2025 PLMA Award Winner

For excellence in load management thought leadership and outcomes, DNV and SMUD went above and beyond in their thoughtful and innovative experiment design, execution, evaluation, and information sharing of their residential managed EV charging pilot.

Design & Execution
In SMUD’s Residential Managed EV Charging Pilot, DNV and SMUD jointly designed an innovative load management experiment to evaluate three use cases of managed EV charging – solar consumption, system peak reduction, and local service transformer overload mitigation. The pilot was designed as a randomized control trial (RCT) with participants assigned to a control group or one of four treatment groups. Each treatment group had its load actively managed daily by a service provider:

• Optiwatt for Tesla vehicles
• OVGIP/ChargeScape for Ford, BMW, and GM vehicles.

By the time of the interim evaluation, approximately 1,200 EVs were enrolled under four OEMS – Tesla, Ford, BMW, and GM.

Evaluation & Outcomes
Innovative approaches in evaluation incorporated traditional statistical EM&V techniques with Monte Carlo simulations of the electrical distribution system power flow. The interim results showed that meaningful financial value can be realized from managed EV charging beyond system peak reduction and resource adequacy offsets traditionally associated with demand response programs. Not accounting for program incentives, the estimated benefit of managed EV charging in the interim evaluation was approximately $60 per vehicle per year, primarily as avoided distribution overloads with the remainder split between reduced energy supply costs, avoided solar curtailment, and reduced resource adequacy needs.

Pilot participation was analyzed by sustainable community segmentation to gauge and evaluate program design for inadvertent bias that could lead to disproportionate program participation considering environmental and social justice. The interim evaluation also identified opportunities to improve the performance, financial value, and customer satisfaction of managed EV charging. With the success of this pilot and a need identified for managed EV charging, SMUD is now beginning the planning of its pilot to program transition in 2025.

Information Sharing & Knowledge Transfer
The knowledge transfer through conferences and publications should also help transfer the learnings to future pilots planned by other utilities and solutions developed by managed charging service providers/aggregators. Updates from the evaluation in progress were shared at the 2024 PLMA EV Symposium in August 2024 and the Energy Transition Coordinating Council (ETCC) Summit in October 2024. The audiences at these two events includes a mix of electric utilities, EV service providers/aggregators, and regulators.

Later in 2024, the interim evaluation was completed showing promising results. The results and paper were accepted to be presented at the 2025 SAE World Congress in April 2025. The paper will also be published and available for download from SAE’s website.

The SAE World Congress has an audience of primarily auto OEMs and suppliers who are enablers of managed EV charging. Auto OEMs and suppliers develop the underlying technology for vehicle telematics and load management that can be leveraged by EV service providers/aggregators for utility programs. It is hoped this presentation will showcase the opportunity for auto OEMs to continue investing in load management capabilities that are built into the vehicle, and leveraging existing vehicle telematics as a cost-effective approach for scaling managed EV charging.