When you review the IIJA and the IRA one portion of the grid stands out, not because of the funding that is in the bills, but because there is very little money in the bills. It needs 2 to 20 trillion dollars, and the allocation is less than 10 billion dollars.
It directly impacts customers and contains the highest losses. 40% of it will not support more than 20% of the cars charging as EVs, it has limited hosting capacity and is close to overloaded today.
Part is the secondary between the service transformer and the premise. Some of the secondary has losses of up to 20%.
It is distribution.
What do we do? Well:
1) Upgrade the voltage of the under 10kV class. Maybe to 34.5kV
2) Replace the secondary connections under 200 amps with a 200 to 400-amp connection.
3) Upgrade service transformers to support 100-300 amps per premise.
These provide the basis for more hosting and charging.
4) Improve the Sectionalization of the circuits to minimize the number of customers out when there is a fault.
5) Improve the protection system to allow dynamic protection and deal with very low fault currents (high EV penetration).
6) Loop circuits to be able to back feed customers beyond the fault.
This improves the reliability
7) Put communications in all inverter resources.
8) Schedule demand side management in advance, including charging and V2G
9) Install meters that can disaggregate load so that different tariffs can be offered to different uses (e.g., EV, Solar, Demand side management, etc.)
This is the basis for load management.
There is nothing fancy here, no new technology required, and can be operated to make the distributed energy resources operate as a virtual power plant or a non-wires alternative. This is just decades of infrastructure upgrades.
State commissions need to step up, since the Federal Government did not and start making capital available to fix things before they are so bad that people will not buy electric vehicles.
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