Clean Energy and Transportation News for July 2017

The Formula E electric race car series will be joined by another large car manufacturer for the 2019/2020 season (season 6). Porsche is a major performance car brand, and plans to join the Formula E series the year after next.

Yesterday was Tesla Model 3 day, meaning it was the first deliveries of the Tesla Model 3. Expectations are HIGH for this car and what everyone expects Tesla Motors will do. While there were 30 cars delivered yesterday in Fremont, there was also a test-ride event where attendees were driven around a course on the Tesla Factory grounds. Several people who took those test rides filmed their experience.

Following yesterday's signing of climate change legislation, California Governor Jerry Brown commemorated the opening of Proterra's West Coast Manufacturing facility. Proterra is a rapidly growing manufacturer of electric transit buses. The new facility will handle production of buses for its West Coast customers, and adds to Proterra's battery manufacturing facility in Silicon Valley, and its East Coast manufacturing facility in South Carolina.

The Los Angeles area is already a strong customer of Proterra. Foothill Transit has 17 Proterra buses and serves 22 cities in the area. That agency plans to go 100% electric by 2030.

Last Winter Lextran, the transit system for Lexington KY, bought five Proterra Catalyst all-electric buses plus one charging station. Lextran plans to buy another shortly, and hopes to buy others as they secure funding to do so. The charging station is installed at the Transit Center on High Street, near the downtown area. Most bus routes in Lexington go through this Transit Center.

Louisville KY, a nearby city engaged in a 100+ year long friendly rivalry with Lexington, has had Proterra buses for a couple years.

The Solar Decathlon is a yearly contest held by the US Department of Energy. They line up University teams to each develop a solar-powered high efficiency house. For the contest, each team must develop and build the house on their campus, disassemble it, transport the house to the contest site, reassemble it for the contest, then after the contest is finished to disassemble the house, and transport it back to their campus. The contest encourages lots of cross-field development work, covering 10 areas (hence, a Decathlon), and acts as a job training exercise for the students.

The big point is that even though the Trump Administration is pushing all things fossil fuels, the US Department of Energy has not canceled this contest. The contest is all about solar power and energy efficiency, but they're letting it proceed as planned. Hurm...

A Transport Evolved viewer in Europe happened upon a Nissan Leaf in the wild, that happened to be at a charging station, shared the pictures with the show, letting them make educated guesses about the car. The Nissan Leaf still has dual charging ports, still sporting CHAdeMO, but the AC charge port was larger implying that Nissan a switch to the Type 2 port for Europe instead of the J1772 port. Doing so will make the Leaf more compatible with Europe's charging infrastructure.

The other detail is that this car seemed to allow a maximum 160+ miles range, implying it has a 40 kiloWatt-hour battery pack. Hurm... is Nissan going to wait on offering the 60 kiloWatt-hour battery size required for a 200+ mile range?

The competition is over what? Will more market share be had with a lower priced car that still offers a significant range boost? What if a 160-180 mile range 40 kWh Leaf can be bought for significantly less than the 238 mile range 60 kWh Chevy Bolt EV or the Tesla Model 3? Would that mean more Leaf buyers because it's much less expensive?

On the other hand, Nissan has long talked about offering multiple battery pack capacities, and has shown promo videos of a Leaf with a 60 kWh pack. It's far more likely that Nissan will offer both 40 kWh and 60 kWh capacities on the Leaf.

Greenlots is a leading company in the electric car charging space. One big claim they continually make is of being the "Open Charging Leader", meaning that their charging network is implemented using open protocols versus the closed proprietary protocols used by other network operators. While the end customer doesn't care about this issue, it is important to network operations. By using open protocols, in theory, Greenlots has a wider choice of charging station providers compared to the networks using closed protocols.

California Governor Jerry Brown today signed significant climate change legislation, AB398/AB617. Part of what happened is the extension of a law originally signed by Gov. Schwarzenegger 10 years ago. With AB398, we have a Cap-And-Trade program that is an attempt at economic pressure to solve for climate change. With AB617, certain gasses are defined as air pollutants and toxic chemicals.

What follows is the text of the legislation.

The Formula E electric race car series will be joined by another large car manufacturer for the 2019/2020 season (season 6). Mercedes-Benz had previously intended to join during the 2018/2019 season, but has instead chosen to wait a year.

This feel-good story about a guy finding his car after he forgot which parking lot he'd parked in has a dark side. His car was blocking an electric vehicle charging station for 4+ days. The news article doesn't talk about this, and the parking lot owner did nothing about this. The parking lot owner should have seen this gasoline car parked at the EV charging station and had it towed.

Back in 2010-2011 an association for blind folk began a push for electric cars to make noise, because quiet cars are dangerous to blind people who use sounds to navigate the world around them. While it's obvious that blind folks need to hear things to avoid risks, it's only part of the story. What about the pedestrian/bicyclist deaths due to gasoline cars and even big trucks? Obviously it's not about the noise emitted by the vehicle. What about noise pollution in our cities? When will we solve for noise pollution?

Instead, doesn't it seem possible the "quiet electric cars are dangerous" idea might be pushed by organizations seeking to delay electric car adoption?

By that measure why is an electric car charging network like eVgo publishing a note saying electric cars are dangerous? What the ____, as they say! I think I'm speaking for all of eVgo's customers when I beg them to please please please work on improving your back-end services.

Lightning Motorcycles can rightfully claim to produce the fastest production motorcycle in the world, an all-electric bike dubbed the LS-218. The name was earned in August 2012, when Lightning set a land speed record at Bonneville of 218 miles per hour. The record was actually 215.960 miles/hr averaged over two runs with the faster run being 218 miles/hr, forming the basis for the bike's name. The next year they took the bike to the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb race, and beat the entire motorcycle field by over 20 seconds. That bike was one of a handful of prototype bikes Lightning built for racing, and the company now sells a production version to the public.

Lightning's engineering team has been at work on two tracks -- One is developing the manufacturing expertise required to produce motorcycles -- The other is to develop a new prototype bike. The team plans to take this new bike to the Bonneville speed trials this summer where the team intends to set a new land speed record, and the new bike will be named after whatever speed it attains. In the riders seat is a leading land speed record holder, Jim Hoogerhyde.

In their "shakedown run", at the El Mirage track in California, they recorded a 211.730 miles/hr record from a standing start. The standing start is a different format than is used at Bonneville, which uses a "flying start" where racers are timed over a 1 mile stretch in the middle of a longer run. In November 2012, Lightning recorded a 189 miles/hr standing start speed at El Mirage compared to the 215.590 miles/hr record at Bonneville. Does this imply they might hit 250 miles/hr at Bonneville?

The company has long used racing as the cauldron within which to develop their motorcycles. They achieved many wins in earlier years, but the last couple years their racing program took a back seat to the priority of building bikes for customers. Lightning has long promised a range of motorcycles targeted more typical usages than racing, such as the daily commute. This press release repeats that promise. At their shop I've seen several prototypes such as an urban-oriented scooter, and a street bike meant for every-day riders.

Previously, Lightning had partnered with Remy for the motor and Ener1 for EnerDel batteries. In this press release Lightning names Farasis as the battery partner. That company has supplied super powerful battery cells to several electric racing teams.

Encouraging person-to-person sharing of charging stations is one way to expand the electric car charging network. It's clear a key to a successful switch to electric cars is the speed with which the charging network becomes ubiquitous. This isn't the first effort at person-to-person charging station sharing. To my knowledge that honor falls on PlugShare/Recargo/Xatori (Xatori and Recargo merged). In any case, the interesting twist in this case is the use of Blockchain to record payments.

Blockchain? That's the transaction recording technology underly Bitcoin and most other digital currencies. Blockchain is a simpler mechanism to record transactions than the prevailing system of monetary settlements through the ACH banking system. Blockchain-style transactions are as fast as an API call on an Internet service, and are touted as being highly secure due to well-thought-out algorithms and encryption mechanisms. Instead of Bitcoin, the team is instead using Ethereum.

Almost two years ago I had a frenzy of excitement about Bitcoin, and posted some theorizing that using Bitcoin in charging stations would reduce the need for charging networks. Who knows if that would be the result.

In California and Hawaii, policy changes are underway requiring "smart inverters" for solar power systems. Requirements going into effect in September call for what's called "Phase 1" functions, comprising a set of "autonomous" actions providing "grid support" functions like voltage or frequency support. That is, these functions happen automatically without any explicit control, and act in reaction to grid conditions. For example the voltage or frequency might go out of bounds, and rather than disconnect from the grid the inverter instead shifts into a mode of helping to correct the problem.

The industry developed a supplemental standard, UL1741SA (Supplement A), defining those autonomous functions. Shortly Enphase, and the other solar inverter manufacturers, will be unable to sell inverters in California that lack this feature.