Batteries and the electric grid are still lacking in terms of quick-charge capacity – medium sized car EVs are capabile of driving for 240 highway miles (65-75mph) in half the size of the initial Chevy Volt battery. But charging them still poses a problem – how do you put 90kWh of energy into the battery. Because the batteries are still somewhat sizable and heavy – 5 cubic feet, 200 lbs – they aren’t easily changeable since they’re still considered a key structural piece of the car that needs to be protected by a space frame just like the human occupants.

Putting 90kWh of energy into the car in under five minutes would require over 1MW of power. Thats not safe for someone to handle, and there are many other complex issues like conductor size, safety and short-circuit protection that would need to be addressed. Suffice to say you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the car while it was charging in case something went catastrophically wrong.

So the need for a range extender will still need to be required. Hydrogen seems like the most likely candidate – fuel cells will start commercial introduction in 2015, and by 2030 should be cheap enough (see superatoms for replacing expensive materials like platinum with tungsten carbide) for mass production, with only small (10-15%) cost over a standard internal combustion engine, plus the benefit of much fewer moving parts.

I’ve outlined where I think the sweet spot of the market will be below. There are a few assumptions, one is that hydrogen refueling infrastructure is available, and that the grid can handle the cars (which I think it will anyways, we just need smart grid technology to keep the cars from charging at the wrong times).

Battery – 30-32 mile AER ($170/kWh)

• Small car: 10kWh ($1070)
• Mid-size car: 13kWh ($2200)
• Large sedan: 15kWh ($2550)
• Small/Mid SUV: 16.5kWh ($2850)
• Mid-sized SUV: 18kWh ($3060)
• Full-sized SUV: 21.5kWh ($3655)

Battery characteristics for sedans:

• 450 Wh/kg, 600W/L
• 6000 W/kg
• Sufficient cycle life to last 10 years or 150,000 miles at 70% DoD

Battery characteristics for trucks and SUVs: (trading power per kg for higher energy per kg and L for less weight and volume)

• 500 Wh/kg, 650W/L
• 5000 W/kg
• Sufficient cycle life to last 10 years or 150,000 miles at 70% DoD

Additional Fuel Source – Hydrogen Fuel Cell

• $3500 for 95W (small cars)
• $5500 for 220W (Mid/large SUV)

Hydrogen Fuel Cell characteristics:

• Last 80,000 road miles (because charging every night means the battery does 80-90% of the driving, endurance can be tuned out of the FC to reduce cost)
• 360 mile range (total vehicle range: 400 mi from full charge)

Fuel cost per mile (in 2010 $)

• 2.7c/mi on electricity
• 4.5c/mi on H2 (assuming cost of H2 is $3.00/gallon gasoline equivalent)
• For reference, a 30MPG sedan has a fuel cost per mile of 10c/mi at $3.00/gal, at 12,000 miles per year vs an 80/20 mix of elec./H2, this is a savings of $828/yr

The deal for the 360MW of extra generation capacity, for a total of 960MW, comes right on the heals of a 500MW cancelled solar power development in the Mojave desert due to environmental concerns. This deal is better suited because it is located on private lands, which aren’t subject to the regulation and scrutiny as when companies build on BLM and other public lands.

The Coyote Springs development is located north of Las Vegas, straddling the Clark and Lincoln county lines. Originally imagined as a distant suburb with more affordable housing (at the time) than Las Vegas, the recession, high gas prices and the long commute (60 minutes each way) have put the damper on those plans. By using these private lands for solar power generation, Coyote Springs can secure income for that land, and BrightSource can cut a lot of the red tape out of the process of building solar power facilities.

There are transmission lines nearby, however most of the power would feed into Las Vegas – one of the issues I’ve been reading up on lately was the transmission gap around Las Vegas. There is transmission lines coming in from the north terminating near Apex, and then again from the south to California and the Eldorado Valley (where there are many other solar power projects), but nothing through the city.

[via Reuters]

This efficency push is estimated to abate the need for three 500MW generation facilities that would otherwise be needed.

If we look at the cost of what it takes to build a new power plant, for coal (which would probably never be built in CA), its about $3.2B (based on NV Energy’s attempt in Nevada to build 1,500MW of coal-fired generation – $3.8B – 0.6B for the transmission line). This doesn’t include a transmission line from where ever they would build this plant and then bring the energy in. It also doesn’t include the ongoing operational and fuel costs associated with running the coal plant.

Three 500MW natural gas combined cycle turbine power plants would be less expensive – about $1500/kW in California (mostly due to permitting and environmental red tape), for a total cost of $2.25B. This is cheaper than the money spent on energy efficiency, but again it does not include maintenance as well as volatile fuel costs – consider that natural gas cost about three times its current value just 12 months ago. Utilities have to raise rates, but they never quite seem to go back down to where they were when the price of fuel goes down.

The other side of the equation is will the investment actually pay off. It might be difficult to quantify beforehand how much money will translate into reduced energy consumption. Replacing windows and putting more insulation will help, but by how much? The other issue is whether or not the savings “stick” – does someone who sees their power bill drop by 20% start to care less about saving energy because they don’t care if it goes back up to where it was before? Does their energy use slowly creep back up to where it was before?

Still it seems like a great investment – for the initial capital costs, they could prevent the need to build more power plants and not have to worry about buying fuel and maintenance.

The price quoted in the piece was 100 Euros, or $150USD. That price may make sense in Europe, where petrol is very expensive, however in the US gas prices are sufficiently low that Nissan would probably need to price it at $129. Can they do it?

Based on the latest estimate of the Volt battery costing $8,000, that would mean that the LEAF battery would cost 50% more (because its 50% larger), or $12,000. Financing the battery over five years at 5% would cost about $140, assuming that you could sell the battery for about $300/kWh after 5 years (consider by 2015/16 the average new battery price will drop from $1000/usable kWh to $500/usable kWh). To get down to the target price of $129, they’d need a resale price of $350/usable kWh, which isn’t impossible.

From the consumer perspective, how much would the battery lease need to cost to equalize the amount you spend on gas every month? We’ll start with a few assumptions: the driver will drive 50 miles per day (out of 100mi city range, 75mi range highway), five days per week plus an extra 60 weekend miles (16K miles/yr); they get about 22 miles per gallon right now; we’ll exclude vehicle cost because the “shell” cost is comparable with a compact car; electricity costs 11c/kWh and charging efficiency is 90%.

The “driver” we specify above will buy 14 gallons of gas per week, or use about 75kWh in electricity. The E-cost is $8.25/week, versus $42/week at $3/gallon. If the $129/mo lease is averaged out to a per week basis (*12/52) the lease is about $29.76/week. Combined is a weekly cost of $38.86, three and a half dollars cheaper than gasoline per week. Over the course of the year that’s $163/yr. Not a whole lot of savings but assuming gas prices go up, the savings get larger. Calculating backwards, the break-even point is about $2.76/gal.

There are a few other issues too – you’re likely to have another car for longer trips. So insurance covering that vehicle will also be necessary (though hopefully not a car payment), minor maintenance like oil changes and new batteries. If you have a significant other then you might already own this car. If you’re single like me, it may not be an optimal situation because you’ll have two cars in your garage and you can only use one at a time (dare I say, you might be better off with a Volt).

The problem of course is range anxiety – a study of Japanese EV users showed that users didn’t want to travel beyond 10 miles from the only charging station. Adding a second charging station gave users the freedom to travel beyond that initial area, but the second station was rarely used. It was just a security blanket.

The bottom line is that EVs are in an interesting situation. In order to make the EV pay off compared to a gasoline vehicle, you need to drive it a lot, however range anxiety factors in and limits the distance people feel comfortable driving – its a catch 22. You get something similar with E-REVs, in that the optimal driving distance for the quickest payback is exactly the EV-only range without tapping the gasoline generator, though people don’t generally worry about range issues.

The phase one portion of the study included narrowing down areas with renewable resources to the zones where the best resources in each state were available. This includes areas of high solar irradiation and sufficient wind speeds at 50 meters above ground. The WECC (Western Energy Coordination Council) peak load was 150GW in 2007, so the resulting 180GW of generation capability identified by the study could significantly mitigate peak load.

Other factors that were included in the study were sufficient density – enough to provide 1,500MW of energy in a 100 mile radius, which would justify a 500kV transmission line from the zone to the demand region. Also excluded were protected areas identified by the BLM and other federal government agencies where the development of renewables is prohibited, not congruent with the development intent or could impact sensitive environmental conditions. Also not included were smaller renewable installations – generally at the local level like PV panels on rooftops.

After all is said and done, the 11 western states identified 80GW of solar thermal, about 74GW of wind, 2.5GW of biomass and 29GW of geothermal, for a total of 185GW (though only about 162GW of that was in WREZ areas).

The 11 western states in the lower 48 in 2007 consumed 667,670 GWh. In the same states, the renewable zones identified could possibly contribute over 442,000, or 66% of the total power consumption. Some states like Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico and Nevada could export renewable energy to states that wouldn’t be able to produce anywhere near what they consume – California.

Future phases of this study will analyse and create a transmission plan, as well as developing a regional purchasing system for utilities to meet their states’ RPS (renewable portfolio standards) goals, and finally getting the various local, state and federal jurisdictions to work together harmoniously in the permitting and construction process to get renewables from generation to distribution.

The problem can be distilled simply: if you have 1MW of PV generation, and the sun goes behind a cloud, how quickly does that 1MW go down, and how far does it go down? My experience with solar PV shows that the time is nearly instantaneous – when the panel is shaded, the output drops immediately. The how far down part depends on the type of cloud. If its low, dark storm clouds, the panels go from nominal output to below the inverter’s threshold of power generation instantly and no power will be generated.

Think of this from the utility’s side – they have 500MW of load to match with 400MW from a natural gas generation facility that can output up to 600MW, and 100MW from solar PV panels that are next to the natural gas plant. If the panels get shaded over the course of a minute, the natural gas plant cant just turn up from 400MW to 500MW immediately. This is due to the nature of the combined cycle generation – modern units have spin-up rates around 7% per minute. So 7% of 600MW is 42MW, so it will take a little over 2 minutes to get back to 500MW of generation. By then the cloud could be gone.

Even if you had software to control the turbines to match the per-second output of the PV array, if the array managed to get shaded faster than the rate the combined cycle system can spin up additional power, then you’re going to have issues matching the load with the power generation.

There is one key to this situation though – how fast can the panels get shaded. If you have a cloud moving overhead at 100 feet per second, and the cloud is 1000 feet long, thats roughly 10 seconds of shade and a 1000′ long shadow on the ground (note I’ve made some assumptions on a few things, like the sun is pretty much stationary over a 10 second period). There are a few things that follow from this…

• Does the turbine get more wear and tear from spinning up at its fastest ramp rate for 10 seconds, the going back down?
• How much PV output gets shaded? Even at 10,000′ long, depending on cloud shape and plant layout, it might only be shading a portion of the total panels, leaving other panels producing at nominal output.
• Does a larger geographic distribution of panels provide for better coverage against the occasional cloud?

There are many questions that need answering when it comes to distributed PV generation. One idea I’ve had is look-ahead demand shaving. In other words, you’d have to build some sort of system to look at the sun and see if there was a cloud coming soon from the perspective of the PV plants. Then, based on the color of the cloud, get an idea how much output will fall, and then send that back to the grid operators. A running net total of PV increases and decreases for the system would be calculated every few seconds so the grid operators would be able to know if the PV-based power output is about to go down, or spike up after the sun comes back out from behind the clouds. They could either use this data to unlock additional power (say, from a flywheel or battery storage system) or send out a message to grid users to try and shave their demand for the next 15 seconds (or whatever time frame is calculated). The backend calculations could get very complex – knowing what data is coming from what geographical position and create a virtual cloud map of the skies above the city, and even doing its own predictions for when dips and spikes will happen.

The problem boils down to if you can geographically distribute the generation, what kind of reliability issues are there on intermittent cloudy days, and how much of that power generation drop can you predict ahead of time to schedule additional generation resources.

I should note wind faces a similar problem. I was looking at a study for how 15GW of wind power in Texas would affect the ERCOT grid. It turns out the maxium 30-minute decrease was around 2.8GW (93MW/minute), which would happen once every 3-4 years, and 2.4GW about once per year. ERCOT, which has a peak demand of about 65-70GW. To accomidate the 2.8GW 30-minute decrease at a 7% ramp rate for combined cycle, you would need to have that much in spinning reserve because even fast starting plants will take about 30 minutes to start. If a plant is at 40% (minimum operational capacity) and had to spin up to 100%, at 7%/min thats less than 10 minutes. So its completely possible to have sufficient reserve within a dispatch pattern, given enough individual turbines (approximately 5GW in the previous example). Also, the report notes that this condition is limited to certain seasonal patterns, so its likely that the dispatch configuration needed would only be required in certain situations.

Yes, several in fact. But only one is significant.

The first claim is that there was an 84% reduction in carbon. This is based on the entire life cycle of petroleum-based fuels (pumping it out of the ground, refining it, transporting it for use and the carbon output) versus growing Camelina plants, refining it and transporting it for use. What allows for the massive reduction in net carbon is that the Camelina plant is taking existing carbon out of the air (sequestering it in the plant as organic material) and then releasing that carbon back into the atmosphere when burnt.

Next, the study was commissioned by a company that manufactures the technology to convert camelina plants into biojet fuel. While they do have an interest in hyping their product, biofuel from plants isn’t some crackpot technology, rather its completely viable. However we have to worry about the displacement of food crops, which this study takes into account – it only uses land that isn’t currently in use to grow food crops. So it isn’t as bad as using corn to grow to turn into ethanol.

The biggest catch is the acre to gallon ratio. They claim that 2-3M acres would generate 200-300M gallons of biofuel for jets per year. How many flights is that? Well, a loaded 777 on a flight from JFK airport in New York City to London-Heathrow airport (LHR) in the UK uses about 16,300 gallons of fuel (it varies depending on direction, flight path, delays, etc). So you could fly back and forth 42 times a day for a year on 250M gallons of jet fuel. While that might sound like a lot, estimates show that over 740M gallons of jet fuel were wasted by flight delays in 2007, nearly three times the amount that the state of Montana could produce. The entire airline industry consumed about 22 billion gallons of jet fuel per year. This 200-300M gallons would represent roughly 1.1% of total jet fuel consumed. And we don’t have 100 other states like Montana to grow this stuff.

While biomass to biofuel its no where near a solution to the consumption of oil-based fuels, it is a step in the right direction – the net reduction in carbon emissions can help, and jet engines are becoming more efficient (GEnX, Trent 1000, P&W GTF-based models) so they’ll use less fuel. Even this week, Boeing announced a 2% reduction in fuel burn in a slightly revised 737 engine.

Word is that Hitachi has a new lithium-ion battery that has a high W/kg ratio and can last 10 years in EREV applications.

I’m tempted to not even write about it since such so little is known about the battery, other than percentage improvements. Thats not really a substantial yardstick to gauge how well the batteries would work in an automotive context (spec sheets are a little better, but sometimes lack necessary information as well).

They state that the batteries can produce 4,500W/kg, which is outstanding considering other batteries today have pulse power ratings around 1000-1500W/kg. But again, other batteries have about 6-7 years to catch up to this hypothetical future battery. For reference, a Volt’s motor would need 120kW peak, and that H3 Electric Hummer was 200kW, each necessitating only 27kg and 45kg of batteries. The problem wont be pulse power at this point, rather power density, volume and recharge cycles – but even at a futuristic sounding 250W/kg, for a 40 mile plug-in like the Volt, you’ll need 40kg at least for 10kWh of energy storage.

Raser posted a video of enthusiastic workers turning the switch to start sending power to California. Their technology allows the usage of water down to about 60C, well below the 150-180C water temperatures needed for traditional geothermal power generation.

The technology used is a binary system, where the hot water’s heat is transferred into a working fluid that has a much lower boiling point that water. This will flash boil the liquid and convert it to steam, which will turn the turbine and generate electricity. After the steam has passed through the turbine, it will collect in a second tank where cool water is circulated through which cools the steam and returns it to a liquid. From there it is pushed through a pump and put back into the first tank with the hot water.

This system in its current form can generate about 280kW. This facility, the Hatch Generating Plant, has 50 of these units, which will generate 10 to 11MW of geothermal energy for use in California, where renewable energy portfolio standards (RPS) require 20% of the energy used to be renewable by the end of 2010 and 33% by 2020.

Raser has a commitment from Merril Lynch to provide for project financing up to 155MW. This allows Merril Lynch to take advantage of the 10% investment tax credit for geothermal passed under the stimulus package of 2009. They currently have seven additional projects under development in the United States.

The details for this beast are impressive. A 200kW AC induction motor to drive the wheels, which is 67% larger than the Volt’s 120kW motor. The motor connects to the 4WD transmission, so the vehicle is just as off-road capable as the conventional H3.

When traveling beyond 40 miles or when the batteries are out of energy, the gasoline generator will kick in to recharge the batteries and provide the power needed to drive the motor. At 60 miles per day (20 miles/day on gasoline, 300 miles total per week), the vehicle will get an equivalent of 100 MPG, which means that the 23 gallon tank would only be refilled once every seven weeks. Even when the batteries are depleted on long-distance highway driving, the H3 still gets 33MPG, which is still twice as good as the average MPG of the conventional H3.

Raser also unveiled a 10 minute promotional video, showing off the electric H3.

Raser supplies the AC induction motor and generator, and it appears that A123 systems supplied the batteries for the demonstration project. It is not explicitly mentioned, however a computer generated image of a lithium ion battery in the video linked above has an A123 logo on it, and none of the performance characteristics of the battery are known.

Price is also not something mentioned in the video, and I can bet that it would be expensive. At an estimated 400Wh/mi, the energy needed to travel 40 miles would be approximately 16kWh, requiring a 30kWh battery pack. Estimates indicate that the 16kWh battery pack in the Chevy Volt would cost around $10,000, this 30kWh pack will cost almost double.

Raser advertises that the powertrain can be taken from the H3 and put into other light trucks like the Ford F150 and Chevy Silverado. One of the neat things that Raser points out is that the generator can be used to offer 100kW of power for the worksite, and 100kW is more than enough to power your house in emergency situations, like after a natural disaster.