Bay Area To Install Electric Vehicle Grid

Mike writes "Recently San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland unveiled a massive concerted effort to become the electric vehicle capitol of the United States. The Bay Area will be partnering with Better Place to create an essential electric vehicle infrastructure, marking a huge step towards the acceptance of electric vehicles as a viable alternative to those that run on fossil fuels." Inhabitat.com has some conceptual illustrations and a map showing EV infrastructure, such as battery exchange stations, stretching from Sacramento to San Diego — though this is far more extensive than the Bay Area program actually announced, which alone is estimated to cost $1 billion.

Comments

Re:the consumers just need to do their part

[sfcat]

Really? Cause they had to pry the last EVs from the cold dead hands of their owners. Every salesperson who sold them had a larger waiting list than GM could manufacture. I bet that they discovered that EVs didn't need many replacement parts which is why all car companies are trying to avoid making EVs. There is a documentary about the EVs in the late 90's http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/ that you should watch. In fact, nothing in your post is factual correct about the situation exception for maybe the range problem.

Vehicle standardization?

[YrWrstNtmr]

Either battery replacement, or plug-ins. We don't yet have a standard as to how to recharge these cars.

110v...220v...different plugs...different acceptable recharge times.
Replacement batteries will require some sort of mechanical/robotic system to do it. Your grandmother is not going to wrestle a 100lb battery pack out of the car. And none of the elec cars I've seen have easily (no more than 5 mins) replaceable packs.

Finally, we have the apartment problem. If I live on the 4th floor, how do I ensure my car won't be unplugged overnight by some miscreant on the street.

All of these can be overcome. But spending billions to build out a grid for this without the standardization in place will fail.

I really, REALLY want this to succeed. But this effort may be premature.

Re:Vehicle standardization?

[zippthorne]

put a rectenna in the base of the car, and charge by induction from underneath the pavement (pick a frequency that meat doesn't absorb very well). As an added bonus, if your electricity is cheap enough, you can design highways to deliver wireless power so the cars only need batteries with 30 miles or so of capacity.

Billing and activation based on transponder identification, of course.

let's give an inconvenient answer

[pimpimpim]

A calculation of the german version of the AAA, the ADAC, showed that the electric smart that is currently on the road, would actually create more CO2 per km than the combustion engine version, IF the power plant was solely coal based (which is a popular power plant in germany at the moment). I also find if fascinating that the hydrogen for hydrogen production is currently produced by transforming oil into hydrogen and ... CO2. It is the most efficient and economic process to do it like that. Sure, at one point in time you could do create hydrogen by electrolysis of water. But in the mean time, because money is an inevitable driving force, it will be made the CO2-producing way. Or, how biofuels will end up competing the farming of food and might lead to difficult hunger problems. All in all, these are exciting times, and for every alternative the effects of the complete life circle on environment and society should be considered....

Why not bikes, for (*&%@'s sake???

[fugue]

The Bay Area would be perfect for bikes. They are far more energy-efficient than EVs (by like 2 orders of magnitude), the Bay Area is largely flat, it suffers from massive congestion (EVs don't even begin to address that), it doesn't get too warm, it doesn't rain much all summer long, the societal cost of maintaining the facilities to park a few million cars are devastating, a few of the people who live there could use some exercise...

I like bikes even in hilly, rainy country, but there they have some disadvantages. It's utterly absurd that somewhere as perfect as the Bay Area doesn't encourage cycling.

Re:Doomed by its creators

[mcrbids]

I don't think you understand what this new electrical grid is all about. This project is about a dynamic grid, one that uses constant-update price changes and continuous feedback systems to self-stabilize.

Let's say that you plug your car in when you get home, at about 6:00 PM. You know, when everybody and their uncle is busy burning power for home heating, TVs, and getting ready for dinner. The price of electricity is high, and your car, in constant communication with the grid, doesn't begin charging until the price of electricity drops around 10 PM.

This continuous feedback loop can tie in through your home heating, your refrigerator, etc. so that they shut off during periods when the electricity is in peak demand, and work extra when juice is cheap.

This reduces strain on the power grid, and makes better use of existing resources which are today massively overbuilt simply to handle the 10 minutes during the year when load is at its highest.

This solves a number of very real problems. For example, Wind power is very bad for power grids when it supplies more than about 10% of the total power fed into the grid - wind gusts cause voltage surges and low-grade brownouts that destabilize the power grid.

However, if you had a large number of distributed, high-amperage charge/discharge power storage units (such as a bunch of electric cars!) you could use them to act as electrical inertia to absorb sudden spikes in power.

The net effect will be a cheaper, more reliable power grid, one that could even stay running for short periods of time even if the mains to the power plants are cut, simply because the affected area would see a dramatic spike in the price of electricity, causing everything non-essential to shut off, while the electric vehicles would start backfeeding electricity, earning a profit for their owners.

This is for real!