A Better Place battery switch at an event in Yokohomo, Japan.
Credit: Better Place; Photoalto
Bleary-eyed, just out of bed, you make your way to the garage. Groping your hand round the corner, you flick on the light and check the meter on the charge-indicator box attached to the wall. Overnight, the car has charged up nicely. It will easily get you to work and back, but it might be worth trying to add a little extra juice during breakfast, just in case.
At the press of a button you read the current price of electricity. You can probably get a better deal at the charge station at work during the day. It's Friday, so maybe if you charge up cheaply, you can even sell something back to the grid at a better price this evening. After all, you aren't expecting to go out.
Welcome to the world of plug-in electric cars! If you live in a city, there's a chance your next car will be fuelled from the grid. The driving experience won't seem radically different. Your vehicle will, if anything, be faster, as well as cleaner, quieter and easier to manoeuvre.
But a whole lifestyle and the segment of society that caters for it will change: how you purchase, fuel, maintain and use your car, as well as how it is manufactured, sold and serviced, where you buy your fuel, and where the parts are made.
In addition, the advent of plug-in electric vehicles may also hasten the spread of renewable energy, with the growing fleet stimulating demand and becoming a giant storage battery that can help to stabilise the electricity grid.
The demise and reorientation of the U.S. automobile industry - which saw the bankruptcy of the once-mighty General Motors in February 2009 - is just the beginning of a technological avalanche that could sweep away not only the world's major car makers, but also dependent industries such as parts manufacturers and service stations - even the neighbourhood mechanic.
In their place, a plethora of new enterprises will arise that lease cars and batteries; build and operate charge stations; design, make and program smart automotive electronics; and companies which process and recycle light metals and other new materials.
"When you consider what the new technologies that we apply to sustainable automotive engineering look like, and compare them with the current industry footprint, they are substantially different," says Barrie Finnin, manager of the Advanced Engineering Components team of Australia's national science agency the CSIRO, which works on components for automotive, defence and aerospace uses.
"The plug-in electric vehicle is utterly disruptive," says Richard Hunwick, a Sydney-based energy industry consultant. This is partly because it cannot be built on conventional production lines and would require a restructuring of the motoring industry and infrastructure.
Nevertheless, he believes the shift to plug-in electric cars is inevitable. And he's not alone. Almost every major car manufacturer - Toyota, Peugeot, General Motors, Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, Audi, Renault-Nissan, Volvo, Ford, Honda, Mercedes-Benz - has an electric vehicle either in production or slated for release over the next five years.
They have no choice, says Hunwick. "Plug-in electric vehicles are coming," he told an Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering symposium on alternative transport fuels in Melbourne in November 2008. "If any incumbents resist the trend, the demand will be met from start-up Chinese or Indian manufacturers." He points to legendary American financier Warren Buffett, who has already invested US$230 million in Chinese company BYD Auto, a battery maker headquartered in Shenzhen that has begun to manufacture plug-in electric cars.
Hunwick's argument is one of sheer numbers. The supply of oil is beginning to have trouble keeping up with demand, he says. Despite some relief courtesy of the current downturn in economic activity, no-one is in any doubt that oil prices are on the way up. Most oil forecasters see this as evidence that we have reached the peak of production, or will soon do so.
Yet, says Hunwick, the demand for cars in India, China and other developing economies is booming, and the world's 700 million registered vehicles is set to triple over the next two decades and could increase as much as sixfold by 2050. "There is no way that petroleum can hope to fuel all of these vehicles."
That's a particular problem for car-dependent countries, such as Australia and the U.S., which are importing an increasing proportion of their oil. All are becoming deeply concerned at the lack of security such dependence engenders. In March 2009, in the name of energy security, U.S. President Barack Obama announced US$2.4 billion of funding to support production of electric vehicles.
But energy independence isn't the only catalyst for the move to electric vehicles: there's also air pollution. In 1990, California passed the Zero-Emission Vehicle Mandate, which sent a shock wave through Detroit, home to three of the largest car manufactures, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.
Los Angeles, the freeway and smog capital of the world, had begun to fall out of love with the car - possibly because at that time as many as one in four children were suffering from severe asthma. The mandate bound any company that sold petroleum-fuelled vehicles in California to also manufacture cars that created no exhaust emissions.
What happened next is recounted in the 2006 U.S. documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? directed by Los Angeles film-maker Chris Paine. The U.S. car industry reacted in two ways. It began designing, developing and building electric vehicles. The results, such as GM's EV-1, were leased to eager customers, but rarely sold. At the same time, the manufacturers also began legal action. When they finally forced California to lower its emissions standards, they promptly recalled all the electric cars and scrapped them.
But automotive air pollution hasn't gone away - as anyone who lives in New Delhi or Bangkok will tell you. The 2008 Olympics in Beijing were made possible by a ban on more than one million vehicles from the roads along with the closure of scores of factories and a ban on construction activity. While cars are still powered by petroleum, the projected growth of vehicle use in developing economies is the stuff of pollution nightmares, and particularly of greenhouse gases.
Transport contributes about 15% of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions, of which passenger vehicles make up more than half. These are mainly in the form of carbon dioxide, but also nitrous oxide and various volatile organic compounds. As the number of cars on the road increases, it is difficult to see how any developed country, and many developing economies, can hope to make inroads on their carbon footprint without a concerted attack on the level of vehicle emissions. The White House has already set the ball rolling in the U.S. by mandating a 30% reduction in vehicle emissions by 2016.
Originally, increasing fuel efficiency was going to help. And indeed we've managed to improve fuel use by 20% over the past two decades - but most of that has been offset by increased vehicle size, says David Lamb, an advisor to the CSIRO on automotive policy and strategy in Melbourne. (Holden's
E-Commodore, a family-sized petrol-electric hybrid concept car developed jointly with the CSIRO as the 'VIP Guest Vehicle' for the Sydney Olympics Torch Relay in 2000, was his idea.)
At the time, the saviour was going to be the switch to hydrogen as a fuel, he says, but there is still no way to produce hydrogen efficiently on a commercial scale without using fossil fuels. Safe storage, transfer and transport are also a problem, and the fuel cells required to turn gas into (electric) energy are expensive. In fact, the U.S. Department of Energy has recently downgraded hydrogen research.
The solution to all of these problems has been around since the beginning of motoring. Before World War I, electric vehicles were used for urban haulage, as taxis and delivery trucks. They relied on a sophisticated battery exchange system and out-performed their petrol-based competitors. But they were run off the road by the flexibility of the internal combustion engine (ICE), which gave the vehicles much greater range and could take people anywhere there was petrol.
Now, it seems, electric cars are on the way back. If their batteries are charged by renewable energy, not only do they produce zero emissions, greenhouse gas or otherwise, but also an electric motor can convert more than 90% of power into useful motion, whereas the efficiency of the combustion engine is still less than 20%. And recent advances in electronics can provide us with advances in safety and manoeuvrability.
The major barriers to widespread popularity are price, and the car's relatively small range - existing battery systems trade off weight, capacity and cost to provide a driving distance of between 100 and 160 km. This small distance may not be a problem for urban drivers, however. A recent Sydney study conducted by Lamb reported that 70% of journeys were 30 km or less, and recent data from the U.S. suggests 77% of trips taken there are 48 km or less.
To break through these barriers, and still provide high performance cars, manufacturers have come up with three basic design strategies. Two are hybrids, which carry and use both electric and ICE engines. The ICE keeps these vehicles going when the limit of the battery has been reached, but it is still a source of gaseous emissions. For oil independence, pollution and greenhouse gas purists, only an all-electric vehicle charged by renewable energy will do - and that demands durable, lightweight batteries that will store enough power for hundreds of kilometres, or a battery that can be charged or swapped at any time.
The electric vehicles you can buy today, such as the Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic Hybrid, are known as 'parallel hybrids' (see p63). Introduced 12 years ago, this is proven technology and we already know they are typically twice as fuel efficient as a petroleum-fuelled car, that the battery pack lasts at least eight years and that the cars are good for a couple of hundred thousand kilometres.
These vehicles are not disruptive technologies. They can be built using conventional production lines, and fuelled at traditional service stations. And the technology can be applied to most current car models. Until the sharp increase in petrol prices in the latter half of 2007, however, consumers tended to shy away from them, because they were considerably more expensive than an equivalent ICE car. Most industry analysts view them as a transitional form.
In the alternative, the 'series hybrid' or 'serial hybrid' (see p63), a small engine powers a generator to keep the battery packs charged. The design concept is yet to be introduced on a commercial basis in cars, but is the basis of GM's long-mooted Chevrolet Volt. GM claims the strategy can extend the range of the vehicle to 600 km, and has the added advantage of fuel flexibility. The auxiliary ICE can be powered by anything from vegetable oil to hydrogen, or it can be replaced or assisted by any other power generating source.
And it's efficient. A life-cycle analysis of the production and use of biofuels, such as corn or recycled vegetable oil, recently published in the U.S. journal Science by a team at the University of California, Merced, concluded that cars would travel 81% further if the energy in biofuels were first converted to electricity rather than used directly.
But that's not good enough for the folks at Better Place, the innovative Israeli-Californian company established by software entrepreneur Shai Agassi to end the world's dependency on oil. For them, nothing short of zero emission, all-electric vehicles powered by renewable energy will do. And they plan to do it now, using presently available technology.
The plan is simple, if revolutionary. It starts with the installation of a home charge point through which the vehicle would plug into the electricity grid whenever it is in the garage, typically overnight. A fully charged battery in the morning would be good for around 160 km in urban motoring conditions. The home charge point, however, will be supplemented by charge points at work, in public parking stations and at supermarkets.
The charging of the battery is regulated by smart technology within the vehicle, which communicates with a Better Place control centre and the grid. Better Place can then ensure that the car is charged with renewably generated electricity at the cheapest off-peak price. For longer trips, or if caught short, an on-board navigation system integral to the technology will direct the driver to the nearest switch station, where the depleted battery can be swapped for a charged one - using a robot battery loader - within a couple of minutes.
A suitable car has already been designed and made by Renault-Nissan, and the charge station technology was unveiled in Japan in May 2009 (you can watch footage showing it swapping the battery in a car in less than 90 seconds at www.betterplace.com/solution/charging/). Cars equipped to use the system would have to come equipped with a standard access point underneath.
Critics are not so sure it will work. Thomas Weber, director of group research and car development at Mercedes, cannot see the motor industry agreeing to such a high level of standardisation, and worries that battery swapping is inherently unsafe. Some bloggers grumble about the vehicles being small and batteries having to be changed every two hours of driving. Others, such as Jonathan Read, president of electric transportation and storage company ECOtality in Scottsdale, Arizona, believe that at about US$500,000 for a switch station and hundreds of dollars a charge point, Better Place's investment is an expensive layer infrastructure society does not need - particularly with fast-charging batteries on the horizon.
Not so, says the company. It argues that the distribution infrastructure is already in place: the electricity grid. Better Place is just adding nodes, it says, and that's a small price to pay for clean air, reduced carbon emissions and energy independence. "Let's put the numbers in some sort of framework," Agassi told a business forum in Washington DC in 2008. "At US$500 a car you could get off oil. In the U.S. that's US$100 billion, that's two months worth of oil. Not a single bit of new science required - no research, nothing."
At least initially, electricity utilities are also on board. Better Place Australia already has an agreement with supplier AGL to work together on their electric vehicle network. "A key reason we are involved is that it gives more incentive for us to build further renewable energy generating capacity," says AGL manager of carbon and renewables, Chris Cormack.
Another advantage of the Better Place initiative, he says, is that any added demand for energy would be regulated through a central point which will direct cars when to charge and when not to, smoothing the load. "You don't really want a whole bunch of cars coming home at six o'clock and charging, because that would put more strain on the grid."
In fact, it's likely that within a few years all electric vehicles sold will be capable of being plugged into the electricity grid for charging. While some experts predict that more than 80% of passenger cars on the world's roads will be electric by 2050, the initial take-up will be relatively slow. In this phase, the impact on the grid should be minimal, says Lamb. "There are many times during any 24-hour period when a car could be recharged with 'spare' energy by using intelligent devices that can ascertain the load on the grid, drawing energy only when demand is lower than the amount being generated."
But as a greater and greater proportion of the passenger fleet incorporates battery packs capable of being charged and discharged at rates of up to 10 kW and storing between 10 and 20 kWh of electricity, things start to become interesting. With smart metering and control systems, these plug-in vehicles cannot only draw power from the grid, they can store and put power back into the grid. With 100,000 such cars (about 10% of the number sold in Australia each year) parked and connected to the grid, you would have a capacity of supplying power at the rate of 1,000,000 kW - the equivalent of a large coal-fired power station.
Such vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology has been under development for more than a decade by a research team led by energy policy expert Willett Kempton, director of the Centre for Carbon-free Power Integration at the University of Delaware, Newark, among others. The government of New South Wales has just taken delivery of a car equipped with an Australian version of V2G developed by a group led by Chris Dunstan of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney.
These are the harbingers of technology that not only will allow car owners to store and sell back electricity, powering their houses in a blackout, but also allow grid operators to 'park' renewable energy and manage peak periods of demand more smoothly. And there are also potential benefits for those who manage large building complexes and commercial parking stations. In short, plug-in cars could replace the need for extra fossil-fuelled power stations to cover the peaks and allow more renewable energy to be used.
But at what cost? Although battery prices are dropping rapidly, there's no doubt they are expensive, currently adding more than A$10,000 to the price of electric vehicles. Once purchased, however, the cost of operation is low. On current prices, electric vehicles run for between 1¢ and 2¢ per kilometre, compared with about 14¢ for a petrol-fuelled car. And with few moving parts, maintenance costs of electric motors tend to be small as well.
In one of the most rigorous comparisons yet, the Electric Power Research Institute in California calculates that over the course of their life cycle, electric vehicles using present technology end up costing about the same as conventional petroleum-fuelled vehicles. This is without incentives and does not count the cost of improved air quality.
So, if electric vehicles could be priced over their life cycle, they could become competitive on economic terms alone. One obvious way of doing this would be a leasing plan for electric cars where, like mobile phones, the cost of the technology and its operation is paid by the month.
Better Place is already on the case. Its idea is to separate the cost of the battery from the price of the car. You buy your vehicle without a battery at a competitive price, and then Better Place provides you with a fuelling solution, which includes battery, electricity to charge it, access to switch stations and charge points, and the software to run the system. It will all be at a contractually agreed price, because the company can negotiate with the electricity retailer for a predetermined bulk supply.
But all of this would demand a different approach to retailing cars from the current system, where vehicles are sold through dealerships that make their money from servicing and from providing parts and added extras. Although they may have one, electric motors have no need of a gearbox. And they allow easy incorporation of the emerging electronic technologies - electronic throttle, cruise control, stability control, braking and eventually electronic steering.
In fact, apart from the tyres and wheels, the linkages for steering, the brake pads and possibly the drive chain (depending on where the motor is located), there are few mechanical parts to wear, lubricate or fail. Servicing will happen less often. And it will revolve more around replacing or reprogramming microprocessors and electronic sensors and attending to wiring, than the traditional grease and oil change, filters, spark plugs and timing.
The holy grail of the electric car design is even more radical: in-wheel engines. Already GM and components manufacturers such as Continental Automotive in Regensburg, Germany, are working on small electronic engine modules which would be incorporated into the wheels of vehicles and controlled electronically. These engines could be individually accelerated and braked - allowing enormous and very precise control over traction, with an engine efficiency of greater than 95%, according to Continental Automotive.
Not only that, but the complete absence of a drive train linking a central engine to the wheels would provide an enormous flexibility in designing future cars. Some are even talking about the capacity to turn the wheels at right angles and park a vehicle sideways.
Again, although initially such technology would increase the price of cars, many proponents argue that the safety, maintenance and efficiency advantages would reduce the overall costs of car ownership and the public costs of operating a transportation system. But such wholesale introduction of electronic technology would have to be accompanied by enormous changes in the car industry.
"Much of the maintenance side would be similar," says CSIRO's Finnin, "except you would need to train your staff to deal with high-power electrical systems." But the plants that currently manufacture ICEs are not a good fit for making electric machines, he says. "Electric machines need you to make windings of copper wire and perhaps making stators (stationary parts of electric motors) by stamping laminations of different alloys. Sometimes you use permanent magnets. All of these raise a whole set of different issues for manufacturing, but there are already electric motor manufacturers in Australia."
The key component to make it all happen is the humble battery. Vast amounts of money have been thrown at research into battery technology over the past couple of decades, and there is more to come. The U.S. government has put up US$2.4 billion in funding to stimulate battery manufacture. Perhaps that's not surprising given forecasts that the battery market will grow from US$9 billion to US$150 billion by 2030 on the back of electric cars.
Though inexpensive, the lead-acid battery, the staple of the auto industry until now, is just too heavy for the amount of charge it stores. While there has been no magic solution, the front-running technology to replace it is based on the lithium ion batteries used in mobile phones and computers. It has a high energy density (charge stored per kilogram), and it can be charged and discharged repeatedly without degrading as fast as the lead-acid battery.
In attempting to scale lithium technology up from small appliances to electric vehicles, there have been issues of safety and questions raised about where the lithium will come from to manufacture the batteries. The safety issue has to do with overcharging and discharging, which may lead to overheating and fires.
A Californian company, Tesla - which aimed to change people's perceptions of electric vehicles by selling a high-performance, all-electric sports car - bypassed the problem by devising a clever means of combining computer battery packs into a vast auto battery, says Andrew Simpson, an engineer who recently spent two years at Tesla building prototypes of the latest Roadster, and is now a research fellow at the Curtin University Sustainable Policy Institute in Perth, Western Australia.
He doesn't think that sourcing lithium will be a problem. "It's extremely widespread. There are natural deposits of lithium salts in lakes all over the world. And the ocean is full of lithium. Lithium salts are one of the components of sea water."
The controls on charging and discharging lithium ion batteries are now good enough that they are being supplied to Better Place by at least two companies, A123 Systems of Boston and Automotive Energy Supply Corp, a joint venture between Nissan and NEC. Another solution has been to play with the chemistry, particularly the development of lithium ion phosphate batteries. While these batteries are inherently safe, they are slow to charge.
But researchers led by Gerbrand Ceder at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston caused a stir with a paper in the British journal Nature early in 2009, claiming that by coating the lithium ion phosphate with a glasslike form of lithium phosphate, they could increase the charge rate by hundreds of times. They speak of car batteries that charge in minutes. If their findings translate into a commercial product, it will transform the electric vehicle horizon.
The Better Place switch stations, for instance, could be challenged by fast charge points at fast food outlets or convenience stores. Perhaps solar or wind farms connected to charge stations would become viable in rural and remote areas. Bring it on, was the response from a spokesman for Better Place: the more competition the better.
Another alternative is provided by CSIRO's 'ultrabattery' - a combination of a super capacitor, which charge and discharge almost instantly, with a lead-acid battery to hold the charge. It is relatively heavy, but inexpensive, and ideal for capturing electricity from regenerative braking. It is a competitive option for electric vehicles where weight is less of a concern such as forklifts and buses.
It's a good example of different strokes for different folks. And that's what the introduction of electric vehicles will look like, says Simpson. "There will be lots of types of vehicles. I wouldn't suggest there will be a single silver bullet technology that will be the answer for everyone. There will be very healthy markets for many different options."
The disruptive avalanche is primed to be triggered. Already many governments are providing or considering incentives for consumers to make the switch to electric and hybrid vehicles. In the U.S., for instance, the federal government already offers tax incentives of up to US$3,500 on hybrid cars, with many states offering additional tax relief. The Canadian province of Ontario has announced rebates of between US$3,700 and US$9,350, and Britain is also planning relief of up to US$7,500, though what form it will take is unknown. China is considering equivalent incentives.
While no incentives are available in Australia at present, Hunwick suggests measures such as reductions on registration of electric vehicles and access to transit lanes as well as more direct purchase subsidies. He also wants state and local governments to purchase plug-ins for their fleets, when they become available. "There is only one fuel good for the very long haul - electricity, ultimately from fully renewable sources."
THE HYBRID CAR
PARALLEL HYBRIDS
A parallel hybrid has an internal combustion engine that works jointly with a small electric motor to drive the wheels. The motor can run from the battery during short in-town driving, then use the engine to recharge during less intense power demand, such as cruising the freeway. It also converts kinetic energy from braking into battery power instead of dissipating it as heat.
SERIAL HYBRIDS
A serial hybrid has only an electric motor connected to the drive train. It uses a small petrol engine to generate power for the motor, which charges a battery and in turn powers the motor to drive the wheels. The engine generates electricity when the battery drops below a minimum level. A cheaper and more reliable battery pack can be used.
ZERO EMISSION?
What does it mean to claim that a car has 'zero emissions'? Nothing. No matter what the technology, there will always be some emissions associated with generating the electricity to charge an electric vehicle (or hydrogen to fuel a hydrogen car). Thus, 'zero emissions' is a misnomer, the best that can be hoped for is 'low emissions'.
If an electric car is charged by 'green' electricity such as solar, wind, hydro or nuclear, then it truly is a low-emissions vehicle (as Better Place is planning). If the electricity comes from fossil-fuel generators, then the story is more complicated.
How low is low? As a reference point, let's use the published emissions data for a conventional Toyota Corolla sedan - producing 171 g/km in emissions - and compare it to a Nissan Leaf electric car.
A Nissan Leaf uses 15 kWh energy per 100 km travelled. As a rule of thumb, when electricity is generated and delivered to the consumer, the carbon dioxide emissions are around:
• 1,300 g/kWh for brown coal (or 190g/km travelled)
• 800 g/kWh for black coal (120 g/km travelled)
• 400 g/kWh for natural gas (60 g/km travelled)
• Max 100 g/kWh for 'green' electricity (less than 15 g/km travelled)
If running on green electricity, the carbon dioxide emissions profile of an electric car is superb. The emissions performance with electricity from natural gas is very good. The emissions performance with electricity from coal is in the same range as a comparable petrol powered car.
The costs: In Australia, travelling 100 km in the Nissan Leaf electric car would cost $2.85 if charged at peak electricity rates ($0.19 per kWh) or $1.20 if charged at off-peak rates ($0.08 per kWh). Travelling the same distance in the Toyota Corolla using 7.3 litres of petrol per 100 km would cost $9.50 (at $1.30 per litre).
Sounds too good to be true? It is: the batteries are expensive. That's why the leasing scheme like Better Place is so important.
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Tim Thwaites is a science journalist in Melbourne and the president of the Australian Science Communicators.
