The United States and Swedish governments have renewed a collaborative agreement first signed in 2007 to accelerate “consumer acceptance and commercialization of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs),” according to a report at the GreenCarCongress.com.

The agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy and the Swedish Energy Agency will share the $1-million cost of the one-year arrangement to “demonstrate plug-in technologies, support research and development, as well as share operational and consumer data and solutions to potential vehicle-to-grid.

During the year-long project, the two groups will work toward developing vehicle instrumentation, vehicle-to-grid and home charging systems and establishing convenient public charging stations. Also, the project will track and evaluate customer behaviour in “field operational testing” and analyze the benefits of PHEVs to customers, electric utilities and to the nation as a whole.

The research will be carried out by Argonne National Laboratory and Test Site Sweden. Argonne will employ its newly-developed Argonne Real-Time Data Acquisition (ARDAQ) system to collect data during performance testing of vehicle technology; ARDAQ was recently used to determine the winner of the Challenge X student competition.