Learn from the world wide web, Scott tells networks

The energy sector should not allow the development of electric vehicles (EV) to become too fragmented from other smart grid technologies by separate committees tackling specific issues, energy consultant John Scott has warned.

Chiltern Power’s Scott welcomed the announcement of a cross-sector committee between energy network companies and automotive manufacturers but warned “it is a solution, but only for one specific issue. The complexities ahead will tend to be whole-system and interacting”.

He also questioned the Automotive-Utilities Task Force’s authority to implement change and whether it intends to expand into other related areas such as smart communities and cities.

Instead Scott said the energy sector should look to the example of how the continued development of the World Wide Web (WWW) is overseen by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The W3C is an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. 

He said that the seamless operation of the WWW between different countries is down to “really good engineering that’s not visible to us as users, and this is co-ordinated by the W3C committee.

“We are used to working with committees, involving different stakeholders, but the big difference when you look at the WWW is they have a really substantial back office.

“So you bring together the knowledgeable, the great and good, the specialists, the senior stakeholders but behind them are people who have deep knowledge and continuity, they are doing research, they are liaising with international standards bodies, they are looking at the future and anticipating what’s next.

“Our industry committees that we are used to don’t have that continuity of specialist support.”

The Automotive-Utilities taskforce is being established by EA Technologies intention to facilitate cross-sector learning involving EV manufacturers and ensure the learnings from the My Electric Avenue project on vehicle clustering are acted upon.

Scott said: “We certainly need to try and be ahead of the curve or there will be some very frustrated car owners and neighbourhoods because charging clusters are likely to cause problems to local networks, or even shut down local networks.

“The LCNI projects are very helpful because they are drawing out information about behaviours and increasing our understanding of clusters of vehicles and enabling us to ask what are their likely charging patterns?”