Category: Electric Vehicles
Inductive Charging Offers Advantages in Electric Transportation
| December 28, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
I’ve been lucky enough to derive so much pleasure from business travel – and to conduct so much business during personal trips — that I long ago ceased to try to separate the two.
Case in point: this trip back East for Christmas, where I carved out an hour and a half to meet with the CEO of Momentum Dynamics, less than an hour’s drive from my family’s home in the suburbs of Philadelphia.
Momentum Dynamics offers breakthrough technology in inductive (versus conductive) charging. For those scratching their heads here, we find this concept implemented in today’s electric toothbrushes, which are charged miraculously by merely replacing the brush – sans metal contacts — back into its base unit. Unbeknownst to the user, it sits there next to a modulating magnetic field that induces an electric current to flow into a conductive circuit within the toothbrush, recharging the battery. Read More
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What Does the Future Look Like for Electric Vehicles? Renewable Energy?
| December 27, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
Over a cold beverage during the holidays, my brother Geoff (terrific person) came to ask me about my level of satisfaction with what I’m doing here at 2GreenEnergy. “It’s a mixed bag,” I told him, candidly. “It’s a combination of experiences that, depending on which day you ask me, could be:
• Deeply rewarding, as we’ve helped move countless cleantech deals forward – in fact, many more than I’m directly aware of,
• Fantastically frustrating, in that this project – and the adoption of cleantech generally — is moving far more slowly than I possibly could have imagined given the urgency, or Read More
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Electric Vehicles and CO2 Emission Abatement
| December 22, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
Frequent commenter Glenn Doty writes:
What would really be nice is an infographic comparing the cost of mitigating CO2 with various alternatives… just to put the different alternatives into proper perspective.
For instance, how much more does it cost to abate CO2 emissions by setting up a rooftop solar panel in NJ as compared to installing additional insulation in an office building in Texas or setting up a wind farm in the Dakotas?
This would be extremely instructional to your readers in terms of what policies would make more sense… and it would be fun to look at how you graph the negative CO2 abatement value of EV’s.
I respond:
Ha! I was reading along here, wondering when you were going to make your point about EVs, and lo! (a good word for the season), there it was.
Seriously, please send me a high-level treatment of your reasoning.
At a minimum, there are two things I don’t get. Read More
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A Collaboration on Fuel Cell Vehicles — But Exactly Whose Interests Are At Stake? Not Yours.
| December 18, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
Here’s an article that describes a collaboration between GM and BMW on fuel cell vehicles.
Wow, that’s remarkable. Just when I had started to trust the car companies based on the sincerity of Nissan/Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn and his people who build and promote the LEAF, I see this. A few basic points:
• The oil companies are the main supporters of the hydrogen economy. They see hydrogen as a mechanism for them to continue to retain a service station which will continue to provide the consumer with something they can pump. Electricity, on the other hand, is ubiquitous.
• Creating hydrogen suffers a 4:1 efficiency issue. I.e., generating hydrogen in a renewable way requires four times the number of solar panels that would be needed to make the electricity to put into my battery. Read More
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How Many Electric Vehicles Can Off-Peak Power Charge?
| December 11, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
Does anyone know how many kilowatt-hours we in the U.S. dump back to ground each night? If so, please comment, and add a link to the source. Cycling coal plants shortens their lives and adds to the cost of maintenance, and is therefore unappealing. But I’m having the devil’s own time coming up with this datum.
The use of off-peak power is directly relevant to the case for EVs. Read More
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Corporate Fleets Switching to Electric Transportation
| December 8, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
The adoption curve for electric vehicles is largely based on consumer attitude for the subject, which itself is for the most part formed by word of mouth: what people hear from others, and what they see around them. It is for that reason that I take great delight when I see news of large corporate fleets switching to electric transportation. Frito-Lay is the 7th largest fleet in the U.S., and will soon be deploying 176 electric delivery trucks in Orlando, FL. Good stuff.
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Gating Factor for Consumer Adoption of Electric Vehicles
| December 3, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
AltEnergyStocks.com wizard Tom Konrad comments on my piece on the gating factor for consumer adoption of electric vehicles:
I think the largest barrier is sticker shock.
Range anxiety does not stop anyone from buying the Volt, and Leafs are selling better. Where’s the range anxiety?
The problem with the Betamax analogy (i.e., that consumers are concerned about investing in what could be the automotive equivalent of the Betamax, a video technology that didn’t catch on) is that the problem with Betamax was you could not get videos to watch on it. With an EV, Read More
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Lunch with Green Car Blogger Jon LeSage
| December 3, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
Green car blogger Jon LeSage and I had identical experiences early last week. We both came across each other’s names, recognized them from our travels in the industry, and said, “I want to talk to that guy.” This all culminated in a three-hour lunch yesterday in Santa Monica, CA.
Jon is the Automotive Editor, Green Initiatives at Automotive Digest Weekly Green, which goes out to about 60,000 readers/viewers. I had come across his stuff largely in connection with the role I play at EV World, consulting to various types of players in electric transportation. Jon has a fantastic command of the language and real personality and voice as a writer.
More importantly, he’s on the right side of the issues here. In fact, if I had any complaint about the lunch experience, it was that we agree on practically everything; I like a bit of controversy with my crab and arugula salad. Read More
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The Validity of Electric Transportation
| December 1, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
I’d like to call readers’ attention to this discussion of the validity of electric transportation. In fact, the discussion began earlier in this piece on bashing electric vehicles. There are a lot of interesting ideas here that challenge the way the EV community generally sees the issue.
I would like to add one more variable into the equation: distributed generation. I bring this up partially because I know people who spec’d the solar arrays they put on their roofs specifically to charge their EVs, and partially because distributed solar (not to mention distributed wind/geo/hydro), has a real shot to change the energy paradigm in the not-too-distant future. Read More
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Electric Vehicles: Confronting the Tough Realities
| November 30, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
Glenn Doty is an extremely senior scientist who studies the macro-world of energy, and doesn’t like what he sees regarding electric transportation. He writes:
While I have tremendous respect for you and the work that you are doing, I have very little respect for the people who compiled that study that you referenced.
The simple truth is that you cannot claim “grid mix” for a new marginal increase in grid demand. If you plug in a new toy (EV), they can’t do a rain dance to get additional energy from the hydropower dam… nor will they amp up the local nuclear reactor to provide more power… The only possible source for the energy going into NEW demand will be what is currently SPARE capacity – that’s natural gas and coal. Read More
