Bay Area To Install Electric Vehicle Grid

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.

Let's anticipate a common response

"You're just substituting one energy source for another. You're not doing anything about the energy shortage."

Yes you are. It's a lot more efficient to have convert all your chemical energy into electricity at one central spot than to have millions of engines that the vehicles have to carry around with them. I believe the efficiency factor is something like 60%. Besides, there are non-chemical ways to generate electricity.

let's give an inconvenient answer

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 (which is a popular power plant in germany at the moment). I also find if fascinating that the hydrogen for hydrogen production is currently produced by transforming oil into hydrogen and ... CO2. It is the most efficient and economic process to do it like that. Sure, at one point in time you could do create hydrogen by electrolysis of water. But in the mean time, because money is an inevitable driving force, it will be made the CO2-producing way. Or, how biofuels will end up competing the farming of food and might lead to difficult hunger problems. All in all, these are exciting times, and for every alternative the effects of the complete life circle on environment and society should be considered....

Re:let's give an inconvenient answer

When my aunt stops getting checks from the government to NOT grow food on her farm, then I will start to worry about food shortages.

funding

State governments, especially California, just can't afford $1B projects. But the Feds sure can. Because they are trying to counter a deflationary spiral, they are printing money as fast as they can and giving it to banks.

Compared to what they've been giving away, $1B is nothing. They really should consider throwing some of that over to CA. [It will create JOBS and reduce foreign oil dependency, Mr. Obama!]

Re:funding

State governments, especially California, just can't afford $1B projects. But the Feds sure can.

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

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.

Something for the Buck

At least spending a billion for this will produce something useful and will provide some jobs. It sounds like a bargain compared to $700+ billion to keep the bankers from having to move to smaller mansions.

Wrong again

I've lived and worked in the Bay Area. Pollution from cars is a problem. Cars are a problem.

Electric cars are not the answer. (I don't even want to imagine sitting in deadlocked traffic, heater or AC on, tunes playing, battery draining...)

Mass transit is the answer - not just BART - REAL mass transit. I cannot stress enough that if one travels to Japan and sees for oneself how fucking cool and efficient the Japanese mass rail system is - billion dollar proposals like this would die at conception.

Mass transit first - electric cars (if they're still needed, really) second.

Fuck me, America - can we try fixing problems instead of fixing symptoms - just once?!?!

Re:Wrong again - yes, you are.

Mass transit is the answer - not just BART - REAL mass transit. I cannot stress enough that if one travels to Japan and sees for oneself how fucking cool and efficient the Japanese mass rail system is - billion dollar proposals like this would die at conception.

No. Sorry. Mass transit is part of the solution, but it is not the solution.

The problem lies in the inherent difference between mass transit and public transit and most people don't recognize the difference.

Mass transit focuses on getting mass number of people between various high density locations. These are your medium to heavy rail systems. For the Bay Area that's BART and CalTrain.

In places like Japan, where they have high population densities, it works great. There's a reason places like Tokyo, Moscow, New York, London, etc., can have fantastically efficient mass transit systems: they have the population density to deal with it.

Public transit on the other hand focuses on being a 'vehicle replacement' so people in lower density areas can actually give up their cars. This is taxies up through light rail. Fewer passengers, but more convenient and more versatile.

Bay Area geography doesn't really favor Mass Transit. It's why BART basically sucks for commuting. With the exception of MUNI linking well to BART, most of the Public to Mass links suck.

The whole electric car infrastructure is an expensive idea, and it talks to the whole "chicken and the egg" problem. Without infrastructure, electric cars are useless. Without electric cars, no one will build the infrastructure. This is actively solving the infrastructure problem ahead of the cars.

Is it a good idea? Ultimately, yes. Is it the right idea? That's a lot harder to say. A massive bay area wide fleet of on-demand bio-diesel fueled hybrid shuttle buses might be better. But who's to say? Cars are a part of US culture partially because of our geography. We live in suburbia, which is inherently tied in with car culture.

Unless your mass transit plan includes re-arranging US cities and how people live in this country, it will never be the solution.

Cheers,
Bagheera

Re:Wrong again

People like private transport.

Because they don't know any other way?

I like private transport - a lot. I just think that it has its place, and that place is no where near 100%. From my time in Japan, I'd say it's less than 10%.

Because people do like going to the same places quite often - the music/bar district ('bout every town I've been in has had one), the university, the business district, the industrial areas, the shopping malls, the grocery stores. And with enough mass transit outlets, you can even get to Aunt Tillie's house pretty easily.

I rode the Metro in the DC area - and freaking hated it. It was like riding with all of the grey people of Trantor - everyone's personal space invaded because of the cattle-car approach to it all.

Mass transit doesn't have to be that way.

We might not like each other at first face-to-face. I'd rather ignore you sitting or standing next to you on a train than have you driving next to me in murderous traffic. (The you in that sentence is strictly rhetorical.)

Re:Wrong again

I cannot stress enough that if one looks at Japan on a map and sees for oneself how fucking small the Japanese island is, and how close together its population centers are...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Tokyo_Area [wikipedia.org]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area [wikipedia.org]

I was discussing the Bay Area. You will note that it's size is comparable to the Tokyo area and has a lower population. I am not referring to the cross-country lines of Honshu island, I'm referring to the KEIO and JR lines.

What I propose most certainly DOES fucking scale - very, very well. So, yes - by all means - let's use the right tool for the job and implement proven solutions from similar circumstances.

Editor Fail

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?

Vehicle standardization?

Either battery replacement, or plug-ins. We don't yet have a standard as to how to recharge these cars.

110v...220v...different plugs...different acceptable recharge times.
Replacement batteries will require some sort of mechanical/robotic system to do it. Your grandmother is not going to wrestle a 100lb battery pack out of the car. And none of the elec cars I've seen have easily (no more than 5 mins) replaceable packs.

Finally, we have the apartment problem. If I live on the 4th floor, how do I ensure my car won't be unplugged overnight by some miscreant on the street.

All of these can be overcome. But spending billions to build out a grid for this without the standardization in place will fail.

I really, REALLY want this to succeed. But this effort may be premature.

Re:Vehicle standardization?

put a rectenna in the base of the car, and charge by induction from underneath the pavement (pick a frequency that meat doesn't absorb very well). As an added bonus, if your electricity is cheap enough, you can design highways to deliver wireless power so the cars only need batteries with 30 miles or so of capacity.

Billing and activation based on transponder identification, of course.

Why not bikes, for (*&%@'s sake???

The Bay Area would be perfect for bikes. They are far more energy-efficient than EVs (by like 2 orders of magnitude), the Bay Area is largely flat, it suffers from massive congestion (EVs don't even begin to address that), it doesn't get too warm, it doesn't rain much all summer long, the societal cost of maintaining the facilities to park a few million cars are devastating, a few of the people who live there could use some exercise...

I like bikes even in hilly, rainy country, but there they have some disadvantages. It's utterly absurd that somewhere as perfect as the Bay Area doesn't encourage cycling.

Re:Why not bikes, for (*&%@'s sake???

They require more time

Maybe. Over long distances of open highway during non-rush-hour, absolutely. Around town, false. In city, at distances under 5 miles or so, I'm usually faster than a car. Some of that is that a car might not be able to park very close to the destination...

require your wmployer have a place to change

Does your employer not provide a restroom?

require you don't need to carry much

Of course--but you should define "much". Panniers carry what I need most of the time, and some people use trailers for the really big stuff.

are more dangerous*

Completely [bicycleuniverse.info], absolutely [kenkifer.com] wrong. Or check the numbers yourself, but making claims that go against the evidence just makes you look like an idiot.

can't pick up very many people

Have you ever counted how many trips see no more than one person in the car? So use a car for the 10% of trips in which you need to pick up someone who doesn't have his own transportation. Would you like to drive and park on roads with 10% of the traffic that you see now?

can't get groceries

Bullshit. Where do you get these half-baked ideas? 95% of my grocery runs are by bike, to a store about 5 miles away. The only reason I tend to take longer than I do when driving is that I take a scenic route because biking is fun.

impracticable in an emergency

Can you be any more specific? Also, please take into account the fact that the more people bike instead of driving, the fewer emergencies there are.

require good health.

They also create it, in a bunch of ways, while cars destroy it both passively (no exercise) and actively (pollution, stress, accidents). How is this a problem? Also, as I noted, the Bay Area is largely flat, and therefore biking does not require especially good health after all.

Just how fat are you, anyway??

Re:Doomed by its creators

Because the same people who promote electric cars, are also the people that recoil from even the word "nuclear"... and thus ensure that while the rest of the world forges ahead in power generation technology, we are stuck with 30+ year old inefficient uranium-guzzlers.

That's not true. Some of us promote electric cars, along with a renewable energy infrastructure which would include nuclear power, in a safe and responsible way.

Re:Doomed by its creators

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:Doomed by its creators

They can not only produce 10 times more energy for a given supply of uranium

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:Doomed by its creators

Please don't forget those of us who promote nuclear power in an unsafe and irresponsible way.

Re:Any bets for the first major blackout?

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:Any bets for the first major blackout?

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.

Deregulation is a nice theory though. Not quite as elegant as communism, but it's a nice idea.

Re:the consumers just need to do their part

Really? Cause they had to pry the last EVs from the cold dead hands of their owners. Every salesperson who sold them had a larger waiting list than GM could manufacture. I bet that they discovered that EVs didn't need many replacement parts which is why all car companies are trying to avoid making EVs. There is a documentary about the EVs in the late 90's http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/ [imdb.com] that you should watch. In fact, nothing in your post is factual correct about the situation exception for maybe the range problem.

Re:the consumers just need to do their part

They had to pry those EVs out of the hands of their owners because they were leasing them at a tremendous loss. The EV-1 program was done for research and to gain experience. The company subsidized every single lessee to the tune of something like 50%. When it became clear that the EV1 would never develop enough demand to be profitable, GM wasn't willing to continue massively subsidizing these people and supporting a miniscule fleet of cars simply out of the goodness of their hearts.

Re:Energy Crisis says what?

The energy shortages were artificially created by Enron to boost profits. No actual shortages occurred.