Illinois Commerce Commission explores electric vehicle deployment

Illinois officials seek to expand the use of electric vehicles for their state and initiated a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) to gather more information to help the Illinois Commerce Commission identify issues, potential challenges, and opportunities in EV deployment.

The electrification of the transportation sector may be key to helping states reach their clean energy goals and could lead to many benefits to the grid, according to commission leaders.
The NOI report was released earlier this month.

“The growth of electric vehicle sales is accelerating across the nation. As Illinois transitions toward a modernized grid, regulators need to have a greater understanding about EV adoption in order to prepare for the growing demand of electric cars and buses,” said Acting Commissioner Anastasia Palivos.

E-buses have lower operating costs, travel faster, displace transport fuel, and reduce harmful emissions, improving air quality in urban areas, say commission officials. Additionally, municipal bus fleets ownership costs are cheaper than conventional municipal bus fleets.

The Advanced Energy Economy, a national association of business leaders who propose making the global energy system more secure, clean, and affordable, responded to the NOI.

“EVs provide drivers with substantial performance improvements over conventional vehicles,” wrote the association’s vice president Matt Stanberry. “The improvements range from the financial – lower fuel and maintenance costs mean that the total cost of ownership for an electric vehicle is often lower than that of a comparable conventional vehicle – to the driving experience – EVs offer instant torque allowing the vehicles to accelerate faster.”

Last year, the commission held two policy sessions to discuss the intersection between EVs and grid stabilization. The report concluded that the policy sessions showed that “uncoordinated EV charging could lead to negative impacts, such as power losses and voltage variations that overload the electric grid. If customers charge their EVs during costly, peak demand times, it could negatively impact the power grid. Conversely, coordinated charging could minimize the need for certain instances of frequency regulation, smooth out generation intermittency from distributed energy resources, and allow for improved efficiencies on the grid as a whole.”

In initial comments for the NOI, the Alliance for Transportation Electrification, a coalition of organizations that advocate for an acceleration of transportation electrification across the country, wrote that “there is a significant efficiency gain to be achieved in primary to final energy usage by moving from ICE vehicles to battery electric vehicles. The metrics for these efficiency gains, of course, are not the same as have been used to measure traditional energy efficiency improvements over the past two decades, and we believe that new approaches and metrics must be developed to measure these improvements.”

The adoption of EV in Illinois is still in its infancy.

The commission suggested, “while many actors are penetrating the EV industry, regulatory uncertainty discourages utilities and customers from participating at a larger scale. It remains unclear how to efficiently integrate EVs into the current electric system, how to treat charging infrastructure from an ownership perspective, how to determine appropriate rate structures, and how to encourage efficient EV charging practices to support grid stability without burdening non-EV owners.”

In response to these challenges, the commission cited solutions to their concerns from not-for-profits and private sector officials in the EV field, including Tesla, whose experts say that EV charging stations can help with managing demand and better utilization of the electric grid’s fixed infrastructure. According to Tesla, “EV charging can be more efficiently integrated via price signals such as time-of-use rates that incentivize charging at times that are beneficial to the grid and drive down cost savings for consumers.”

Ameren Illinois also submitted initial comments to the commission, stating that the installation of an affordable charging infrastructure will drive higher levels of EV adoption among its customers.

“We look forward to working with the Illinois Commerce Commission and all interested parties to establish a regulatory model that will support this new, more complex electric system, serve a customer need, and ensure that a performance-based and/or value-based model will fairly compensate utilities for their investments in the needed regulated energy infrastructure,” Ameren Illinois said in the document the company submitted in October 2018.

The future of EV according to Bloomberg’s NEF’s Electric Vehicle Outlook 2018 report predicts that 55 percent of all new car sales and 33 percent of global fleets will be electric by 2040.

The comments found in the NOI report serve as “a starting point for discussions among stakeholders regarding the role of utilities, regulators, and other market participants in the electric vehicle charging infrastructure industry and the optimal level of regulatory guidance needed in the electric vehicle and charging infrastructure industry,” according to a written statement from the commission.