Well speaking of letters … the USPS is approved to purchase “a fleet of 20,000 electric delivery vans and to get a network of 24,000 charging stations (with more to come)”
UPS is in the demo stage. As you note though, they are experimenting with many approaches, electric, HEV, natural gas, propane, and so on. The “too big” is not the issue (look at some of the Smith trucks and Navistar’s eStar ); range may be. This pdf gives an analysis of the UPS experience with CNG trucks - pertinent to this discussion, route ranges vary from an average of 60 miles per day to 125 miles per day. They’d want to match the battery pack to the route and unless they had a Better Place style quick charge point or battery swap location along the route going over 100 would be pushing it with the currently available products. Of course that may be why they are demoing one custom built to their specific requirements. CNGs apparently did not end up saving them any money and while they value the good citizen PR enough to keep them in service, they state in that pdf that they do currently have no plans to buy any more. It will be very interesting to see how their demo trial of the new EV UPS parcel delivery truck goes.
Buses also are a particularly good application, and China has an announced plan to deploy electric buses as a first part of their EV implementation. Again, high daily mileage with defined routes and access to predefined locations for battery swaps or quick charges that can keep the vehicles running the routes 24/7.
On the freight side I don’t see it happening with the current battery situation (pun alert). Postal densities tend to be pretty low so it is a more likely candidate. Postal routes are also low mileage routes. They have much tighter service areas and urban routes involve a great deal of foot traffic delivery.
To give an idea of freight density, a light package company would run 7-8 lbs per cubic foot. Heavy lift would be upwards of 10-15 lbs per CF. Postal freight would be something like 2 lbs per CF.
I’d like to see the numbers for USPS trucks because the mileage may be so low as to negate any value in the purchase.
Now you’re adding more batteries to the cost of the vehicle. The price is going up. It would be better to wait for fast charge batteries and use overhead wires to charge them at various stops. I don’t know what a pure battery bus costs but we just “bought” hybrids to go along with our electric fleet and they were $400,000 apiece. They’re something of a gift from our grandchildren since it was part of the federal spend-fest of last year.
No I wouldn’t. That would be stupid. As I explained above, with Lithium-Air Batteries, I expect pure electric vehicles to be comparable or cheaper than ICE cars. The break even point should be a few thousand dollars more than a ICE car. At that point the monthly fuel savings would counteract the increase in the car payment.
Of course, changes to changes to smaller, lighter, more aerodynamically efficient vehicles like the Aptera would save a lot of energy no matter what kind of engine they use.
Of course, the Aptera still weighs over 2200 pounds. My vision of an ideal commuting machine would look something like the GM Lean Machine that only weighed 350 pounds. It was turning in a combined City/Highway MPG of 150MPG.
In South Korea they are experimenting with electric buses that use magnetic induction power buried in the street to power the buses. You can also use a hybrid system where the buses recharge at the stops. Even if you only recharge at the turnaround points you could get a bus that only needs to go 20 miles on one charge.
You can also use flywheels on a bus instead of batteries. Flywheels can be spun up very rapidly unlike batteries.
Of course prices right now are for boutique custom even pretty much hand made to order affairs. This is development cost upfront. And priced at $1000/kWh or more for the batteries. The question, and it is a question, is what will be the net comparable cost of ownership for an electric bus vs a diesel one over the life of the vehicles. The unknowns right now are how much the batteries will come down as they commoditize (we know that Project Better Place was able to order for $400/kWh; will they get down to $250 or not?), how much the vehicles will cost otherwise when made as production items, how much fuel costs will be, how much less risk of volatility in future cost structure is to a transit company, and how much the decreased concentration of pollution inside city confines (and the other intangibles) are worth to the potential purchasers.
What we do know is that running costs are less than a third for the EV and that a bus that has a 100 mile daily route with a 3 mpg (pretty typical) fuel economy would spend about $37K on fuel alone at $3/gallon. If the bus needs an 80kWh pack to make between quick charge or swap points then the battery runs $20K at $250/kWh to $40K at $500/kWh. If the battery is thought as fuel then it pays for its part of the cost structure within two years at the longest and maybe within one or sooner at a higher cost of diesel. Or sooner if we monetize the cost of the CO2 and particulates concentrated within city confines.
Joel probably supercaps do even better for the fast charge between short stops, but I did find this on flywheels as an economical alternate to diesel-electric hybrids. Basically using a flywheel instead of regen storing in the battery or a supercap.
We’re playing a game of what if’s and not of what is. The Volt is a “what is”. As I said before, it’s not a technological achievement of any kind. They are spending a tremendous amount of money building a from-scratch car that has no customer base. It could easily poison the well for future cars (the “what if’s”) with the guaranteed poor performance of current batteries.
From a technological and marketing standpoint they should take an established hybrid platform and work more batteries into it as improvements in batteries dictates.
I haven’t actually seen any articles about supercaps in automotive applications. I expect flywheel regen system to become popular in a few years. They are actually simpler than battery powered regen systems and should last much longer than batteries.
I disagree with this sentence. The volt is basically just another hybrid that puts a heavier focus on batteries and that is done at the transmission. You could make the case that this change represents a development cost but I see it as more of a standard engineering cost associated with any new car platform. IMO it was a waste of platform development and should have been worked into their current hybrid groups.
From a marketing standpoint it would be best to establish a Prius wanna-be as a product name and then transition into a more battery dependent car as batteries come down in price and rise in performance. That way you have an established product which does nothing but improve energy efficiency as it evolves.
But to address the statement. A plug in serial hybrid/extended range vehicle is bit different than just a bigger batter pack regular hybrid. The Volt really is more of an EV with a generator than hybrid.
It is a completely new platform for GM, the “Voltec powertrain”, and will, if the markets proves it wants these products in any numbers (something we will have to see about, and that I have doubts about as well, albeit for very different reasons than do you), be the basis of many other vehicles up and downstream market. It is designed so that the sort of generator can be swapped in different individual product lines - and I suspect that microturbines will end up winning the day there in the long run but fuel cells could even be the winner someday - and that new battery technology and different capacities can be moved in to future versions as they occur as well.
It is that new powertrain that they hope to be their Prius killer product name which they plan to establish and improve as it evolves.
Joel, here’s an article about ultracaps in EVs and how they may be used both on their own for start-stop functionality and along with batteries (which both allows for smaller batteries and prolongs battery life by avoiding excessive cycling by power leveling).
I recently attended a private lecture assessing the potential impacts to US electrical grid stability if large amounts of plug-in electric vehicles are added, as well as other ramifications (such as the cost to upgrade feeder lines to homes, upgrades inside homes, safety concerns, etc.) I cannot link to the papers (since it cost me $2,000 to get access to them, I’m not going to share them on here either) so of course I don’t have a snappy cite…in lieu of that, I just want to share one surprising prediction made by two of the researchers, arrived at separately, was a potentially large increase in home fires and deaths due to accidental electrocution.
Yes, if the home high-amp installations go like they should there should be little problem, and if people do smart things around electricity, there should be no accidents. But given my recent experience with so-called “master electricians” who not only don’t follow code, they don’t know it in the first place, I wonder how many of these high-amp electrical installations will be done properly. One researcher equated a PEV fleet of 10,000,000 automobiles with 950 more house fires per year (of varying intensity and impact), and a combined death total from fire and accidental electrocution of 500-1,000 per year. I think the death total is much too high, personally. Not to piss on this; rather I think that there needs to be some upgrades to the NEC which add additional protections for PEV charging stations.
I also recently attended a conference where I spoke to some folks from Areva and Westinghouse, where their message was that in the US the only way to support a large EV fleet would be to bring online about 1.5 GW of nuclear power every 3 months, for about 50 years, starting now. But the Westinghouse folks said that in the US the nuclear industry is so decimated that many critical castings and forgings just can’t be made fast enough for that schedule, and the number of trained nuclear equipment-certified welders would need to increase by a factor of 50. The Westinghouse folks worried that US utilities would buy Chinese parts of “questionable” quality at a serious risk (I’m a consultant on a new boiler in…well, SE Asia, let’s say) where the Chinese boiler tubes are showing up on-site in horrible shape. The reason the client is sticking with them is that the tubes are so cheap, even if they reject 1 in 2 and accumulate delays, they still save money.
The Areva folks on the other hand had no such worries, but then every time I talk to them they always act like they’re the Gallic “cock of the walk” (and the people I know in the company always tease me over coal.)
Darwin will take care of the wiring handicapped. How someone could screw that up is for another thread.
4 nuclear plants a year for the next 50 years qualifies as an elephant in the room. The last one attempted in my state turned into the world’s most expensive coal plant.
I can understand why you cannot link to the cites but can you share some additional information with us from them?
Did they feel these UL approved 220V home devices present a greater risk than other high current 220V home appliances, such as tankless water heaters, electric stoves, electric washing machines and driers, plasma TVs, or refrigerators? And if so, why? The home stations (also called “Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment” or EVSEs) have many safety features built in.
The home station that Nissan is using, as an example, draws 30 Amps max. Tankless electric water heaters in comparison draw 44 to 150 Amps. A hot tub or an electric stove cooking Thanksgiving dinner can both also hit the 30 mark or above. Installation is subject to code and, I think, to inspection.
I do not mean to say that they are necessarily wrong. Afterall, there are 485 deaths a year in America from home electrical fires as it is (most in the bedroom from “faulty electrical outlets and old wiring” or from overloaded or damaged or misused cords. And a few fires from appliances themselves. But it is hard to understand why they would conclude that these devices should present more lethal risk than all of the rest of home electrical use combined.
It probably should not shock us (sorry for the pun) that nuclear industry folk are claiming that many more nuclear power plants are needed, but did they reference the study cited up thread that showed that the current grid could handle 70% of today’s fleet being EVs today, so long as they charged in a trough filling fashion? Did they discuss V2G in any detail, if only to dismiss it on grounds of some sort?
They also tried to guesstimate the number of DIY installations people would try, and I think their estimate must have enormous errors on it. They claimed that they based some of their estimates on an accident study showing how attempts to implement EnergyStar programs resulted in negative unintended consequences. I’m not sure what weight I would put on these things, I’d rather see some more broad-based public studies. I think at best it puts things out there as additional items on the checklist of “what you need to know to make this happen.”