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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.
Those were manufactured shortages thanks to the crooks at Enron, Duke Energy, and the sham Governor that was Gray Davis.
The problem isn't that SF wants to be electric-friendly, or even environmentally friendly. The problem is that they are doing it simply to cash in on a trendy idea. The union bosses responsible for building this grid will charge SF taxpayers billions to produce a sub-par grid, that will need constant repair, and that is unlikely to be utilized.
Why? Because the same people who promote electric cars, are also the people that recoil from even the word "nuclear"... and thus ensure that while the rest of the world forges ahead in power generation technology, we are stuck with 30+ year old inefficient uranium-guzzlers.
Perhaps people should consider that it's better to do things because they are the right thing, not because they are the "in thing".
"You're just substituting one energy source for another. You're not doing anything about the energy shortage."
Yes you are. It's a lot more efficient to have convert all your chemical energy into electricity at one central spot than to have millions of engines that the vehicles have to carry around with them. I believe the efficiency factor is something like 60%. Besides, there are non-chemical ways to generate electricity.
State governments, especially California, just can't afford $1B projects. But the Feds sure can. Because they are trying to counter a deflationary spiral, they are printing money as fast as they can and giving it to banks.
Compared to what they've been giving away, $1B is nothing. They really should consider throwing some of that over to CA. [It will create JOBS and reduce foreign oil dependency, Mr. Obama!]
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
At least spending a billion for this will produce something useful and will provide some jobs. It sounds like a bargain compared to $700+ billion to keep the bankers from having to move to smaller mansions.
OK it was set in LA instead of SF, but the implication in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel was that the slotcar grid was at least statewide.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I've lived and worked in the Bay Area. Pollution from cars is a problem. Cars are a problem.
Electric cars are not the answer. (I don't even want to imagine sitting in deadlocked traffic, heater or AC on, tunes playing, battery draining...)
Mass transit is the answer - not just BART - REAL mass transit. I cannot stress enough that if one travels to Japan and sees for oneself how fucking cool and efficient the Japanese mass rail system is - billion dollar proposals like this would die at conception.
Mass transit first - electric cars (if they're still needed, really) second.
Fuck me, America - can we try fixing problems instead of fixing symptoms - just once?!?!
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Recently San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland unveiled a massive concerted effort to become the electric vehicle capitol of the United States.
Capitol is a proper name, originally of a temple and the hill it sat on, but now often of a building that serves as the seat of a legislature. Capital means the city that serves as the seat of government. It also means the chief city of a region, and is the metaphorical sense intended here.
Even if submitter didn't know the difference, a professional editor should have. Good thing we don't have any of those around here, huh?
And the brethren went away edified.
And you're still cranking out CO2. This is about EVs (Electric Vehicles).
My Babylon
From some back-of-the-envelope calculations it seems that we already have enough power generation and electrical distribution in the Bay Area and in most places to charge Chevy Volt-like cars overnight on our existing 220V. It might be nice to charge faster than 8 hours, or at work as well as home, but I don't see this as a major technology adoption problem.
The grid and power stations are designed to deliver about 3KW average to each household during peak hours in the summer heat. A single 220 outlet typically can deliver 3KW continuously. A Chevy Volt will need no more than 20KW hours of juice to charge. The math works.
The grid is barley taxed during the night, so this is a match made in heaven. The build-out we really need is an interstate-HVDC grid to deliver renewable power across the country from wherever it's generated. This can't be done at the state level, and will require action by Obama.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
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.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
The energy shortages were artificially created by Enron to boost profits. No actual shortages occurred.
That's why I installed an electric vehicle grid in my driveway 2 years ago. Get on the ball, Bay Area!
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.
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....
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
It's really so sad that "hybrids" have hijacked the public's perception of what a fuel efficient vehicle here in the US.
In Europe fuel costs 4 times as much as it does over here right now. The majority of vehicles sold in Europe are diesels. You almost never see a Prius. In fact, you'll see them ridiculed in the automotive press as an example of American idocy more often than you'll see them on the roads over there.
Why exactly is a Japanese car an example of American idocy?
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
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Because they wouldnt have any profits anymore.
Much better to ask for free money. They'll probably get it too.
It's also interesting that this happened less than a year after deregulation. Doesn't disprove deregulation in theory, but 40 years of regulation worked great, deregulation worked less than a year, the utility companies are, as you said, crooks.
Deregulation is a nice theory though. Not quite as elegant as communism, but it's a nice idea.
That's how everything works in the US. Things start in the cities and then the rest of the nation eventually catches on. California has been demanding higher efficiency appliances for decades now and because of the vast purchasing power of the state manufacturers are forced to meet our demand. This in turn allows other states to have the option to purchase those more efficient appliances, though it appears most opt for the cheaper up front appliances as opposed to the long run cheaper more efficient appliances. I guess some people just don't get this whole environmental thing.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
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.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
The Americans are the idiots, not the car.
They had to pry those EVs out of the hands of their owners because they were leasing them at a tremendous loss. The EV-1 program was done for research and to gain experience. The company subsidized every single lessee to the tune of something like 50%. When it became clear that the EV1 would never develop enough demand to be profitable, GM wasn't willing to continue massively subsidizing these people and supporting a miniscule fleet of cars simply out of the goodness of their hearts.
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Mass transit is the answer - not just BART - REAL mass transit. I cannot stress enough that if one travels to Japan and sees for oneself how fucking cool and efficient the Japanese mass rail system is - billion dollar proposals like this would die at conception.
No. Sorry. Mass transit is part of the solution, but it is not the solution.
The problem lies in the inherent difference between mass transit and public transit and most people don't recognize the difference.
Mass transit focuses on getting mass number of people between various high density locations. These are your medium to heavy rail systems. For the Bay Area that's BART and CalTrain.
In places like Japan, where they have high population densities, it works great. There's a reason places like Tokyo, Moscow, New York, London, etc., can have fantastically efficient mass transit systems: they have the population density to deal with it.
Public transit on the other hand focuses on being a 'vehicle replacement' so people in lower density areas can actually give up their cars. This is taxies up through light rail. Fewer passengers, but more convenient and more versatile.
Bay Area geography doesn't really favor Mass Transit. It's why BART basically sucks for commuting. With the exception of MUNI linking well to BART, most of the Public to Mass links suck.
The whole electric car infrastructure is an expensive idea, and it talks to the whole "chicken and the egg" problem. Without infrastructure, electric cars are useless. Without electric cars, no one will build the infrastructure. This is actively solving the infrastructure problem ahead of the cars.
Is it a good idea? Ultimately, yes. Is it the right idea? That's a lot harder to say. A massive bay area wide fleet of on-demand bio-diesel fueled hybrid shuttle buses might be better. But who's to say? Cars are a part of US culture partially because of our geography. We live in suburbia, which is inherently tied in with car culture.
Unless your mass transit plan includes re-arranging US cities and how people live in this country, it will never be the solution.
Cheers,
Bagheera
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
Europe has higher fuel costs because they tax the fuel heavily to support mass transit and other things that make it so that people don't need to use their cars constantly. This rather changes what kind of car it makes sense for individuals to purchase.
I'll make it simple for you. 10 years ago car companies realized that EVs don't need as many after market parts as IC cars do. So ever since then, they have acted to prevent EVs from coming to market. Not evil but against the public good. You are blaming the consumers (who did want to buy the cars) instead of the car companies (who didn't want to sell them). Quit being intentionally dense.
For comparison: a used Prius goes for ~24K USD http://www.internetautoguide.com/usedcars/11-int/toyota/prius/index.html
a new prius goes for ~22K USD http://www.toyota.com/prius-hybrid/
Now why would a used Prius sell for more than the new one? Because you can't find a new one to buy. They are always on back order. Really? No demand? Stick to engineering...
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
What makes the government think it knows which technology is good for reducing carbon emissions? Just put a cap on pollution, punish polluters, fix the market failure by capturing external costs associated with pollution, and let the market fix the problem efficiently and cheaply.
Currently hooked on AMP
It's also interesting that this happened less than a year after deregulation. Doesn't disprove deregulation in theory, but 40 years of regulation worked great, deregulation worked less than a year, the utility companies are, as you said, crooks.
The rate to which utility companies have colluded on prices in the past is well known. In Australia rampant price fixing lead to government "ring fencing" and free market contestability regulations, and more choice for the end user. Power generation companies were no longer allowed to be power distribution companies. This was matched to an independent national electricity market and hub company that so far has done a great job as traffic cop IMHO. Have a look at http://www.nemmco.com/
Disclaimer: I was involved in the independent audit of their market settlements system design, so I have opinions.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Just because your car is powered by electricity doesn't mean the electricity was generated without the use of fossil fuels. Might I remind the greens that most electricity in the U.S. is (unfortunately) still produced by burning coal? The same coal combustion which causes acid rain?
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch (but solar and tidal energy are as close as we'll get).
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Let's add some more facts to this discussion.
You talk about GM refusing to sell, service, or support EV1s outside of the tiny corner where they were running their project. Yet you completely ignore why they did this. I can only surmise that you are either being disingenuous or, more likely, you simply don't know.
So allow me to inform you. The batteries in the EV1 were extremely sensitive to cold, which ruled out most of the US due to the phenomenon we call "winter". There were also concerns about how they would respond to humidity, which ruled out all of the remaining places which get humid. Take a map of the US, eliminate all of the places which ever get cold or humid, and what remains is essentially GM's approved EV1 area.
This alone should tell you that the EV1 was not ready for full-scale sales and production. But it goes a lot farther than this. The EV1's design wasn't up to the rigorous safety requirements that any production car must meet. As a research project this made a great deal of sense. As a production car, obviously this simply could not work.
GM spent a billion dollars on the EV1, and leased them for half of what they would have charged if they had been trying to make money at it. A production-ready car that was up to production safety standards probably would have cost at least another billion dollars to design and certify, so jack that price up even more.
Of course GM never intended to sell any EV1s. That's pretty well implied by "research project". It was intended to give them experience for building an eventual production model electric car. The experience it gave them was, alas, that a production model would be impractically expensive. The truth of this should be obvious given that no car maker has ever built such a thing in the decade since the EV1 project was cancelled. Perhaps GM is colossally stupid. Given how much money they've been losing that proposition is pretty reasonable. But are all of them so stupid that they won't build electric cars even though everybody wants to buy them? No, they are not. Nobody is building electric cars because technology and demand simply haven't met yet.
I have no idea why you're comparing the EV1 to the Insight and Prius. The Insight and Prius are hybrid cars. That is, they have a gasoline engine and a small set of batteries to augment it, as an efficiency measure. The EV1 was a fully electric car, which is an utterly different kind of machine altogether, one which simply was not (and is just barely getting there now) ready for prime time.
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Except that GM's experiment with them showed that they could not be sold at anything remotely approaching a profit. Nothing to do with aftermarket parts, and pushing on with such an obvious boondoggle would not do anything for the public good. But believe what you like....
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Get our screwed-up tort system fixed and perhaps this stuff could have happened. As it stands now, having a few hundred experimental vehicles on the road is a tremendous liability risk. GM was willing to take that risk when it was part of a program designed to lead to a production-worthy car, but once that program ended the risk became unacceptable.
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Given that EV1 production ceased nearly a decade ago and no major car manufacturer has seen fit to take up the cause, I'm going to have to say that electric cars probably weren't going to be profitable at the time, considering that none of them seem to think that they could be profitable now. Perhaps they're all a bunch of morons, but I doubt it. I can believe one of them being stupid, or several of them, but all of them? No way.
It's telling that the real successes for alternative cars in the past decade have been hybrids, not electrics. Hybrids are much less radical and eliminate essentially all of the massive downsides of pure electrics. Even the Chevy Volt, being marketed as an "electric car", is really just a standard serial hybrid with the ability to charge its batteries from external power and some mind-bending PR applied.
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Diesel powered cars in europe get better economy because they are turbocharged small diesel engines. Normal (naturally aspirated) diesel engines are large and heavy. Both get good efficiency. The reason why they get good highway economy in Europe is that there is less breathing losses in the small engines wrt to the large ones.
And the lower power to weight ratio of diesels wrt their gas powered cousins, is another reason why they get better economy. When compared to a small gasoline engine of roughly the same power output (compare a 110HP 2.0L Turbo Diesel to a 110HP 1.1L Turbo Gas), their economy isn't that much better (67 versus 57). So European diesel buyers are giving up 0-60 times for better economy.
A Prius is vastly overpowered compared to either of those. It has a 76HP 1.5L normally aspirated 16V I4 engine plus a 67HP electric motor for a total of 143HP (145 DIN HP). It accelerates much faster than your standard turbo diesel car. It gets 46MPG on the highway, but that is using the much tougher new EPA driving tests at 75MPH peak with the AC on. Using the European tests, it gets 56.7MPG on the highway (4.2L per 100km). After adding in the fact that diesel fuel has about 15% more energy than gas per volume, or about the equivalent of 65.2MPG. What it excels at though is urban economy. There it gets 48MPG (EPA) and 47.3MPG (Euro (5.0L per 100km)). The european turbo diesel cars don't get anywhere near that. And the Prius would do even better with a smaller turbocharged engine, say about 1.0L Turbo gasoline engine making those 76HP. Its more efficient and lighter in weight.
European turbo diesels are still overpowered, just not as much as gasoline powered cars are over here. Here most engines are normally aspirated and get their high power via large displacement and/or high speed. This is bad for highway economy. However its even worse for urban driving. The smallest Focus engine here is a 16V DOHC 2.0L making 140HP. To do 90MPH (faster than is legal here), it only needs about 35HP (the 140HP allows 132MPH max). The real reason for the high power is to get low 0-60 times of 8.3 seconds (5 spd man). It gets 24MPG (EPA (9.9L/100km)) in the city and 35MPG (EPA (6.8L/100km)) on the highway. In Europe that same car has a 1.4L 8V gas engine getting only 74HP but a higher highway MPG of 47 (5.1L/100km). But to go from 0-60, it takes 14.1 seconds and tops out at 107MPH (the gearing is wrong for max speed).
A 40HP engine (about 400cc turbocharged gasoline or 1000cc turbocharged diesel) alone would take 28 seconds to go from 0-60, but top out at over 90MPH and get about 63MPG (EPA) or 78MPG per European standards. Adding a plug in hybrid to that of about the same power 40HP or 30KW, would put the 0-60 times back under 14 seconds, yet boost urban MPG to about the same 78MPG (EPA or European). Turbo diesels get about 30-40% efficiency. Gasoline turbo engines get 25 to 35%. Base load power plants get from 36 to 48%. Combined cycle plants (gas turbine Brayton followed by a steam turbine Rankine) can get up to 60% efficiencies. Most of the higher efficiencies in engines are for the large slow stationary engines. Of course that is all at the high efficiency point. The wide operating range of most car engines pushes those numbers down greatly. The base load plants operate at peak efficiency 24/7.
Bay Area geography doesn't really favor Mass Transit. It's why BART basically sucks for commuting. With the exception of MUNI linking well to BART, most of the Public to Mass links suck.
I'm an Australian, and I've traveled a bit and spent a lot of time in San Fran, using the BART and MUNI to get from my relatives place in Pacifica to various places around.
I agree it sucks for commuting, unless the place you want to go happens to be on a connected line on the BART/MUNI lines. Fortunately most of the places I've been going to have been (well, not Pacifica - it's a fucking $40 cab fare from there to Daly City which I discovered last time).
I almost totally agree with the GP. I agree with some of what you said, but I think the Bay Area could (logistics aside - those fucking hills are a killer, not to mention quake-proofing everything) definitely benefit from improved public transport (using your nomenclature) around the city area. At the moment its a bit of a chore.
I've just come from spending 3 months in Europe and have been reminded again of the awesomeness of properly done transport systems. I think there's enough people in and around SF to justify a system (again, ignoring logistics, which I think would be the biggest roadblock there).
From the time I've spent in the US though, it'll be a long, long haul to get people out of cars onto public transport. It needs to be made cheap, clean, safe, and (most importantly) useful by having those links you're talking about.
I'd love to come to the US and see Euro/Japan style public transport to get around in. I really do not look forward to repeat visits and the fact that to get anywhere I have to drive or get a taxi.
So why not rearrange the cities? The Bay area is still growing rapidly, it would seem, and the newer bits (I'm at the north edge of San Jose, for example) absolutely suck as places to live, because the population density is so low that there are no services. Nada. It's a thirty minute walk to buy groceries, a 50 minute walk to eat supper (with the possible exception of a Spanish language sports bar that sells quasi-pizza), there's nominally s Starbucks here, but it closes at, what, 8PM or something. The city planners are clearly retards. They need to draw lines and say NO MORE CONSTRUCTION OUTSIDE THIS LINE. Then they need to tear up every second street inside that boundary and make them pedestrian areas with light rail down the middle instead. Remove whatever zoning restrictions are separating the residences and the services. Charge for road use and make the light rail free, instead of the other way around.
There's no downside. The current arrangement is insanity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis
Je ne parle pas francais.