photos: green wombat
California utility PG&E has given Green Wombat an exclusive look at new
technology that could provide a big boost to both the nascent
electric car market and renewable energy production. In the coming years, the utility plans to buy thousands of plug-in hybrid and electric car batteries once they’ve outlived their usefulness for transportation and install them in the basements of office towers and at electrical substations to store green energy. That will cut peak demand for expensive – and greenhouse gas-emitting – electricity. On a recent morning Green Wombat went down to a sub-basement below PG&E’s (PCG) San Francisco headquarters where the utility parks its plug-in hybrid Toyota (TM) and Mercedes fuel-cell car. Against one wall a nickel metal hydride battery salvaged from a wrecked Prius sat on a metal cart attached to an inverter that converts the battery’s DC power into AC power. The setup is hooked up to an electrical meter, a fluorescent light and a portable heater. (In the photos, the Pruis battery is on the middle shelf; the inverter is on the top left.) "The meter is spinning anti-clockwise right now," says Sven Thesen, PG&E’s supervisor for clean air transportation. "That means we energy is coming out of the building and powering the meter. PG&E is paying for this right now." A minute later the meter begins to spin in the opposite direction and the lights and heater come to life as the 1.3 kilowatt/hour Prius battery uploads electricity into the power grid.
Electric vehicle batteries generally retain 80 percent of their capacity even after they’re no longer good for powering cars. Thesen envisions a time in the near future when banks of EV batteries are charged at night with electricity produced by wind farms, which tend to generate the most electricity in the evening when power demands are the lowest. Normally, that energy is just lost because it isn’t stored. During the day when air conditioners crank up and energy demand rises, electricity can be released from the batteries to take the load off the power grid. In theory, that means PG&E won’t have to build as many planet-warming natural gas-fired power plants to meet peak demand or as an insurance policy against blackouts. It also allows the utility to do "load leveling." Cranking up a power plant to supply electricity when demand suddenly spikes is expensive. EV batteries could release electricity to the grid to smooth fill in the gaps between supply and demand. The same is true if batteries are used at electrical substations. "If we can put in $5,000 worth of batteries and avoid putting in a $50,000 transformer and upgrading the lines then everyone is a winner," says Thesen.
Electric car makers like Silcon Valley’s Tesla Motors and Norway’s Think could be some of the biggest winners. The battery is the most expensive part of the car, and PG&E’s plan would create a significant secondary market for them, especially if other utilities like Southern California Edison (SCE) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) follow suit. A second life for electric car batteries would lower their cost as battery financing syndicates are formed to buy and sell the micro-mini power plants. That would help jump start the market for electric cars by making them more affordable. It would also spur further technological progress in battery development to exend their range and power. "Those batteries have some residual capacity and that residual capacity is actually valuable," Tesla CEO Martin Eberhard told Green Wombat last week. "At a substation you take a whole stack of three-quarter dead batteries and just run them into the ground an then chuck them into recycling." He says there would be no obstacle to re-purposing Tesla’s powerful lithium-ion batteries – which give its forthcoming Roadster super car its 200 mile range and zero-to-60-in-four seconds vroom – for such use.
The chicken-and-egg dilemma, of course, is that PG&E and other utilities will need thousands of EV batteries. Ford (F), General Motors (GM), Toyota and other automakers are not yet making plug-in hybrids. Companies like Think and Tesla, meanwhile, will be selling limited numbers of electric cars over the next couple years. Many EV batteries are expected to last five years or 100,000 miles, meaning it’ll be some time before they’re ready for recycling. Still, the creation of a secondary market for batteries could drive down costs and expand the electric car fleet sooner than anticipated. That will create another source of supply: Inevitably, drivers will crash their cars, leaving behind batteries in mint-condition that utilities can re-deploy.
"By having these out there we don’t have to import as much peak power when it’s really expensive from places that are far away," says Thesen, who himself drives Prius he had coverted to a plug in. "We move it at the cheapest most efficient time. And for PG&E that also means it’s the cleanest. So we’re going to be able to upload more clean power to the grid and it’s the cheap stuff. So it’s this wonderful synergistic win-win for everyone and it will make vehicle batteries cheaper because they will have worth. When we make an electric battery cheaper that means more people can afford it; that means we put less demand on foreign oil imports."
Great news — here’s what I sent out to the subscribers of CalCars-News:
PG&E continues to be a PHEV trailblazer: on April 9, the company became the first utility to conduct a public demonstration of a rudimentary “vehicle-to-grid” (V2G) setup. (At the Alternative Energy Solutions Summit, held at AMD headquarters in Sunnyvale — see video links at http://www.calcars.org/audio-video.html .) Last September, the utility sent a mailer promoting plug-in hybrids to its five million customers.
CALCARS COMMENTS
Plug-in cars will provide a more efficient alternative to what utilities already do when they pump water up into high reservoirs at night to be used during the day. This means we’ll have a new answer to the question, “what happens to all those old batteries?” We can say, “when they’re still working fine, but a bit less efficient, there’s a way to keep them working for years to come.” (Batteries don’t fail; they degrade slowly. Years from now, when your PHEV’s 25-mile range battery takes you only 20 miles, you’ll be able to trade it in for a new one, knowing that your old battery will continue providing benefits! And their relatively benign raw materials will be recycled many years later.)
This is all part of the larger V2G picture. Utilities can start building new business models based on the distributed energy storage system they’ve always wanted. V2G will turn intermittent night-time wind power into a reliable 24-hour energy source. It will “valley fill” and “peak shave” utility load curves (and by enabling more efficient use of generating plants, we might all get lower monthly bills). And it will bring a revenue stream back to plug-in car owners who allow the utilities to tap their batteries for spinning reserves and regulation services. All the technologies needed to make this happen already exist. We hope other utilities will join in confirming their intention to buy older batteries down the road.
This announcement also bolsters current discussions about third-party battery warranties that could motivate carmakers to start building PHEVs before they are sure the batteries will last the lifetime of the car. And along with the “Cash-Back PHEV” concept popularized by Federal Energy Regulatory Commissionier Jon Wellinghoff (see http://www.calcars.org/news-archive.html ), by further improving the already favorable Lifetime Total Cost of Ownership advantage of PHEVs, it can be the basis for enhanced state and federal Executive Orders and public and private fleet commitments.
Felix Kramer, founder, The California Cars Initiative
If goverment supports initiatives on Electric car the dependance of oil will go down in few years.
As far as cost concern just import batteries from China. Read Green Olympic buses in China.
Make mendatory plans on utility companies to reduce carbon.
Power Company To Recycle Hybrid Batteries!!!!
A big argument against electric cars and hybrids is, well, the bat…
I am glad to see PG&E supporting something I can agree with for a change. My solar system has been an interesting experiance in regards to PG&E support…
Now lets get some car builders moving to the new world’s needs of conservation of oil and increased national security thru reduced mideast oil imports.
This sounds nice, but I think electric utilities should give more incentives for the purchase and charging of electric vehicles. I bought a ZAP electric car last year. PG&E advertises a program where they would install a special meter and give a lower a rate for electric car charging. I called and left a message with their E-9 program, downloaded a form from their website, but I’m still waiting to hear back from them. Alameda Electric provides a utility program that give a $15/month rebate for electric car charging, which virtually pays for all the electricity used by the ZAP car.
It’d be nice if the automakers could help establish a financing program with more utilities to defer battery costs for the automobile purchaser. This kind of financing would make the technology less of a regional play. Furthermore, it would make the purchase of a PHEV more compeling for consumers, who right now are left to do the math of a higher up front investment balanced against variable gas prices.
Why is Tesla and Think always brought up in these stories and Phoenix Motorcars and Altairnano ignored?
Phoenix Motorcars are selling its first 4 all electric trucks (which seat 5 people) powered by Altairnano’s nanosafe battery to PG&E for $45,000. Doesn’t that make Phoenix Motorcars more relevant to this story than Tesla’s $100,000 car?
How many average americans or fleets will be buying Tesla’s sportscars for the rich?
Shouldn’t a “treehugger” site be talking about vehicles for the masses vs. the rich?
I advocate tax credits or incentives for homeowners to install residential UPS systems based on lead – acid batteries patented by Firefly Energy. They may not be ‘used’, but will be much cheaper than Li ion or NiMH batteries. Even if you avoided the cost of a system to feed electricity to the grid, if you could take your refrigerator and a few more appliances off the grid from noon until 6 pm, magnified millions by millions of homeowners, the demand on the electrical grid would be greatly reduced.
Electron Economy News: Witricity and a Market for Used EV/Hybrid Batteries
by: Michael HoexterA quick post to call attention to two recent electron economy related news items: 1) Youve probably read in your local paper, on the web or on TV about the MIT researchers that have figured out a way…
We need similar smart meters and V2G in Spain to fight against Barcelona Blackouts and global warming at the same time .
Batteries could be for RENT or RENTING (this is, including maintenance) by the electric utilities.
Felix Kramer has done a great deal to promote plug-in-hybrid cars. He and Ron Gremban did not wait until the perfect battery was available at low prices, but first experimented with relatively heavy Lead Acid batteries that were available at fairly low cost. The batteries did eventually fail to provide the high level of power required for convenient operation of the Toyota Prius and were replaced. The still working cells could have been used for several other uses and probably were used for other tests. They could have been put into a Battery-to-Grid system and run at their remaining power level for years.
Battery-to-Grid systems do not need to be expensive, and ones that supply about two kilowatts can be manufactured in quantity at a price far less than a hundred dollars. Without batteries, they would be very similar in size and cost to a desk top computer power supply and less complicated.
Ron Gremban subsequently invented a proceedure to use the original Prius batteries in conjunction with additional batteries, and in such service the original Lead batteries or new ones would have much longer lives. Electronic pulse de-sulphators and chargers can, under many circumstances, recover or prolong the lives of lead acid batteries, and certainly, very carful computer controlled charging of lead batteries can give them much longer lives.
Firefly has introduced chemical modifications of standard lead battery grids that immediately and substantially increases the lives of traditional lead positive elements. Their foam graphite negative element may reduce weight.
Atraverda will use conductive ceramics, that have already proven themselves in corrosion protection, to give long life and lower weight to lead acid batteries. Their bipolar-plate connectionless cell will also substantially reduce weight.
EFFPOWER is producing prototype quantities of bipolar lead batteries for hybrid service. They should be working together with ATRAVERDA.
There was a European consortium for researching bipolar lead battery production.
One commercially successful bipolar battery was used in Polaroid film packs.
Metal case Nickel-Iron storage batteries have had working lives of over fifty years and Nickle Cadmium batteries could have this life and more. Bipolar nickel cadmium batteries might be a very good choice.
There is no reason for very high capacity batteries in a vehicle. A battery with sufficient capacity for a standard daily use is the best. No battery, or any other system where air is available (except nuclear) including hydrogen fuel cells, can compete in terms of energy density with hydrocarbon tanks and internal combustion engines. Where-ever and how-ever it is produced, hydrogen can be combined with carbon-dioxide to produce ethanol, methanol or any other convenient hydrocarbon fuel and stored and transported convenienly. Butanol is a good choice for a high energy long storage life fuel. Stabilized BIO-DIESEL is another high energy density stable fuel. The carbon-dioxide could even be extracted from office building air-conditionig systems, but a cheaper source would be waste digestion and ethanol production factories.
Identical Plug-In-Hybrid vehicles may have engines of greatly different size. Neighborhood use requires only a one or two horse-power engine-generator for back up of a low battery. At the CalCars published rate of use of 200 watt-hours-per-mile, an average speed of 20 miles an hour, requires only 4 kilowatts or 5.25 horse-power for continuous travel, but the low speed would likely require even less. For continuous high speed freeway driving about twenty horsepower is required on the average.
The TZERO with generating trailer demonstrated this continuous use, but a built in, small but adequate for almost all uses, engine generator would not take up much space in the smallest of cars.
The engine generator that is almost never used is not required to have high efficiency or have a long operating life, as its sole purpose is to get the vehicle back home after the rare longer distance trip. After failure, it could be replaced, just like a battery, at the local auto parts store.
A very high speed machine can be low weight for both the engine and the generator and no gears and clutch are needed to match the speed of the engine to that of the wheels. Inverter generators from HONDA use this principle.
An OPOC four piston, two cylinder, mechanically scavenged engine is said to have 13 horse-power for 13 pounds of weight and runs on diesel. The OPOC might be able to run at far higher speed with much higher horse-power when charging a battery with a rectified high frequency alternator, but, if stated correctly, its power to weight ratio already approaches that of an aircraft fanjet engine. Electro-turbo-super charging can give even higher power density to such an engine, and would be suited for continuous highway use in a TESLA or TZERO class car. But the engine generator from a HONDA i1000 portable would be suitable for the neighborhood car and could take it over 350 miles on a ten gallon tank if the engine were only 20% efficient.
Capstone makes air bearing turbines that need no lubrication and air filter changes only after 8000 hour of operation. The 30 KW ones can run on diesel or any other fuel at the right pressure. These have been used in very low polution hybrid busses. No exhaust treatments are needed to meet the highest current rules anywhere. Unfortunately a ten or fifteen KW unit is not being made for use in cars.
With only one moving part they are quite attractive except that small engines of the same output and many more moving parts can be bought for far less and their efficiency is higher. Even at ten percent efficiency, a five KW turbine would take a Plug-in-Hybrid 170 miles on ten gallons of diesel. The electronics that take the power from the 100,000 Hz generator to the 60 Hz power lines may be most of the cost and could be eliminated for turbine powered Plug-in-Hybrid cars and trucks.
A strange paradox is that plug-in-hybrid cars do not need high efficiency engines if many of the miles are done on electricity. They also do not need large engines.
Buying a battery for an electric car is similar to buying your proportionate share of an oil well drilling costs, a refinery, pipelines, tankers and service station all at once, and is quite expensive, but if power companies owned them and leased them, the initial cost could be reduced.
No house and almost no new car is bought with an expectation that its costs will be paid for out of any savings in operation. A battery car needs to be no exception, but there must be Plug-In-Hybrids made that are cheap enough to compete partially against other vehicles for a mass market mass production efficiency.
The model T FORD, the VOLKSWAGON and the CITROEN II put many people into automobiles at a low cost. What car and what battery can do the same. It must be legal to operate on all roads. The battery must have relatively low cost and a good service life. The low cost and low capacity of the battery must be balanced by a hydrocarbon fueled electric generator of adequate performance to provide relatively safe continuous operation at city street speeds when combined with the battery.
Steam locomotives had many of the advantages of hybrid cars. Peak torque had no relationship to how much fuel was burning at that instant. Small locomotives could have very high pulling torque at start up, but the boiler was not big enough to continue pulling at high speeds. Special locomotives, at flour mills and gun-powder plants where fire might cause an explosion and many other places, were PLUG-IN-Locomotives. Their steam storage tanks were filled with very hot water from factory stationary boilers. There are a few still operating.
The EPA-UPS hydraulic hybrid gives cause to think that a hybrid car should not have electric motors driving the wheels at all. As in the steam locomotive peak torque can be obtained, at starting from a stop, from the energy stored in compressed air in a hydraulic reservoir. Electric batteries and electric motors with transistor drives cannot provide this peak torque at anywhere close to the same low price in spite of the fact that billions of transistors are now put into computers for a hundred dollars or less. Diesel Electric Locomotives are at least five times the price of steam locomotives of the same power.
How can a plug in hydraulic hybrid be built??? Air pressure tanks cannot store much energy per pound. A cheap low power high energy battery operated at low power level is connected directly through a pressure switch to a simple direct current motor that drives a fluid-flow-optimized standard hydraulic pump. When the stored air pressure drops to the set level, the pump turns on and delivers presurized fluid to the hydraulic motor drive system. A small engine is connected through a simple clutch to the motor-pump shaft to pump fluid, charge the battery or both. A separate highspeed engine runnning a rectified alternator to charge the battery is probably a cheaper system.
NOAX has invented efficient hydraulic transformers that can be used for regenerative hydraulic braking down to very low speeds and also cheap to build hydraulic motors. Large diameter pipes and flow optimized hydraulic passages can optimize the fluid flow to give high efficiencies and power as was done for the steam locomotive by Chapelon in France to the embarassment of those promoting electric railways. (Electric railways make a lot more sense now with 80% nuclear electric generation, very high oil prices and no coal mines.)
The battery of a plug-in hybrid should have the voltage that would run ordinary household tungsten filament lamps directly or double that voltage with a center tap for universal world wide application. This would make charging and vehicle to grid and emergency power supplies very easy and cheap to build. Mains voltage could charge the battery through simple diodes and a power factor corrector. And a simple array of high power transistors could be used as an inverter for emergency power and V2G operation. A cheap micro controller can manage that the phase and frequency and power level are at the proper values and that power is not fed into a dead grid. V2G operation can also correct the power factor imbalance caused by large air-conditioning motors and remove load from the grid without the need for supplying any net power.
A Japanese maker of large electrical equipment has made a giant flywheel for this purpose. For size think of the generators at Hoover dam.
The ZEBRA battery (sodium nickel chloride) has been built with adequate power levels for automobile use for over ten years and tested in full electric cars for most of those years. The chemistry is very safe and will not explosively run away under any circumstances of heat or mechanical damage, but internal cell failure results in a self neutralizing reaction at close to normal operating temperatures.
Its electrical efficiency surpasses that of the lead acid system by a large margin, and the cell will never release hydrogen or need any maintenance short of total failure. Since the failure of a cell almost always results in a shorted cell, in a high voltage system, such a cell failure always has the only result that the total battery voltage is slightly lower, and this is not even noticeable during usual operation.
The cells must be kept at a high enough temperature so that the solid electrolyte is sufficiently conductive and the liquid eletrolytes melted. The batteries are built with highly insulating panels. The high internal temperature, while it must be established and maintained, is an advantage not a disadvantage over other batteries when used regularly. The internal losses of regular use keep the battery hot, and internal heating resistors, heat only when the battery starts to get too cold or to initially heat it up.
The insulation prevents battery power and capacity loss at low temperatures, makes cooling very easy in hot climates and prevents most damage from over charging and prevents any damage from overloads. Fuses can prevent cell connectors from failing at many times the rated current of the cell. Cells are being built to operate electronics in hot oil wells that would destroy most other batteries.
Vacuum insulation, such as that in a Thermos bottle or metal Dewar flask, could even allow the use of one or two cells in large portable power tools, even flashlights. High frequency high voltage capacitive heating could bring a cell to operation temperature inside the Vacuum insulation in a very few minutes. Capacitive heating puts the heat directly into the solid and liquid electolytes where it is needed. The cell retains a full charge forever in its cooled state, so it would have a full charge when activated. Such a system would be good for garden tools not used in the winter.
Because they require no maintenance and have nearly infinite life in standby service, Zebra batteries are very good for un-attended UPS systems and emergency lights. The recent availability of high power white light emitting diodes will allow far greater use at better efficiency and life than with standard filament or fluorescent lamps.
The ZEBRA battery’s use is much cheaper and far more efficient than hydrogen fuel cells and hydrolysis or even methane steam hydrogen production.
The capacity of the ZEBRA battery is similar to that of most lithium ion systems.
A Zebra battery made with nearly identical cells to those now used but packaged to fit neatly into the avalable space in a Prius and have the same voltage as the existing battery would make the nearly ideal plug in hybrid. The original battery is used all the time and power is transferred at appropriate load levels with a buck boost converter to and from the Zebra battery. If the Zebra battery has been left to cool by disconnection from the power lines, the car will still operate in standard hybrid mode.
A fast heating system could be designed to use power from the Prius engine generator for quick activation where power lines were not available. One hundred to two hundred watts are all that are needed to keep the battery active. In addition to the many hours that it takes to cool below operation temperatur after being fully charged, the battery could keep itself active electrically for more than four days and much more if only an absolute minimal operational temperature were maintained. This is the temperature at which the battery will start to charge at the highest acceptable range of charging voltage.
The manufacturing cost of the ZEBRA battery is many times that of the material costs, but these could be reduced by developing a system that uses iron instead of nickel, but this would not be usefull unless the manufacturing costs were much lower. Very high volume production of the cells and batteries with more mechanization or lower labor costs can significantly reduce the current cost of both the cells and the batteries.
The use of separatly insulated single and double ZEBRA cells for emergency lights and tools would increase the demand for cells significantly, as the perfomance and maintenance advantages far outweigh the increase of cost over that of lead and the price is not an extremely large part of the puchase and installation costs.
This service would be far less demanding, and much more simple control and monitoring can be used. Redundant bimetal thermostats can keep the temperature in the right range and even turn off charging current. Fuseable alloy protectors can be used as well to avoid catastrophic failure. Electricity for heating is always available except during outages, and these last a few days at the most. It must be remebered that the temperatures involved are much less than those in tungsten filament lamps especially halide lamps, and we use them all the time at very high wattages.
The TH!NK car will be introduced with leased Zebra batteries, but no on board generator, and a deal for lithium batteries is in the works.
The Prius with a Zebra supplimental battery would be the next logical choice for a long distance plug-in-hybrid with no concerns about lithium battery fires and about equal capacity.
A hydraulic hybrid with lead acid batteries, electric hydraulic pump and a small engine-generator is a very good candidate for a cheaper plug-in-electric MODEL T. EDISON..hg..