Up until now, the use of electric vehicles has been limited by cost to purchase and the lack of charging stations.
Seehafer News sat down recently with Troy Adams, the General Manager of Manitowoc Public Utilities, and asked if his municipally-owned utility could handle the EV technology.
Adams explains that adding an electric car is about the equivalent of half a house.
“So if we had every household at two electric cars that would create some challenges for us from a power supply side and a system design side,” he explained. “But, those are problems that I’d love to have.”
The GM, who came to Manitowoc two years ago, says “the idea of having some growth through this method creates opportunity for us to improve the system.”
But Adams added, “I don’t think the transition to electric vehicles is going to happen as fast as maybe we’ve seen in social media, but it’s happening. You see that auto manufacturers have committed to produce electric cars and just through that, the transition will happen. It is going to happen.”
Adams also says it’s important for MPU to look at the system and how they’ll serve that load from a local neighborhood perspective.
“What is kind of exciting about electric cars is they end being battery storage, which is like a generator,” he said. “Twenty years from now we’ve got 20 to 25 percent EV’s in our community and we have programs where people can charge and discharge at certain times, I see MPU having rates and facilitating that as a benefit to customers to utilize those batteries and help manage costs.”
It’ll be wherever people park and plug in.
He says “it might be at home, at work, adding everyone with an electric car can all of a sudden become like a local generating unit with the battery storage.”
