Archive for August, 2009

Part I of a two-part series on the development of electric energy storage, starting with the storage we need and continuing on Aug. 31 with a look at the technologies and the political challenges they face.

Unlike our information system with its local hard drives and remote data centers, our electric grid has virtually no storage.

At our peak energy-using hours, or when the weather calls for indoor warming or cooling, the grid must generate more power in order to meet more demand. It does this by turning on more capacity — “peaker plants,” which cost significantly more to run than bulk power plants.

Similarly, about 15% of the energy in the grid is always kept in reserve to ensure power performance when a grid flow needs balancing. The reserve is very rarely used and so, as it can’t be stored, it is usually wasted. Yet its business and its emissions costs must be paid.

This huge waste has always been accepted by utilities. Running peaker plants or just excess of bulk power has been arguably cheaper and certainly less risky than investments in experimental storage — or in other kinds of efficiency.

With little policy constraint on energy production or use, there’s been little incentive for reform. But this is beginning to change, driven by forecasts of rising demand, by pressures (CO2-based and otherwise) on supply, and by the first shifts of a centrally-organized and hierarchical system toward a more distributed model.

The 2005-2009 Bush DOE budgets allocated about $11 million to electric energy storage research, development and deployment (EES RD&D); versus $2.5 billion for fossil fuels RD&D. The Obama stimulus package put real money on the table, allocating $210 million in matching grants to utility EES RD&D. It allocates $1.5 billion in matching grants to building battery manufacturing capacity, associated with the development of electric vehicles.

An EES story is unfolding amid the contexts of a scrambling-to-change centralized grid and an emerging model of distributed energy. And against it being anyone’s guess whether centralized and distributed systems will ultimately compete or be complementary.

Storage is needed to reduce significantly the financial and emissions costs of keeping everyday grid performance reliable, and to enable renewable power resources to be integrated into the electric system on a massive scale. It is needed to enable power generation, transmission, and distribution, the components of the centralized grid. It is also a critical enabler of decentralized energy models — that is, of energy systems at the edges of or even off the grid.

“Energy storage is an essential enabling technology for a low‐carbon power system.” — Nicholas Institute For Environmental Policy Solutions, Duke University

GRID-TIED STORAGE

Today’s centralized U.S. electric grid (under a limited central control yet comprised of 3,200 utilities, several regional transmission service areas, and many independent power providers) has two essential uses for storage. It is used to maintain power performance, locally and regionally, amid the ebbs and flows of what is both a physical system and a marketplace. It is also used to reduce the grid’s operational costs.

Yet its role is minimal in both areas, accounting for only 3% of electric power production capacity. A third essential use comes on line with the integration of renewables, intermittent resources (needing the sun to shine or the wind to blow) that cannot deliver continuous high-performance power. A fourth comes on line with the electrification of vehicles and a vehicle-to-grid infrastructure.

In the way the grid has developed over 125 years, generation refers to the points at which electricity is made from feedstock, such as coal, natural gas and hydro power. Transmission refers to the movement of electricity via wires from generation points to areas of usage—to the substations around metropolitan Pittsburgh, for example. Distribution refers to movements of electricity from substations to places where electricity is used.

Each of these system sectors has technology, business, regulatory, and interconnection infrastructures.

Supporting Performance: Local performance or power quality is affected by occurrences as diverse as supply and demand variations in the electricity market, and partial or full system failures that originate at points of generation, transmission, or distribution. We all know that even bad weather can be a culprit. We watch the power flicker or go out.

It happens rarely in the U.S., though, because grid managers use expensive means, which move small amounts of electricity very fast, to maintain reliability. These crisis situations have high dollar and CO2 costs, because managers turn to spinning reserves, wasteful as they increase by 15% to 20% the amount of generation that must always be available, or to expensive spot markets. Often they also confront clogged transmission lines.

Energy stored across the generation, transmission and distribution grid, thus closer to problems wherever they surface, and designed for rapid movement, would give managers a lower cost, far cleaner alternative for use in performance support.

Supporting Efficiencies: Utilities hedge the costs to make, transport, and distribute electricity with a set of strategies. The lower their costs, the lower the costs to consumers. Keeping system costs relatively low will become even more important as the social costs of carbon are added to the total price.

Being regulated, utilities must deliver power everywhere, even to low-population areas, and they must deliver highest quality power at all times. At peak usage times or when the temperature makes people ratchet up air conditioners or heaters, the grid must still perform perfectly. It does this by accessing “peaker” capacity — energy plants that generate lots of power but run infrequently, and therefore, because of start up costs, expensively.

Peaker power is called “dispatchable,” differentiated from bulk power. Some peaker facilities operate less than 10 hours per year. This gross inefficiency is being addressed by efforts to lower demand in peak usage hours, through the use of “demand response” information technology tools that use various methods to dynamically lower system usage as needed.

By becoming a demand response tool, storage will provide cleaner and cheaper alternatives to fossil-fuel peaker plants, and will reduce the need for the transmission and distribution build outs that follow population shifts. When supply is stretched, the grid manager will be able to flow stored energy into the system.

Supporting Renewables: While the early penetration of renewable energy feedstocks, primarily onshore wind, into the U.S. electrical grid have not suffered from their single major weakness, the penetration at scale of renewables won’t be accomplished without effective workarounds. The weakness is the variability of wind and solar: Where the wind is not blow or the sun is not shining, the grid fails at these points of generation.

This represents a major potential degradation of the grid, where both bulk and dispatchable power sources, however high their CO2 content, have been reliable. Coal and natural gas plants simply turn on and work. Wind and solar have both regular (for solar, night) and and irregular (for solar, rainy days) periods of failure. The first generations of wind power systems have been able to depend on existing peaker capacity to even out their variability, but this is neither a scalable economic solution nor a CO2 solution.

Energy storage, however, can be a major contributor to the necessary workaround. At the points of renewable generation, solar or wind farms whatever their sizes, storage can provide reliability without additional transmission costs. There will be generation, transmission, and distribution applications for different storage technologies, to support the integration of renewables for both grid performance and grid efficiency.

“Electric energy storage technology has the potential to facilitate the large-scale deployment of variable renewable electricity generation, such as wind and solar power, which is an important option for reducing GHG emissions from the electric power sector.” —Pew Center on Global Climate Change

DISTRIBUTED STORAGE

Much like the telecommunications industry of the 1980s, today’s utility industry maintains a ubiquitous, largely static infrastructure. A few years ago, its R&D budget was less relative to its revenues than the pet food industry’s, and it had changed little in eight decades.

Reluctance to change, perceived or real, has led to a movement that seeks to modernize electrical usage at the edges of the system, in buildings and neighborhoods that would be partly or wholly independent of the grid. These places would need local, distributed storage. Conversely, early stage efforts to electrify vehicles has led some industry participants to experiment with aggregating distributed local storage to support grid performance and efficiencies.

The linchpin on all this is that for distributed, local storage to scale it will have to be inexpensive and safe.

Supporting Electrified Transportation: Driven by oil security and climate change concerns, the U.S. has made transportation electrification a priority. Evidence for this is the $1.5 billion in stimulus matching grants allocated to build domestic vehicle battery and component manufacturing capacity.

U.S. consumer electricity consumption would increase 50% if everyone owned and nightly recharged a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). The utility business would grow by 50%. In addition, the new load, distributed nationally across neighborhood garages and charging stations, would potentially be available to the electric power grid as local storage. Utilities could aggregate it locally to use as a demand response resource, thereby improving the utility’s performance and efficiency.

At present, however, the main thing working against this vision is the lack of scalable storage technology.

“The transportation energy storage market will grow from $12.9 billion in 2008 to $19.9 billion in 2012 … principally driven by light electric vehicle shipments rising from about 500,000 to nearly three million as new plug-in hybrid and pure electric vehicles emerge.” —Lux Research

Supporting Community Energy: The model of affordable portable storage, with development funding from transportation stakeholders, has great additional appeal for the less-leveraged distributed energy movement. Very simply, a PHEV not in use could feed its stored energy into the local system or building instead of into the utility distribution network.

Likewise, this hypothetical portable, inexpensive storage could be used directly for community energy; an apartment building could have a dozen PHEV storage units in its parking garage and stand-alone units in its basement. A CO2-free community energy system might only use solar energy and storage.

A microgrid—microgrids being large integrated systems, like the facilities of a university, that minimized or eliminated grid connections—might rely on hundreds or thousands of storage units. One utility, AEP, is testing community storage, putting a few secure, now expensive units in to support the houses on a street.

EES is essential to a clean energy ecosystem, but it faces business, technological, and political challenges. In Part II of this series, we will look at the technologies and political changes needed to meet our future storage demands.
Source:solveclimate.com

Honda is poised to become a player in the Electric Vehicle market.
A spokesperson for the company, Japan’s No. 2 automaker, said it was developing an electric car but had not decided when to launch it.
The company could also not comment on the Nikkei business daily’s report, without sources, that a prototype of the car would be unveiled at the Tokyo Motor Show in October.
The vehicle is expected to be around the size of a minicar, the Nikkei said.
Other automakers such as Toyota Motor Corp and Volkswagen AG have also announced plans to launch electric cars in the next few years.
But they say it could take decades for the vehicles to spread due to their high cost, limited driving range and long charging times with the current battery technology. Others appear to be more optimistic, with some believing that EV’s and Plug-In Hybrid EV’s will dominate new car technology by 2030. Some manufacturers have been caught behind the curve on EV and PHEV development including Honda, which until recently was betting on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as the new transport breakthrough, though a huge amount of infrastructure would be needed to create a network of filling stations. As electrical grid is already pervasive in most developed and developing countries, the issue of infrastructure for charging EV and PHEV vehicles is easier and cheaper to implement. Charging times can be accelerated by providing higher voltage/amperage DC charging and most newer vehicles with the newest Lithium-Ion batteries will be able to complete an 80% charge in as little as 20 minutes, making the electric vehicle almost as convenient to fuel as their petroleum-powered counterparts.
Nissan Motor Co, Japan’s third biggest automaker, unveiled its electric car “Leaf” earlier this month with plans to begin selling it in the United States, Japan and Europe towards the end of 2010.
Source: Honda
via Nikkei Business Daily

Build Your Dream (BYD), has repealed its decision to push it’s electric vehicle launch in North America back. It has now been reset to its original launch time of next year.

The announcement that BYD’s electric vehicles would be back on schedule could have to do with the increasingly competitive electric car market. Most recently, the announcement of the Nissan Leaf with its 100-mile range and low price tag, has added to the mix of low price, long range electric vehicles coming into the US market in 2010.

The Chinese automaker has a few a aces up its sleeve coming into the electric vehicle market in that its backed by the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffet, and specializes in battery technology.

The first BYD all-electric vehicle expected to his the US market will be a five seat e6 crossover. Due to the BYD’s experience in battery technology, it is expected to an impressive range of 186 miles. While the cost is expected to be around $40,000, don’t expect to be picking one up anytime soon. Initial launch will see only a few hundred vehicles spread through select markets as well as to government agencies, utilities and some eco-friendly celebrities.
Source: EcoAutoNinja.com

Aug 7, 2009 3:08 PM, By Sean Kilcarr, senior editor
Electric vehicles grant

The electric vehicle industry is getting a major shot in the arm with $2.4 billion in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy – funding coming from the $787 billion in spending and tax cuts encompassed within the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act or “stimulus bill” passed by Congress back in February.

“This marks the single largest investment in advanced battery technology for hybrid and electric-drive vehicles ever made,” said Secy. of Energy Steven Chu. “They will help achieve President Obama’s goal of putting one million plug-in hybrid vehicles on the road by 2015. And, most importantly, they will launch an advanced battery industry in America and make our auto industry cleaner and more competitive.”

Those grants are focused on funding three key areas of the electric vehicle industry:

1. Roughly $1.5 billion for battery and battery component production, plus battery recycling;
2. Some $500 million for production of electric drive vehicle components, motors, and electronics;
3. $400 million to fund purchase incentives for plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles for demonstrations, as well as funds to build recharging infrastructure and workforce training.

“This is transformational, and not just in terms of the dollar amount,” Jennifer Watts, spokesperson for the Electric Drive Transportation Association (EDTA), told FleetOwner. “This level of government investment creates a strong policy direction for electric vehicles, making them appeal to investors over both the medium and long term.”

It’s also critical that the grants are “across the board” in the electric vehicle industry, funding not just vehicle development but the creation of recharging infrastructure while funding new battery research. “You can’t just have a shot in the arm in one area of this industry,” Watts explained. “It brings everyone to the table – electric car and truck makers, battery makers, etc. It makes sure all the pieces of the puzzle are in place so electric vehicles can make an impact.”

For example, Navistar received $39 million in funds for its Wakarusa, IN, manufacturing facility to develop and build all-electric delivery vehicles in partnership with British electric truck maker Modec. The deal would see a Navistar-Modec joint venture build electric Class 2 and 3 commercial vehicles for North, Central and South American markers – primarily for urban-suburban pickup and delivery service.

Navistar said plans call for building 400 of the all-electric light duty trucks in 2010 and expects that within a couple of years several thousand such vehicles will be produced annually. “These will be city delivery and UPS/FedEx style electric trucks – medium- and light-duty models,” Roy Wiley, Navistar’s head of corporate communications, told FleetOwner. “This is where it is at for electric truck demand at the present time.”

Smith Electric Vehicles U.S. Corp. received a $10 million DOE grant toward the production of its all-electric medium-duty commercial trucks unveiled in Washington D.C. last week – both for a nationwide demonstration project to validate the unit’s performance across a range of climates and locations as well as fund purchasing incentives to reduce the cost of its electric vehicle.

“[With these grants] the Obama Administration demonstrated its commitment to this fast-emerging industry,” said Bryan Hansel, Smith’s CEO. “This demonstration fleet will allow major corporations to evaluate the technology at greatly reduced cost, which we expect will rapidly accelerate the shift from trial phase to volume orders.”

Electric Transportation Engineering Corporation (eTec), a subsidiary of ECOtality, received $99.8 million in federal funds to test and analyze electric vehicle usage and charging infrastructure – and it’s partnering with Nissan North America on a project to deploy up to 5,000 electric vehicles and 12,750 charging stations in five U.S. markets.
Source: Fleet Owner.com

In the past electric vehicles have had a bit of fear attached to them: What if I run out of juice and can’t recharge? AAA can’t simply dispatch a truck with a gallon of electrons to refill the tank. The fear has enough of a grain of truth behind it to be real. The truth of EV ownership is that with care the range limits aren’t as much of a problem as the stereotype would have you think. Further, Nissan has thought very carefully about this problem and has a very good solution. (part 1: Nissan announces the LEAF, an affordable zero-emissions electric car, part 3: Technical specifications for the Nissan LEAF, part 4: Turning over the Nissan LEAF (to look inside)

The LEAF has a claimed 100 mile range. Statistics say the average driver covers 25 miles per day, or so, meaning a 100 mile range would cover far more than average daily driving needs. Nissan claims the range will satisfy 80% of drivers even if their only charging station is at home. Nissan’s EV isn’t the first one to provide a 100 mile range, the GM’s NiMH EV1 and Toyota’s RAV4-EV both had near or over 100 miles range. If history is any judge there will be news articles describing the 100 mile range as an unbearable limitation. Or maybe Nissan has thought this through well enough to satisfy everybody but those with the most hardcore of long range driving.

First, Nissan describes three charging scenarios. In the home charging scenario, the car owner is relying on their charging station at home and can make trips up to 50 miles distance from their home. In the destination charging scenario, the car owner has a destination (such as their workplace) where they can charge making their total daily range closer to 200 miles. In the pathway charging scenario, the car owner plugs in at charging stations they find as they drive around.

Charging stations are not a new idea, they’ve existed for over 100 years. The prior wave of electric cars in the late 90’s caused a wave of charging stations to be installed. Experience showed a person could plug in their car as they drive around town, stopping at businesses where charging stations have been installed, and have a much longer effective driving range. Todays charging stations are much more advanced than the prior generation, and for example Coulomb Technologies offers an interesting business opportunity for businesses to operate commercial charging stations. But what if you’re driving around an unfamiliar neighborhood and don’t know where the nearest charging stations is?

Nissan is including a navigation system which shows whether the desired destination is within the current range of the battery pack. The navigation system will also know the location of charging stations and can direct the driver to one as required. Further the navigation system may be able to determine the greenest route to take. This sort of assistance should ease the range anxiety.

In short the Nissan LEAF offers an adequate range for 80% of driving needs. As the networks of charging stations are installed a LEAF owner could stop for opportunity charging easily extending driving range. Additionally the LEAF has a quick charging mode offering a full recharge in under 30 minutes, but which requires a very high power three-phase circuit. This well thought-out series of charging options should do a lot to resolve range anxiety.
Source: David Herron at the Examiner.com

Source: Bloomberg
Class: SYNDICATED NEWS

SYNOPSIS: The Japanese automaker has said it will have the capacity to produce 200,000 electric vehicles in the U.S., 100,000 in Europe and 50,000 in Japan

Nissan Motor Co. Chief Executive Officer Carlos Ghosn said electric cars will make up at least 10 percent of global vehicle demand by 2020, depending on conditions.

“Ten percent by 2020 is very reasonable,” Ghosn said, referring to research by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Demand estimates are based on Nissan’s assessment of rising energy prices and tougher environmental regulations, Ghosn said at a news conference today after the opening of the automaker’s new headquarters in Yokohama, south of Tokyo.
Source:EV World