How to run cars without oil

[Ghent12]

Re: How to run cars without oil

I spoke with the head of US business development for Better Place, the CEO of Gulf Oil, and others in my research for my book. My conclusion is that this approach is too capital intensive. The winning strategy will be a top-off approach, as is used today by everyone with a laptop computer. You plug your car in wherever and whenever you can, to keep the charge topped off. At the supermarket. At work. At the airport. And so on. My book refers to an entrepreneur who is trying to build a company around this low capex, incremental concept.

That seems to be the most plausible approach--just put a metered outlet in every parking space at Wal-Mart and every office parking space, etc. Maybe a "free outlet" could be an employee benefit in the future for some corporations. This approach would certainly make the all-electric vehicle less repulsive to Americans but it still leaves a number of logistic problems to be dealt with:

1. Long commutes are still impossible with Electric Vehicles at present or near-present time frames.
2. The increased demand on the grid will probably be substantial, meaning an increased demand on coal and natural gas (although both have some advantages over oil).
3. Electric Vehicles still have low energy density and keeping them plugged in all the time will probably kill their battery life (as it did with my laptop battery). Perhaps not so much on the latter since they won't be run while plugged in.

[Starving Steve]

Re: How to run cars without oil

I am lost as usual. Who is going to pay the incremental electric useage cost to re-charge these electric vehicles? Your store where you shop? Your supermarket? Your employer? You? The taxpayer?

What is the cost of the re-charge? How often do I have to re-charge the batteries? What is the out-of-pocket cost per mile to drive an electric car, just for the re-charge alone?

Can I re-charge in a rainstorm? Can I stand in a puddle and re-charge my car? Can I hold-on to a ground, like a metal pole when I re-charge the electric car?

And then there are all of the other unknowns such as: re-sale value to any dealer? Would the electric car pass the Winnipeg winter test? What are the maintenance and repair costs and other hidden costs of driving an electric car for 200,000 miles in a cold climate?

Atomic power would be great for electric cars, but we don't have enough atomic power in North America, at least not like China has now. So why are we thinking about electric cars now when we barely have enough electric power to keep the lights on and air-conditioners working in homes and buildings?

Not exactly what the people at Pebble Beach Country Club might want to hear, what are the toxic materials inside old battery packs from electric cars? What are the disposal costs for these materials? Do they get re-cycled and if so, at what cost to me, the owner?

Do battery packs freeze in winter in Winnipeg because there might be liquids in the batteries? What are the liquids? What toxic acids are in the batteries? Do I have to add distilled water to the batteries in winter?

[tmicou]

Re: How to run cars without oil

Steve,

I had the immense pleasure of listening to Shai Agassi speak about this whole effort about 2 years ago, and I'll try to answer what I can from memory. I'm sure some of the facts are off a bit, so with a bit of a grain of salt, hopefully I can at least reiterate some of the concepts. This also presumes that his assessment/predictions etc are all accurate -- so a lot of assumptions here, but here goes:

I am lost as usual. Who is going to pay the incremental electric usage cost to re-charge these electric vehicles? Your store where you shop? Your supermarket? Your employer? You? The taxpayer?

In order for this system to work, all the vehicles and the grid have to be "Smart". Really smart, but not anything that a good software system can't handle. So when I plug my EV into WalMart, or go to your house and plug into your charging station, my car's account gets billed, not you. The economics works out to something like: Better Place guarantees me $2.50/electron "gallon" (eGallon) for the life of my car. Forever. They pay, all in, about $0.30 per gallon for those electrons (variable cost, not including fixed cost of battery, charging stations, disposal, etc). The difference is their profit plus the cost of the batteries (free to the car owner, e.g., when you purchase the car it's the ultimate "batteries included" situation, except that you don't own the battery, they do. And, if you are one of the many folks with a short commute to work, and your car knows that you have plenty of juice, when you plug in at work, you may be giving back electrons that you charged up from home, and are being credited to your account.

Short answer is that all cars are part of the Smart grid and all the $ electrons are accounted for.

What is the cost of the re-charge? How often do I have to re-charge the batteries? What is the out-of-pocket cost per mile to drive an electric car, just for the re-charge alone?

The cost of the recharge is $2.50/eGallon. You would charge (or give back), whenever you are not driving (on average 22 hours/day).

Can I re-charge in a rainstorm? Can I stand in a puddle and re-charge my car? Can I hold-on to a ground, like a metal pole when I re-charge the electric car?

You simply plug in and leave it there, whether at home or at the office or at mall. Deals are being made in countries pursuing this. The first one was with an Israeli Railroad company that put the chargers in the parking lots of their commuter trains. http://www.betterplace.com/global-progress-israel Others are following suit, as Israel, Denmark, Australia, Japan and a few others are testing the idea.

And then there are all of the other unknowns such as: re-sale value to any dealer? Would the electric car pass the Winnipeg winter test? What are the maintenance and repair costs and other hidden costs of driving an electric car for 200,000 miles in a cold climate?

These are clearly unknowns, to be sure. What kind of resale will a car that costs $2.50/eGallon be versus a car that costs the then current cost of gas get? It can't be known, but my guess is that as PCO changes the cost of gasoline, resale of gas driven cars will have "issues". Then there is the problem that EV cars (not hybrids) don't cost much to begin with. If you can buy a sedan for $15k new (remember, it's just the cost of the body, the drive train and an electric motor, all well known entities -- a major cost component goes away not having to pay for fuel systems, exhaust systems, cooling systems, pistons, manifolds and all the expensive components of a fuel engine.) Thus, resale costs matter much less.

I am less sanguine about driving in cold climates -- a tough challenge to be sure for battery powered cars. It's not surprising that the first cities/countries are Israel, Hawaii, Australia. But then they are also doing Denmark where fuel is expensive and wind power is over-plentiful (They pay to get rid of excess electricity). Canada will probably be a long-time coming though.

Maintenance and repair costs are TBD, but with less moving parts, it *should be* reasonable at scale. And the Batteries are owned and serviced by BetterPlace, not by the car owner, so BetterPlace is responsible for servicing the batteries.

Atomic power would be great for electric cars, but we don't have enough atomic power in North America, at least not like China has now. So why are we thinking about electric cars now when we barely have enough electric power to keep the lights on and air-conditioners working in homes and buildings?

It's a question of how efficiently the electric power and the grid is used. For most of the US, the grid is one-way only, from Power Plan to end user. With a SmartGrid, the power can come from many more input sources, not just from a Power Generation system xxx miles away, but also from HydroElectric, Wind, Solar and other power plants that may be much smaller, but much closer and more numerous. A big fleet of EV's means a great big distributed capacitor of electricity -- one in which the electric storage follows the user of the electricity from place to place. It is clearly TBD how much of each source will contribute to the overall usage. But what is clear, is that a very smart grid should theoretically be able to reduce the overall transmission miles of electricity, thus increasing efficiency. As a simple example, all those cars are charging up at night during non-peak periods, driving to work carrying some of that power and balancing out the peak periods at work during the day. How much? TBD. But with some imagination and ingenuity, it's possible that there is a net benefit. Maybe. No one knows for sure, but Israel and Denmark will be fun to watch, and we'll have good empirical evidence to get the answer to these theories in a couple of years. (They are roughly 3 years into a 4 year launch plan, and we'll probably know a year or two later how the experiment goes. So far, they have raised $500M of private money from folks willing to bet on the outcome. Will they win their bet?)

Not exactly what the people at Pebble Beach Country Club might want to hear, what are the toxic materials inside old battery packs from electric cars? What are the disposal costs for these materials? Do they get re-cycled and if so, at what cost to me, the owner?

Excellent question that Agassi did not address, and I don't have any clue to the answer.

Do battery packs freeze in winter in Winnipeg because there might be liquids in the batteries? What are the liquids? What toxic acids are in the batteries? Do I have to add distilled water to the batteries in winter?

[/QUOTE]

Agassi did not address this either, but it's not likely these will be liquid batteries or use distilled water. What is clear though, is that BetterPlace is responsible for the battery, and has accounted for disposal costs in their business model (Agassi did say that).

To be clear, the expectation here is that you will both Recharge, and Replace the battery on an "As needed" basis. Many people that drive short distances will rarely change out the battery. But to take an extreme and contrived example, let's say you drive 200 miles each way to work every day. You're probably not a very good candidate for one of the first 10 EV's to roll off the assembly line. So assume this extreme example also is done when at least some scale has been achieved. In a normal car, you would probably have to go to the gas station about once a day. In an EV, you would have to find a charging station near the mid point of your commute, and go in and change it on the way to work, recharge at work, drive home and change on the way home, then charge overnight, so you would go twice a day. For your troubles, BetterPlace would PAY you for your extra trouble of having to spend extra 1 minute and 20 seconds changing your battery twice each day. (Their contracts with the EV owner says they start paying YOU for your inconvenience if you have to change out your battery more than once a week.) Why make that deal? Think of the profit margin on the usage they are getting at $2.50/egallon. Think Cell Phone model or Printer/Ink model. Give the phone (or Printer or Car and battery) away, and just charge for usage.

BTW, another question you didn't ask: Why would existing gas stations consider putting in expensive Battery Changing stations. Two answers: current margins on Gas sales are roughly 5-10%. BetterPlace is offering margins of ~70%. Not bad, except the initial small quantities -- this will require a significant investment. Second answer: It won't be just Gas Stations. Changing stations can be placed anywhere. McDonald's Drive Through window. Wal-Mart, Taxi-cab stands at airports. It's a much different world when you don't have to worry about fuel storage and delivery.

The first tests were with a fleet of Taxi Cabs, with changing stations in Japan. Well, if you consider 3 cars over a 3 month test period to be a fleet . Still, you need to start somewhere, and a 3 month experiment with 3 cars would be where I would start if I were them. http://blogs.edmunds.com/greencaradv...-a-glitch.html

The cost of outfitting a city like Tokyo, or a country like Israel with a full complement of Changing stations (enough to reach critical mass), is something on the order of $100M. Not trivial, but I live in Boston where we (and all other taxpayers) spent 200 times that to add an extra lane of road through the city and reduce the time it takes to get to the airport by a few minutes. It is a small enough number that it can be done privately. (And so far, it is being done mostly with private funds)

Please don't argue the numbers I've used above as I can't back them up with any links -- these are from memory, and require not only reliance on my memory, but the word of Shai Agassi, the CEO of BetterPlace -- and he's quite the sales pitchman. And I'm sure much has changed in the last 2 years. So, put whatever fudge factor you want on the figures. If you agree 100% then you have a good deal of faith that these guys will work through the technical challenges. But, if you want to multiply by 10% or any other number, so be it. What I know is the numbers are a guess to begin with, and some will prove optimistic, and some pessimistic -- time will tell us the answer. One thing is definitely true: Some very smart investors are putting up big bucks for this bet, and so far, BetterPlace has stayed on plan about 3/4 of the way through it.

[flintlock]

Re: How to run cars without oil

Hybrid Car May Have Sparked Garage Blaze

http://www.wfsb.com/news/27541598/detail.html

They seem quick to blame the car when I'd say its just as likely a house wiring problem.