NEWS Driving research opportunities at RAELApril 12, 2023

April 4: for the orig­i­nal arti­cle, click here.

Cal­i­for­nia pol­i­cy­mak­ers made head­lines in 2021  when they announced new emis­sions reg­u­la­tions that will ban the sale of new gas-pow­ered vehi­cles by 2035. As the state inch­es clos­er to that date, researchers in UC Berkeley’s Renew­able and Appro­pri­ate Ener­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ry (RAEL) are study­ing how an all-elec­tric fleet will inter­act with California’s pow­er grid.

Late last month, the research team received a new tool to help their work: an elec­tric car donat­ed by Viet­namese automak­er Vin­Fast, a sub­sidiary of the Vin­group con­glom­er­ate. Ener­gy and Resources Group pro­fes­sor Dan Kam­men, who leads the research team, said he con­nect­ed with the automaker’s rep­re­sen­ta­tives last year while he was in Hanoi, Viet­nam, judg­ing the $3 mil­lion Vin­Fu­ture Prize.

“This was com­plete serendip­i­ty,” he said. “At the end of my trip, the com­pa­ny asked if they could donate one of their first 999 U.S. vehi­cles to our lab.”

Kam­men said the vehi­cle will be used by RAEL—a mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary research group that focus­es on design­ing, test­ing, and dis­sem­i­nat­ing clean and sus­tain­able ener­gy systems—to study ener­gy stor­age con­straints, how changes in tem­per­a­ture affect bat­tery per­for­mance, and oth­er issues relat­ing to elec­tric cars, as well as the social and equi­ty dimen­sions of EV infra­struc­ture devel­oped to sup­port mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties. The lab also hopes to work along­side the man­u­fac­tur­er to explore the costs asso­ci­at­ed with mod­i­fy­ing vehi­cles to send pow­er from their bat­ter­ies back to the elec­tric grid.

“Ser­vice, deliv­ery, and rideshare vehi­cles that might be dri­ven for work dur­ing the day could be used at night to shore up our grid and pro­vide dis­trib­uted ener­gy stor­age for prof­it,” Kam­men said.

The vehi­cle also offers RAEL researchers an oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­duct com­mu­ni­ty out­reach, par­tic­u­lar­ly with­in low-income neigh­bor­hoods where access to elec­tric vehi­cles is low. “Elec­tric vehi­cles are now suf­fi­cient­ly inex­pen­sive that, if the upfront costs could be amor­tized, they would be cheap­er than gas-pow­ered vehi­cles,” Kam­men said. “Low-income com­mu­ni­ties, how­ev­er, might not be giv­en the chance to dri­ve a shared elec­tric vehi­cle because that’s not a stan­dard thing to loan out.”

In the future, the car might be sta­tioned at pub­lic charg­ing loca­tions near BART sta­tions or inte­grat­ed into the ongo­ing EcoBlock research project as a shared-mobil­i­ty vehicle.

Learn more about RAEL and the EcoBlock projects at their websites.