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Australia Developing Massive Electric Vehicle Grid
blairerickson writes "A US firm Thursday unveiled plans to build a massive one-billion-dollar charging network to power electric cars in Australia as it seeks cleaner and cheaper options to petrol. Better Place, which has built plug-in stations for electric vehicles in Israel and Denmark, has joined forces with Australian power company AGL and finance group Macquarie Capital to create an Australian network. Under the plan, the three cities will each have a network of between 200,000 and 250,000 charge stations by 2012 where drivers can plug in and power up their electric cars. The points would probably be at homes and businesses, car parks and shopping centres. In addition, 150 switch stations will be built in each city and on major freeways, where electric batteries can be automatically replaced in drive-in stations similar to a car wash." I hope they're talking to the car companies about the necessary standardization it would take to make this work, too.
Is this the same grid who's owners are claiming there will be rolling blackouts again this summer because they don't have enough capacity?
This is the electric-car effort spearheaded by Shai Agassi, formerly of SAP. He was profiled in Wired a couple of issues back.
The gist of it is that the cars are all-electric (not hybrid), the energy companies sell the power, and the cars are basically free (or close to it). To get around the runtime problems of current electric cars, he envisions filling stations where you pull up in your electric car and instead of waiting for your battery to fully charge, the company swaps out your drained batter with a brand-new, prefilled one, and off you go. This is possible because they own the batteries anyway.
In short, the idea is to move away from the Gillette razor model for cars, toward the cell phone model.
Breakfast served all day!
Yeah, but as has been said a billion times by now, the electrical grid is cheaper and cleaner than a half billion cars driving around burning hydrocarbons. Power plants make it a point to be as efficient as possible, whereas cars make almost the inverse point with IC engines.
Looking forward, the grid is a lot easier to update to cleaner technologies as they come available. It is extremely tough to get anyone to put a new engine in their car because it might improve their gas mileage.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
envisioned that as a massive electric bump car grid.
One of the main reasons this might work in Australia is because it is an island. Cars don't get on and off this country, so buying a car and worrying about going to "non-compatible" countries won't be a problem.
This is why their initiative may have a bigger effect than, say, a European country surrounded by differently positioned countries.
Full Tilt
Why not a lot of really long extension cords?
-- Make America hate again!
Actually, now that I think about it, Gillette is the wrong model. The current car model is the PC model: Pay a bunch of money up front for the computer, pay for software and support on an ongoing basis, eventually send the computer to the junkyard. Agassi's model is the cell phone model: Pay next to nothing up front, pay the service provider regular installments, replace or upgrade the hardware as needed for a nominal fee, but the hardware is all tied to the service provider. What you're paying for is not a car, but transportation.
It's an intriguing concept, but it's hard to see it taking off in the U.S., where the automobile probably ranks ahead of diamond jewelry as a universally-recognized status symbol. Even Prius owners are making a statement about their lifestyle.
But what do I know? I ride the bus.
Breakfast served all day!
It says the funds will be raised by Macquarie, which is an investment bank. Who, exactly, in the current economic climate, going to give them that kind of money?
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
That is fantastic - but where are the electric cars?
You could always try steering out of the road. Why do you *have* to be in front? Are you going to get there significantly faster than the car behind you? My anecdotal tests have convinced me I can let 10 - 20 cars over take me and still not lose any noticeable time getting where I want to go.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Because of the time required to charge vehicles, we'd need a cord station at pretty much every parking space everywhere for widespread use of pure electrics to be tenable.
(even if we implemented amazing recharge rates through capacitors, we wouldn't be able to utilize them because, without a completely separate, ultra-capacity utility network, the grid would overload)
How expensive is this per capita vs a carbon trapping device from the government for everyone and a massive fuel subsidy program?
In the long term they're financially better off rolling out a complete rebuild of the power grid to support "burst charging" of ultra-capacitors so cars can be charged in a couple minutes at "stations", the same way we do now with gas.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I hope they're talking to the car companies about the necessary standardization it would take to make this work, too.
For all the press Better Place has been getting lately, I haven't seen an in-depth analysis of their business model, specifically as it relates to standardization of the infrastructure, including plugs and sockets.
I have a feeling their charging plugs, sockets and protocols are proprietary. Anyone who attempts to produce a compatible charger/socket is going to find themselves on the end of a very aggressive lawsuit. Unless of course they've licensed the technology from Better Place.
Our current gasoline-based system is deeply flawed, but at least it's open. We're replacing it with a marginally better system, but we're giving up that openness for a closed system owned by a single company.
And then there's the conflict of interest issue. What incentive does a company have to reduce power consumption on a car when it's getting a cut of every charge?
Shai Agassi is a smart and charismatic man, but who can really say they're happy with the cell phone business model? Most consumers aren't, but the cellular networks are making quite a profit.
The notion of a "water-powered car" is stupid conspiracy theory touted by those who never took a introductory chemistry course because electrolysis consumes energy. It might be novel (which is its only real value) but inside all those cars are batteries which are doing electrolysis and then the resulting mixture is burned, which is vastly less efficient than using that power to drive the car or using hydrogen created by wind or solar.
Hydrogen is not an energy source.
Because of the time required to charge vehicles, we'd need a cord station at pretty much every parking space everywhere for widespread use of pure electrics to be tenable.
Surprise, that's exactly why they're starting the buildout now. You build it once, and you're done, you don't keep building it again and again, as you do with cars.
I'm not saying that we have to immediately switch over to everyone on electric either. I'm not even saying that petrol should go the way of the dinosaur (in this case, literally). But for most drivers, electric is more than enough for every day life. And even "slow" charging batteries are just fine, because most of us spend most of our days inside, whilst our cars sit outside doing nothing but collecting heat.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
...plans to build a massive one-billion-dollar charging network
Sounds pretty useless. How many australians can be charged one billion dollars?
Come off it. Yesterday I was in the left hand lane that was practically stopped. I could see the reason it was stopped... about 1.5km up the road the traffic was also stopped (because of an accident). The left land was slow because lots of people were trying to exit the motorway to avoid the congestion.
When a small opportunity arose, I changed into another lane. I did not accelerate to 110km/hr because I could see that 1.5 km further on I'd be stuck anyway. What happened? I got wankers on their horns 'cause I did not go 110km/hr for the next 1.5km... This is the problem on the road: people somehow cannot see more than one car ahead. This is how I judge people. A LOT of people cannot think mid- to long-term. A lot of these same people make critical business decisions. No WONDER the economies of the world are in bad shape.
Just for the record, I ended up further along the road than those fools behind me,giving me grief, dodging in-and-out of traffic, and not thinking beyond the next 2 seconds. If more people thought ahead things would BE BETTER. But, alas, the first car in front (for these fools) is always the one at fault. And they extend this stupid mentanility to all aspects of their life. The hare and the tortoise. We need more turtles
But how do you define efficient? Pure thermodynamic efficiency? Sure power plants win out - but what does that mean and exactly how useful is it? Power plants do not keep in line with demand - they cannot, as demand waxes and wanes the power grid supply more or less flat lines. How is that efficient?
I drive an old car, but I bet that I use less fuel than the vast majority of people and I am unashamed of driving my old car because the numbers don't lie. Now not to be combative but I say screw you and the horse you rode in on to anyone who tells me my car is worse for the environment than theirs. For the record I drive a 1970s 'pickup truck' (we call it a ute) with a 5 litre V8 engine, carburettor, 4 speed gearbox and low geared differential. It gets 15 l/100km on the highway (work it out yourselves - thats our unit) and I have no idea what in the city, I do not care. Why don't I care? Because I spend about $10 - $20 a week on petrol. And down here that amounts to about 7-15 litres a week, or something like 2-4 gallons. A week. So how much more efficient is driving my car the way I do (as in: I don't) than commuting to work in a plug in hybrid? Much more, whats even better is I love my car.
Back to my point: What electrical systems lack is an efficient means of *storing* energy, this is subtle but extremely important. It is basically THE issue when it comes to transportation. In my personal example I use bugger all fuel because I don't turn my car on: I walk, ride the train and bus, ride my bike, etc. I make less impact on the environment than feelgood hybrid driving fart sniffing hippies who plug theirs into the wall socket. Why? Because my hulking pile of metal with an oversized engine and two seats is recycled for one - its age alone means I have drawn out its embodied energy over 30 years, and my owning of it means one less new car needs to be built (another argument for another day). But most importantly it can be TURNED OFF.
The power grid can't just be turned off.
So how are we defining efficient operation? Electric vehicles are time inefficient - it takes a long time to charge them, so in a busy society how does that help us? What do trucking companies do? What do busy mums and dads do? Don't tell me they should just own two cars or two fleets of trucks: Then you double the required resources and construction energy required just to get back to the point we are at today, and the grid *still* can't be turned off like my V8 can. How efficient is that exactly?
No, none of this electric car business makes sense on a large (whole of society) scale. The reason we use oil is because in net terms it IS the most efficient means of storing energy, above all else it is the most *economically efficient* means of achieving mass scale transportation. You can't deny it and electricity won't change this fact. I predict that oil will not be replaced as an energy storage mechanism for transportation, not in the near or distant future. Barring some ridiculous breakthrough in battery technology and a power grid that allows us to charge our cars with megawatts (some 6 meagwatts is transferred to your car from a pump. 6 million joules... every second.) of electricity, it is not going to happen. Of course if we start talking about making oil driven vehicles more efficient, now we're talking - that is smart.
I have an Insight, and even though it only has a 70hp engine, it can accelerate just fine. In fact I've had it up over 100 mph while cruising across the American continent. At no point have I ever felt the need for more power, and I drive the four-lane-wide I-95 every day with thousands of other cars and trucks.
The key is to learn how to go with the *merge* with the flow of traffic, rather than be an obstacle that jumps in front of massive trucks.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
>>>But, alas, the first car in front (for these fools) is always the one at fault. And they extend this stupid mentanility to all aspects of their life.
P.S. This is why, in additional to the front-facing horn, God also invented the rear-facing middle finger. It's almost become an automatic response with me:
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeep. Finger.
Beeep-beeep-beeep. Finger.
I want them to know that I think they are "#1".
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
While a lot of what you say makes sense, driving an old car very little etc. However the second part of your post is bollocks.
1) The grid can be turned off and scaled to meet demand
2) Efficiency is measured in how much energy is lost, current petrol engines lose about 70% of the stored energy.
3) As per point 2, Oil has nothing whatsoever to do with efficient storage, the reason we use oil is because it's there, someone else(nature) stored it for us so we don't care that it's inefficient as fuck
4) We will run out of oil, nature creates it extremely slowly and we use it up rather quickly, people just argue about exactly when the oil will run out.
5) Better energy storage (batteries) is what everyone is working on, however efficient energy storage doesn't have to be an electric battery, if we for example could efficiently produce oil and efficiently use oil then that would be a good renewable process.
I'm with you. One time in Germany I was crawling through roadworks which caused a lot of delay as everyone was forced into one lane. Once the first set of roadworks ended and we were back to three lanes but I could see it was only going to be for about 2km before another set of roadworks, so I didn't bother speeding up too much (maybe to 80km/h) or changing lanes (because the lane I was in was the one we'd all be in in 2km). Of course the bozo behind in a (what else) BMW 735i was 2 inches off my bumper flashing his headlights and tooting his horn. He got the finger repeatedly. I was in a UK-registered car, right hand drive, and with GB plate, so that probably wound him up even more. I feared for his heart as he was clearly going purple with rage. Eventually, fearing a ramming, I let him past. He accelerated excessively past me, expending a great deal of effort and attention on gesticulating at me. He didn't notice the traffic was slowing down again and was stopped up ahead, but realised just in time and just about managed to stop. Llucky he had ABS. I tucked in behind him and followed him for another 10km at a slow crawl through the roadworks. As they ended, he pulled off into a Rasthof as I tootled past... You have to wonder why he felt it so necessary to get in front of me for no good reason (except it *was* a BMW, so that does go with the territory). Maybe his pa was shot down in the war and couldn't stand a British car in front. He was extremely lucky he didn't cause an accident.
Clearly he was a Sour Kraut.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.