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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.
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!
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