Clean Energy and Transportation News for October 2017

We're intensely interested in the Tesla Model 3 and whether it will live up to the hype. The guys running The Model 3 Owners Club got this chance to make an in-depth evaluation of the Model 3, giving an hour of video going over all kinds of details.

In the 4+ years since BMW started mass production of the BMW i3, sales have reached nearly 100,000 electric and plug-in-hybrid BMW i3's, and yearly production capacity stands at around 25,000 vehicles. By comparison, that is one quarter of Tesla's production capacity for the Model S and Model X, meaning that Tesla Motors has achieved a faster production growth velocity than BMW. In any case the BMW i3 is a fine electric car, and BMW has achieved a significant milestone.

One step taken to mark the occasion is innauguration of a second-life battery facility at the BMW i3 factory in Leipzig. The phrase "second life" means that after a battery pack's first life as the traction battery in a car, it can be repurposed as an energy storage unit.

What happens to an electric car battery pack that's depleted to 80% usable capacity? That battery still has significant usable capacity, and can be reused. In theory. Hence the "second life" concept.

The facility being built by BMW will hold 700 BMW i3 battery packs, some recycled from old cars, the others from newly produced packs. It is to be paired with wind turbines on the site, to time-shift some of the electricity produced by those turbines to being used at other times of day.

In the 4+ years since BMW started mass production of the BMW i3, sales have reached nearly 100,000 electric and plug-in-hybrid BMW i3's, and yearly production capacity stands at around 25,000 vehicles. By comparison, that is one quarter of Tesla's production capacity for the Model S and Model X, meaning that Tesla Motors has achieved a faster production growth velocity than BMW. In any case the BMW i3 is a fine electric car, and BMW has achieved a significant milestone.

One step taken to mark the occasion is innauguration of a second-life battery facility at the BMW i3 factory in Leipzig. The phrase "second life" means that after a battery pack's first life as the traction battery in a car, it can be repurposed as an energy storage unit.

What happens to an electric car battery pack that's depleted to 80% usable capacity? That battery still has significant usable capacity, and can be reused. In theory. Hence the "second life" concept.

The facility being built by BMW will hold 700 BMW i3 battery packs, some recycled from old cars, the others from newly produced packs. It is to be paired with wind turbines on the site, to time-shift some of the electricity produced by those turbines to being used at other times of day.

"Turnover" means that Soltec has essentially doubled their sales, with over 200 percent revenue growth in 2017. The company supplies solar tracker systems across three continents. It's likely the company will rise to 3rd place in global PV Tracker supply market in 2017. Whatever good that means for Soltec as a company, it is an early indicator of continued strong growth in solar for renewable electricity production.

Carbon nanotube fabrics could be used to convert waste heat into electricity or serve as a small power source. This is the result of research by NREL scientists announced today. The research concerns using semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) as the primary material for efficient thermoelectric generators. That's opposed to the current practice of using that material as a composite, e.g. carbon nanotubes and a polymer. The research revealed that removing polymers from all SWCNT starting materials served to boost the thermoelectric performance and lead to improvements in how charge carriers move through the semiconductor.

NREL's patented inverted metamorphic (IMM) multijunction solar cells are coming down to earth thanks to a licensing agreement with MicroLink Devices. The IMM technique enables multijunction III-V solar cells to be grown with both higher efficiencies and lower costs than traditional multijunction solar cells. It gives two advantages, the first being greater power extraction from the higher-bandgap sub-cells, and the second being more efficient low-bandgap sub-cell materials such as Indium Gallium Arsenide. Further, manufacturing improvements act to lower device costs, while also reducing the weight allowing these cells to be used on solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicles (a.k.a. Drones). The NREL technology adds to MicroLink's existing expertise in producing lighter-weight solar cells.

California's plan to reshape the electricity grid is taking a big step forward as solar inverter makers, like Ginlong Technologies, adopt UL1741SA. The plan hinges on smart inverters, with the UL 1741SA standard being the first concrete step. Previous inverters would, if grid conditions go wonky, disconnect from the grid. Power systems engineers thinking about the problem recognized that inverters could help prop up the grid, to remedy certain wonky grid conditions.

The increasing rate of installing solar inverters gave California an opportunity to field a different kind of solar inverter. California Rule 21 governs the methods of interconnecting solar power systems to the electricity grid. Over the last 3-4 years, the Smart Inverter Working Group convened by the California Public Utilities Commission worked on redesigning solar inverters to provide grid support functions. The content of UL1741SA, which was ratified in September 2016, is the first concrete result and describes the sort of grid support functions required of solar inverters.

UL1741SA contains what is called the "Rule 21 Phase 1 autonomous functions", meaning these functions automatically kick in whenever the electricity grid frequency, voltage, power factor and similar measures are out of line with grid stability requirements. If the grid strays beyond certain parameters, the inverter will still disconnect itself from the grid, but so long as the grid stays within those parameters the inverter will assist with keeping the grid stable. This may seem like a small thing, but it is the first step of a cooperatively managed electricity grid.

Over time Rule 21 Phases 2 and 3 will be standardized and be required features of future inverters. Those phases add communications ability so that smart inverters can be proactively managed from a central cloud-based service. It's thought that over time the electricity grid will morph from a system of large centralized electricity generation resources, to a distributed set of electrical grid resources of many types and sizes. A distributed management system will orchestrate electricity inflows and outflows to balance electricity demand throughout the day, and also take care of the intermittency issue.

The US Department of Energy is pushing for even faster charging time. The agency is ponying up $15 million in R&D grants to develop batteries and infrastrcture supporting 400 kiloWatt charging and a 15 minute recharge time.

BMW is building a battery factory, but it doesn't appear to be on the scale of a proper Gigafactory. This factory is based in China, and is positioned as producing battery packs for the BMW 5 Series Plug-in Hybrid for the local market, meaning China. In other words, sales volume for that vehicle may not be that significant and therefore the factory described below is likely to be at a much smaller scale than a Gigafactory. On the flip side, a BMW Board Member is quoted discussing the planned expansion of BMW's electrified vehicles to be 15% to 25% of global sales. It may be this new battery factory is intended to expand battery production capacity to meet that future demand.

Bottom line is that Tesla Motors has demonstrated that to move electric vehicles to the mass market requires building a massive increase in global battery production capacity. Whether we are to perceive BMW as being serious about electric vehicles depends in great measure on how big they go in battery production.

Volkswagen is announcing a return to the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in 2018, driving a custom-built four-wheel-drive all-electric race car. It will have been 31 years since Volkswagen's last attempt at that race, in that case with a highly modified VW Golf that failed to reach the finish line. Pikes Peak is a very dangerous race course, climbing up to the top of the 14,000+ foot Pikes Peak near Colorado Springs CO. As you might expect, the course includes many stretches of road carved literally out of a cliff face, and a single mistake can send a racer plunging down a thousand-foot high cliff.

In recent years electric vehicles have made a significant showing. In 2015 electric cars won outright, taking both 1st and 2nd place. In 2012, Lightning Motorcycles won the motorcycle field outright, beating the entire motorcycle field by 20 seconds.

Racing is one place where electric vehicles will prove themselves to the public. The stereotypical die-hard petrol-head fast-car-fanatic will need to see concretely that electric cars can serve their need-for-speed. To the extent that these people are influencers, the more who convert from fast-petrol-cars to fast-electric-cars the more successful will be this project of converting to electric vehicles.

After home charging, workplace charging is the most convenient place to charge an electric car. The 4 hours for a full recharge doesn't matter if you're inside the office working. Your personal involvement is the time to plug the car in, and the time to move the car when charging is complete. Having charging facilities at the workplace obviously will make folks more amenable to driving electric if only because the total driving radius is greatly expanded.

Ford Motors says they've learned, after installing 200+ charging stations at 50 facilities, that Ford's employees are more open to buying a plug-in electric car knowing they have charging available at the office.

This isn't exactly an earth shattering ground breaking research result. This result has been seen by others over the years, and it is an intuitively obvious result. It's nice to see the intuitively obvious verified by actual research results. And, it's nice to see that the results of this study will convince Ford to triple the number of workplace charging stations at Ford facilities. Maybe it will finally start sinking into the collective knowledge at Ford Motors that Electric is the direction we all need to take.

Last thing to note is that Ford's charging facilities expansion is meant to enable bad charging etiquette. The press release says the burden of moving ones car after it's fully charge is a major downside to electric car ownership. I can imagine certain office campus situations where that would be true. However, it means the folks who plug in to charge in the morning will be hogging the charging station all day. That a car is parked in front of a station tends to make it impossible for another car to use that station. Bottom line is that electric car charging facilities are a scarce resource that we must learn to share. This plan instead gives folks the idea they do not have to share charging facilities.

Toyota has long held off from supporting electric vehicles, instead relying on hybrids and fuel cells as their contribution to cleaning up the transportation system. In this project Toyota is deploying prototype fuel-cell class 8 big rigs in the Port of Los Angeles area. The task of drayage trucks is delivering containers offloaded from ships at the port over to rail facilities a few miles away. Traditionally this has been done with regular diesel-powered big rigs, and as a result the area around the Port of Los Angeles is horribly polluted.

With a dual-motor drive train, Proterra is now offering an electric city bus with nearly twice the horsepower and acceleration of previous models. The new drive train will be five times more efficient than a standard diesel bus, an industry-leading 26.1 MPGe. That the bus can climb a 25 percent grade makes it attractive to the Park City Utah transit organization, who must climb a steep mountain from Salt Lake City to Park City.

Van Hool, the leading bus and coach manufacturer, has chosen Proterra to supply its battery platform for Van Hool's first all-electric motor coach. The plan is to integrate Proterra's electric drive train with Van Hool CX45E coach platform. That model is designed for long-range intercity travel, while delivering a world-class customer experience in quality and comfort.

Last month, Proterra drove one of their heavy-duty buses for over 1100 miles on a single charge, blowing away the previous record. Given that Van Hool plans to integrate Proterra's drive train into Van Hool's long-range bus platform, it's next to obvious that Van Hool plans to deploy these electric buses to customers with long-distance inter-city routes.

Earlier this week GM announced a plan to transition to all-electric vehicles. Curiously the only vehicle mentioned in the announcement was a fuel cell autonomous vehicle platform, which is a non-electric hydrogen powered vehicle type. Here is the announcement concerning that fuel cell vehicle platform, and the fact that it's targeted at the military and heavy duty trucking sectors.

The military faces a deadly problem with "regular" military vehicles, because of the necessity to deliver fossil fuels to the field. The delivery process exposes more soldiers to harm because delivering fuel to remote outposts requires driving convoys through possibly hostile territories. The military has been interested for several years in other energy systems if only to reduce the risk to soldiers. You might think that instead of invading countries willy nilly for unclear reasons and terrorising the population so badly they want to fight back, that the best choice would be to pull out and say we're sorry and try to make amends. But the political leadership we have instead wants to keep the war going and obviously I've flown off into tangent land.

That tangent was meant to explain why the press release stresses "minimize logistical burdens and reduce human exposure to harm." Clearly this Association of the United States Army meeting will include some attention on the issue of mitigating risks from delivering fuel to dangerous territory.

I don't understand why General Motors thinks this is a solution to the named problem. Fuel cell vehicles require pure hydrogen. Since it's difficult to deliver fuel to a remote outpost in hostile territory, how does switching to hydrogen fuel make any difference? The hydrogen still has to be delivered to the field.

The last few months several carmakers have announced plans to go fully electric. General Motors, the company that killed the EV1, has announced their own plan. You'll notice that details are lacking below just what is meant, and that the announcement curiously includes discussion of a fuel cell prototype vehicle platform. Fuel cell vehicles are driven by electric motors, but it's hard to call them "electric" since they do not plug in to a power socket to recharge. Remember, "It's not electric if you can't plug it in".

Call me hopeful but skeptical. The image GM included with the announcement is obviously meant to convey several vehicles in the R&D stage waiting to be unveiled.