Innovation Toronto » Project Energy

Home Charging for Electric Vehicle: Costs Will Vary

innovation2 — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 18:45:33 +0000

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By the end of the year, at least five plug-in cars, including the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt, are expected to be on the market. And as electric vehicles roll out, their owners will be wiring their homes to accommodate what is called Level 2 charging. The wall-mounted 220-240-volt boxes can recharge an E.V.’s batteries in four to eight hours.

Think of home chargers as gas pumps for your garage. The more sophisticated ones will be programmable to charge only late at night when energy rates are low and can be scheduled from cellphones and computers.

But as is often the case, the answer to the question, “How much will they cost?” is more complex. Because of the challenges in homes with what can be very outmoded electric service, a Nissan spokesman, Mark Perry, said that the cost of adding home charging is one-third hardware (the box itself) and two-thirds installation and labor costs. Mr. Perry said that homes built in the 1990s or later usually have 200- or even 400-amp service that is fine for E.V. charging, but earlier homes could face costly upgrade bills.

Jonathan Read, president and chief executive of ECOtality (working with Nissan to create charging stations for 4,700 Leaf battery cars), put the cost of home unit hardware at around $300 to $350, with installation ranging from $500 to $1,500. The Boston Consulting Group, in an e-mail message, put the cost for installed Level 1 or 2 chargers somewhere between $750 and $2,000 per unit, with $300 to $600 of that being labor costs.

But Richard Lowenthal, chief executive of charging company Coulomb, said those home wiring upgrades could increase charger installation to as high as $10,000 “if new service and panels are needed.” He put the average cost of a charger at around $2,000, but consumers won’t necessarily be paying it. Many battery E.V.’s will come with charger installation as part of the deal, Mr. Lowenthal said. Plug-in hybrids, with electric motors complementing gas engines, may put chargers on the option list, he said.

Read more . . .

A few glitches for electric cars (money.cnn.com)
Report: Nissan Leaf priced at U.S. $38,500+ in Japan (autoblog.com)

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Companies join forces to standardize charging infrastructure

innovation2 — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 18:38:37 +0000

One of the criticisms often levied at the drive to get electrically-powered vehicles from the fringe into the mainstream is the current lack of a network of charging stations.

Four car manufacturing giants have teamed up with a utility service provider to tackle this problem head on. The newly formed CHAdeMO Association is not only calling for a standard method for charging electric vehicles to be adopted but is also hoping to add some much-needed momentum to the global installation of fast charging solutions.

Mitsubishi, Toyota, Nissan, Fuji Heavy Industries and the Tokyo Electric Power Company have teamed up to help speed up global installation of fast charging technology and so provide an essential support infrastructure for the rollout of electric vehicles. A difficult enough task in itself but the CHAdeMO Association will also look at standardizing how electric vehicles are charged and so avoid any frustrating compatibility issues for users.

These objectives are not as clear cut as they may appear. Rolling out a charging infrastructure that can meet the real-world current and future requirements of everyday electric and hybrid vehicle users needs significant investment as well as political will and mass cooperation. Then there’s the issue of getting members of a competitive industry to agree on a standard charging method or even a standard voltage.

Huge challenges ahead

In promoting “electric vehicles through the efforts of technical improvements of quick chargers, standardization activities of charging methods, and international extension of our knowledge related to quick-charger installations”, the Association certainly has its work cut out for it. But without such an effort, the mass adoption of the electric vehicle might never happen.

Read more . . .

Japan Develops Electric Car Standard (benzinga.com)
Japanese firms join forces to promote electric car charging standard (businessgreen.com)
Japanese Automakers Team Up To Promote EV Standards (thecarconnection.com)
Smarter Chargers for Electric Vehicles (technologyreview.com)

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Mile-High Mega Kites Could Pull Giant, Floating Power Plants

innovation2 — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:32:49 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Take a huge oceanic catamaran, stick a hydroelectric turbine underneath it, and hitch it to a 6.5 million-square-foot parafoil flying nearly a mile in the air. That’s a Korean research team’s new proposal for generating gigawatts of clean energy.

As the parafoil pulls the boat, seawater would be forced through the turbine, which generates electricity. The 800 megawatts of electricity produced would separate seawater into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis, and the hydrogen would then be stored on-board the ships.

“The calculation shows that, with a large such ship, a gigawatt order electrical power may be harvested by this system,” wrote Park Chul of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute and Kim Jongchul of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, in the journal Energy in March.“If such ships are deployed at 20-km (12.4-mile) intervals over two temperate zones, one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the Northern Hemisphere and the other everywhere in the Southern Hemisphere, the total power produced will be many times that needed by the world,” they wrote.

Read more . . .

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Smoothing Out the Wind

innovation2 — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:15:12 +0000

A cunning plan to store energy underwater may help fulfil the promise of wind power

THE problem with wind power is that is cannot always be relied upon. The wind—and other transient, environmental energy sources such as solar—must either be used when it is harvested or stored expensively in batteries or specially designed hydroelectric schemes that use the resulting energy to pump water uphill. Alternatives would be extremely welcome. Alexander Slocum, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks he has one. Observing that the fashion among wind-power fans is to build turbines out at sea, where the wind blows strongest, he proposes a pumped-storage system that uses seawater.

Dr Slocum’s scheme involves anchoring a hexagonal array of hollow, 31-metre-diameter concrete spheres to the ocean floor at a depth of approximately 350 metres. Floating turbines would be tethered to these spheres and surplus power from these turbines, generated during periods of high wind and low electrical demand, would be used to pump water out of the spheres, evacuating the central chamber. When the wind faltered or the lights went back on, water forced into the central chamber by the pressure of the surrounding ocean would pass through a turbine and generate electricity. Each sphere would provide a five megawatt turbine with four hours of storage capacity.

Read more . . .

Wind Vs Conventional Electricity Economics (slideshare.net)

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Backpack Power Plant offers hydroelectricity on the move

innovation2 — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:04:19 +0000

Hydroelectric power specialist Bourne Energy has developed a human-portable hydroelectric generator which can create clean, quiet power from any stream deeper than four feet.

The “Backpack Power Plant”, which joins the company’s Riverstar, Oceanstar and Tidalstar designs, is aimed at bringing cheap, practical energy technology to remote areas.

Bourne Energy has developed two versions of the BPP; BPP-1 is aimed at civilians, while BPP-2 is designed for the military and was recently unveiled at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco. Both measure three feet in length and weigh less than 30 pounds, though the military version is 10% lighter. Both are self-contained with their own integrated power, control, cooling and sensor systems. They collapse into a backpack-sized module comprising three parts; the generator, hub and folded stored blades.

While the military BPP-2 unit produces 20% more power (600W) of high quality continuous power depending on river current, the civilian BPP-1 unit produces approximately 500 W/unit but was not designed to work with a variety of flow rates and produces optimum energy in streams moving at 2.3 meters per second. Both can be arranged singularly or in arrays of 20-30 kW. The BPP-2 however operates silently with no heat or exhaust emissions, is 40% less visible during operation and can also be bottom-mounted to ensure total invisibility if required.

Read more . . .

Backpack Power Plant: You ARE the Grid [Energy] (gizmodo.com)
Backpack Hydroelectric Plant Gives You 500 Watts on the Move (wired.com)

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Sunshine is free, so can photovoltaics be cheap?

innovation2 — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 01:03:31 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

Here’s how to make a solar cell from silicon: take one solid block of doped silicon, saw it into thin wafers, layer said semiconductors beneath a panel of transparent glass, connect them to a metal electrode that can channel away the electrons knocked loose by incoming photons and turn it into a photovoltaic device. That process has at least two flaws: such silicon is expensive, contributing more than half to the final price of a solar photovoltaic, and sawing it turns as much as half of that silicon into wasted grit.*

As a result, solar costs as much as $4 per watt by the time it’s installed on your roof or in a large-scale power plant, says Arun Majumdar, the first director of the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, or ARPA-E. “If you can reduce that to $1.50 per watt it can enable scaling,” or widespread adoption of the clean, renewable electricity source, he told ScientificAmerican.com at last week’s ARPA-E summit.

And a company called 1366 Technologies may have found a way to do just that by growing a nearly pure wafer directly from melted silicon rather than forming an ingot that is then sawed.

That may make silicon photovoltaics, which are the most efficient currently at turning sunlight into electricity, as cheap as thin-film solar cells, whose advantage is cost but which are not as good at creating electric current. In fact, rapidly decreasing cost for solar power means some experts expect such distributed electricity generation to cost the same or less than electricity from today’s grid by as soon as 2015.

Read more . . .

Worldwide Solar Photovoltaic Market Reaches Record High of 6.43 Gigawatt in 2009 (eon.businesswire.com)
1366 Tech leaps from pure silcon to solar wafer (news.cnet.com)
Seeking Transformational Energy Technologies (scientificamerican.com)
Material Traps Light on the Cheap (technologyreview.com)

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Generating hydrogen fuel from waste energy

innovation2 — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:29:49 +0000

We recently looked at a breakthrough in using sunlight to create hydrogen but now scientists have found a way to use ambient noise to turn water into usable hydrogen fuel. The process harvests small amounts of otherwise-wasted energy such as noise or stray vibrations from the environment to break the chemical bonds in water and produce oxygen and hydrogen gas.

Materials scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison grew nanocrystals of two common crystals, zinc oxide and barium titanate, and placed them in water. When pulsed with ultrasonic vibrations, the nanofibers flexed and catalyzed a chemical reaction to split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

When the fibers bend, asymmetries in their crystal structures generate positive and negative charges and create an electrical potential. This phenomenon, called the piezoelectric effect, has been well known in certain crystals for more than a century and is the driving force behind quartz clocks and other applications.

The researchers applied the same idea to the nanocrystal fibers. “The bulk materials are brittle, but at the nanoscale they are flexible,” says UW-Madison geologist and crystal specialist Huifang Xu. He likened them to the difference between fiberglass and a pane of glass.

Smaller fibers bend more easily than larger crystals and therefore also produce electric charges easily. So far, the researchers have achieved an 18 percent efficiency with the nanocrystals, higher than most experimental energy sources.

Read more . . .

Scavenging Energy Waste to Turn Water Into Hydrogen Fuel (usnews.com)
New Reactor Uses Sunlight to Turn Water and CO2 into Fuel (grantlawrence.blogspot.com)
A cheaper and more efficient solar-hydrogen system (arstechnica.com)

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Breakthrough in quest for solar hydrogen production

innovation2 — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:35:35 +0000

Scientists at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, have built on feats of Mother Nature to develop the most potent homogeneous catalyst known for water oxidation, which they hope will lead to producing clean hydrogen fuel using only water and sunlight. Could cars of the future be powered by just water and a solar collector on the roof?

The water oxidation catalyst (WOC) research is a component of the Emory Bio-inspired Renewable Energy Center (EBREC), which aims to copy natural processes like photosynthesis to generate clean fuel. The next step involves incorporating the WOC into a solar-driven, water-splitting system. The long-term goal is to use sunlight to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. While hydrogen becomes the fuel, its combustion produces water – which would then flow back into a clean, green, renewable cycle. “The fastest, carbon-free molecular WOC to date has really upped the standard from the other known homogeneous WOCs,” said Emory inorganic chemist Craig Hill, whose lab led the effort. “It’s like a home run compared to a base hit.”

The new WOC is based on the cheap and abundant element cobalt, adding to its potential to help solar energy go mainstream.

Read more . . .

A cheaper and more efficient solar-hydrogen system (arstechnica.com)
Breakthrough Producing Hydrogen from Water + Sunlight (treehugger.com)

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Solar panels made three times cheaper and four times more efficient

innovation2 — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:34:13 +0000

As regular readers will know, we cover more than our fair share of breakthroughs promising next-generation super-efficient solar cells. Everything from growing photovoltaic crystals, applying special coatings or using carbon nanotubes teases us with cheaper, more efficient solar energy – eventually. In this latest news, scientists are using current technology in a new type of concentrating array which they say is four times more efficient and three times cheaper than current solar cells.

The technology was originally developed at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and will be commercially produced by a spinoff company called Technique Solar. Each solar module consists of nine “troughs” that feature a concentrating acrylic lens and reflective walls to focus the sun’s rays onto a strip of photovoltaic (PV) cells, which enables the number of PV cells to be cut by 75 percent. The PV cells are used to generate electricity, while a heat exchanger located under them is used to generate heat for circulating water and storage tanks for a hot water system. Additionally, to maximize the sun’s rays the array has a motor drive mechanism with tracking sensor to follow the sun.

The company says its Concentrated Universal Energy Solar System (CUESS) makes it possible to deliver solar energy more economically and more efficiently than other current forms of solar energy generation. Each 3.5 square meter array apparently produces a total of around 2.1-kW of power, while a standard PV panel would need to be around 12-14 square meters to produce around the same amount. Technique Solar says its panels can supply heat load (hot water) and electrical energy at one quarter of the energy costs of conventional solar energy systems.

Read more . . .

The innovator: Matthias Kauer (guardian.co.uk)
Sunshine is free, so can photovoltaics be cheap? (scientificamerican.com)
Solar energy with jewel-like curtains on windows (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
Micro Solar Cells Handle More Intense Sunlight (technologyreview.com)
New photovoltaic system is “foldable, concealed and mobile” (energyrefuge.com)

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Storing megawatts: Liquid-metal batteries and electricity

innovation2 — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:19:17 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Making aluminum requires a lot of electricity. That’s because the metal bonds tightly to oxygen and it takes a lot of energy to break that bond. In essence, the process of making aluminum is a giant battery with the silvery metal being reduced to purity at the cathode while oxygen bonds with the carbon anode to make, you guessed it, CO2. It takes roughly 15 kilowatt-hours of electricity to make just one kilogram of aluminum via electrolysis.

But what if instead of making aluminum, one used the process to store electricity?

“What’s a big current sink? Aluminum smelters,” explained Luis Ortiz, research director for materials scientist Donald Sadoway at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), at last week’s ARPA-E summit. “Maybe the aluminum industry is sitting on the answer [to large-scale electricity storage] all along.”

Unfortunately, thanks to that CO2 gas floating away, this aluminum-making process turns out to be a very bad battery—it is simply not reversible. But David Bradwell, a graduate student in Sadoway’s lab, tweaked the process to involve liquid metals for the anode, cathode and even electrolyte and evolved a battery that has a high charge transfer, long life and costs “below $100 per kilowatt-hour,” according to Ortiz. “It is as good or better than lithium ion in energy density but cheaper than lead acid.”

Read more . . .

Blog – Energy-Dense Silicon Batteries Get $3M (technologyreview.com)
Blog – New Charging Method Could Slash Battery Recharge Times (technologyreview.com)

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Innovation Toronto » Project Energy

Home Charging for Electric Vehicle: Costs Will Vary

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Companies join forces to standardize charging infrastructure

One of the criticisms often levied at the drive to get electrically-powered vehicles from the fringe into the mainstream is the current lack of a network of charging stations.

Huge challenges ahead

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Mile-High Mega Kites Could Pull Giant, Floating Power Plants

Smoothing Out the Wind

A cunning plan to store energy underwater may help fulfil the promise of wind power

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Backpack Power Plant offers hydroelectricity on the move

Hydroelectric power specialist Bourne Energy has developed a human-portable hydroelectric generator which can create clean, quiet power from any stream deeper than four feet.

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Sunshine is free, so can photovoltaics be cheap?

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Storing megawatts: Liquid-metal batteries and electricity

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