Will Electric Car Charging Stations Be Standardized?

This post, part of a series we're running all about electric cars, was written by Akweli Parker from HowStuffWorks.com.

It's the early adopter's dilemma: A new technology hits the market; companies scramble to make the coolest product to exploit the technology; a few companies try to corner the market and make theirs the standard.

Given the high costs of getting everyone on board with one product from one manufacturer, companies often turn to cooperation, rather than competition. It's Innovation 101: Cooperation among client companies, vendors and even the government, allows for the creation of standards-based markets for new technology.

So how, you ask, has that been working out for the rapidly changing, emerging technology of electric cars? Will electric car charging stations ever be standardized?

When it comes to electric cars, this could well prove to be the development that gives them permanent market traction. One of the major obstacles to people buying electric cars on a large scale is figuring out how to replenish the cars' batteries away from home. Lots of methods have been developed, but electric cars still face a real quandary: No one wants to build lots of expensive charging stations unless they know there's a large market for electric cars, and (with the last couple of years as an exception), major automakers didn't want to risk building electric cars -- in part because there was no guarantee customers could recharge them far away from home.

Currently (no pun intended), electric-car charging stations are in that stage of innovation known as a "standards war." When the dust settles, many of the companies that proposed innovative solutions will be out of business, while a handful will emerge victorious and perhaps even become household names.

Israel- and Silicon Valley-based Better Place, a global provider of electric vehicle networks and systems, hopes to be one of the winners by building a worldwide network of charging stations and battery swap stops. The company recently partnered with General Electric, which created an electric charger called WattStation, to make the two companies' products compatible. Better Place is rolling out in Israel and Denmark, with plans to finance 10,000 batteries. Under the Better Place business model, customers would lease out a certain amount of battery power each month, and then just switch their car's battery pack at a Better Place station when appropriate. You can watch a pretty cool video of the process here.

But Better Place isn't just betting on battery switching. It's also designed an infrastructure of private and public curbside charging stations. Each one serves as a power and communications hub for the driver, Better Place's network operations centers and local utilities.

In the United States, Coulomb Technologies has set up what it calls the ChargePoint Network -- a nationwide network of independently owned charging stations. At the time of this writing, there were several dozen ChargePoint-linked stations around the country. The network allows drivers to find out, via the Web or smart phone, where the nearest station is and what its status happens to be -- available, occupied or in need of repair. Coulomb makes the claim on its Web site that its network is open to any electric vehicle from any manufacturer.

As for the charge stations themselves, they can provide power according to the Level I electric vehicle protocol used in the United States, Level II or both, depending on the model. The most common charging interfaces are the NEMA 5 (which looks like a standard wall plug, with one blade turned sideways and charges at 120 volts) and the SAE J1772-2009 (a round plug, newer spec and charges faster at 240 volts). These specifications have evolved over the past couple decades through considerable wrangling and deal-making between automakers such as General Motors, Toyota, Ford and Honda. Even so, equipment makers are proposing even more charging configurations for different global markets.

And finally, it appears as if we could be headed toward two global standards for so-called "vehicle-to-grid," or V2G charging and communications. One for the United States under the supervision of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE); and another that would apply to Europe and be headed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), two international standards bodies.

So it's anybody's guess when or if a single, unifying charging standard will prevail. For that answer, we'll all just have to stay plugged in.