GM, Utilities Partner To Advance Plug-In Hybrids 582
chareverie writes "General Motors is forming a team with utility companies nationwide to create a charging infrastructure for electric cars. Their goal is to improve the design of charging stations — making them weatherproof and child-proof, for example — in locations such as public garages, meters, and parking lots. They're also working on ways to avoid overwhelming the utilities during peak hours. Their goal is to have these improved charging stations implemented by 2010, when the Chevy Volt is introduced. Everyone recognizes however that a national car-charging infrastructure would be far from complete at that time."
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the Volt is everything it is rumored to be, I would buy it even if gas were back down at 50 cents a gallon. The reasons are simple: not only is it better for the environment, but it requires far less (maybe even none depending on how you drive) of a non-renewable resource like oil. So long as oil remains a non-renewable resource, any dips in price will be strictly temporary.
I would hope that at least some of us have learned our lesson from this most recent fuel crisis: oil is simply not a sustainable way to get our energy over the long term.
Remember Kids: (Score:5, Insightful)
Time for government to step in (Score:5, Insightful)
We have to go electric in the future, gas power isn't a viable long term solution and oil is going to be too valuable in the future to waste on driving around. But the 'free market' isn't going to fund the kind of network we need in the short term. Sure, they'll build the cars but infrastructure costs are beyond them.
Without a national infrastructure program the move towards electric transportation will be slow and patchy. This really is a case of if we build it they will come.
Re:What Charging Infrastructure? (Score:2, Insightful)
Hybrid cars are economically viable and relatively practical.
Electric cars? Not so much.
You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain the lack of electric cars on the market. People don't want them. Very, very few people will pay new-car prices for a car that will go 150 miles then require a 3-hour recharge.
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know where you live, but where _I_ live, most power is either coal, hydro, or nuclear.
I checked the US as well, oil was the source of only 3% of the nation's power in 2005.
http://www.teachengineering.com/collection/cub_/lessons/cub_images/cub_earth_lesson08_figure5.jpg [teachengineering.com]
Re:What Charging Infrastructure? (Score:4, Insightful)
Very, very few people will pay new-car prices for a car that will go 150 miles then require a 3-hour recharge.
Yeah, because my friends and I all drive more than 150 miles every day.
If it leads to a standard then I am all for it. (Score:5, Insightful)
If it leads to a proprietary method which other automakers and utilities must license with fees then I am hoping someone else comes along and whacks them.
I still think while we are doing our typical over reaction; c'mon Europeans put up with prices higher than this; at least this over reaction is leading somewhere good. Granted it may mean life with even more SUVs as the technology will make their mileage acceptable. Since the majority of SUV/CUV don't do any heavy towing it can easily be adapted to their increased carrying capacities.
I guess giving up the "frivolous" luxuries was too much to ask
Re:Would a plugin hybrid actually save money? (Score:3, Insightful)
A gallon of gas contains approx. 1.3 x 10^8 joules of energy, and there are 3.6 x 10^6 joules in a kilowatt hour. At $0.10 per kilowatt hour, that is equivalent to $3.61 worth of electricity to replace a gallon of gas. Which isn't a whole lot cheaper than current gas prices.
Of course, this leaves out difference in conversion efficiency of gas v.s. electricity.
Yep, and that is a difference of at the very least a factor of 2. Naturally, regenerative braking and other nice aspects of hybrids that would be quite unfeasible in a gas car are also still there.
Re:What Charging Infrastructure? (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. And all those people had to have SUVs because of all the off-roading they do.
What people need doesn't enter into it.
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:3, Insightful)
Oil is not at all important for power generation. It's useful for cars, because today's cars require a *mobile* power source. It's a poor choice for power generation, and the few power stations that use it were presumably built during the $14 a barrel days.
The infrastructure that GM is pushing for *is* important. We can't seriously change over to electric cars without a 20-year infrastructure build out (and pipedreams aside, 20 years is fast for any kind of infrastructure change). It's about time we got started on that.
Even when oil gets cheap again, nuclear is cheaper, and solar cheaper still. IMO we'll never "run out" of oil precisely because we're going to switch to something better. Though electric car batteries have a ways to go to be practical, even from an environmental perspective, the money to be made from solving that engineering problem is very large indeed.
Rates are the problem, not infrastructure (Score:3, Insightful)
GM's finally seeing the light, I want a Volt. But PG&E's regulated rate structure will put me at 400% of baseline and US$0.35 / KWh to charge it. $5.00/gallon gas is still cheaper(!)
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you live in the US. In Quebec, almost all power is hydro. Ontario is a mix of nuclear, hydro, and coal. Many places in the US also use nuclear. France is almost completely nuclear. While nuclear is not 'renewable' it's at least not pumping out CO2 and smog.
Re:What Charging Infrastructure? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What Charging Infrastructure? (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't need to drive 150 miles every day to need a car that has more than a 150 mile range. Just two days ago I drove 350 miles in one day while driving back from Canada.
I'd sure as heck rather own a car that has the capability of taking me where I want to go than own a car that can take me some places but be useless for other trips.
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even better, use hydraulic hybrids instead of these expensive batteries that are a bear to recycle.
I thought that GM tried and gave up on hydraulic hybrids?
One last point, won't charging a bunch of cars require all of the coal plants to go into overdrive?
Yes, but coal doesn't come from the Middle East, is a more efficient way to produce energy than burning gas in an internal combustion engine, is centralized and easier to scrub the emissions, and can be replaced by a different source in the future.
Re:Would a plugin hybrid actually save money? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:2, Insightful)
And that will continue to be true until there is some massive advance in the viability of wind or solar, or people stop voting against nuclear power.
I wouldn't hold your breath for either of those two things occurring. Progress in wind technology has likely been near exhausted and progress in solar is promising, yet slow. People have irrational fears of nuclear based on obsolete knowledge of the risks, and a lack of knowledge about how truly awful coal power is.
So we'll keep burning coal, and we'll only see clear skies for the few days after a rare New York City blackout.
It doesn't work yet, that's why (Score:4, Insightful)
The main downside of solar panels at home and EVs, apart from the cost, is that the EV is usually at work in the daytime. So the obvious place to put solar panels is on business sites where they could feed into EV chargers during hours of maximum sunlight.
vandalism? (Score:4, Insightful)
What happens with some thug snips your power cord?
Will the cord be coming from your car, or from the outlet, and how easy and cheap is it to swap out cords?
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:5, Insightful)
They are going to use LI/ION so they are not a bear to recycle.
Most of the charging hopefully will be done at nite and not at peak. A lot power is wasted while base load plants are just idling.
Finally even if they are using coal there should still be a savings. Modern coal plants pollute less than a car per unit of energy.
Of course if you are on a nuke or hydro then you are even better off.
That being said I am not a big fan of hybrids but they are not as bad as you might think.
Re:What Charging Infrastructure? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't drive 150 most days, but I DO drive 150+ miles SOME days. And since I can't afford two cars, my one car needs to be able to go as far as I need to go, including vacation trips.
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe after the electric cars are working, we'll see electric trucks, electric trains, electric machinery...
We just need the oil to bootstrap the whole thing.
Oil might go the way of the punch card...
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, just weapons-grade spent uranium. That's all...
Not unless you reprocess it. Good luck making a bomb using an old fuel rod.
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:5, Insightful)
I would hope that at least some of us have learned our lesson from this most recent fuel crisis: oil is simply not a sustainable way to get our energy over the long term.
The only thing I've learned is that the price of oil has NOTHING to do with the actual supply or sustainability as a natural resource and is artificially set by non-sequitur geo-political issues. Unless you assume that there has been less oil pumped over the past year than previous years, or that we consume more oil than can be pumped (hint: both of these assumptions are false).
The other thing I've learned is that "crisis" is hyperbole. In the US, we've enjoyed cheaper-than-should-be fuel for decades. People still drive to work and still drive to the store, regardless if gas costs $4/gallon or $2.
Re:alternate title: (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't do Big things without Big industry. Luckily for us, this generates Big economic impact, and creates a Big percentage of our jobs. The net effect on our quality of life, and our overall wealth as a society is Big (in a good way).
Don't bite the hand that feeds you.
Re:What Charging Infrastructure? (Score:3, Insightful)
Back in the late 20th century the EV1 [wikipedia.org] had a waiting list.
Well, it was subsidized... and they didn't make very many.
I was lucky enough to drive one. Pretty darn cool, but the little skinny wheels they put on it were too narrow. On the other hand, you could get them spinning at just about any speed :)
The appeal of an expensive 2-seater was pretty limited, I think. If they charged full price and tried to make more than a handful I think the waiting list would have vanished :)
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If it leads to a standard then I am all for it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Aside from the fact that the entire design of our cities/towns/suburbs/etc. is built around the concept of practically everyone owning at least one car, and don't even get me started on the lack of sensible car designs here. Walking, biking, and public transit are generally not feasible means of getting around.
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What Charging Infrastructure? (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, this is a straw man argument. If you NEED to drive more than the range of an electric car, don't get one, get a hybrid. For suburban and urban car owners, an electric car is a viable alternative. I'm married and my wife works less than five miles away. An electric car would be fantastic for her needs, and we have two cars anyway, so we have a hybrid for long trips. We may come to a time when your 350 mile trip is fantastically expensive as well.
Re:Time for government to step in (Score:5, Insightful)
Time for government to step in...
Sure, that way we could a poorly considered proprietary solution that has never faced any actual competition or real world use. Then we could deploy it everywhere and be stuck with it forever.
Roads and highways had been around for a really long time, and were a mature technology before the interstate system was built. Here we are talking about technology that is in its infancy - they haven't even figured out how to make it safe and weatherproof yet! This is absolutely *not* the right time for the government to pick a system and inflict it on everyone.
SUVs make more organ donors (Score:5, Insightful)
You're focusing on passive safety rather than active safety, which is primarily a North American way of thinking.
Here, read this. [gladwell.com]
Most of us think that S.U.V.s are much safer than sports cars. If you asked the young parents of America whether they would rather strap their infant child in the back seat of the TrailBlazer or the passenger seat of the Boxster, they would choose the TrailBlazer. We feel that way because in the TrailBlazer our chances of surviving a collision with a hypothetical tractor-trailer in the other lane are greater than they are in the Porsche. What we forget, though, is that in the TrailBlazer you're also much more likely to hit the tractor-trailer because you can't get out of the way in time. In the parlance of the automobile world, the TrailBlazer is better at "passive safety. " The Boxster is better when it comes to "active safety," which is every bit as important.
The safest cars are the ones that can dodge an accident, rather than plow through some obstacle and hope to survive due to sheer mass.
What is so special about a "charging station?" (Score:5, Insightful)
I would think that a vehicle that could plug into any 50-60Hz, 90-260VAC source would make the absolute most sense.
Thinking of that, at a motel I recently stayed at in Montana, each parking spot had a regular AC outlet mounted about 7 feet high on the wall in front of the parking spot.
That kept it out of casual contact from kids, pretty much ensured that any water on the cord would run down-hill away from the outlet, and each outlet had a spring-loaded weather-proof cover for when they were not in use.
(Those were primarily for winter use: Block heaters to keep oil and fuel from gelling.)
With the addition of some way to simply meter the load on each outlet, and providing a key-switch so one could only use the outlet one is assigned, something like that could be an inexpensive, nearly universally available, simple to install and maintain charging grid for plug-in vehicle charging. (I've seen very similar things on parking meter posts, and they could even be coin/bill/credit card operated, just like modern parking meters...)
Still, though, my biggest problem with plug-in rechargeable vehicles is the length of time it takes to recharge and the very limited mileage between charges.
Driving from home to destination on that recent trip required about 600 miles/day, and is not something that any currently-being-discussed plug-ins can accomplish.
When electric vehicles were first being energetically discussed, one of the promising ideas was removable battery trays/packs that were "leased" with a full charge and rolled into the vehicle.
Instead of parking and charging to "refuel," each electric car service station would have a batch of charged batteries available on carts to be swapped in no longer than it takes to refuel a petroleum powered vehicle.
The discharged batteries would be charged overnight at off-peak times and be ready for the next day's needs.
That would also cover the cost of replacement batteries, as the lease or rental fees would cover not only the cost to charge and change the battery packs, but the cost of replacing them when they were no longer up to required minimum power retention levels.
At least doing it that way, stopping every 200 miles or so to swap batteries, would be better than stopping every 200 miles for several hours to recharge non-swappable batteries.
(It would also allow for some much needed standardization in battery packs and such...)
What bothers me is that idea is from reading magazines like Popular Mechanics and Popular Science in the '50's and '60's... We don't seem to have come very far since then, eh?
--Tomas
Re:Rates are the problem, not infrastructure (Score:3, Insightful)
A decent AC-motor powered electric car will probably get you better than 0.3 kWh / mile, which at $0.35 is going to cost you $0.105 / mile. That's high for an electric car, but at $4 per gallon that's equivalent to a 38 MPG car, which isn't half bad.
Also, note that the AC-motor systems get a lot more efficient than that - I went way conservative.
Bigger picture please (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer is single-use-zoning and suburban sprawl.
Daily needs are separated from each other so that you have to drive between home, work, shopping and entertainment. It's flat out illegal to build a corner store in a residential neighbourhood or build a building with apartments above retail stores, and developers are forced to set them back off the road behind enormous parking lagoons, just to make sure the cars are happy and pedestrians are prohibited.
This is a monumentally wasteful pattern of settlement. It's like building a 'house' with the bathroom, kitchen and bedroom all miles apart but connected by roads.
Bring back mixed-use mixed-income development. Bring back the humble 'street' that has served humanity so well for millennia ever since we started living in cities. This isn't the industrial revolution age anymore, the days are gone when every workplace spewed soot into the air and it made some sense to partition it off where people didn't live. An office in the same building as your apartment isn't going to hurt you, nor will a corner store that you can walk to. Write to your congressman and tell him to back the New Urbanist movement.
But before you do that, you have to get mad! I want you to go out to your window, lean out, and yell, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!!"
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:3, Insightful)
You didn't know oil was a traded commodity?
Sure he does, he just defined it as a commodity.
Re:What Charging Infrastructure? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:SUVs make more organ donors (Score:4, Insightful)
The safest cars are the ones that can dodge an accident, rather than plow through some obstacle and hope to survive due to sheer mass.
Which is very a very flawed way of thinking. In the US, most drivers are already distracted. The number one type of accident in the US is rear ending. You seem to advocate that a driver in front must evade the driver to his rear, but they must now constantly watch a 360' view, while distracted. Not realistic in the least.
In reality, passive protection is the only form of protection which reliably works. As a counter point, motorcycle accidents are frequent here and all studies cite smaller vehicles are more difficult for other drivers to estimate distance. This is one of the classic causes of vehicle-motorcycle accidents in the US. That is, the vehicle pulls out, cutting off the motorcycle rider. This normally results in two types of collisions; one, the cycle t-bones the car, two, the rider slides and/or falls off the bike, sometimes resulting in a nasty bike-rider mess which comes to a sudden stop against the vehicle. Either way, it's bad results for the rider.
Perhaps once riders get used to seeing small vehicles and cycles on the roads this will change, until then, passive protection is far and away the best protection drivers have today in the US.
Re:Plug-in Prius in 2009? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gas cheaper than it should be is total BS (Score:5, Insightful)
The price of Gas in Dubai is 25 cents a gallon, Iran 42 cents, Qatar 83 cents, Saudi Arabia is 45 cents per gallon, Venezuela 11 cents. That is the real cost. What we in the western countries are paying is designed to generate huge profit margins for oil companies. They are fucking over the consumers, and yet you stand here saying, "Please sir can I have another!"
Re:SUVs make more organ donors (Score:5, Insightful)
I would counter that your line of reasoning seems to have a flaw. Namely:
In the US, most drivers are already distracted. The number one type of accident in the US is rear ending.
From the article I posted, which you may not have read:
The S.U.V. boom represents, then, a shift in how we conceive of safetyâ"from active to passive. It's what happens when a larger number of drivers conclude, consciously or otherwise, that the extra thirty feet that the TrailBlazer takes to come to a stop don't really matter, that the tractor-trailer will hit them anyway, and that they are better off treating accidents as inevitable rather than avoidable.
If you're distracted and look up and suddenly notice you need to stop in a hurry - if you stomp on the brake the SUV will take another 30 feet to stop. That's almost the entire length of a box trailer behind a semi, FYI.
Perhaps the rear-end phenomenon you are referring to is caused by gigantic SUVs rather than in spite of them.
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:3, Insightful)
You can make natural gas out of biogas, so there's no reason that natural gas
should be considered nonrenewable.
Also, I get natural gas piped straight to my house. If I had an inline
compressor, I could bottle it up and use it in a hypothetical natural gas
powered car. How convenient would that be?
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not necessarily a good idea.
First, only the NE uses heating oil extensively. Granted there are a lot of people in the NE so getting them off of oil is probably a good idea. That said furnaces are more efficient for heat production than electricity ever is.
Basically the best way to get heat is cogeneration, which is heat that would otherwise be wasted from electricity production. That's great, if you live next to a power plant. The second best (from a thermodynamic perspective) is to burn something, preferably natural gas. Natural gas is more abundant than oil, and burns pretty cleanly. The third best is electric heat pumps, because you are burning something at the powerplant then converting that heat to electricity with less than 100% efficiency and then converting the electricity back to heat(again less than 100% efficiency). If what you want in the first place is heat you shouldn't waste your time putting a generator in the middle.
From an environmental standpoint this is true as well, at least until the bulk of our power generation comes from solar/wind/nuclear.
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ultracaps (Score:3, Insightful)
GM Volt: ha! I'll believe it when I see it. GM isn't about bad luck, its about bad decisions and so much clout that they survive when they do not deserve it.
Re:vandalism? (Score:3, Insightful)
What happens when some thug keys your car or drops a match in your gas tank?
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure you realize that's not true in a more overall sense. In any fission reaction, you permanently lose a part of the reaction materials that is unrecoverable. (Part of that is what you take out as usable work, for nuclear power plants.) It is still nonrenewable.
Breeder-reactors create a different sort of fissile material using byproducts of a fission reaction. I don't recall the reactions off the top of my head, but you could then react this new material in a breeder-reaction to produce more fissile material. Eventually, however, you'll end up with non-fissile material. There's a finite amount of energy extractable from, say, uranium, even including all breeder-reactor byproducts.
It's just that by comparison, current reactors are terribly wasteful.
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not so sure about -- what about the billions we have spent, and continue to spend, to defend the interests of the oil companies? There are many indirect subsidies (such as tax incentives to refineries, for example) that often get missed.
I'd also add that pollution and resource depletion are externialities, so if they were factored in, I'd say that the cost of gas, in the US at least, is _FAR_ lower than it should be.
Public Works Project? (Score:1, Insightful)
Hmmm...Job creation, new markets, more people working and paying taxes...Oh I forgot, we have to spend money on the war...Never mind.
More 600 dollar stimulus checks for everyone!!! Hooray!!!!!
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:5, Insightful)
You will see that a civic costs $36,895 to own and operate for 5 years and a prius costs $41,051. Now take the 48mpg vs the 32mpg multiply it by a price hike per gallon, and you will see how much gas would need to cost per gallon before a prius did anything financial for you besides relocate your gas payment into your car payment.
At market plus 6 dollars per gallon, the prius costs about 500 dollars less to drive 75,000 miles in 5 years. So gas needs to be about 10 bucks a gallon before a prius makes financial sense over a civic... of course a civic isn't gonna help your green street cred like a prius will, and lets be honest a prius first and foremost a political statement. The numbers are much worse for a Camry hybrid vs a plane jane camry in case you wondered.
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:3, Insightful)
If that's drawing the full 15 amps, at my current rate of $0.33/kWhr (we don't have time-of-day billing, so every extra kW I use is billed at that tier), that comes to about $4.75 worth of power every night. How far does it go on this? If it's less than about 60 miles, a Prius will run cheaper on gasoline without plugging it in.... (Since it only gets 40 miles on that charge, so much for your "big savings".)
Plug-in hybrids are only a huge cost savings if you live somewhere where power is cheap or if you can convince somebody else to provide power for you (e.g. plugging in at work, at the supermarket, etc.). Otherwise, you may actually find gasoline cheaper, and since so much power production comes from fossil fuels, barring a national policy change to push for more solar, hydro, wind, wave, and nuclear power, that is unlikely to change (and since those power sources are all at least currently more expensive than fossil fuels, it is still unlikely to change for a long time to come even if we had such a policy change).
TANSTAAFL. You either need a car or you don't, and you're not really going to get around for dramatically less money by buying a more efficient vehicle, since the cost savings of the more efficient vehicle are almost always more than factored into the purchase price of the vehicle up front (and that assumes that the more efficient vehicle really would save you money anyway). My advice to car buyers is to just pick a vehicle that meets your needs and only consider fuel economy in terms of environmental impact, not in terms of impact on your pocketbook.... Trying to reduce the latter is a fool's errand.
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's 40 miles on stored electricity and then the gasoline engine kicks in and it acts pretty much like a regular hybrid.
Except for one important difference. In a regular hybrid, both the ICE and the electric motor are connected to the drive train through the transmission, and one the other or both apply power to the wheels depending on the situation. So the ICE has to more or less be designed like a normal car engine. It can slouch on the low end where the electric motor does the majority of the work, but still needs to operate across a wide range of rpms, and like all ICEs this means it is sometimes running in its optimal band, and other times not.
In the Chevy Volt, only the electric motor is connected to the transmission, and is always what supplies power to the wheels via electricity from the batteries. The ICE exists only to serve as a generator to recharge the batteries. What this means is that the ICE only ever needs to run at the specific optimal rpm for which it was designed. Which means it can be smaller and more efficient at its job than a regular hybrid's ICE.
That's the beauty of the plug in hybrid concept: pure electric for short trips and no range limitations if you want to go across country using gasoline. I'd probably only need the gas engine 10 to 20 percent of the time, myself.
I think it really is a beautiful design. The gas engine is truly a backup for the electric engine, and optimized for that task. For a guy like me who mostly drives to work and back and other local destinations, I can envision myself filling up the gasoline tank "just in case", and by the time I finally need it discovering that it's been so long that the gas has all evaporated and escaped. Of course if that's really the case then the gas is just extra weight and I should probably just fill up the tank when I know I'll need it. But I'm a "Be Prepared" kind of guy; you never know when you might have to jump in the car and drive across the Mexican border. ;)
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's not true. Nuclear, coal, biomass and geothermal are considered base load generation. This means they are always on. This is due to the must run quality of the technology. They are basically steam engines and do not shut down or start up quickly. Hydro and natural gas are considered dispatchable because the power can be ramped up and turned off quickly. Solar, run of river hydro and wind are considered intermittent resources. These resources generate when available.
Power markets are complex and highly volatile due to the high cost of entry into them and the difficulty in moving power from region to region. Baseload generation is not suitable for covering peak load because they need to be on all the time. You cannot start up a coal plant and operate during the six hours of peak load and expect to stay in business.
When the grid requires more generation, dispatchable resources are usually called upon if nothing else can be found. Prices are much better during peak load. It makes more sense to use the water in a dam to generate during this time than at 3 in the morning when the power prices are much, much lower.
Peak load is most likely to be powered by natural gas, not coal. This is about a 50% improvement in CO2 emissions.
If you are talking about new generation to handle annual increases to demand, you are more correct. Most new base load generation has come from coal in the last 20 years. However, due to the new found greenness of the population, it is becoming extremely difficult to site and build coal plants. We are in for some interesting times.
Re:Gas cheaper than it should be is total BS (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand, most of those countries have little to no facilities to refine the crude oil into gasoline. The real reason it's so cheap is that the governments in thouse countries are subsidizing the cost of the fuel.
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:3, Insightful)
There doesn't appear to be any logical way to 'lock in' utilities when your car can plug into standard outlets and run off gas.
The second that charging your Volt on the road becomes more expensive than just buying a few gallons of gas and running it through the Volt's generator, no one will do it. People will just treat it as a normal car that gets the first 40 miles a day free, and then uses gas.
That's not to say that GM might not want a cut of the profits. But people would only say that if they didn't understand what GM is doing.
GM is literally betting their entire company on the Volt. The whole thing. They see other American car makers struggling, and they decided to roll double-or-nothing.
I seriously doubt they would endanger this by putting any obstacle in the way of making it cheaper for drivers. They're probably just going to add a 'supercharge' plug on the Volt, which can charge in five minutes, in addition to the standard 115V 15A plug, and hand out the specs to the gas stations, and let them build and operate pay version of them however they see fit.
And possibly sell a version that doesn't charge, for home installation, or even one that works like a vending machine for parking lots, taking cash.
Incidentally, for those two, I'm imagining systems that don't need special wiring. Essentially, they themselves have batteries in them, and slowly charge off the wiring. When a car hooks up, they dump all their power at once into it, and start charging again. It means they can only charge four cars a day, but that should be enough to start with, and is more than enough for a single house. This is assuming the same amount of batteries as a Volt...they could obviously have more, or run off 220, or 30 amps, or all sorts of stuff to charge faster and hold more.
I'm basically seeing fast-chargers as a step between the cheapest 'charge overnight' and the most expensive 'using gasoline to charge'. So if you drive, for example, 60 miles and back, the first 40 are from your car's overnight charge, the next 20 are from the gas generator, you fast-charge once you get there, the next 40 are off that, and the last 20 are from gasoline again.
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no need to combat FUD with FUD!
The Great Smog was from home heating using coal, not power plants - let alone modern ones.
While China continues to lose miners, coal mining fatalities in this country are rare - and uranium also needs to be mined.
As for radiation, coal plants do send radioactive material into the air, which settles on an area surrounding the plant. They have done studies, and I believe that the worst-impacted people get exposed to an additional 18 rads. That's about 10% of what a resident of Denver gets just for living in Denver (due to the altitude), and you get 7 if you live in a brick (instead of a wood) house.
Neither coal plants nor nuclear plants present an unmanageable radioactive danger, and both have serious waste-disposal issues.
Coal sucks from a CO2 standpoint, but is a hell of a lot better than gasoline burnt in an internal combustion engine.
You also forgot (Score:3, Insightful)
That we wouldn't be paying out around 700 Billion dollars a year overseas. That in itself would help to lessen nuclear threats from some countries like Iran, since - Hey - no money, we can't afford it.
Re:With GMs luck. (Score:3, Insightful)
$0.33/kWh?!?!
Try a normal, non-Californian-buttrape price:
http://www.duke-energy.com/rates/north-carolina.asp [duke-energy.com]
specifically the residential, no-energy discounts rate, RS:
http://www.duke-energy.com/pdfs/NCScheduleRS.pdf [duke-energy.com]
Basic Facilities Charge per month $ 7.87
For the first 350 kWh used per month, per kWh 7.3572
For all over 350 kWh used per month, per kWh 7.7470
Yes, that's 7-something cents a kWh, 24 hours a day. Of course, there are at least 2, possibly 3 nuclear reactors feeding this service area, and NC is well regulated.
Ah, even better, state-by-state and national numbers:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html [doe.gov]
10.24 cents/kWh average across the US for residential in Feb 2008.
Anyways, using your $4.75/night figure and converting to my prices ($0.077470/kWh), that's more like $1.12/night.