Tag: electric vehicle

3 Ways Electric Cars Are Changing More Than the Way We Drive

Part 1 of 3 on the Future of Transportation and the Internet of Things

The world is moving away from cars based on the internal combustion engine (ICEs). The future is electric. With Tesla leading the way on what’s possible with electric vehicles, more traditional auto manufacturers are following suit.

Volvo has announced that all of its cars will have electric motors by 2019. Aston Martin is planning the same by 2025. General Motors plans to have at least 20 electric vehicles (EVs) by 2023. The list goes on.

Much of the pressure is coming from countries banning ICE sales in the not-too-distant future (The Netherlands by 2025; China, India and Germany by 2030; France and the UK by 2040). Industry and consumers, however, want electric as well.

When everybody wants something, it tends to happen. The question is, what will be the ramifications? One safe bet is that the market for your ICE -based car will be drying up quickly – so think about selling now. But beyond concerns for personal finance, we can also expect EVs to have a dramatic impact in a number of areas including climate conditions in cities, the automotive industry in general, and energy distribution worldwide.

Lower emissions

The obvious benefit of electric cars – the reason countries, industries, and individuals everywhere are pushing for them – is lower emissions. One of the cities most concerned about emissions is Beijing. Back in 2015, the notoriously thick smog of the city disappeared quickly when authorities banned driving  for two weeks in preparation for a World War II commemoration parade. The day after driving resumed, the smog returned.

Today, Beijing is planning to replace the city’s nearly 70,000 taxis with EVs. Doubtless, this is a step in the right direction. Yet, while Beijing tends to get the lion’s share of press coverage when it comes to smog, other cities face similar challenges. From Paris to Mexico City and all around the world, lower emissions from electric vehicles will help to improve health for citizens locally and fight climate change globally.

Industry change

The automotive industry is not just General Motors, Volkswagen, Toyota and the rest. It’s also made up of countless suppliers of parts and components. But when you move from a traditional ICE to the electric engine, you lose about 90% of the parts. Electric engines are just simpler.

This means that for companies in the automotive supplier ecosystem, much of the market is going away soon. The simplicity of electric engines will also be felt further down the value chain. Service centers, for example, will feel the hit.  Many of these centers – particularly the large chains – use the inexpensive 3,000-mile oil change as a loss-leader to upsell customers on needed maintenance. But without oil in the electric engine – and without as much need for maintenance – many of these chains will have to rethink their business models to survive.

New energy horizons

One of the most significant impacts of EVs will be on the way energy is distributed – because in addition to being modes of transportation, EVs will also act as energy sources that can plug directly into the grid.

This will help address the challenge of “demand response.” The problem to solve here is one of grid stability in the era of renewable energy. Traditionally, large centrally located energy generation plants –  coal, gas, and nuclear – have churned out a steady supply of energy that results in a fairly stable grid.

However, the renewable energy paradigm – based mostly on solar and wind – is neither centralized nor steady. Rather it is distributed across rooftops, solar farms, and mountain tops. And it is variable according to weather conditions.

With renewables, in other words, utilities have less control over the supply side of the equation – meaning how and when energy is generated. This has the potential to lead to instability on the electricity grid. If you can’t manage the supply, then you have to use demand side management, also known as demand response. This can be done using through incentives, and the technology is advancing such that increasingly the process is becoming automated.

By providing a storage mechanism that can both take energy in and send it out, car batteries on EVs can act as frequency regulators for the grid. This is a big deal that has the potential to change energy distribution forever.

At night, say, when the wind is blowing, a car battery can store energy generated by wind turbines. Or, in the middle of the afternoon when everybody wants air conditioning on a hot day, the same batteries can distribute some of their energy. This leads to improved grid stability.

Industry convergence

Let’s just note, however, that the entities with the closest relationships to the owners of the batteries so critical to grid stability would not be the utilities but EV manufacturers. What’s stopping Elon Musk from enticing Tesla customers from sharing their batteries? Tesla could enable its customers provide energy from their batteries – and then sell it on the grid for a profit. Customers make money. Tesla makes money. Utility companies make money. Everybody is happy.

This transforms the automobile industry into an energy industry. At SAP we talk a lot about digital transformation as a response to digital disruption. This is disruption at its most dramatic.

Elon Musk has stated aims to make 500,000 Tesla’s in 2018. Let’s say he falls disastrously short and only hits half his target. Let’s also assume an average 80 kilowatt hour (kWh) battery size in the EVs – (Tesla cars today have battery sizes ranging from 60 -110 kWh). 250,000 cars x 80 kWh – and you’ll see that this fleet would have the capacity of 20 gigawatt hours of storage. For comparison, a gigawatt is roughly the output of a nuclear power plant. So, Tesla will be producing the equivalent of 20 nuclear power plants worth of storage, at least, per year.

Electric vehicle manufacturers will be able to aggregate the energy on their networks, and sell access to their “virtual power plants”. It is a whole new world.

Stay tuned for more on how the transportation industry is changing forever.

 

Photo credit Tesla

Elon Musk has two more Secret Master Plans

In August 2006 Elon Musk first published his Secret Master Plan for Tesla:

Build sports car
Use that money to build an affordable car
Use that money to build an even more affordable car
While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options

And with the launch (for pre-order) of the Tesla Model 3 last month, the Secret Master Plan is now well under way (if a little behind schedule!).

However, I’ve long suspected that Elon Musk has even greater ambitions than moving the world to electric transportation. I think he has two more Secret Master Plans, and I’m going to lay them out below. See if you agree with me.

The first is the more obvious of the two – to disrupt Uber, public transportation, and other ride sharing operators, by allowing owners of fully autonomous Tesla vehicles to participate in a Tesla operated ride sharing scheme.

How would it work – well, when I drive to work in the morning in my Tesla. I park the my car, and engage the Ride Share mode. The car then broadcasts its location and availability to the network, which assigns it rides as and when they are needed. At the end of my work day, my car knows to meet me back at my place of work to take me home, and I can choose once more to set it to Ride Share mode, or have it charge (or both if I have the Tesla robotic charging arm).

DrivingATeslaThe trips would be undertaken on a revenue sharing basis, so money made could well be put towards the car loan/lease costs. In this way, the car could go a long way towards paying for itself, while also reducing traffic congestion, reducing global emissions, and making the roads safer.

And in case you think this is just the voices in my head (!), Elon Musk himself strongly hinted that he was planning something along these very lines last week.

The second Secret Master Plan is less obvious – it involves disrupting the utility industry. How?

By using the batteries in the electric vehicles to buy and sell energy. I know this may sound totally outlandish, but bear with me.

Most home energy storage systems store somewhere between 4-8kWh of electricity (with Tesla’s PowerWall coming in at 6.4kWh). But if you own a Tesla car, your battery is 70-90kWh (for the Model S, it may be as low as 50kWh for the Model 3). That’s still a lot more than a home energy system.

Now consider, Elon Musk’s stated aim is to sell 500,000 cars a year by 2020. That may sound very ambitious given Tesla are currently selling a little over 50,000 cars per annum. However, Elon Musk is nothing, if not ambitious, and orders for the new Model 3 are approaching 400,000 according to Tesla Vice-President of Business Development, Diarmuid O’Connell.

But let’s be conservative and say that Tesla manages to deliver 200,000 cars in 2020 with an average battery of 60kWh. A quick bit of maths tells us

60KWh x 200,000 = 12,000,000KWh

12,000,000kWh = 12,000MWh

12,000MWh = 12GWh

12GWh is a lot of storage. For context, that’s the ability to store an hour’s output from 12 typical modern nuclear reactors.

Indian Point nuclear power plant
Indian Point nuclear power plant – Photo Tony Fischer

Now, add to this the fact that every Tesla sold has an always-on data connection.

Suddenly you realise Tesla has the ability to control dozens of virtual nuclear power plants worth of storage, and Tesla will be selling at least 12 more nuclear power plants worth of storage, every year. Conservatively.

So the business case – Tesla can sell usage of this distributed storage to utility companies to use as backup, or for frequency regulation, to help smooth the demand curve on the grid, and remove the instability introduced by the addition of variable generators (wind and solar). If utilities can buy energy from Tesla at times of peak demand, it can mean they avoid having to build a power plant (or 12), which is a huge cost saving for them, and also reduces their emissions because peaker plants are invariably powered by burning fossil fuels.

For Tesla car owners, they get paid on a revenue share basis for use of the battery in their car, and the increased grid stability allows for more variable generators (wind and solar) to be added to the grid, making the world a better place for everyone. And that sounds just like something Elon Musk would want.

After all, Musk is the guy who said, when he published his Master Plan back in 2006:

the overarching purpose of Tesla Motors (and the reason I am funding the company) is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy, which I believe to be the primary, but not exclusive, sustainable solution

So what do you think, will Tesla be the next ride-sharing platform, while also becoming the Uber of electricity?

IBM’s mobility play: MobileFirst


Airplane mode on iPhone

One of the big talking points at this year’s IBM Pulse was IBM’s recent unveiling of its new platform for mobile, MobileFirst. My colleague James covers the announcement in details on his RedMonk blog, but I thought I’d talk a bit about the GreenMonk perspective, as we haven’t covered mobile here very much to-date, and it is becoming increasingly pervasive.

Mobile is now huge. I know this is self-evident, but it is totally game-changing. Now everyone is instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent, as IBM themselves might say.

What does this have to do with sustainability? Well, we here at GreenMonk take a broad view of Sustainability and as we noted in our write-up of the Pulse conference, IBM’s Smarter initiatives all play to a sustainable agenda. Sustainability is all about doing things more efficiently. Mobile definitely enables that.

You only have to think of the application IBM rolled out last year to help staff and students crowdsource cleaning up of the Los Angeles Unified School’s District. And, it is also making a big splash in the Enterprise space, as witnessed by SAP’s Operational Risk Management mobile app; the ESB and IBM mobile app to help finding and scheduling charging of electric vehicles in Ireland and many similar initiatives.

And there’s also social – I wrote a blog post last November about the intersection of big data, social and sustainability. What does this have to do with mobile? Well, in each of the examples outlined in the blog post, a significant amount of the data would have been entered via mobile. People as sensors. The internet of everything.

There are lots of other examples in healthcare, smarter cities (the Boston mobile app I mentioned in this post), education, etc.

The one place IBM may be missing a trick in mobile? Mobile endpoint energy management. IBM have an endpoint management app for mobile, but it’s focus is more on security than energy management, but, as we’ve noted here previously, battery life is a significant pain point for mobile users. A user whose device is out of battery, is a frustrated, disconnected, unproductive worker.

An Endpoint Management solution which manages mobile battery life (by having low power modes, or by automatically shutting down all but the frontmost app, or similar, for example) would be a definite win for any enterprise.

(Full disclosure – IBM paid (economy) travel and accommodation for me to attend Pulse.)

(Cross-posted @ GreenMonk: the blog)

Unfortunate EV choice won’t help SAP’s Greenhouse Gas reduction commitments

SAP's 2010 Global Greenhouse Gas Footprint

The graph above is taken from the Greenhouse Gas Footprint page of SAP’s Sustainability Report and it shows SAP’s global GHG footprint for 2010. Of particular note in this graph is that globally SAP’s 2010 carbon footprint for corporate cars is 24%. This is up from 23% in 2009 and 18% in 2008. This is obviously a problem for SAP who have publicly committed to reducing their Greenhouse Gas Emissions 51% (from their 2007 baseline) by 2020.

In an effort to help address this SAP decided to embark on a small scale Electric Vehicle (EV) project called Future Fleet. Future Fleet uses a fleet of 30 EV’s charged solely from renewable sources supplied (along with the charging infrastructure) by project partner MVV Energie.

SAP Future Fleet electric vehicle

SAP Future Fleet electric vehicle

SAP are using this project to test employee attitudes to EV’s but also to test their own EV eMobility charging and fleet management software which is being developed, and tested in tandem with the project. The software allows employees to log in and book cars for specific journeys between SAP sites in Germany, or for a day or a week at a time. The software also intelligently prioritises charging of cars based on expected upcoming journey duration, current battery state and other factors.

All good and laudable stuff. However, one major issue I have with the project is that for purely political reasons SAP chose an electric car for the project which seemed to be designed with the distinct purpose of turning drivers off EV’s…

The zero-emissions Nissan Leaf test drive

The Nissan Leaf

I love the idea of electric cars and have done for a long time.

Recently, one of my best friends Ray Flynn, proprietor of Flynns Garage (a Nissan Dealership in Carlow, Ireland), contacted me to let me know he is one of only 15 Nissan dealerships in Ireland who have been approved to sell the new all-electric Nissan Leaf. As such he had a limited number of slots available for a test drive and he wanted to know if I’d like one of them. I jumped at the chance!

The Leaf is a totally electric car relying completely on its 24 kW·h/90 kW lithium ion battery pack for power. The battery pack is rated to deliver 100 miles on a full charge but this can vary from about 62 miles (100 km) to almost 138 miles (222 km) depending on driving style, load, traffic conditions, weather (i.e. wind, atmospheric density) and accessory use.

Nissan Leaf under the hood

Nissan Leaf under the hood

The car is a five seater with a spacious interior. It is very responsive to drive. My own car is a 2008 Toyota Prius and this is a much nippier car than the Prius. It handles well on the road and because there are 300kg of batteries under the floor, the car sticks to the road on corners!

Charge time varies on the type of charging (normal or fast) and whether the battery is fully depleted or only partially. Using a standard 220/240 volt 30 amp supply the battery can be fully charged in 8 hours. Fast charging using a 440V level 3 charger charges to 80% in around 20 minutes – these are typically the kinds of chargers you will see deployed in places like McDonalds, Tesco’s and motorway café’s I assume.

Nissan Leaf interior

Nissan Leaf interior

There is a lot of technology built in to the car. It is connected to a global data center which provides support, information and entertainment at all times. The GPS navigation system delivers a constantly updating display of your range as well as showing all the charging stations on your route and it allows you to book a charging station to ensure that it is available when you arrive.

Mobile phone apps will allow remote turning on of aircon and heating as well as setting charging times to coincide with time of use rates from utilities…

Friday Morning Green Numbers round-up 01/29/2010

Green numbers
Photo credit: Unhindered by Talent


Photo credit Unhindered by Talent

Here is this Friday’s Green Numbers round-up:

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

by-sa

Friday’s Green Numbers round-up 01/15/2010

Green Numbers
Photo credit arekiiu

Here is today’s Friday Green numbers round-up:

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

by-sa

Ford discusses their Electric Vehicle and smart grid integration plans


Just before Christmas I had a chat with Ford’s head of battery electric vehicle applications, Greg Frenette. We discussed how Ford has been working with utilities and industry organisations to ready its electric vehicles for deep integration into smart grids.

It was fascinating for me to see just how far Ford have proceeded with their thinking on this.

Here’s the transcript of our conversation.

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone and welcome to GreenMonkTV. My guest in the show today is Greg Frenette. Greg is the Manager of Battery Electric Vehicle Applications for the Ford Motor Company. Greg let’s start of with a bit of historical background. Ford have been looking at electric vehicles for some time now; I think 2005 was when you started looking at electric vehicles and smart grid integration. Were you working on electric vehicles even before that?

Greg Frenette: Oh! Sure, we’ve been working on electric vehicles for over 20 years, in our research organization primarily. And when I say electric, I talk about not only battery electric, but fuel cell electric vehicles. But it was in 2007 when we decided to explore a demonstration fleet of plug-in vehicles, plug-in hybrids that we started thinking very seriously about the integration of those vehicles with the grid and in July 2007 announced a partnership with Southern California Edison, which has since grown to a partnership with about 12 different utilities and industry organizations.

Tom Raftery: What is the basis of that partnership, I mean Southern Cal Edison is a utility company, is it that you are test bedding your electric vehicles to see how they fit in with smart grids or what’s the basis of the partnership?

Greg Frenette: That’s exactly it. We’ve got some very high-fidelity Ford Escape production vehicles that have been modified with Lithium-Ion battery packs and charging systems and we’re really exploring what the interaction of that vehicle with the grid is like. We are trying to get a better understanding of the win-win solutions between industries that’ll be necessary in order to commercialize plug-in hybrids as well as full battery electric vehicles.

Tom Raftery: From the research, what are you guys seeing, how well do electric vehicles, battery electric vehicles — how well do they integrate with smart grids?

Greg Frenette: I think the opportunity is tremendous. With our plug-in Escape fleet of about 21 vehicles that we’ve deployed across North America we’re now in the process of setting up communications and actually demonstrating communications between the vehicles and smart meters which are becoming more and more available today in the market.

So we are finding that whole idea of how a vehicle interfaces with the grid is more than simply plugging it in; there’s an opportunity to communicate and an opportunity for the consumer – automotive consumer, electric consumer to make choices and to communicate those choices back and forth from the vehicle to the grid and vice versa.

I’ll give you an example; if you are sitting in one of our plug-in Escape prototypes, hybrid prototypes, today, what you’d find is if you decided you didn’t want to start charging until the rates are cheaper say around midnight or so you could tell the vehicle don’t charge until then, or if you wanted a full charge by a certain time in order to return home or whatever you could then dictate that, communicate it through the vehicle to a smart meter that would then modulate the charges such a way to meet your needs.

Tom Raftery: Interesting! So you are basically shifting your consumption to match times when electricity is less expensive.

Greg Frenette: You can do that; you can also, though, if you are plugged in and you don’t have a need for a particular charging and you have some freedom flexibility, you can indicate that you are willing to accept interruptible service in order to, again, reduce the cost of charging your vehicle. So that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the, sort of, communications that will become available in vehicles and the, kind of, capability we’ll have to really interact with the grid and dictate how we use energy with vehicles.

Tom Raftery: One of the other issues around integration of Battery Electric Vehicles and smart grids is the billing. So say if I go and visit somebody else, some cousins or some neighbours or some family or something and they live a couple of hours away and I need to charge to get home, can I plug in my vehicle in to their electric outlets and have it billed back to my account, is that — are you working on those kinds of integrations as well?

Greg Frenette: Absolutely! One of the real beauties of Ford partnering with a number of utilities across North America is we are exploring those sorts of scenarios and so this whole idea of mobile billing, how that occurs how it takes place is something we are exploring along with a number of other interface opportunities and challenges that we want to face and work out together.

Tom Raftery: Another issue that people raise around electric vehicles is if an electric vehicle is being charged by a utility who are burning coal are they outputting more CO2 than they would if the same car was running off gas?

Greg Frenette: Well that scenario could certainly present itself. One of the things — one of the opportunities that may present itself in how consumers interact with the grid is you may dictate through your vehicles or through an interface at the meter — you may dictate that you want the greenest form of charging.

In other words you will dictate that you will charge at times when the least the amount of coal is being burnt and perhaps other sources of energy are being made available to the grid. So that sort of thinking is something that we are currently engaged at. At the end of the day, though, the total environmental solution is more than a solution at the tailpipe of the vehicle. It has to be what we call a wells-to-wheels solution, and so the energy industry sees the role, I think, they need to play in helping drive emissions down, helping us really improve the environment together.

Tom Raftery: Okay, one last question Greg. When will I see a Ford Battery Electric Vehicle in the showroom?

Greg Frenette: Well, our current plans, today, call for Ford Transit Connect Battery Electric Vehicles to begin coming off our production line at the end of next year (2010).

The following year, 2011, we are currently scheduled to be putting out a full electric Ford Focus Battery Electric Vehicle and then our plans beyond then, 2012 and beyond, call for a plug-in hybrid, a version of the vehicles that we are currently running in demonstration today. So we are not talking about a long-term reality here; what we are really talking about is vehicles that are currently under design and development and will be deployed out in to the public very shortly.

Tom Raftery: Superb Greg, that’s been fantastic. Thanks for agreeing to come on the show.

by-sa