Posts Tagged by Electric Vehicles
A Promising Player in Neighborhood Electric Vehicles
| April 8, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
Here’s a short video I made recently on a company in Michigan that I believe to be one of the most promising players in neighborhood electric vehicles (NEVs) aka low-speed electric vehicles (LSEVs). These guys have the design, the team, and the background to be quite successful in this space.
Connecting Eos Energy Storage to Strategic Partners in India
| March 23, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Energy Storage |
I started my day with a predawn call to Edison, New Jersey and Mumbia, trying to connect my people at Eos Energy Storage with strategic partners in India. The breakthrough in battery chemistry/design will result in product for sale in 2013 at $165/kWh. This, of course, will change the game completely, both for electric vehicles and for utility-scale grid storage — and India will be an enormous market. What’s the loss on an hour or two of sleep in the scheme of things?
2GreenEnergy at the 2012 Cleantech Forum
| March 16, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Business |
I plan to attend the last day (Wednesday, March 28th) of the 10th Cleantech Forum, to be held in San Francisco. The show does a great job in pulling together cleantech innovators, investors, corporate leaders and policy-makers from around the world. It’s always great to meet new people at the top of the field, and learn about the technologies that are shaping our future.
As the name suggests, there’s more to this than clean energy per se: energy efficiency, water, biofuels, electric vehicles, smart grid, etc.
If you happen to be in the Bay Area that day, please let me know, and let’s meet for a cup of coffee.
Are Electric Vehicles Really a Boon to the Environment?
| March 12, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
There are at least two kinds of “EV deniers” (as I call them), i.e., people who doubt that electric vehicles represent an improvement for the environment over gasoline. The first concept is that for the foreseeable future, an increase in the electric load means burning more coal. I.e., coal plants that would otherwise have been tamped down during off peak hours are instead running full-throttle through the night. Frequent commenter Glenn Doty points out that even California and the other states that have no coal buy power when they need it, and this ultimately means that somewhere, more coal is being burned.
Classically, I’ve addressed this by saying that we do indeed face the need to shut down coal plants; this is part of the reason that I favor a significant role of government in support of the migration to renewables and the ancillary areas: smart-grid, efficiency, conservation, energy storage, etc. I’ve also pointed out that the true externalities of fossil fuels are almost completely ignored in most of the arguments. E.g., as bad as coal is, it could be argued that it’s not as bad as oil because of international security issues. The costs (both financial and human) of war, terrorism, and civil unrest and injustice are enormous, and normally totally dismissed. As oil becomes scarcer, these problems will only get worse.
The other major class of objection Read More
Dan Sturges — Changing the Paradigm in Transportation
| March 9, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
I’m very proud of 2GreenEnergy’s dozen or so “associates,” who perform a huge variety of tasks for our clients – everything from raising capital, to performing engineering reviews, to marketing and public relations, social media, project management to IP protection. My aim is simple: When someone asks if we can do something for their clean energy business, I want the answer to always be a resounding Yes.
One of the associations we recently formed is one with Dan Sturges, in which we deliver cutting-edge thinking in transportation for city planners who may be looking for a better way of moving people and goods around a local area. For a century, we operated off a central paradigm in transportation:
Virtually everyone 16 years or older has his own car, a huge piece of steel that weighs Read More
EV Adoption Curve Will Benefit from Critical Mass
| March 8, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
My friend and colleague Tom Konrad does not share my belief that the consumer adoption of EVs is, to some degree, driven by perception of the long-term prognosis for electric transportation.” He writes:
If I’m buying an EV, why should I care if it’s the way of the future or not? My car will work as long as I have electricity and roads, the supply of neither of which is under threat. Owners of natural gas vehicles may need to worry about charging infrastructure, but while a robust charging network for EVs would be nice, it’s not absolutely necessary. If it works today, it will work 10 years from now.
I think, though it’s just a theory, that most people don’t want to own a form a transportation that few other people use — especially in this case. To the degree EVs do not catch on, there will be very little build-out of charging infrastructure, and very low resale value for used cars.
Changing the Equation for Electric Transportation
| March 7, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
I’ll be at the 26th International Electric Vehicle Symposium (“EVS26”) in Los Angeles in May. If anyone wants to meet me for a cup of coffee, please hit “Contact” and let me know.
The migration to electric transportation is going through a period that some of us anticipated: a bit of nervousness brought on by the fact that the value proposition for the consumer is simply not there yet. EV start-ups are having a hard time getting there, which has given the established auto industry a great deal of time to breathe, take its time, hedge its bets, and, perhaps most to its liking, milk the internal combustion engine cow a few more years.
Take the Ford Focus Electric, as an example of what I mean by consumer value proposition. I’m sure they’d explain it differently, but, at a high level, Ford has taken an extremely unexciting, garden variety passenger car, the Focus, ripped out Read More
Big Advancements in Electric Vehicle Batteries
| February 29, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
A reader asks my opinion of Envia Systems‘ lithium-ion battery. I reply:
If these claims are true, it’s a really important breakthrough — potentially even more significant than that of my friends at Eos Energy Storage.
The number one issue that electric vehicle nay-sayers throw in the face of us advocates is resistance of battery technology to rapid change: both in terms of cost and energy density. In particular, they say that where Moore’s Law (the idea that the functionality of technology increases exponentially over time) applies to things like integrated circuits, it absolutely does not apply to power systems like motors and batteries. I believe the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, and perhaps this is evidence of that. We’ll see.
Comparing the Environmental Impact of Conventional Vehicles, Hybrids, and Plug-ins
| February 26, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
Thanks to longtime reader Roberto DePaschoal for alerting me to this recent white paper from the Department of Engineering and Public Policy and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, at Carnegie Mellon University, comparing the environmental impact of conventional vehicles with hybrids and plug-in vehicles. The study considers the entire lifecycle, from extraction of the raw materials, construction, operation, and decommissioning. Read More
Video: The Future of Transportation
| February 25, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
When I’m in the television studio next week, I plan to shoot a video promoting 2GreenEnergy’s relationship with Dan Sturges, to facilitate our telling his story as a transportation visionary/futurist.
Let’s start with a tough question: Who says we need to be pro-active in evolving transportation? Don’t industries evolve on their own as R&D makes incremental improvements in adding features or reducing costs?
Put another way, is there anything truly broken about our approach to transportation? Well, it depends on how you define “broken.” Read More
