Bay Area To Install Electric Vehicle Grid 388
Mike writes "Recently San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland unveiled a massive concerted effort to become the electric vehicle capitol of the United States. The Bay Area will be partnering with Better Place to create an essential electric vehicle infrastructure, marking a huge step towards the acceptance of electric vehicles as a viable alternative to those that run on fossil fuels." Inhabitat.com has some conceptual illustrations and a map showing EV infrastructure, such as battery exchange stations, stretching from Sacramento to San Diego — though this is far more extensive than the Bay Area program actually announced, which alone is estimated to cost $1 billion.
Editor Fail (Score:5, Informative)
Recently San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland unveiled a massive concerted effort to become the electric vehicle capitol of the United States.
Capitol [reference.com] is a proper name, originally of a temple and the hill it sat on, but now often of a building that serves as the seat of a legislature. Capital [reference.com] means the city that serves as the seat of government. It also means the chief city of a region, and is the metaphorical sense intended here.
Even if submitter didn't know the difference, a professional editor should have. Good thing we don't have any of those around here, huh?
Re:Any bets for the first major blackout? (Score:5, Informative)
From some back-of-the-envelope calculations it seems that we already have enough power generation and electrical distribution in the Bay Area and in most places to charge Chevy Volt-like cars overnight on our existing 220V. It might be nice to charge faster than 8 hours, or at work as well as home, but I don't see this as a major technology adoption problem.
The grid and power stations are designed to deliver about 3KW average to each household during peak hours in the summer heat. A single 220 outlet typically can deliver 3KW continuously. A Chevy Volt will need no more than 20KW hours of juice to charge. The math works.
The grid is barley taxed during the night, so this is a match made in heaven. The build-out we really need is an interstate-HVDC grid to deliver renewable power across the country from wherever it's generated. This can't be done at the state level, and will require action by Obama.
Re:Wrong again (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Energy Crisis says what? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wrong again (Score:1, Informative)
Cool and efficient like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axwMxUBL_ws [youtube.com]
Capital, not capitol !! (Score:2, Informative)
[...] unveiled a massive concerted effort to become the electric vehicle capitol of the United States.
Sorry to be the spelling Nazi, but (from the New Oxford American Dictionary):
Capitol
1 the seat of the U.S. Congress in Washington, DC.
â ( capitol) a building housing a legislative assembly : 50,000 people marched on New Jersey's state capitol.
2 the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill in ancient Rome.
ORIGIN from Old French capitolie, capitoile, later assimilated to Latin Capitolium (from caput, capit- âheadâ(TM) ).
On the other hand:
capital
noun
1 (also capital city or town) the most important city or town of a country or region, usually its seat of government and administrative center.
â [with adj. ] a place associated more than any other with a specified activity or product : Milan is the fashion capital of the world.
[...]
I'm not a native English speaker and even I knew that.
Re:Vehicle standardization? (Score:3, Informative)
"But spending billions to build out a grid for this without the standardization in place will fail."
What has to be standardized is the last 10 foot of cable. They are building the grid, that part that feeds that last ten feet.
Re:funding (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the difference between states and the Feds is that the states require themselves to balance their budgets. The Feds are actually in worse overall financial shape debt-wise, but are much more liquid by virtue of the size of their credit cards.
Re:funding (Score:5, Informative)
California has an economy so large that if it were an independent nation, it would still have one of the top ten economies in the entire world. California actually has a larger economy than the entire nations of Canada or Russia. In other words, there's a lot of money in California, which means a lot of taxes being collected.
I'm not sure why you would say, "especially California," considering its economy is substantially larger than any other state in the union. Are you indicating that the state should spend its funds elsewhere? That we are suffering so much disproportionately more than anywhere else? I'm not sure.
Re:GO for it, (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Doomed by its creators (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed. Modern Feeder-Breeder reactors are safe, environmentally friendly and efficient.
They can not only produce 10 times more energy for a given supply of uranium, but they could cure the worlds problem of disposing of long term nuclear waste by using it as recycled fuel. Not only this, but what little waste is produced has a short enough half-life to be a threat for a manageable few hundreds of years instead of thousands. They do not have the land use ecological impact that solar does.
Combined with balanced use of solar thermal and tapping Americas northern and offshore oil and natural gas reserves, it presents us the option of becoming completely independent of both foreign energy and dirty coal that we currently burn (fun fact: the average US coal plant releases more radioactive waste into the environment than a conventional nuclear power plant).
The infrastructure SF is implementing is admirable. The vision I have for a good future also includes electrified railways and highways with charging rails that allow drivers to run off of grid power on longer trips, allowing us to remove the use of oil as a significant factor in transportation cost throughout the continental US even with the current generation of relatively low power density batteries.
Re:funding (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure why you would say, "especially California," considering its economy is substantially larger than any other state in the union.
California's current budget is something like $15 billion dollars in the red, so we really don't have an extra $1 billion laying around at the moment.
Re:Doomed by its creators (Score:5, Informative)
It's between 60-100 times and that is without taking into they can use the depleted uranium that is left over from the enrichment ( if you enrich the uranium from 0.7% to 2.5% you're left with a bunch of depleted uranium so the total quantity of natural uranium used is 3.5 times the content of teh fuel rods ).
Thus if you compare it with a PWR running at 2.5% enrichment and consuming 1% of the enriched fuel rod, then a breeder will be able to extract about 100 times the energy from the same fuel rod, but if you consider the consumption of natural uranium it's even more than that by up to a factor of 3.5. Now you could of course recycle the plutonium as MOX in traditional reactors, which would not be as efficient, but this is where the figure of 60 times comes from.
However, that only considers the heat generated, most breeder designs also operate at higher temperatures than present reactors so they get a better electric conversion efficiency ( 40%-45% as compared to 30%-35% for PWRs ) so you gain another 28% or so there.
Additionally most designs of breeders seem to be able to use thorium which is about 4 times as abundant as uranium. (thou some thermal designs, like CANDU , might have this ability as well ).
Thus depending on if you are interested in heat or electricity, and depending on which of the many designs used today you compare with, and depending on if you want to consider the possibility of using Thorium, breeders could produce between 60 and 1600 times as much energy from available fissile material as could traditional designs.
Of course in practice this is somewhat irrelevant since even the low estimate would easily cower present energy demand for thousands of years. Even the existing nuclear waste contains enough uranium to last a century or more.
Re:let's give an inconvenient answer (Score:4, Informative)
.
1 Over-production.
Prices collapse. Markets collapse.
2 Over-production.
The land is exhausted. That requires different plantings to repair some of the damage - extra tilling, a lot of fertilizer.
Rebuilding can take decades - consider the dust bowls of the thirties.
3 Green space. Conservation.
The land may be marginal for commercial agriculture. That doesn't mean it has no value as wild habitat or as a buffer zone against suburban development. Politically in the states, "subsidies to the family farm" is an easier sell than a government-owned "land trust."
"Marginal for agriculture" usually implies a shortage of water, distance from major markets, and a host of other problems that will show up later - in what you pay for gas, electric, water, sewage service, and so on.
Re:Any bets for the first major blackout? (Score:3, Informative)
It's also interesting that this happened less than a year after deregulation. Doesn't disprove deregulation in theory, but 40 years of regulation worked great, deregulation worked less than a year, the utility companies are, as you said, crooks.
The rate to which utility companies have colluded on prices in the past is well known. In Australia rampant price fixing lead to government "ring fencing" and free market contestability regulations, and more choice for the end user. Power generation companies were no longer allowed to be power distribution companies. This was matched to an independent national electricity market and hub company that so far has done a great job as traffic cop IMHO. Have a look at http://www.nemmco.com/ [nemmco.com]
Disclaimer: I was involved in the independent audit of their market settlements system design, so I have opinions.
Re:the consumers just need to do their part (Score:4, Informative)
Except that GM's experiment with them showed that they could not be sold at anything remotely approaching a profit. Nothing to do with aftermarket parts, and pushing on with such an obvious boondoggle would not do anything for the public good. But believe what you like....
Re:Doomed by its creators (Score:4, Informative)
You do realize that California's completely unique zero-emissions standards were instrumental in getting electric cars created in the first place, right? That California has been investing heavily in alternative car reasearch including pure electric, hybrid, and hydrogen technology?
SF is not doing this simply to cash in on a trendy idea. As far back as I can remember, alternative fuel stations have been a priority. While most states have 1 or 2 Hydrogen fueling stations planned for some point in the future, according to the National Hydrogen Association [hydrogenassociation.org] California has 28 currently active.
San Francisco has been pushing alternative vehicle technologies for years. Just because one aspect is now coming to fruition doesn't mean it is a cynically shortsighted cash grab. It may still be an underutilized overpaid attempt to slay a windmill, but it is completely in line with the bay area's ongoing and slightly quixotic idiom.
Re:let's give an inconvenient answer (Score:5, Informative)
A calculation of the German version of the AAA, the ADAC, showed that the electric smart that is currently on the road, would actually create more CO2 per km than the combustion engine version, IF the power plant was solely coal based
This did not seem quite right, so I ran the numbers for the electric and non-electric versions of the MINI:
Electric Mini: 2.095 lbs CO2 * .233 kWh/mile == .488 lbs CO2/mile
Gas Mini: 13,400 lbs / 15000 Miles == .893 lbs CO2/mile
So it looks like a Gas MINI produces about twice the CO2 per mile... In the absolute worst case (For the electric version).
Thanks!
Re:the consumers just need to do their part (Score:3, Informative)
Given that EV1 production ceased nearly a decade ago and no major car manufacturer has seen fit to take up the cause, I'm going to have to say that electric cars probably weren't going to be profitable at the time, considering that none of them seem to think that they could be profitable now. Perhaps they're all a bunch of morons, but I doubt it. I can believe one of them being stupid, or several of them, but all of them? No way.
It's telling that the real successes for alternative cars in the past decade have been hybrids, not electrics. Hybrids are much less radical and eliminate essentially all of the massive downsides of pure electrics. Even the Chevy Volt, being marketed as an "electric car", is really just a standard serial hybrid with the ability to charge its batteries from external power and some mind-bending PR applied.
Re:GO for it, (Score:2, Informative)
Diesel powered cars in europe get better economy because they are turbocharged small diesel engines. Normal (naturally aspirated) diesel engines are large and heavy. Both get good efficiency. The reason why they get good highway economy in Europe is that there is less breathing losses in the small engines wrt to the large ones.
And the lower power to weight ratio of diesels wrt their gas powered cousins, is another reason why they get better economy. When compared to a small gasoline engine of roughly the same power output (compare a 110HP 2.0L Turbo Diesel to a 110HP 1.1L Turbo Gas), their economy isn't that much better (67 versus 57). So European diesel buyers are giving up 0-60 times for better economy.
A Prius is vastly overpowered compared to either of those. It has a 76HP 1.5L normally aspirated 16V I4 engine plus a 67HP electric motor for a total of 143HP (145 DIN HP). It accelerates much faster than your standard turbo diesel car. It gets 46MPG on the highway, but that is using the much tougher new EPA driving tests at 75MPH peak with the AC on. Using the European tests, it gets 56.7MPG on the highway (4.2L per 100km). After adding in the fact that diesel fuel has about 15% more energy than gas per volume, or about the equivalent of 65.2MPG. What it excels at though is urban economy. There it gets 48MPG (EPA) and 47.3MPG (Euro (5.0L per 100km)). The european turbo diesel cars don't get anywhere near that. And the Prius would do even better with a smaller turbocharged engine, say about 1.0L Turbo gasoline engine making those 76HP. Its more efficient and lighter in weight.
European turbo diesels are still overpowered, just not as much as gasoline powered cars are over here. Here most engines are normally aspirated and get their high power via large displacement and/or high speed. This is bad for highway economy. However its even worse for urban driving. The smallest Focus engine here is a 16V DOHC 2.0L making 140HP. To do 90MPH (faster than is legal here), it only needs about 35HP (the 140HP allows 132MPH max). The real reason for the high power is to get low 0-60 times of 8.3 seconds (5 spd man). It gets 24MPG (EPA (9.9L/100km)) in the city and 35MPG (EPA (6.8L/100km)) on the highway. In Europe that same car has a 1.4L 8V gas engine getting only 74HP but a higher highway MPG of 47 (5.1L/100km). But to go from 0-60, it takes 14.1 seconds and tops out at 107MPH (the gearing is wrong for max speed).
A 40HP engine (about 400cc turbocharged gasoline or 1000cc turbocharged diesel) alone would take 28 seconds to go from 0-60, but top out at over 90MPH and get about 63MPG (EPA) or 78MPG per European standards. Adding a plug in hybrid to that of about the same power 40HP or 30KW, would put the 0-60 times back under 14 seconds, yet boost urban MPG to about the same 78MPG (EPA or European). Turbo diesels get about 30-40% efficiency. Gasoline turbo engines get 25 to 35%. Base load power plants get from 36 to 48%. Combined cycle plants (gas turbine Brayton followed by a steam turbine Rankine) can get up to 60% efficiencies. Most of the higher efficiencies in engines are for the large slow stationary engines. Of course that is all at the high efficiency point. The wide operating range of most car engines pushes those numbers down greatly. The base load plants operate at peak efficiency 24/7.
Re:Energy Crisis says what? (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis [wikipedia.org]
Re:Doomed by its creators (Score:3, Informative)
The only estimates I've seen on that order assume use of nuclear power at the present rate, the estimates of the total extractable supply of fuel, and (for the "few thousands") complete replacement with the most advanced reactor designs. They don't account for any increase in nuclear energy use even to keep the current share of total energy use, they certainly don't factor in the fuel use for nuclear power actually substantially replacing any other existing source of energy by increasing its share of overall world energy production.