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GM, Utilities Partner To Advance Plug-In Hybrids
chareverie writes "General Motors is forming a team with utility companies nationwide to create a charging infrastructure for electric cars. Their goal is to improve the design of charging stations — making them weatherproof and child-proof, for example — in locations such as public garages, meters, and parking lots. They're also working on ways to avoid overwhelming the utilities during peak hours. Their goal is to have these improved charging stations implemented by 2010, when the Chevy Volt is introduced. Everyone recognizes however that a national car-charging infrastructure would be far from complete at that time."
If the Volt is everything it is rumored to be, I would buy it even if gas were back down at 50 cents a gallon. The reasons are simple: not only is it better for the environment, but it requires far less (maybe even none depending on how you drive) of a non-renewable resource like oil. So long as oil remains a non-renewable resource, any dips in price will be strictly temporary.
I would hope that at least some of us have learned our lesson from this most recent fuel crisis: oil is simply not a sustainable way to get our energy over the long term.
You'll need a GM Certified "Super VOLT-adapter" for just $499.99 for any non-VOLT electric car to use this grid. (Licensing and Taxes may apply, adapter not sold in California or Alaska).
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
Just as Eisenhower signed off on the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act to kickstart the roads system in the US so too should the government act to fund this.
We have to go electric in the future, gas power isn't a viable long term solution and oil is going to be too valuable in the future to waste on driving around. But the 'free market' isn't going to fund the kind of network we need in the short term. Sure, they'll build the cars but infrastructure costs are beyond them.
Without a national infrastructure program the move towards electric transportation will be slow and patchy. This really is a case of if we build it they will come.
I don't know where you live, but where _I_ live, most power is either coal, hydro, or nuclear.
I checked the US as well, oil was the source of only 3% of the nation's power in 2005.
http://www.teachengineering.com/collection/cub_/lessons/cub_images/cub_earth_lesson08_figure5.jpg
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Very, very few people will pay new-car prices for a car that will go 150 miles then require a 3-hour recharge.
Yeah, because my friends and I all drive more than 150 miles every day.
If it leads to a proprietary method which other automakers and utilities must license with fees then I am hoping someone else comes along and whacks them.
I still think while we are doing our typical over reaction; c'mon Europeans put up with prices higher than this; at least this over reaction is leading somewhere good. Granted it may mean life with even more SUVs as the technology will make their mileage acceptable. Since the majority of SUV/CUV don't do any heavy towing it can easily be adapted to their increased carrying capacities.
I guess giving up the "frivolous" luxuries was too much to ask
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Right. And all those people had to have SUVs because of all the off-roading they do.
What people need doesn't enter into it.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
GM's finally seeing the light, I want a Volt. But PG&E's regulated rate structure will put me at 400% of baseline and US$0.35 / KWh to charge it. $5.00/gallon gas is still cheaper(!)
If you live in the US. In Quebec, almost all power is hydro. Ontario is a mix of nuclear, hydro, and coal. Many places in the US also use nuclear. France is almost completely nuclear. While nuclear is not 'renewable' it's at least not pumping out CO2 and smog.
You don't need to drive 150 miles every day to need a car that has more than a 150 mile range. Just two days ago I drove 350 miles in one day while driving back from Canada.
I'd sure as heck rather own a car that has the capability of taking me where I want to go than own a car that can take me some places but be useless for other trips.
Even better, use hydraulic hybrids instead of these expensive batteries that are a bear to recycle.
I thought that GM tried and gave up on hydraulic hybrids?
One last point, won't charging a bunch of cars require all of the coal plants to go into overdrive?
Yes, but coal doesn't come from the Middle East, is a more efficient way to produce energy than burning gas in an internal combustion engine, is centralized and easier to scrub the emissions, and can be replaced by a different source in the future.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Close a hybrid is around 25% efficient so at $.10/kwh it's closer to $0.90 or at 8c/kwh it's 72c.
The main downside of solar panels at home and EVs, apart from the cost, is that the EV is usually at work in the daytime. So the obvious place to put solar panels is on business sites where they could feed into EV chargers during hours of maximum sunlight.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
What happens with some thug snips your power cord?
Will the cord be coming from your car, or from the outlet, and how easy and cheap is it to swap out cords?
They are going to use LI/ION so they are not a bear to recycle.
Most of the charging hopefully will be done at nite and not at peak. A lot power is wasted while base load plants are just idling.
Finally even if they are using coal there should still be a savings. Modern coal plants pollute less than a car per unit of energy.
Of course if you are on a nuke or hydro then you are even better off.
That being said I am not a big fan of hybrids but they are not as bad as you might think.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I don't drive 150 most days, but I DO drive 150+ miles SOME days. And since I can't afford two cars, my one car needs to be able to go as far as I need to go, including vacation trips.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Maybe after the electric cars are working, we'll see electric trucks, electric trains, electric machinery...
We just need the oil to bootstrap the whole thing.
Oil might go the way of the punch card...
No, just weapons-grade spent uranium. That's all...
Not unless you reprocess it. Good luck making a bomb using an old fuel rod.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I would hope that at least some of us have learned our lesson from this most recent fuel crisis: oil is simply not a sustainable way to get our energy over the long term.
The only thing I've learned is that the price of oil has NOTHING to do with the actual supply or sustainability as a natural resource and is artificially set by non-sequitur geo-political issues. Unless you assume that there has been less oil pumped over the past year than previous years, or that we consume more oil than can be pumped (hint: both of these assumptions are false).
The other thing I've learned is that "crisis" is hyperbole. In the US, we've enjoyed cheaper-than-should-be fuel for decades. People still drive to work and still drive to the store, regardless if gas costs $4/gallon or $2.
You don't do Big things without Big industry. Luckily for us, this generates Big economic impact, and creates a Big percentage of our jobs. The net effect on our quality of life, and our overall wealth as a society is Big (in a good way).
Don't bite the hand that feeds you.
A bear to recycle? Compared to what? Surely not more of a bear than collecting and recycling everything a gasoline engine spits out over it's lifetime.
The coal plant can be replaced with nuclear, fusion, solar, hydroelectric, etc. Have you ever tried replacing a car's engine with a Dam? It doesn't work so well.
Look, this is a straw man argument. If you NEED to drive more than the range of an electric car, don't get one, get a hybrid. For suburban and urban car owners, an electric car is a viable alternative. I'm married and my wife works less than five miles away. An electric car would be fantastic for her needs, and we have two cars anyway, so we have a hybrid for long trips. We may come to a time when your 350 mile trip is fantastically expensive as well.
You're focusing on passive safety rather than active safety, which is primarily a North American way of thinking.
Here, read this.
Most of us think that S.U.V.s are much safer than sports cars. If you asked the young parents of America whether they would rather strap their infant child in the back seat of the TrailBlazer or the passenger seat of the Boxster, they would choose the TrailBlazer. We feel that way because in the TrailBlazer our chances of surviving a collision with a hypothetical tractor-trailer in the other lane are greater than they are in the Porsche. What we forget, though, is that in the TrailBlazer you're also much more likely to hit the tractor-trailer because you can't get out of the way in time. In the parlance of the automobile world, the TrailBlazer is better at "passive safety. " The Boxster is better when it comes to "active safety," which is every bit as important.
The safest cars are the ones that can dodge an accident, rather than plow through some obstacle and hope to survive due to sheer mass.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I would think that a vehicle that could plug into any 50-60Hz, 90-260VAC source would make the absolute most sense.
Thinking of that, at a motel I recently stayed at in Montana, each parking spot had a regular AC outlet mounted about 7 feet high on the wall in front of the parking spot.
That kept it out of casual contact from kids, pretty much ensured that any water on the cord would run down-hill away from the outlet, and each outlet had a spring-loaded weather-proof cover for when they were not in use.
(Those were primarily for winter use: Block heaters to keep oil and fuel from gelling.)
With the addition of some way to simply meter the load on each outlet, and providing a key-switch so one could only use the outlet one is assigned, something like that could be an inexpensive, nearly universally available, simple to install and maintain charging grid for plug-in vehicle charging. (I've seen very similar things on parking meter posts, and they could even be coin/bill/credit card operated, just like modern parking meters...)
Still, though, my biggest problem with plug-in rechargeable vehicles is the length of time it takes to recharge and the very limited mileage between charges.
Driving from home to destination on that recent trip required about 600 miles/day, and is not something that any currently-being-discussed plug-ins can accomplish.
When electric vehicles were first being energetically discussed, one of the promising ideas was removable battery trays/packs that were "leased" with a full charge and rolled into the vehicle.
Instead of parking and charging to "refuel," each electric car service station would have a batch of charged batteries available on carts to be swapped in no longer than it takes to refuel a petroleum powered vehicle.
The discharged batteries would be charged overnight at off-peak times and be ready for the next day's needs.
That would also cover the cost of replacement batteries, as the lease or rental fees would cover not only the cost to charge and change the battery packs, but the cost of replacing them when they were no longer up to required minimum power retention levels.
At least doing it that way, stopping every 200 miles or so to swap batteries, would be better than stopping every 200 miles for several hours to recharge non-swappable batteries.
(It would also allow for some much needed standardization in battery packs and such...)
What bothers me is that idea is from reading magazines like Popular Mechanics and Popular Science in the '50's and '60's... We don't seem to have come very far since then, eh?
--Tomas
The answer is single-use-zoning and suburban sprawl.
Daily needs are separated from each other so that you have to drive between home, work, shopping and entertainment. It's flat out illegal to build a corner store in a residential neighbourhood or build a building with apartments above retail stores, and developers are forced to set them back off the road behind enormous parking lagoons, just to make sure the cars are happy and pedestrians are prohibited.
This is a monumentally wasteful pattern of settlement. It's like building a 'house' with the bathroom, kitchen and bedroom all miles apart but connected by roads.
Bring back mixed-use mixed-income development. Bring back the humble 'street' that has served humanity so well for millennia ever since we started living in cities. This isn't the industrial revolution age anymore, the days are gone when every workplace spewed soot into the air and it made some sense to partition it off where people didn't live. An office in the same building as your apartment isn't going to hurt you, nor will a corner store that you can walk to. Write to your congressman and tell him to back the New Urbanist movement.
But before you do that, you have to get mad! I want you to go out to your window, lean out, and yell, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!!"
Drill baby drill - on Mars
It's a change of mindset but how often do you really drive > 150 miles in a day where a recharge wouldn't be practical? A few times a year? The cost savings of an electric vehicle would more than pay for a car rental when you need a long range vehicle.
Our bugs are smarter than your test scripts.
The price of Gas in Dubai is 25 cents a gallon, Iran 42 cents, Qatar 83 cents, Saudi Arabia is 45 cents per gallon, Venezuela 11 cents. That is the real cost. What we in the western countries are paying is designed to generate huge profit margins for oil companies. They are fucking over the consumers, and yet you stand here saying, "Please sir can I have another!"
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
Which is where the last point comes in. I too support nuclear but I recognize that with our current political climate nuclear will be a hard sell to make. His points about coal are valid though and I guess it will have to do until A)The reality of the energy situation forces us to a fission powered grid with solar, hydro and wind supplements or B)Western civilization collapses and it all becomes irrelevant. Boy will B be a fun one to live through...
I'm sure you realize that's not true in a more overall sense. In any fission reaction, you permanently lose a part of the reaction materials that is unrecoverable. (Part of that is what you take out as usable work, for nuclear power plants.) It is still nonrenewable.
Breeder-reactors create a different sort of fissile material using byproducts of a fission reaction. I don't recall the reactions off the top of my head, but you could then react this new material in a breeder-reaction to produce more fissile material. Eventually, however, you'll end up with non-fissile material. There's a finite amount of energy extractable from, say, uranium, even including all breeder-reactor byproducts.
It's just that by comparison, current reactors are terribly wasteful.
I'm not so sure about -- what about the billions we have spent, and continue to spend, to defend the interests of the oil companies? There are many indirect subsidies (such as tax incentives to refineries, for example) that often get missed.
I'd also add that pollution and resource depletion are externialities, so if they were factored in, I'd say that the cost of gas, in the US at least, is _FAR_ lower than it should be.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
5 years??? the prius vs say the honda civic doesn't offer any savings if gas were 11 dollars per gallon... People see the price they pay weekly for gas but they fail to see the price they pay monthly for their car, insurance, gas, etc. Play around with the Edmunds True cost to own tool... it factors in gas for 75000 miles, payments for 5 years, insurance, scheduled maintenence, etc.
You will see that a civic costs $36,895 to own and operate for 5 years and a prius costs $41,051. Now take the 48mpg vs the 32mpg multiply it by a price hike per gallon, and you will see how much gas would need to cost per gallon before a prius did anything financial for you besides relocate your gas payment into your car payment.
At market plus 6 dollars per gallon, the prius costs about 500 dollars less to drive 75,000 miles in 5 years. So gas needs to be about 10 bucks a gallon before a prius makes financial sense over a civic... of course a civic isn't gonna help your green street cred like a prius will, and lets be honest a prius first and foremost a political statement. The numbers are much worse for a Camry hybrid vs a plane jane camry in case you wondered.
There doesn't appear to be any logical way to 'lock in' utilities when your car can plug into standard outlets and run off gas.
The second that charging your Volt on the road becomes more expensive than just buying a few gallons of gas and running it through the Volt's generator, no one will do it. People will just treat it as a normal car that gets the first 40 miles a day free, and then uses gas.
That's not to say that GM might not want a cut of the profits. But people would only say that if they didn't understand what GM is doing.
GM is literally betting their entire company on the Volt. The whole thing. They see other American car makers struggling, and they decided to roll double-or-nothing.
I seriously doubt they would endanger this by putting any obstacle in the way of making it cheaper for drivers. They're probably just going to add a 'supercharge' plug on the Volt, which can charge in five minutes, in addition to the standard 115V 15A plug, and hand out the specs to the gas stations, and let them build and operate pay version of them however they see fit.
And possibly sell a version that doesn't charge, for home installation, or even one that works like a vending machine for parking lots, taking cash.
Incidentally, for those two, I'm imagining systems that don't need special wiring. Essentially, they themselves have batteries in them, and slowly charge off the wiring. When a car hooks up, they dump all their power at once into it, and start charging again. It means they can only charge four cars a day, but that should be enough to start with, and is more than enough for a single house. This is assuming the same amount of batteries as a Volt...they could obviously have more, or run off 220, or 30 amps, or all sorts of stuff to charge faster and hold more.
I'm basically seeing fast-chargers as a step between the cheapest 'charge overnight' and the most expensive 'using gasoline to charge'. So if you drive, for example, 60 miles and back, the first 40 are from your car's overnight charge, the next 20 are from the gas generator, you fast-charge once you get there, the next 40 are off that, and the last 20 are from gasoline again.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?