Toyota to Test Plug-In Prius at Xcel’s SmartGridCity

SmartGridCity, Xcel Energy's showcase smart grid project in Boulder, Colo., will test out some of the first plug-in Toyota Prius hybrids to come to North America.

Toyota will send 10 of its new plug-in hybrids to SmartGridCity in March 2010, the first wave of about 150 it hopes to test in United States next year. Toyota plans to bring the plug-in Prius to a broader market by 2012.

That's out of about 500 vehicles Toyota intends to deliver for testing with fleet customers in 2010. Other announced tests include about 100 plug-in Priuses going to French utility EDF (see Toyota's Plug-In Prius Heads for France).

In Boulder, the Priuses will be at the heart of a new research project by the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, a joint venture of the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Xcel is no stranger to plug-in vehicles. Last year it tested several models – including regular Prius hybrids retrofitted with plug-in capability – to test their ability to allow their batteries to be drawn upon when the utility needed power during peak demand times.

The question remains: What vehicle charging system will be put through its paces with the test Priuses? So-called "smart charging" is a big focus of Xcel and many other utilities that worry about managing the new loads that will come if thousands of plug-in hybrid or electric vehicles make their way into customers' garages and office parking lots (see Electric Vehicles Could Surpass Grid or Support It, IBM Tests Smart Charging in Denmark and A V2G Test: Pool Electric Cars for Grid Needs).

In SmartGridCity, one obvious candidate would be GridPoint, the well-funded smart grid software startup. It participated in previous smart charging tests with Xcel, as well as with utility Duke Energy, and bought Seattle-based smart charging startup V2Green last year (see GridPoint Gets $120M, buys V2Green and Laying the Grid Groundwork for Plug-In Hybrids).

Other charging startups include Ecotality, Coulomb Technologies and Better Place, the latter proposing a "battery-swapping" business plan in addition to charging batteries that remain in vehicles (see Ecotality and Nissan Team on EV Charging Tech, Coulomb Bags $3.75M For Electric-Car Charging and Better Place and Ontario Launch Project).