Australia Developing Massive Electric Vehicle Grid 260
blairerickson writes "A US firm Thursday unveiled plans to build a massive one-billion-dollar charging network to power electric cars in Australia as it seeks cleaner and cheaper options to petrol. Better Place, which has built plug-in stations for electric vehicles in Israel and Denmark, has joined forces with Australian power company AGL and finance group Macquarie Capital to create an Australian network. Under the plan, the three cities will each have a network of between 200,000 and 250,000 charge stations by 2012 where drivers can plug in and power up their electric cars. The points would probably be at homes and businesses, car parks and shopping centres. In addition, 150 switch stations will be built in each city and on major freeways, where electric batteries can be automatically replaced in drive-in stations similar to a car wash." I hope they're talking to the car companies about the necessary standardization it would take to make this work, too.
Where are they getting the power? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this the same grid who's owners are claiming there will be rolling blackouts again this summer because they don't have enough capacity?
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I'll give you a hint: it's the other "n" word.
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Re:Where are they getting the power? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Where are they getting the power? (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't make a profit in their lifetime?
That's not inherent to nuclear, but to the one-off nature of all the early nuclear plants. Standardized designs, pre-approved by the appropriate regulatory agencies, can be cheap and reliable. Look at France. Their reactors are so cheap and reliable they're a net exporter of electricity, and they make quite a bit of cash from it. The trouble with all the reactors built in the 60's we have now is that each one was scratch built at a time when no one really knew the best way to build one. They're all basically experimental.
Re:Where are they getting the power? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where are they getting the power? (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is mute because as others have pointed out TFA claims that AGL will use renewables, however I have to object to your implied conclusion that Australia should build reactors.
Australia has both huge uranium reserves AND huge renewable potential (enough to power most of SE Asia), why not sell the uranium and disposal services to other nations that don't have such an embarrasing wealth and under-utilisation of renewables? Personally I think the shame I cry over the most is how we consitently sell taxpayer funded IP for pennies, as in the case of The Sun King [sbs.com.au]. IMHO we should be selling uranium and keeping ideas, not the other way around.
The meat from the link:
"The new technology Dr Shi helped develop has now been put into commercial production at this factory near Leipzig, in Germany. But it is protected by patent - he might have helped develop it but the Sun King can't use it. Indeed the failure by Pacific Solar to commercialise the technology so disheartened Dr Shi at the time that he considered giving away research altogether and starting a restaurant or a supermarket in Sydney...[snip: but he went back home to China]...Six years later Dr Shi and his wife have transformed $6 million in seed capital into a $6 billion company. Oh, not only did we sell his invention, we even built the factory [pv-tech.org] for the Germans who are now pumping about a gigawatt of EXCESS back into the grid from rooftop PV - quite an achivement considering "sunshine" is not the first thing that comes to one's mind when they think about German weather.
And while we are at it, why do we ship ore to China to smelt with coal, why not refine the metal where it is dug up using solar thermal and "value add" to our product? Even the small quantity we smelt is done with horrendous inefficiency and still makes a profit, eg: Aluminium in the south using a purpose built coal plant but the ore is dug up under the sweltering sun in the north. To get the ore from north to south there's all this infrastructure of railraods, ports and ships. If we can automate the world's largest diamond mine to operate with a dozen staff why can't we build intergrated mine/refine/power stations that take maybe 100 people to run? Plonk it on the ore deposit and away you go.
If I had my tinfoil hat on I might think that a lot of the insanity in the economy is nothing more than a "full employment" scheme for western society.
Politics: The Greens have two problems, first their nuclear dogma directly contradicts their platform of "science based policy". Second their leader is as boring as dogshit. I'm an old fart who was an adult during the Franklin thing and I admire Brown for what he did back then, I also admire him for standing up for the rule of law in the Hicks case even though Howard neutered him by branding him a "Hick's supporter". I really DO want to hear what he has to say but his voice and his predictable dogma are like auditory valium, two sentances and I'm asleep. The last time I remember him doing anything effective was the time he got the Greens locked out of parliment while the Chineese were visting, and when I say effective I mean he was effective in convincing the nation that he's a wack-job. (Not that different to how McCain has "lost his way", once that happens your credibility is dead to the casual observer and the one-eyed dogmatists are drawn to you like flies are drawn to a turd.)
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The point is mute
Moot. [wiktionary.org]
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Moot
;)
I have nothing to say about that...
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I have, and I can listen to informed reason - tell me what's the problem with pebble bed reactors?
I'm not sure if your obtuse post is infering I'm youthfull because of a typo and/or conservative because I don't subscribe to the nuclear taboo, but just to be clear - you're wrong on both counts.
Cars on the Grid is cleaner than Cars on the Pump (Score:5, Insightful)
Looking forward, the grid is a lot easier to update to cleaner technologies as they come available. It is extremely tough to get anyone to put a new engine in their car because it might improve their gas mileage.
You'd need a LOT more plugs than gas pumps. (Score:4, Informative)
Because of the time required to charge vehicles, we'd need a cord station at pretty much every parking space everywhere for widespread use of pure electrics to be tenable.
(even if we implemented amazing recharge rates through capacitors, we wouldn't be able to utilize them because, without a completely separate, ultra-capacity utility network, the grid would overload)
How expensive is this per capita vs a carbon trapping device from the government for everyone and a massive fuel subsidy program?
In the long term they're financially better off rolling out a complete rebuild of the power grid to support "burst charging" of ultra-capacitors so cars can be charged in a couple minutes at "stations", the same way we do now with gas.
Hence the reason for the buildout. (Score:5, Insightful)
Surprise, that's exactly why they're starting the buildout now. You build it once, and you're done, you don't keep building it again and again, as you do with cars.
I'm not saying that we have to immediately switch over to everyone on electric either. I'm not even saying that petrol should go the way of the dinosaur (in this case, literally). But for most drivers, electric is more than enough for every day life. And even "slow" charging batteries are just fine, because most of us spend most of our days inside, whilst our cars sit outside doing nothing but collecting heat.
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>>>Surprise, that's exactly why they're starting the buildout now. You build the electric grid once, and you're done, you don't keep building it again and again, as you do with cars.
>>>
Your sentence make no sense. Once you've installed the "gasoline grid" (pipes/charging stations) you don't need to rebuild it again-and-again. It's done.
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Don't you remember multiple choice tests where the "...is always true" type of answers were always wrong.
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Ok, but using some kind of flow battery would make a lot of sense here. This way, the eletricity producer is the one that charges the bateries (the slow step), and the charging station simply exchanges its contents (what is fast).
It only makes less sense to do that with carbon. Ok, we'd reuse the current infra-structure, but there are all kinds of inefficiencies in getting it from the air, turning it into hidrocarbonets and using it at the final destination. I guess some metal-oxyde would be great here.
Re:Cars on the Grid is cleaner than Cars on the Pu (Score:3, Insightful)
But how do you define efficient? Pure thermodynamic efficiency? Sure power plants win out - but what does that mean and exactly how useful is it? Power plants do not keep in line with demand - they cannot, as demand waxes and wanes the power grid supply more or less flat lines. How is that efficient?
I drive an old car, but I bet that I use less fuel than the vast majority of people and I am unashamed of driving my old car because the numbers don't lie. Now not to be combative but I say screw you and the hor
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While a lot of what you say makes sense, driving an old car very little etc. However the second part of your post is bollocks.
1) The grid can be turned off and scaled to meet demand
2) Efficiency is measured in how much energy is lost, current petrol engines lose about 70% of the stored energy.
3) As per point 2, Oil has nothing whatsoever to do with efficient storage, the reason we use oil is because it's there, someone else(nature) stored it for us so we don't care that it's inefficient as fuck
4) We will ru
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I say screw you and the horse you rode in on to anyone who tells me my car is worse for the environment than theirs. For the record I drive a 1970s 'pickup truck' (we call it a ute) with a 5 litre V8 engine, carburettor ...
There's the rub. A 1970's vintage vehicle, at least in the US, was likely to not have a catalytic converter (they were mandated in the US in 1976). If your ute doesn't have one, it puts out much higher levels of CO, unburnt hydrocarbons, and lots of Nitrogen oxides (NOx).
Since it has a
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>>>Your ute will be rolling long after the last Prius has begun to leach the toxic contents of its batteries into the water table.
The Prius uses NiMH batteries which are not toxic. You can dump them in your backyard if you want (not that I recommend that). They are no more harmful than dumping salt water plus a few nickles on the ground.
As for the 1970s truck:
Due to lack of a catalytic converter, it spews about 1000 times more NOx and CO than a modern ULEV car. If it is one of the later models w
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THAT is why the environmental protection agencies say an old car is more polluting than a new car, and why some governments uses emission tests to remove these old cars from the road.
Except the emissions testers don't really give an accurate picture. Most cars don't sit with the engine unloaded running at 2000rpm, but that's how the emissions are tested. If you test engines under load then the gap closes noticeably.
Even in normal testing, my carb-fed, non-catalyst car is cleaner than the requirement for
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>>>Most cars don't sit with the engine unloaded running at 2000rpm, but that's how the emissions are tested.
Not in the state of Maryland. The car is driven at ~55 miles an hour, and THEN the emissions are examined. So it is tested while under load and at speed. ----- BTW my 70mpg insight was so clean the sensors just reported 0.001 across the board. Way below the legal limits. Sweet.
>>>Of course, it takes about ten minutes careful adjustment once a week to keep it that way, which is
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The main component is Nickel, which is considered "semi-toxic".
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Re-reading your reply... this just doesn't make sense:
100 times more pollution? An non-cat car produces CO, while a cat car produces CO2. Considering the requirements for the cat to work (rich mixture, and reduces effective output), the cat car outputs more than the non-
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CO2 is not a pollutant. Breathing CO2 does not damage human lungs. That's why the U.S.-EPA does not regulate it. Instead they regulate CO and NOx which *is* poisonous for human beings, and according to their published statistics, a 1975 car without catalyst outputs approximately 1000 times more CO and NOx than a 2009 car.
Also it's a mistake to think a catalyst won't work with a lean-burning engine. Honda has been making lean-burn engines for years (Civic HX and Civic Hybrid and Insight), and they are
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CO2 isn't a pollutant all of a sudden? I thought there was this whole "greenhouse gas" hysteria because of CO2 nowadays.
Of course an non-cat car outputs a hellovalot more CO than CO2. That's the whole point of the cat. You're just phrasing it as if though old cars produce more pollution than new ones because of the cat. The cat just changes what kind of pollution is produced. It also increases the amount a bit.
With lean-burning cats, the NOx reduction is very inefficient. Hondas NOx emissions are higher tha
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>>>I thought there was this whole "greenhouse gas" hysteria because of CO2 nowadays.
Greenhouse gases are not classed "pollutants" by the U.S.-EPA or the California Air Resources Board unless they damage human lungs. You can breathe CO2-laced air every day, and nothing will happen to you. BUT if you breathed CO or NOx-laced air, you'd quickly develop asthma. Possibly even lung cancer. That's why the EPA (and CARB) strictly regulate CO and NOx. ------ That's also why fuels are oxygenated; to p
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>>>the electrical grid is cheaper and cleaner than a half billion cars driving around burning hydrocarbons.
This is not true. ACEEE.org ranked the EV1 as no cleaner than a Prius or Civic Hybrid. That same ranking showed that the 66mpg Honda Insight was 10% cleaner than either of those EVs.
With electricity you have a 50% loss during the coal-to-current conversion. Then another 10% loss in transmission. 10% loss in the motor and almost 40% loss in the chemical battery. The end result is that the
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Maybe true for US, but not so true for Australia.
We have 300 years of natural gas at current use with gas (that's liquefied petroleum gas or LPG) fired power stations being built which are much more efficient than coal. AGL use renewables (waste) and will incorporate alternative technologies as they become available.
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Natural gas is definitely cleaner, but still not perfect. The natural-gas powered Civic ranked equal to the gasoline-powered Insight Hybrid. That's an improvement over the gasoline Civic or the coal-powered EV1 (tied), but still not better than an Insight.
Re:Cars on the Grid is cleaner than Cars on the Pu (Score:4, Insightful)
You could always try steering out of the road. Why do you *have* to be in front? Are you going to get there significantly faster than the car behind you? My anecdotal tests have convinced me I can let 10 - 20 cars over take me and still not lose any noticeable time getting where I want to go.
Re:Cars on the Grid is cleaner than Cars on the Pu (Score:4, Interesting)
I have an Insight, and even though it only has a 70hp engine, it can accelerate just fine. In fact I've had it up over 100 mph while cruising across the American continent. At no point have I ever felt the need for more power, and I drive the four-lane-wide I-95 every day with thousands of other cars and trucks.
The key is to learn how to go with the *merge* with the flow of traffic, rather than be an obstacle that jumps in front of massive trucks.
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I have a 4 door 1986 Geo Metro and it goes up to 105mph just fine as well. In fact that car is fast for it's 62hp engine. It's simply built by engineers that have a brain and made the gearbox to fit the car and a performance point. In FACT I towed back 400 miles a trailer with a entire drivetrain for a much larger car on it. I was towing 110% of the weight of my car and it did fine.
Honestly only the dumb or worfully undereducated believe they NEED high horsepower engines. They dont, they need cars that
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I'd love to get my hands on a Metro XFI (~60 mpg highway). Unfortunately most of them were poorly-maintained by their owners, so it's beginning to look less and less likely.
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Why do you *have* to be in front?
Because his penis is incredibly small and it makes him fell more like a man?
Just guessing from how those people drive.
Re:Cars on the Grid is cleaner than Cars on the Pu (Score:5, Insightful)
Come off it. Yesterday I was in the left hand lane that was practically stopped. I could see the reason it was stopped... about 1.5km up the road the traffic was also stopped (because of an accident). The left land was slow because lots of people were trying to exit the motorway to avoid the congestion.
When a small opportunity arose, I changed into another lane. I did not accelerate to 110km/hr because I could see that 1.5 km further on I'd be stuck anyway. What happened? I got wankers on their horns 'cause I did not go 110km/hr for the next 1.5km... This is the problem on the road: people somehow cannot see more than one car ahead. This is how I judge people. A LOT of people cannot think mid- to long-term. A lot of these same people make critical business decisions. No WONDER the economies of the world are in bad shape.
Just for the record, I ended up further along the road than those fools behind me,giving me grief, dodging in-and-out of traffic, and not thinking beyond the next 2 seconds. If more people thought ahead things would BE BETTER. But, alas, the first car in front (for these fools) is always the one at fault. And they extend this stupid mentanility to all aspects of their life. The hare and the tortoise. We need more turtles
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>>>I got wankers on their horns 'cause I did not go 110km/hr for the next 1.5km...
So the moral is Aussies are impatient drivers? (ducks a spitball). I deal with almost the same problem every day, due to bridge construction, and none of my American neighbors honk at me. They do have that same tendency to race to a stoplight, which makes no sense..... I think it has less to do with stupidity, and more to do with the desire to get home ASAP.
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>>>But, alas, the first car in front (for these fools) is always the one at fault. And they extend this stupid mentanility to all aspects of their life.
P.S. This is why, in additional to the front-facing horn, God also invented the rear-facing middle finger. It's almost become an automatic response with me:
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeep. Finger.
Beeep-beeep-beeep. Finger.
I want them to know that I think they are "#1".
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Re:Cars on the Grid is cleaner than Cars on the Pu (Score:4, Interesting)
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Clearly he was a Sour Kraut.
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I want to have something happen when I put my foot down.
All the better, an electric motor *starts* at maximum torque, so you're putting down as much power as possible right when you slam your foot down... instead of like an archaic IC engine that takes time to rev up to max torque.
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A hybrid has the best of both worlds - an electric motor with max torque from 0 rpm, and a gasoline engine that can be recharged in 2-3 minutes time, thereby giving the driver unlimited range.
Re:Where are they getting the power? (Score:4, Informative)
Sigh, from the article:
"AGL will power the system with renewable energy."
Sigh? (Score:2)
Sounds like a brilliant idea.
The timing depends, of course, on the severity of the current global economic meltdown. But very soon Kevin 007 is going to be handing out hundreds of millions of dollars as part of the Emissions Trading Scheme to companies who substantially reduce their carbon footprint.
AGL currently have a very high carbon footprint given they supply natural gas and electricity. This way they'll probably get a government grant for innovative technologies to tackle climate change, i.e. electric
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Where's the renewable energy going to come from?
I'm with AGL - They burn sugar cane detrius and other organic materials when they can.
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Tassie is 95% Hydro & Wind (possibly a bit higher), and connected to the National Grid by Basslink. (Good in Theory, but we don't have a lot of water right now......)
Re:Where are they getting the power? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where are they getting the power? (Score:4, Interesting)
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solar, wind, wave, tidal, geothermal, ... ?
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I guess you're implying that if a nuclear reactor goes then lots of people may die...which is somehow worse than a couple of people dying everyday...
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the difference is that there aren't safe options for cars, there are safe alternatives for nuclear.
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Maybe he/she did but the anti-nuclear zealot mob is unstoppable.
Re:Where are they getting the power? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Where are they getting the power? (Score:4, Informative)
In Brisbane:
This is why ripple controllers are being installed on air conditioners by Energex to alleviate the transformer load. It will be interesting to see what effect turning off an airconditioner for 15 minutes will make on the network.
Things have changed since 2004 from a management perspective. It used to be cost cut as much as possible. Now tranny upgrades are occurring as a preventative maintenance meausre. If a maximum demand indicator gets close to the limit, it gets upgraded, not left to the last minute when it falls over. Of course spending (or not spending) on the network can be a political thing aswell. Having said that the network is still under significant load during summer. Hopefully the firies won't be hosing down pole transformers to keep them cool this summer. At least it's not the Joe Bjelke-Peterson days that it used to be.
"Wind turbines and other renewable" (Score:2)
According to Scientific American, [sciam.com] the plan is to power the cars with "wind turbines and other renewable sources (when possible)". Take it as you will.
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I *do not* want a car powered by a wind turbine. Overhead power lines, OTHER wind powered cars, lack of go motion whilst in still air are but a few problems.
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As somebody who works in the industry, there's plenty of capacity. The reason for the rolling blackouts last summer was because our redundant lines (in Victoria) were taken out by bushfire. There was no way to prevent it.
Posted anonymous because I don't recall my login (not at home PC).
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Talked to anyone from the Northern suburbs of Darwin lately? Wondered where all of Australia's large rental generators have gone?
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They have developed helmets you put on and when you pray hard enough electricity comes out.
Shai Agassi (Score:5, Informative)
This is the electric-car effort spearheaded by Shai Agassi, formerly of SAP. He was profiled in Wired [wired.com] a couple of issues back.
The gist of it is that the cars are all-electric (not hybrid), the energy companies sell the power, and the cars are basically free (or close to it). To get around the runtime problems of current electric cars, he envisions filling stations where you pull up in your electric car and instead of waiting for your battery to fully charge, the company swaps out your drained batter with a brand-new, prefilled one, and off you go. This is possible because they own the batteries anyway.
In short, the idea is to move away from the Gillette razor model for cars, toward the cell phone model.
Now that I think about it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, now that I think about it, Gillette is the wrong model. The current car model is the PC model: Pay a bunch of money up front for the computer, pay for software and support on an ongoing basis, eventually send the computer to the junkyard. Agassi's model is the cell phone model: Pay next to nothing up front, pay the service provider regular installments, replace or upgrade the hardware as needed for a nominal fee, but the hardware is all tied to the service provider. What you're paying for is not a car, but transportation.
It's an intriguing concept, but it's hard to see it taking off in the U.S., where the automobile probably ranks ahead of diamond jewelry as a universally-recognized status symbol. Even Prius owners are making a statement about their lifestyle.
But what do I know? I ride the bus.
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I think he's talking about the cell phone "contract", where you pay $x per month for y years and get a particular phone free.
The more you call/drive, the better phone/car you can get
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To get around the runtime problems of current electric cars, he envisions filling stations where you pull up in your electric car and instead of waiting for your battery to fully charge, the company swaps out your drained batter with a brand-new, prefilled one, and off you go. This is possible because they own the batteries anyway.
I find the idea of owning a car and not owning the battery (or gas/deisel engine) that powers it... distasteful.
If you flash the ECU in your car for more performance, do you void [contract] you have with the owner of the battery?
Re:Shai Agassi (Score:5, Funny)
I think I'm going to need an easier, car-based analogy to fully understand this.
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Anyone for tennis analogies? We are talking about Agassi after all.
Re:Shai Agassi (Score:5, Informative)
The gist of it is that the cars are all-electric (not hybrid), the energy companies sell the power, and the cars are basically free (or close to it). To get around the runtime problems of current electric cars, he envisions filling stations where you pull up in your electric car and instead of waiting for your battery to fully charge, the company swaps out your drained batter with a brand-new, prefilled one, and off you go. This is possible because they own the batteries anyway.
This is perhaps the "elevator pitch" but in reality there is much, much more to it than just this.
1) Other comments have posted about rolling power outages - these electric cars will help *prevent* rolling power outages! The truth is that the power grid is massively overbuilt. There is about 25% of the grid built to handle perhaps 12 hours of usage per year - the dreaded mid-summer air conditioning spike. These cars "talk" to the grid. They charge when power is plentiful (eg: at night) and can even backfeed into the grid if there's a shortage. The result is that they make better, more consistent, and more even use of the grid 24x7, while also providing embedded resiliency.
2) The cars are rented. You pay for usage. Yeah, much like the cell phone model. But because of this, you don't have to worry about batteries, you don't have to worry about mechanic bills, and the cost for usage (per mile) is less than your existing car, anyway. Since nearly all cars are either financed or leased nowadays, anyway, the effect on the consumer is negligible. Day-to-day, you wouldn't notice the difference!
3) The reason why electric cars bomb is the dreaded long trip. Even with 250 or so miles per charge, roughly equivalent to most cars' "full tank" range, the electric cars to date are utter fail for trips that are farther. You have to find a place to charge. You have to wait 4-8 hours. Etc. But with these electric cars, you can swap batteries in less time than it would take to fill the tank on your existing car. The problem of replacing batteries just.... goes away.
I'm not just sold on this plan. I'm sold and sold and sold. I wish California would jump on board - I'd finally have a good reason to replace my aging (but perfectly operational) 10 year old 200,000 mile Saturn SL2!
the child in me... (Score:5, Interesting)
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The current trams weigh so much that its more efficient to have 100 of the more energy efficient Hondas on the road than a single tram.
Works fine in Australia (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why their initiative may have a bigger effect than, say, a European country surrounded by differently positioned countries.
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They could always roll it out like mobile phone technology. Stuff the people in the country. :)
Roll it out for the cities first, then rural centres. That covers 98% of the population. The rest can stick to deisel because there is no point driving say 350ks then having to stop for 30mins to recharge. Although this would probably help stop most fatigue related accidents on country roads.
Maybe a good thing. If you want to cross the Nullaboor (which most people outside Australia wont understand, Its that giant
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Stuff the people in the country. Roll it out for the cities first, then rural centres. That covers 98% of the population.
Yes it becomes quite apparent when you drive for 1000ks with no mobile coverage, Unless you get "Next G", which is more like 3.5G and not compatible with any other network in the world.
The rest can stick to deisel because there is no point driving say 350ks then having to stop for 30mins to recharge.
Pocket hurts from stupid parity pricing of diesel. It should be cheaper than unleaded! Highest I saw it was $2.15 a litre (which is nearly AU$10 a gallon), where as the petrol was $1.80 something.
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You have no idea how big and sparsely populated this country is do you?
Think the population of New York spread across the continental US. In some places, you can drive for an hour or more before getting from one populated town (a few hundred) to another town (a few hundred).
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Tell me about it ! I was in Australia once and we hired a car to drive from Sydney to Brisbane, on the map it only looked about as far as from Birmingham to Edinburgh ( a good 4 or 5 hours ) so we planned on arriving the next morning. Turns out it's bloody miles away, it took us almost a week in the end !
The really annoying thing though was that there were no warning signs it would take that long anywhere, not on the map or on the signposts ( which weren't even in miles but in some other weird measurement )
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but you wouldn't want to take your hovercraft overseas, it would get full of eels!
Why charging stations? (Score:2, Funny)
With what money? (Score:3, Insightful)
It says the funds will be raised by Macquarie, which is an investment bank. Who, exactly, in the current economic climate, going to give them that kind of money?
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going to give them that kind of money?
(picks teeth..) "The govmint"
Where are the electric cars? (Score:3, Insightful)
That is fantastic - but where are the electric cars?
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You expected Ferraris before the roads were paved? No! The infrastructure has to start supporting such things before they can exist.
Oh, I'm sure there are -some- people that only drive 20 miles a day and don't have to worry about getting electricity while they are out. But the rest of the people have to know they can get back home before they'll invest in a car like that.
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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/ [imdb.com]
Proprietary networks are bad (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope they're talking to the car companies about the necessary standardization it would take to make this work, too.
For all the press Better Place has been getting lately, I haven't seen an in-depth analysis of their business model, specifically as it relates to standardization of the infrastructure, including plugs and sockets.
I have a feeling their charging plugs, sockets and protocols are proprietary. Anyone who attempts to produce a compatible charger/socket is going to find themselves on the end of a very aggressive lawsuit. Unless of course they've licensed the technology from Better Place.
Our current gasoline-based system is deeply flawed, but at least it's open. We're replacing it with a marginally better system, but we're giving up that openness for a closed system owned by a single company.
And then there's the conflict of interest issue. What incentive does a company have to reduce power consumption on a car when it's getting a cut of every charge?
Shai Agassi is a smart and charismatic man, but who can really say they're happy with the cell phone business model? Most consumers aren't, but the cellular networks are making quite a profit.
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``Shai Agassi is a smart and charismatic man, but who can really say they're happy with the cell phone business model? Most consumers aren't, but the cellular networks are making quite a profit.''
I'm not complaining. I get to make and receive phone calls and text messages and access the Internet pretty much everywhere I go, for less money than my ADSL line costs.
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I haven't seen an in-depth analysis of their business model, specifically as it relates to standardization of the infrastructure, including plugs and sockets.
1) promise electric car network
2) ?
3) profit
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If you don't note the sarcasm... google.
They are selling miles (Score:2)
Of course their systems will be proprietary. At the very least there will be strong authentication to ensure you're paying the correct operator for your miles.
The idea - as outlined in the Wired article - is that you buy miles from Better Place. They pay for the electricity - from environmentally friendly companies. They own the battery - and therefore you can replace the depleted battery in your car with a fully loaded battery at any time.
For that to work as a business model, you will need some level of pr
One billion... (Score:5, Funny)
...plans to build a massive one-billion-dollar charging network
Sounds pretty useless. How many australians can be charged one billion dollars?
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All of them, it's capacity to pay where the buisness model falls apart.
Will the cars lose there radio and other settings (Score:2)
Will the cars lose there radio and other settings when you swap the battery?
Electric cars, as I see it (Score:2)
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Or it could be that Australians are actually doing things of significance... Aren't the persons mentioned ... US Citizens?
Re:I'd prefer a water-powered car! (Score:5, Informative)
The notion of a "water-powered car" is stupid conspiracy theory touted by those who never took a introductory chemistry course because electrolysis consumes energy. It might be novel (which is its only real value) but inside all those cars are batteries which are doing electrolysis and then the resulting mixture is burned, which is vastly less efficient than using that power to drive the car or using hydrogen created by wind or solar.
Hydrogen is not an energy source.
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I agree that most people don't understand the concept. But there is an "advantage" to "water powered" or more accurately, hydrogen powered vessels (yes, it includes boats).
There is a proposal by a company in Australia to build a hydrogen powered trawler because it is possible to load it with sufficient hydrogen to go out on their fishing trips, they can top up their supply (not indefinitely) using solar panels, and teh initial load is generated from renewable sources.
It's an intriguing concept because they
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I think that "station" means "charging station," not like "petrol station". Think pumps, not complexes.
Put 1 plug per space in a 2000 space car park and you're 1% there.