LAS VEGAS — Electric vehicle owners eager to charge up in the greenest, most economical manner plug in during off-peak hours when rates are lowest. Ford wants to extend the concept of off-peak power to home appliances, further reducing an EV owner’s electric bill and CO2 footprint by allowing them to tap into the cloud and a proprietary power-tracking database.
Here at CES 2013, the automaker announced MyEnergi Lifestyle, a sweeping collaboration with appliance giant Whirlpool, smart-meter supplier Infineon, Internet-connected thermostat company Nest Labs and, for a green-energy slant, solar-tech provider SunPower. The goal is to help people understand how the “time-flexible” EV charging model can more cheaply power home appliances, and how combining an EV, connected appliances and the data they generate can help them better manage their energy consumption and avoid paying for power at high rates.
Because the electric grid experiences its heaviest loads during daytime hours when people are most active, consumers pay more for juice because utilities must produce more of it — an expensive proposition for all involved. For that reason, many utilities offer discounted rates for off-peak consumption to encourage customers to shift their energy usage patterns to nighttime or early-morning hours. Discounted rates typically apply between midnight and 5 a.m. and, according to Ford, can cost half as much.
The use of smart electrical meters in more than 40 million homes across the U.S. allows households to better take advantage of off-peak rates, said Mike Tinskey, Ford’s global director of vehicle electrification and infrastructure.
“We launched in 19 markets last year with our Focus Electric,” he says. “Of those, 16 had a timing use rate available and that’s all been driven by smart power meters.”
Appliances are getting smarter, too. Some of the most power-hungry appliances, such as a water heater and the ice maker in your freezer, can now schedule their most energy-intensive activities at night. Nest’s Internet-connected thermostat can help homeowners save energy while their away. While some of the appliances and devices within MyEnergi Lifestyle launch early this year, others are available now, Tinskey said.
“One of the key points we wanted to make is that this isn’t expensive stuff,” he said. “This is aimed at mid-America.”
The MyEnergi Lifestyle project also aims to tie these threads together and make it easier for EV owners make to manage and track of their electrical consumption using cloud-based data collected by smart appliances and meters. Users enter info such as their location and local utility rates into the database via the participants products, such as the MyFord Mobile app for the automaker’s EVs. And then they get results on the best charging times and the potential energy savings.
“When we put all these things together, we were astonished by what you can actually do,” Tinskey said.
Ford and its partners worked with researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology to create a model that calculates the electricity usage of a typical single family home for one year and the savings that could come from using off-peak electricity. It predicted a 60 percent reduction in energy costs and a 55 percent reduction in CO2 generated. That’s more than 9,000 kilograms of CO2. MyEnergi Lifestyle collaborators also announced plans to award a “typical” American family with the delivery and installation of energy-saving products from each company to create a real-world example of how the effectiveness of the program.
Researchers estimate that having every home in the U.S. implement energy-saving technologies like those promoted by MyEnergi would be the equivalent of taking every home in California, New York and Texas — around 32 million — off the grid. That’s a significant savings, but it still requires a significant initial investment on the part of the average homeowner. And it still may not be reason enough for some to buy an EV.
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Ford Wants to Teach You Some Off-Peak Electrical Tricks
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Ford Wants to Teach You Some Off-Peak Electrical Tricks
