Tag Archive for 'electric cars'

Google and GE joining forces on clean energy

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on September 24, 2008
in smart grid
. 2 Comments

In the above video Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, Google interviews Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman and CEO, GE.

The reason Google and GE were talking? Google and GE jointly announced the other day that they are coming together “to help develop tomorrow’s power generation, transmission and distribution — known as the “smart grid” — and its interface with next generation electric transportation”.

From the release:

The existing U.S. infrastructure has not kept pace with the digital economy and the hundreds of technology opportunities that are ready for market. In fact, the way we generate and distribute electricity today is essentially the same as when Thomas Edison built the first power plant well over one hundred years ago. Americans should have the choice to drive more fuel efficient cars – or even electric cars - and manage their home energy use to reduce costs, and buy power from cleaner sources, or even generate their own power for sale to the grid.

We all receive an electricity bill once a month that encourages little except prompt payment. What if, instead, we had access to real-time information about home energy use? What if our flat screen TVs, electronic equipment, lights and appliances were programmed to automatically adjust to save money and cut energy use? What if we could push a button and switch the source of our homes’ electricity from fossil fuels to renewable energy? What if the car sitting in our garage ran on electricity – the equivalent of $1 per gallon gasoline – and was programmed to charge at night when electricity is cheapest?

This is spectacular news! GE are the largest player in the power industry in the US. Their product line covers every aspect of power generation, transmission, distribution and consumption. And GE have an enviable record in renewables. They are the largest manufacturer of wind turbines globally having purchased Enron’s wind business out of bankruptcy for $300m and turned that into an asset generating between $7-$8bn in 2008!

Google get Demand Response. Coming from an Internet background as they do, they know all about the read/write web, p2p and publish and subscribe mechanisms - these are going to be the cornerstone of Electricity 2.0 as espoused by Eric Schmidt and Google in their release, and by me as I write about them regularly on this blog!

In fact, I am giving a talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin on Oct 23rd entitled “Electricity 2.0 - Using The Lessons Of the Web To Improve Our Energy Networks” - this builds on the Keynote I gave there last year on using demand response to reduce our carbon footprint.

by-nc-sa

Why don’t we already have a real time market for electricity?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on September 2, 2008
in demand response
. 3 Comments

Supply and Demand
Photo Credit whatnot

If Demand Response is such a good idea and will help get more renewables onto the grid, why isn’t it being embraced by the grid management companies?

Most grid management companies have been in business for decades managing a grid in which the supply is manageable and the demand is variable but reasonably predictable - typically daily demand is “this day last year +2.5%”!

Now grid management companies are faced with a situation where an increasing percentage of their supply is coming from variable sources (i.e. wind) - if the wind blows more than anticipated, too much electricity is generated and if it blows less than anticipated, the converse is true. This totally messes up their planning and consequently grid management companies hate wind, and think of it as unpredictable, negative demand!

Instead of having such a negative attitude to renewables and shutting them down in favour of fossil fuels they should be asking how can we facilitate the greater penetration of clean renewable energy sources onto the grid.

In the coming years, the demand for electricity will increase significantly as transportation goes more electric (electric and plug-in electric cars, bikes, trucks, etc.) and as heating moves more to electricity. This will add demand to the grid system but this increased demand is eminently movable - for the most part you don’t care if your car re-charges at 7pm or 4am as long as it is re-charged when you want to leave for work at 8am. Similarly with heating, if you use storage heaters (and they will become more common) you don’t care when they suck in the heat as long as they heat the house the following day.

If you can move the demand to a time when traditionally the requirement for electricity was low, you can deliver it over the same infrastructure, thereby selling significantly more electricity without having to massively upgrade the network.

The upshot of this is that an increasing movable demand (the ability to time shift consumption) should be a strong business case for a real-time electricity market. Let demand be guided by supply (as indicated by price). With a real time market for electricity you need never shut down wind farms in favour of fossil fuels, you sell more electricity and you enable a greater penetration of renewables onto the grid. Win, win, win.

Why hasn’t this happened already? Ask your local grid management company.

by-sa

Electric vehicles are the future

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on July 24, 2008
in automotive
. 0 Comments

Our Electric Future
Image from the Andy Grove article in American.com

I wrote a post about Plug-In hybrid vehicles and their potential value to the grid the other day.

Since then I have seen several other articles published from eminent sources which seem to back the thesis that electric vehicles are the way to go.

Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, in an excellent article called Our Electric Future said:

We live in a world where just about everything—from a hairdryer to the Internet—runs on electricity. A big exception is the transportation sector, critical to the movement of people, production materials, food, and even fuel. Transportation uses more than half of all the petroleum consumed in this country. If we don’t convert a large portion of the transportation sector to electricity, we cannot make real progress toward energy resilience…

Startups like Tesla Motors and Project Better Place have begun to experiment with all-electric cars, and important developments are underway at Nissan and General Motors. But our exposure to the vagaries of oil supply is growing by the month.

We must accelerate conversion to electricity in a major way….

Estimates show that converting these vehicles [SUVs, vans, pickups] to dual-fuel operation, even with electricity providing no more than 50 miles of driving range between daily recharging, could cut petroleum imports by 50 to 60 percent—a stunning opportunity….

A policy that favors sticky energy with multiple sources and that aggressively moves vehicles first toward dual-fuel mode and ultimately to running on just electricity provides the answer.

Then I see the following excellent video of FedEx CEO Fred Smith speaking at the Plug-in Vehicles 2008: What Role for Washington? conference dinner.

In this 36 minute video Fred speaks of, amongst other things, FedEx’s multi-billion $ investments in efficiency, he pooh, pooh’s cap and trade in favour of carbon taxes and at about 26 minutes into the video he promises to issue an RFP for an Electric powered fleet. The FedEx fleet consists of around 80,000 vehicles. An RFP from FedEx for 80,000 electric vehicles would be a fabulous kick start to this nascent industry.

Finally, I see CNet reporting that General Motors is teaming up with utilities to develop a charging infrastructure for electric cars by 2010.

The future of transportation is still pretty much up in the air but one thing is certain and that is that transport based on the internal combustion engine has no future. The best alternatives at the moment seem to be either electric or hydrogen powered vehicles.

Given that hydrogen cars are electric cars with the addition of a fuel cell and hydrogen storage you have to suspect that electric cars will work out cheaper to produce and with the right batteries, just as efficient.

by-sa