Tesla to sell elecric car with 300-mile battery

Source: AJC

Electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc. plans to offer a limited-edition version of its model S sedan next year that will have a battery mighty enough to keep the car going for 300 miles on a single charge. That's much farther than the Nissan Leaf, which can go up to 100 miles on a charge. The Leaf went on sale late last year. Tesla VP for worldwide sales George Blankenship said in a Web posting Monday that Tesla plans to sell a Model S Signature Series with the 300-mile battery in North America starting in mid-2012. Tesla will sell versions of the all-electric Model S with 230-mile and 160-mile batteries later in 2012.

Exxon Announces Lack Of Oil, Sun Smirks

Source: WSJ

HOUSTON—Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest publicly traded oil company, is struggling to find more oil.

In its closely watched annual financial report released Tuesday, the company said that for every 100 barrels it has pumped out of the earth over the past decade, it has replaced only 95.

It's a conundrum shared by most of the other large Western oil-producing companies, which are finding most accessible oil fields were tapped long ago, while promising new regions are proving technologically and politically challenging.

Although this is scary news to hear about a decreasing supply of oil, this is where solar energy from the sun really shines (pun intended).

There is a limitless supply of sunlight that can be used to power everything from your home and the appliances inside to your (electric) car and the power you use to charge it in your own garage.

Please visit our new solar website to learn more about our vision for your future.

If You Build It, Will They Charge?

Source: NYTimes

A transition to electric cars isn’t just a matter of the cars, but also of the infrastructure that goes with them, including public charging stations. The Electric Power Research Institute and the Tennessee Valley Authority plan to cut the ribbon on Tuesday on a prototype of a new kind of charging station, one that uses solar cells and batteries. But they do not work together in quite the way the public might expect.

The initial installation has six parking stalls, one of them extra wide for handicapped drivers, with carport roofs covered with solar panels. There are three refrigerator-size battery packs in a building that is heated and air-conditioned.

Under the program, called the TVA Smart Station Initiative, such charging stations are described as “solar assisted” because the panels generate only 12 kilowatts at noon on a sunny day, and the charging stations, when in use, draw 3.3 kilowatts for each vehicle, for a total of nearly 20 kilowatts. Cars will go three or four miles on a kilowatt-hour, and in Tennessee, where all of the charging stations will be installed, the cells atop each space will make enough electricity to move a car about 7,000 miles a year, according to John W. Halliwell, a senior project manager at the institute’s research center in Knoxville.

Yet for much of the time, electricity from the cells will flow to the grid because no car will be there to charge. And to recharge the cars, the system draws power from the grid, so the sun does not have to be shining for a driver to charge up.

The batteries and the solar cells themselves are something like shock absorbers for the grid. If drivers want to charge their cars during peak periods on the grid, the charging station’s batteries will meet part of that demand so that the impact on the grid is milder. Likewise, the solar cells will chip in with some energy, lessening the load on the grid.

“If with new technologies we can control these resources on the distribution side, we can eliminate the need for potentially very expensive upgrades to the distribution system,” said James A. Ellis, the senior manager for transportation and infrastructure at the T.V.A.’s Technology Innovation Organization.

At the Electric Power Research Institute, which will be the site of the first charging stations, Mr. Halliwell said, the various elements could be used in any mix. The batteries, of an advanced lead-acid design, have a usable capacity of 30 kilowatt-hours. They will wear out if they get too hot and will not deliver much current if they get too cold, so one question is how much energy it will take to keep them at a comfortable temperature.

Years from now, Mr. Ellis said, batteries that began their life in electric cars but have lost some of their capacity might be suitable for use at the charging stations. In fact, one function of this program is to determine whether such batteries could be useful, although the batteries to be used in the initial trial are not the sort used in cars.

Researchers say they need to know a lot more about charging stations. Will drivers use them to get a full charge or simply park there for as long as they happen to be in the neighborhood, to add a few miles of range? (At 3.3 kilowatts, a typical car would add about 10 miles of range per hour of charging time.) Where are charging stations most likely to get used? Airports? Universities? Shopping center parking lots?

With the Chevy Volt hybrid and the Nissan Leaf all-electric vehicle just hitting the streets, the question remains open.

Another question is economics: there is no mechanism at the moment for charging the driver for the electricity. Because the project is expected to cost $50,000 to $100,000 per space, some purpose beyond electricity sales will probably be needed to make it work, Mr. Halliwell said.

The institute and the T.V.A. hope to have about 125 parking stalls in place, most of them by the end of this year and mainly in the Knoxville, Nashville and Chattanooga areas.

Pioneer Sees Shift To Electric Cars

Source: AJC

Electric car pioneer Shai Agassi is a man with a startling prediction: Before 2020, he says, more people everywhere will be buying electric cars than those powered by gasoline.

"It doesn't mean that oil is not necessary, but we're starting the way out," said Agassi, a former top executive for information giant SAP AG who launched his Better Place venture several years ago.

Existing electric cars have a limited range, after which owners have to stop and wait for hours while their car's battery recharges. Owners of Agassi's cars would be able to remove the used battery and replace it with a fully charged one, allowing them to get back on the road almost immediately. The first country slated to go live with a network of "battery-switching" stations run by Better Place is his native Israel, where he plans a launch — with 56 stations and an expected 5,000 cars — before the end of 2011. In 2012, Denmark and Australia are expected to join, along with trials in Hawaii and in the San Francisco Bay area.

Brimming with infectious optimism, Agassi has been a regular at the World Economic Forum, where he was interviewed by The Associated Press. Agassi said he has raised about $700 billion and spent about a third of it, mostly on setting up the stations. That leaves enough cash to absorb losses while he builds up to break-even, which Agassi asserts will not take long. "In Israel, in 2016, plus or minus a year, more electric cars will be sold than gasoline cars.

When that happens in Country One, within two years you will see it in every country," he said. That claim may seem preposterous for the car-crazy United States — but not for Israel. The country's electric company also expects electric cars to achieve a significant market share in the near future and is preparing its grid to meet the demand, according to the Haaretz newspaper.



Former U.S. President Bill Clinton has emerged a believer as well. "Israel will become the first country in the world to put 100,000 all-electric cars on the road," he said Thursday. "Not the US. Not China. Not countries much bigger — Israel!" Agassi has found a niche created by a widespread sense that the world is not doing half enough to deal with the eventual end of oil — a prospect hastened by the explosive recent growth in the developing world. "From 2000 to 2010, China added 120 million cars on the road (and) next year, 25 to 30 million," Agassi said. "It's no longer the U.S. that sets the price (of oil). Now it's a question of how many cars were added in China, how many were added in Brazil, how many were added in India." He admits that the market for gas is somewhat inelastic, meaning that despite rising costs at the pump, people grumble and drive on. But they save elsewhere, he says, harming the economy in cascading ways. Agassi plans to sell cars being developed by Renault SA and equipped with removable batteries — which are currently quite heavy and have a range of 100 miles (160 kilometers). Drivers would be promised four battery swapping stations along any route the length of the range.

Although prices have not yet been set, Agassi said the idea would be that the consumer would not pay more to drive a given distance than its current cost using oil. Like any venture that could threaten a mammoth industry, Better Place has generated its share of critics. Some charge the company is trying to establish a new type of monopoly, while environmental groups objected to the laying of new power cables. It is also not clear that Israel's electricity grid can sustain the heightened demand posed by the electric cars. Some say battery-swapping is impractical and customers will prefer a fixed-battery car.

In Davos, Nissan Motor Co. was demonstrating its new Leaf, a fixed-battery electric car that you can charge at home. Agassi is not worried. He says over time, batteries will grow smaller and their ranges will grow longer, making the swap less odious. He is most animated as he refutes criticism that the electricity needed to charge the battery has its own carbon footprint and the net result might be worse for the environment than the internal combustion engine.

The electricity could come from coal but also from natural gas or wind or other sources, he said, adding that the Israeli government has approved a 600-megawatt solar project in the country's southern desert that can power a half-million cars a year.

Is the main thing idealism or profit? Agassi's message combines the two. "The end of the oil era will not come because we ran out of oil — it will come become we don't want to use oil any more to drive," he said. "I can guarantee you that we will finish the need for oil as an energy source for cars before we run out of oil in the ground."

Cracker Barrel to offer electric vehicle chargers

Source: AJC

Cracker Barrel, modeled to represent a slower time of rocking chairs on old wooden porches, will soon feature a very modern technology — electric vehicle chargers.

Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc. has launched a pilot project in which it will install Blink electric vehicle chargers, provided by ECOtality Inc., at 24 restaurants across Tennessee.

The pilot is part of a broader effort by ECOtality to get charging stations in more places across the country.

Cracker Barrel restaurants are mostly located near major highways where travelers can get to them, and back on the road, easily. ECOtality says this makes them an ideal fit for the charging stations.

Guests will be able to get a full charge in under 30 minutes.

No word yet as to where the power will be sourced from, but we at Energy Roofing Systems are hoping such a forward thinking vision would include the adoption of solar technology.

Georgia can power electric car grid

Source: AJC

With our leaders seeking new paths to growth sectors, I’d submit that Georgia has an opportunity staring us right in the face.

By 2015, analysts are predicting nearly 1 million electric vehicles will be on the nation’s roads.

Our state is offering a number of incentives to fuel this growth with the standing $5,000 tax credit for purchasing vehicles and tax credits for the building of charging stations. In Atlanta, the Metro Atlanta EV Readiness Task Force was organized to help plan a charging infrastructure in the city.

It’s an exciting vision, really — a whole new generation of clean, energy-efficient plug-in electric vehicles capable of running for long periods from a single charge at home overnight.

Then when parked at the office, school or curbside, they could instantly and easily plug in for a recharge or someday even provide excess power to the electrical grid. This vision is bringing into focus a major obstacle to the development, deployment and adoption of electric vehicles on a large scale.

The fact is the electrical utility grid, as it exists today, simply can’t support large numbers of vehicles. In general, our electrical grid system doesn’t even know when a consumer has lost power until they phone the utility to tell someone.

There are a number of innovation hubs across the country focused on the drive trains, batteries and other features to improve the performance of these cars. What is missing is a focused effort targeting the “charging infrastructure” required to make electric vehicle use feasible. This is a leadership opportunity that Georgia can grab and run with. We can take the lessons we learn locally and turn them into a national example while making our state into a incubator for new companies in this field.

What would be the focus of this effort? One of the early assumptions about electric cars is that people would recharge the batteries overnight while their car is parked in their garage, paying for this electricity on their normal monthly utility bill. There’s just one problem with that scenario: A lot of people don’t or can’t park the car in their garage.

For many people, it might make more sense to charge cars up in a more central location, such as an employer’s or a MARTA station’s parking lot.

But this, too, raises questions: Who gets financially charged for that electricity? What if you travel outside your utility company’s service region — how do you pay for that electricity you use? And how do all those cars recharge their batteries during the day in what is already a peak usage period for electricity, especially if they are geographically concentrated at work or transit stations?

The answers to these questions all start with getting increased intelligence and information flowing side by side with the electrons.

So what makes our state well-suited to address the electrical grid and charging infrastructure challenges?

First, our local business community is already organizing around the issue with dozens of partners participating in the Technology Association of Georgia’s (TAG) Smart Grid Society. Leveraging Georgia Tech and its world class research and engineering expertise is critical to addressing this challenge.

Georgia is home to more than 230 automotive-related manufacturing companies, so we clearly have a concentration of partners locally. All this will be complemented by Georgia’s 42 electric membership cooperatives and providers like Cobb Energy and Southern Company.

Also, Georgia Power has already begun work with auto manufacturers to research the impact of electric vehicles on the grid, and is helping to develop industry standards for electric vehicles.

The U.S. government has already committed billions of economic stimulus money to support electric transportation roll-outs across the country.

Georgia has won some of this funding to electrify at least 85 parking spaces at three or more different truck stops. With the right, focused effort around charging infrastructure, Georgia could possibly attract even more stimulus funding.

Making sure Georgia is in on the ground level for this new part of the green ecosystem will be central to accelerating economic development, creating new high-paying jobs and entrepreneurial innovation locally.