Qualcomm’s Technology Inside Ecotality’s Electric Vehicle Chargers

At the Xconomy Smart Energy Forum in San Diego just a couple of months ago, Qualcomm’s Manuel Jaime emphasized that 100-percent electric vehicles (EVs) like the Nissan Leaf will need to be integrated with EV charging stations—and the charging stations have to be integrated with a local power grid. Once they’re integrated, Jaime explained, EV owners will know whether a specific EV charging station will be available when they need it—and electric utilities can begin to manage the “clustering effect” of energy demand that could occur when a bunch of EVs are recharging in the same neighborhood.

Against that background, San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) and Ecotality (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ECTY]]), which moved its headquarters last month from Phoenix, AZ, to San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center, announced an agreement today that will add cellular connectivity to Ecotality’s EV charging stations.

With cellular connectivity, the EV charging stations can begin to share the kind of information that Jaime outlined in June. “Cellular networks will play a critical role in connecting the charging stations with ECOtality’s control systems,” Ecotality CEO Jonathan Read says in a statement issued by the two companies. Using a commercial cellular network will help Ecotality and local utilities manage all kinds of data about EVs and the charging stations, providing what Read describes as “real-time monitoring, command, and control.”

The deal between Qualcomm and Ecotality is part of a broader effort to build out EV charging infrastructure. It also puts Qualcomm in the pole position among the technology giants vying to get their IT, chips, and software inside the charging stations and related power grid infrastructure that utilities will need as EVs become more commonplace on U.S. roads. Ecotality is leading a federally sponsored pilot program that is intended to demonstrate how the rollout of EV technology can be accomplished without disrupting the local power grid.

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded a grant for almost $100 million to Ecotality, which plans to deploy almost 15,000 EV charging stations in 16 cities (in six states), including San Diego, Seattle, and Portland, OR. The program is intended as a real-world study of

Pages: Page 1, Page 2

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.