Siemens wins $1.6 million research grant for electric vehicles
Siemens announced it was recently awarded $1.6 million in development funding from the Department of Energy (DOE) to support research aimed at significantly reducing the current costs of electrical vehicle (EV) chargers and developing "smart" charging capabilities that support power grid efficiency and consumer demand. The grant, awarded to Siemens Corp., Corporate Research and Technology (SCR&T) will be supported by nearly $750,000 in matching research funding, an investment shared with Siemens Low Voltage Electronics, the group responsible for Residential Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment and a business unit of Siemens Infrastructure and Cities.
Collaborating with Siemens in the overall development effort are Duke Energy and Ford Motor Co., who will focus its efforts on validating concepts intended for their respective industries and markets. According to the DOE, the intent of the research grants is to improve the functionality and affordability of electric vehicle chargers. In addition to supporting energy security, U.S. Energy Secretary Steve Chu said in a press release announcing the grant, "Developing smart electric vehicle chargers will provide more options to consumers and accelerate the build-out of the charging infrastructure in ways that strengthen the grid."
"The government's investment will expedite collaboration," said Barry Contrael, director of Low Voltage Electronics for Siemens Infrastructure and Cities, said in that release, "If any company were to endeavor to go it alone, they would have to create and let the market accept or reject solutions for all the possible combinations of EV chargers, utility communication protocols and networks that exist. The resources required to take on this task would be prohibitive, even with companies like Siemens that have the necessary scaling and infrastructure. By teaming up, the companies chosen by the DOE will be able to develop standardized solutions faster and at a greatly reduced overall cost."
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Jim Lucy Blog
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Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.