe 20 kilowatt hours of it for whatever reason happens between 5 PM and 10 PM, right? And that is a consideration for when your car's charging is gonna happen. On top of that, usually what I've seen in the past when it comes to EV charging is you can have trickle charging, so like slow charging, or you pick a window of time to do all your charging. What is recommended here is that you can actually have windowed charging, where let's say for whatever reason, this algorithm determines that between, 10 p.m. to 12 a.m. and then 2 a.m. to 4 a.m., that's the optimal time for your car to be charged because of cost or because that's when the most amount of wind energy is available, then it will pick to do that for you as a part of the strategy to charge your vehicle. There's other things that it offers, which I think some EV manufacturers might offer. Daniel, you were mentioning this before we got on the call. Things like battery health, like making sure the rate of charging is not gonna deteriorate and degrade your battery faster over time. Things like speed, how fast you wanna charge it. Then there's a unique factor like carbon-free. I don't think I've ever seen this before, where you get to say, again, I want to use the amount of time where wind and solar are most plentiful because I want to be super green. And that's pretty unique.

Daniel: Well, and one of the things we were talking about, and I think it's worth discussing again, right? Is maybe some of these features exist on a Tesla as an example, or on a Hyundai EV or on a Rivian. Some of these features may exist, but having these features available at the charger side makes it easy for anyone with any brand EV. And I'm thinking specifically of like fleet vehicle owners, right, where they've got maybe two Ford F-150 Lightnings and they've got one Rivian commercial van and they've got one Tesla Cybertruck and they've got two Tesla Model 3s, right. They don't have to worry about going across all those different manufacturers controls to try and set this up vehicle by vehicle, again, specifically for a fleet owner perspective, you can set this on the charger side and use the same charger for all these different vehicles, which is what a lot of people do. Especially now that there's the North American charging standard, Tesla, open source their charging standard. If everyone's using the same plug and everyone can use the same charger, why not control the charger? Which is the year, you know, as a fleet owner, that's your interface with your grid, that's your interface with your energy costs, that's your interface with when vehicles are ready. And then I like the fact that they've tested with different EVs, they filed for a patent here. And one of the ideas is that they not just wanna commercialize chargers, but they also wanna be able to license this same logic, the software to EV manufacturers as well, maybe for different EV companies that don't have these features already. They can borrow some of this and again, the goal here is to make all of these features available to all of the EV owners everywhere. Again, with the big large goal of reducing grid stress, making sure that EV adoption isn't something that stresses or breaks the electric grid, causing the fundamental desire that people have for this technology to be limited because of the fact that they aren't able to conveniently charge at their homes. So, I think this is pretty interesting. I love that they built their hardware, they built their software, that conducted case studies. And then the eventual goal is like, let's get this licensed out to companies and automakers everywhere. They're not saying, we've got to make a new charger company from the ground up and we're going to take over the world. Or they're not saying we've got to make our own EV company and take over the world, their understanding that they've got a really, really useful piece of software that's a platform that any EV company, any EV charger could use. And I'd love to see this technology roll out at every EV charger everywhere.

Farbod: Totally agree, man. And I'm so happy you brought up the North American charging standard, because like you said, now there is one universal plug that everyone's kind of getting on board with. Imagine if there was one charging algorithm that everybody was using, which could then help it get better much quicker over a period of a few years, instead of every single company, I think you were saying. For example, Tesla optimizing their own, and then you have Rivian optimizing their own, and then you have GM optimizing their own. No, let's all get on a single thing, optimize the crap out of it, and then let's all benefit from it.

Daniel: And one of the things that I think is really awesome about this is they mentioned that, for the vast majority of people, their energy requirement to charge their vehicle actually isn't that huge, right? So, let's say, you're at home for 12 hours between when you get home from work and when you leave for the gym the next morning before you go to work. Of that 12 hours, maybe you only need to charge for one to two hours of it. But if everyone is using a similar algorithm and they're saying oh, I'm gonna charge when we're off-peak at uh, I don't know I'm looking at a graph right now…

Farbod: At static energy time.

Daniel: Yeah. Everyone wants to start charging at midnight because that's when energy demand is low there's actually gonna be a spike in energy demand especially related to this being potentially another 33% of people's total energy consumption. So, it's not a tiny bit. It's a big drop in the bucket and everyone's going to drop it at the same time and it's going to make a huge wave. So, one of the things they talked about is understanding the available charging time with the correct parameters and then randomizing between lots of different vehicles to make sure that they're spreading out peak demand across the entire population of EVs, not just looking at one window, one static window, like you mentioned, and plugging it in and charging. And one of the other things I wanted to mention is I was a little hesitant at first when they mentioned the one renewable energy is available.

Farbod: Yeah.

Daniel: Because solar and wind energy are usually available during the day. And I was like, well, in the summer, the peak energy demand is actually a little earlier. It's not right when you get home from work. It's like in the middle of the day. So, I'm like, when wind is high, when solar is high. Also, AC demand is going to be high, which is why there's peak demand in the summer. But I looked at the winter curve and there's actually an awesome. It looks, it looks like an M. So, it's got a peak in the morning, right? We've got a dual peak essentially in the winter. We've got a peak in the morning. When everyone wakes up and they want to heat their homes and they're all like doing everything to get ready for work and then they go. And then during the middle of the day, when the sun rises, there's actually less heating demand on homes and on buildings. So, the peak or the, the energy consumption goes down in the middle of the day. And then I'm thinking, oh, that's a perfect time if people had chargers at work, if they're able to plug in during the middle of the day and have these chargers phased so that right as the sun's coming up and there's lots of wind and there's lots of solar, right? Cause wind activity is also related to the sun being up. There's lots of solar, there's lots of wind available. The energy demand is down for people trying to heat their homes because the sun is also warming their homes. Bam, turn on the chargers and like top off all these vehicles. I think a lot of the times we think about people charging at their homes. One of the things that I think is interesting is if people are charging at their destination to right you charge at work, you charge at the grocery store.

Farbod: Agreed.

Daniel: There's a lot of the possibilities are endless right because you don't need everyone doesn't need to go to one place the gas station to get their fuel anywhere there's electricity which is pretty much everywhere. You've got the ability to top off your vehicle. So that's something that specifically during the winter makes a lot of sense to me. Again, I'm looking at 2 or 3 p.m. being the minimum energy consumption in the winter. Maybe that's when everyone's vehicles should start charging. Boom, boom, boom, boom, fill them all up right before people drive home. It could be interesting.

Farbod: Dude, the future is promising. And again, it's nice to see you always go on about this, but it's nice to see that this isn't a piece of tech that they're going to keep locked up and just write a paper about. There's a patent. They want to commercialize it. They're working with EV companies to get this tech out there. So, it's nice to see that this team is motivated to get this tech into the hands of people.

Daniel: And we're excited about it.

Farbod: Definitely, I don't even have an EV and I'm excited. So that tells you how excited we are.

Daniel: I'm with you.

Farbod: With that said, let's wrap it up. Folks, EVs, they are everywhere, but no one's really thinking about the big potential side effect. And that's gonna be on the grid. Look, let's just be honest. When you come home, the first thing that you're doing is turning on the AC, turning on your lights, turning on your TV, and guess what? So are the rest of your neighbors. Well, what happens if at least half of you, at least that's what the estimate is by 2035, half of you are gonna be driving an EV and then you wanna plug in that car right as you get in? Well, it's gonna cause a 33% uptick in the amount of electricity need and the grid is not gonna be happy. It's already overloaded. Well, the folks over at Georgia Tech are already tackling this problem. They've come up with a smart charger that will take into account the load on the grid. It will take into account the preferences of electricity usage in your home whether you want to use electricity from clean sources like wind and solar, whether you want to minimize cost or maximize speed, all those good things. And it will come up with a strategy to charge your call. The goal with this is that eventually we're going to reach a point where charging is not going to be stressful for the load. And then realistically, what this is going to unlock is mass adoption of EVs across the United States and hopefully the world.

Daniel: Boom. I love it.

Farbod: I do it again. Folks, thank you so much for listening, and as always, we'll catch you in the next one.

Daniel: Peace.

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The Next Byte: We're two engineers on a mission to simplify complex science & technology, making it easy to understand. In each episode of our show, we dive into world-changing tech (such as AI, robotics, 3D printing, IoT, & much more), all while keeping it entertaining & engaging along the way.