Plug-in hybrids’ one little detail: The smart grid

I’ll be attending the Plug-In 2008 Conference in San Jose this week. I signed up for it even before I heard that Andy Grove is the keynote speaker on Tuesday. Grove’s topic will be, “the critical importance – and business opportunity and viability – of moving transportation from oil to electricity.” 

Here are some of the questions I’m going to be asking the smart grid folks at the conference, which I got from Jeff Taft, my utilities-of-the-future go-to guy:

–How will PHEV’s react to power line voltage sags and faults?

–Will a local power line fault damage a PHEV’s power system?

–Will utilities have to resize all their distribution transformers and lateral line fuses because of the new loads?

–Will PHEV’s be designed to ramp up demand slowly when plugged in or will they just take in inrush?

–Will they be designed to start taking power after a random delay so as to provide some load diversity beyond that which will arise more or less (mostly less) naturally?

Grove, ex-CEO and guiding light of Intel, wrote a popular biz book in the ‘90’s called “Only the Paranoid Survive.” After the rah-rah “We can move to renewables in the next ten years” talk of the past week, that’s a healthy attitude to have as we figure out how to get there from here.