In addition to my work at 2GreenEnergy, I’m a partner in two companies related to electric vehicles. One is the largest website on Earth dedicated to EVs — an 11-year-old website with 225,000 unique vistors a month — EVWorld.com. I’ve very proud of the work that Bill Moore, my fine friend, has done through the years in forwarding the cause of clean transportation.
Another partnership of which I’m happy to be a part is its subsidiary, EV World Associates. I’m trying to create a video to tell our story there, the first vesrion of which you can see below. You’ll see at a glance that the images are too low-res and that it needs help in a million different directions. But I think that the basic message is clear: we’re here to serve.
This week’s news in electric transportation calls to mind the auto companies’ deceit a decade ago with California’s Zero-Emission Vehicle mandate. According to the Automotive News, Chrysler has disbanded the engineering team that was working to bring three electric models to market as a rush job. This program, of course, was the basis on which they got every man, woman and child in the United States to bail them out with $12.5 billion in taxpayer money. And I suppose we have to add in the $70 million in grants that Chrysler took from the U.S. DoE to develop a test fleet of 220 hybrid pickup trucks and minivans — vehicles that are now scrapped as well.
I was speaking with my friend Bill Moore (of EV World fame) just now about how cheesed off we should all be by this. I mentioned that $12.5 billion is quite a heist. “Isn’t that one of the biggest burglaries in history?” I asked. “Yes,” Bill said. “But they’re too big to arrest.”
Honda’s Steve Ellis is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the subject of alternative fuel vehicles and their commercial trajectory. He happened to be a fellow speaker at last month’s AltCarExpo in Santa Monica, and I’m proud to count him among my friends. We’ve have had several meetings over the past year or so, from which I’ve learned how much more there is to the subject of fuel cells than most people realize. In an interview last night, Steve reviewed the subject with me from top to bottom, forming the basis of an important chapter in my book on renewables.
While they were fresh in my mind, I thought I’d note a few of the most interesting highlights from Steve’s presentation:
Of those who know anything at all about fuel cells, most have opinions that are based on sources that have made essentially no effort to treat the subject fairly.
It is true that the process by which hydrogen (the “fuel”) is electrolyzed from water and then, in the car, recombined with oxygen to form water is less efficient that the process of storing electrical energy in a battery and converting it to kinetic energy in an electric motor. However, this is largely missing the point; there are far more important factors that affect fuel cells’ utility in transportation that are normally overlooked.
Both types of electric vehicles (fuel cell and battery) offer the potential for completely clean transportation; the issue is how the energy is generated in the first place.
Over the past few years, the efficiency of fuel cells has improved faster than the relevant statistics (energy density and cost) of batteries.
Technologies by which drivers can refuel their cars for longer trips will bedevil the battery electric vehicle market for the foreseeable future. Better Place is not a good fit for the US, and ubiquitous quick-charging is many decades away, if it ever comes at all. So if you want clean vehicles that can be refueled in a matter of a few minutes (versus many hours), hydrogen is your only answer.
I guess the most memorable moment of the interview was the concept of personal emotion and politics. Steve is at a loss to understand why people with a sincere devotion to environmental stewardship would manipulate the facts to denegrate a technology that is strategic to moving us in the right direction. “This is truly strange behavior. Fuel cell advocates don’t try to derail the battery industry. It’s obvious that both have strengths and weaknesses, and form complementary paths in our journey to clean transportation.”
I guess we’d all like to think that meeting the challenges of reducing our carbon footprint are purely technological, rather than political. Or — if the challenges in fact do have political components that it’s “the good guys against the bad guys” — and that there is a kind of “brotherly love” among the fans of renewable energy and electric transportation. But my recent interviews have suggested that this is not the case. All I can say is what I remind my kids of constantly: This is not going to be easy. Let’s not fight among ourselves and make it impossible.
The 2009 “Business of Plugging In” conference also featured a great deal of discussion on the readiness of the utilities to support EVs. Although some people were horribly cautionary and indicated that this was a major impediment, a few key speakers cleared the matter up nicely:
EV’s are generally charged at off-peak periods when the power is usually discarded anyway. (Approximately half the electrical energy generated each day is wasted because it is not used and cannot be stored cost-effectively.) The opportunity to sell power that is otherwise thrown away provides additional revenue for the utilities at very little cost, which is, of course, a help rather than a hindrance.
Most people initially will charge at 110 volts and 15 amps. This is the power of a hair dryer, and will put very little strain on the grid. Only over time will a sizeable percentage of people upgrade to more robust chargers that will shorten the time necessary to charge their cars. But one astute person asked, “If you start charging your car at 11 PM, how important is it to you that’s it’s fully charged by 1 AM?” This slow migration to fast charging will provide ample time for the utilities to prepare.
Most of the audience came away with the (fortunately correct) idea that there is a natural fit between the development of the EV, the grid, and the increasing adoption/demand rate of EVs that we see from the consumer. None can proceed without the other two. Yet there seems to be a unforced harmony between the growth of each one.
And here’s another piece of good news from the conference. One elderly corporate speaker said to a standing-room-only break-out session of about 400 people, “We had EV conferences like this one a few years ago, and we were lucky to have 10 people in the room. Take a second and look around.”
Considering all the writing I’ve done on the EV adoption curve over the past 18 months or so, I was interested in the immense amount of discussion on the subject at the “Business of Plugging In” conference in Detroit earlier this week. Here are a few comments, for what they’re worth.
I noted a great deal of speculation about “range anxiety,” i.e., dread of running out of charge away from home or a charging station. There is no doubt in my mind that, until opportunity charging can be made fast, convenient and ubiquitous — a process that will certainly require many decades — there will be some people who will cling fast to their gasoline-powered cars (at least until the demand for gas goes so low that it is no longer supplied). Having said that, the EV owners I’ve spoken with say that they got over this anxiety fairly quickly. You simply have to take a moment and plan ahead to ensure you’re not taking a chance of running out of charge. They say that it’s not altogether different than driving with gasoline; you need to be aware of what that needle reads and plan accordingly.
Another point that I found valuable was the reminder that the communications industry had estimated an approximate 2% penetration of cell phones. They had somehow missed the fact that once people have them, use them, and tell their friends about them, there is a very direct route to everyone’s wanting one.
The case here, I believe, will closely parallel cell phones. EV technology costs are falling, performance is improving, wars in the Middle East are raging, and CO2 levels are rising. I really don’t know what could happen to make this migration happen any faster.
As the name suggests, “The Business of Plugging In” conference in Detroit this week was about business — the profit motive — and there is nothing wrong with that. Yet, though there is widespread agreement that the world should migrate to electric vehicles, there is considerable disagreement as to exactly how this should happen and who should profit as a result. There are a great number of directly competitive strategies in terms of products, business models, and charging infrastructures…..and guess what happens when you put their representatives on a stage in the hopes of calmly and dispassionately discussing these issues? Can you say “rabid dogs?”
I’m kidding; it’s all been fairly professional here, but generally, this is a forum for the presentation of ideas that serve the speaker’s ultimate profit-making agenda, so one hears some pretty wild, and, in my way of thinking, unsubstantiated ideas.
George Patacki, Governor of New York from 1995 – 2006, moderated the opening panel, and made what I thought was the single most important point of the day on Tuesday: we live in a country that has wind energy in the plains, solar energy in the southwest, and geothermal in the mountains — but no infrastructure — physical or regulative — to enable our nation to provide all this wonderful capacity to consumers. He’s supporting legislature that will bypass the boundaries of the literally 2000 local and regional utilities and upgrade the grid at a national level and make possible the sharing of renewable energy.
My partner at EV World and good friend Bill Moore and I convene in Detroit this week for the “Business of Plugging In” show, which runs through Wednesday. Upon my return, I’ll deliver a full report on who’s doing what. For now, I can tell you that the show has been sold out for quite a while, and that the interest in this subject is at an all-time high.
Driven by technology breakthroughs in batteries and ultracapacitors, aggressive policy-making at the federal and state levels, and, of course, the formation for capital enabling thousands of businesses to enter the supply chain at all levels, there is no doubt that electric transportation is coming in a big way, and that it will not be derailed this time.
It won’t be long until consumers all over the world join the early adopters in saying, “No plug? No deal.”
In addition to my work at 2GreenEnergy, I’m a partner in two companies related to electric vehicles. One is the largest website on Earth dedicated to EVs — an 11-year-old website with 225,000 unique vistors a month — EVWorld.com. I’ve very proud of the work that Bill Moore, my fine friend, has done through the years in forwarding the cause of clean transportation.
This week’s news in electric transportation calls to mind the auto companies’ deceit a decade ago with California’s 
The 2009 “Business of Plugging In” conference also featured a great deal of discussion on the readiness of the utilities to support EVs. Although some people were horribly cautionary and indicated that this was a major impediment, a few key speakers cleared the matter up nicely:
Considering all the writing I’ve done on the EV adoption curve over the past 18 months or so, I was interested in the immense amount of discussion on the subject at the “Business of Plugging In” conference in Detroit earlier this week. Here are a few comments, for what they’re worth.
My partner at
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