Lifetime Citizen Portal Access — AI Briefings, Alerts & Unlimited Follows
Peninsula Clean Energy pilot finds low enrollment for managed home charging; recommends rightsizing chargers in multifamily housing
Loading...
Summary
Peninsula Clean Energy reported a year‑long telematics managed‑charging pilot with low enrollment (about 4%) and only modest peak‑shifting impacts; the program recommends rightsizing multifamily charging to low‑cost Level‑1 outlets to scale installations.
Philip Cobernick, associate director of energy programs at Peninsula Clean Energy (PCE), presented findings from a year‑long telematics managed‑charging pilot focused on residential drivers.
Recruitment and enrollment: PCE targeted a Silicon Valley EV owner cohort and reported approximately 700 participants enrolled — about 4% of the targeted outreach pool — substantially lower than the pilot team's recruitment goal. "Recruitment is a real challenge," Cobernick said. PCE tested multiple incentive levels including a cohort paid $40 per month but found that higher per‑participant incentives did not materially improve enrollment rates.
Observed load impacts: Among participants the pilot saw measurable reductions in the midnight timer peak (the surge of charging that begins when off‑peak TOU hours start), but it recorded almost no reduction during the evening ramp period (the 6–8 p.m. hours when the bulk system evening load rises). Cobernick said the main reason was self‑selection: drivers who chose to enroll were already more likely to charge off‑peak. PCE linked telematics signals to meter data to validate behavior.
Charger speed and rightsizing: PCE also measured in‑home charging rates and found that many participants were not charging at full Level‑2 speeds; a significant share were using Level‑1 outlets. Cobernick argued that for multifamily housing — where many ports must be installed at once — rightsizing to Level‑1 (roughly 1.4–1.9 kW per port depending on vehicle) can be far more cost‑effective and easier to scale. PCE's program offers incentives for lower‑cost Level‑1 installations of about $2,500 per outlet versus the state EV‑infrastructure average cited of roughly $12,500 per Level‑2 port; rightsizing would permit roughly five times more ports for the same budget, Cobernick said.
Why it matters: PCE's results suggest managed home charging enrollment is limited without clear customer value and streamlined enrollment channels. For multifamily deployment, PCE recommended prioritizing lower‑cost Level‑1 ports to accelerate charger counts and reduce per‑unit program costs, while pilots and demonstrations continue to test managed charging and V2G use cases for sites where higher export or resiliency value justifies the extra cost.
PCE said it is working with UC Davis on further evaluation and that detailed pilot results and the recruitment/data methodology are available in PCE's pilot report.
