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.

Whoa!

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."

We Are Expanding Our Sales Division

Energy Roofing Systems is in growth mode and is currently expanding the sales division of the company.

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The primary responsibility of the new sales managers will be lead generation and product sales. This job requires a person capable of presenting products onsite.

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For more information please visit our website.

Cutting wasteful and environmentally harmful spending

Source: Green Scissors

Green Scissors 2010 identifies more than $200 billion in wasteful government subsidies that are damaging to the environment and harmful to consumers. The report targets four major areas for budget cuts: energy, infrastructure, agriculture and biofuels, and public lands. Each section provides an overview, a summary of the spending cuts and a chart of recommended subsidy cuts. Undoubtedly there are more cuts that could and should be made, but this report is a first step to restoring fiscal sanity while also protecting our environment.

You can download the report here.

East Decatur Station Powers Up With Solar

Source: AJC

East Decatur Station, a mixed-use commercial center at 627 E. College Ave. in Decatur, will hold a "power up" ceremony at 11 a.m. today to launch its elaborate new system of solar panels. A total of 531 photovoltaic panels, arranged across the complex's rooftops and entrance canopies, will feed $32,000 a year of "green electricity" into the city's electric grid, saving 315 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually.

531 panels is a BIG amount! The current project we are doing in Dawsonville is a 20kW array with 91 panels and it is out largest yet.

Way to go, Decatur!

How One Local Company Decided To Truly Go Green

It all started with an ugly commercial metal roof. Empty, lonely, and unhappy...

We then added some metal rails and other mounting hardware.

They were then secured to the roof to withstand 90+ mph wind.

We then attached some microinverters to keep track of each individual solar panel and measure unique performance. The entire installation process was overseen by 1 of only 10 NABCEP certified solar installers in Georgia.

The brand of microinverters is Enphase. They are THE BEST on the market to date and come with a really useful web-based monitoring service to make sure your panels are always running at max efficiency.

Once the panels arrived we lifted them via forklift to the roof.

The panels were then installed ontop of the racking system at the optimium tilt angle to accept the highest amount of solar sunlight.

Here is another view. The panels are connected together via the racking system and electrical wires and the microinverters.

Here is a closeup of the array. These are American-made panels from Mage.

When the sun sets at the end of the day, our client will see utility savings on average of $614 dollars every month. Over it’s expected 35-year life the 20kW system will generate approximately 1015 RECs (Renewable Energy Certificates) equivalent to offsetting 868 tons of CO2, planting 20,712 trees, or offsetting 27,740 gallons of gasoline. Energy Roofing Systems educated this client on federal, state, and local tax incentives that helped make this project possible. The Federal Clean Energy Grant is covering 30% of the total system cost while the Georgia Clean Energy Tax Credit picks up another 35%. Additionally, local utility provider Sawnee EMC is providing a $3,000 dollar incentive and a guarantee to purchase any excess energy this system generates.

Please visit our website, twitter page, and facebook acount to learn more about our company and our commitment to helping businesses improve their bottom lines by adopting clean, affordable, and renewable energy sources.