Producer's Notes: Waiting for the Electric Car
The Tesla Roadster is an all-electric sports car you can buy today.
General Motors, Chrysler and Ford face an uncertain future. They have been lobbying Congress for a $25 billion bailout, which representatives seem reluctant to grant them. It seems like an odd time to be talking about technological breakthroughs in the automotive industry. But GM is saying that it still intends to come out with its plug-in hybrid, the Chevy Volt, by 2010, and that this new car will "completely reinvent the automotive industry."
Plug-in hybrids run for a certain distance on batteries (so far, hackers have been able to create plug-in hybrids that run for about 10 miles on batteries). After that, they revert to standard hybrid operation, which uses gas and electricity. When you get home in the evening, you plug the car in and recharge the batteries so that the following day you can drive another 10 miles with the electric charge.
Today you can only get a plug-in hybrid by hacking your Prius to add more batteries to it. We filmed members of the Palo Alto nonprofit CalCars doing just this for our QUEST story on plug-in hybrids in 2007. If you're not handy with tools, you can have someone else retrofit your Prius with the necessary battery pack. Luscious Garage, in San Francisco, has started offering this service. They're featured in today’s QUEST story "Waiting for the Electric Car," which explores why all-electric everyday cars remain an elusive goal. The limiting factor is the difficulty in making a battery that is powerful, long-lasting and cheap. QUEST goes behind the scenes to a battery lab at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley to find out what goes into the making of a lithium-ion battery and why it’s taking so long to make one that can power an all-electric car, or even a plug-in hybrid that can go for more than 10 miles on its electric charge.
Watch the Waiting for the Electric Car television story online.
10 Comments
There are some exciting looking extended range, fast and sophisticated electric vehicles that are being designed in the US which will be ready to be rolled out next year. The high demand for EVs among people right now, has ensured that this will happen and people will have more of a choice in the EV segment.
Not enough credit is being given to the high gas prices this past year and it's serious damage on our economy and society. That one factor alone has caused serious stress in both individuals and businesses. A record number of homes and jobs have been lost as a direct result. And, while we are doing the happy dance around the lower prices at the pumps OPEC is announcing cuts to manipulate the prices upward again. We must get on with becoming energy independent.We can't take another year like this past. There is a wonderful new book out about the energy crisis and what it would take for America to become energy independent. It covers every aspect of oil, what it's uses are besides gasoline, our reserves, our depletion of it. Every type of alternative energy is covered and it's potential to replace oil. He even has proposed legislative agenda's that would be necessary to implement these changes along with time frames. This book is profoundly informative and our country needs to become more informed and move forward with becoming energy independent. Green technology would not only provide clean cheap energy it would create millions of badly needed new jobs. The Book is called The Manhattan Project of 2009 Energy Independence NOW. Our politicians all need to read this book. http://www.themanhattanprojectof2009.com
While high gas prices may be very painful to some people, the general effect was that finally people became aware of the waste generated by oversized cars and city planning blind to energy use. The price increases have pushed people to finally do something about oil dependency. This was talked about for decades and nothing happened.
The job of the government should be to push us into the right direction, and that means higher gas prices with the tax profits used to increase alternative energy research and helping those hurt most by the high prices, like a tax writeoff for poor commuters – but not supermarkets who insist on shipping goods an average of 3000 miles.
One important factor that is often neglected in news coverage of electric vehicle is the ramifications of plugging in millions of automobiles into the electric grid.
First, California has too many days when the electric grid is nearly overwhelmed. Remember the rolling blackouts? If we are going to substantially increase the power drawn from the electric grid we must have more electric power input into the grid. More nukes anyone?
Second, most additional forms of power input into the grid are powered by fossil-fuels. Pluin electric vehicles may decrease local pollution. Yet, they will likely increase regional pollution and release of CO2.
Why was this aspect of electric vehicles not covered in the Quest segment?
Martin is correct. High gas prices were a blessing because they focused the country's attention on the need for more fuel efficient cars. The ideal solution from an economist's standpoint would be to gradually increase the gasoline tax over five years until the pump price of gasoline equals the price in Europe. That would give car makers and customers an opportunity to adjust to the higher cost of fuel. The downside of that approach is that the tax would be regressive, i.e., the burden would fall heaviest on the poor. Taxing personal, non-commercial gas guzzlers would be a less regressive alternative. With a weight and horsepower tax buyers of heavy, high horsepower personal cars or trucks or SUVs would be required to pay for the cost of externalities (pollution, greenhouse gas, etc.)attributable to their choice of vehicle. This could be accomplished by imposing a tax on horsepower and/or vehicle weight. Soon car makers would be applying the laws of physics to produce smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles to satisfy buyer demand for them. This should have been done 30 years ago.
Douglas: Many utilities (especially PG&E) are looking forward to the day when millions of EV's are plugged in, but with joy not dread. The reason is that those EV's will generally be charging up at night when other demand is low (and by then there will be a lot more wind generation, which also comes on at night) so the EV's will "suck up that extra juice". And if it's done right, their chargers will actually be under the control of the utilities themselves or maybe a third party like Better Place, so the chargers can go full bore or cut back within seconds to help manage the grid (and reduce the costs of charging).
Then during the day the cars may be plugged in at work, but again will only charge when there is extra capacity – and may even start supplying energy TO the grid during an emergency (Google has a pilot project doing this, it's called Vehicle to Grid or VTG).
You are right that at the margin more electric generation creates more pollution, but again at night there are only the efficient natural gas generators running, and they generate a lot less than an inefficient internal combustion engine, even accounting for transmission losses etc.
So perhaps QUEST erred in not talking about the impacts of EV's on the electric grid, but those impacts are almost all positive, not negative as you claim.
What electric car drivers need is more charging station. If they can drive their EV to the place they wanted to go and then park it there to charge the batteries, you can definately increase the car mileage.
I hope electric car will be popular in future. If people are using electricity instead of gasoline for their car, the problem of global warming will be eased. As less carbon dioxide are released from the car, light can be escaped eaily. Thus, improves our climate and protect the habitat of animals.
I feel like the electric car movement is overlooking one very important factor: Where are we going to get all this extra electricity needed to charge electric cars? America's electrical grids are already stressed and to date we have not developed clean, affordable electrical power plants on a large scale. If we use coal fired power plants to charge our electric cars; what have we achieved?
Our organization looks at energy from the standpoint of its impact on water resources. Currently the nations 550 power plants use 214 billion gallons of water each day for cooling purposes. In addition these plants pollute water resources with lead and mercury. If the electrical demand is significantly increased the need for and pollution of water resources will also increase. Electrical cars are a great ideas; but their charging sources must come from wind or solar energy.
This is ridiculous!!!! The one poster said power is cheaper at night so it's not a problem. Well, there is a little economics prinicple I like to refer to as Supply & Demand which refutes that argument! If there is a huge spike in demand due to everyone plugging in these "planet saving" vehicles, then power WON'T be cheap at night. We may have the extra generation capacity to support all these vehicles, but peoples electric bills won't be the same again. Not only that, but unless they find a way to only bill the people increasing the demand side, WE ALL pay in higher energy bills!
Also, don't tell me that energy companies will only fuel your car IF they have EXCESS generation. During the day, that's such a roll of the dice, especially in large metro areas. Tell me how long that theory last when you get into your car and can't make it home because you didn't get any of that precious excess generation! Answer: not long! You can't have people stranded because they didn't get any power after plugging in their vehicles!
Point being, no natural resource can solve this problem. Natgas isn't an unlimited resource either. We have more domestic supply of it, yes, but are we just gonna burn through that at a faster rate!?!? There's coal, but environentalist won't let that go through, even though there's better technology & we are the Saudi Arabia of coal.