Posts Tagged ‘plug-in electric vehicles’
From powering plug-in electric vehicles to backing up the grid
Saturday, July 30, 2011, 7:22 pm No Comments | Post a CommentIn a lab on N.C. State University’s Centennial Campus, engineers are probing the potential of the Chevrolet Volt’s T-shaped battery once it no longer powers General Motor’s plug-in hybrid electric car.
The research is based on an agreement GM and the ABB Group signed three months before the first Chevy Volt rolled off the lot, which was in December. The carmaker and the Swiss-based engineering firm are considering options that range from energy storage to powering bicycles.
A Chevy Volt battery is hooked up to an ABB inverter in the ABB lab on Centennial Campus.
ABB provides power and automation technologies to utilities and industrial customers worldwide. The firm concentrates on renewable energy and supplies wind and solar energy generators with electrical equipment and services. Its North American headquarters is in Cary and the R&D projects with the Chevy Volt batteries are conducted in the ABB lab on Centennial Campus. ABB employs about 500 in the Research Triangle area and 1,500 in North Carolina.
A first step in the research is combining a Chevy Volt battery with a commercially available ABB inverter, a device that exchanges direct current from the battery into alternating current used to transmit electricity on the grid.
The next step is hooking up several of the batteries to the inverter, said Sandeep Bala, an R&D engineer in the ABB lab.
“There’s a lot of work to do yet,” Bala said during a tour of the lab. “What the cost is, what the business case is.”
The learning curve will be steep, Pablo Valencia, the senior manager GM has assigned to the project, agreed. It’s not even known when it’s worth reconfiguring the battery, Valencia said.
The T-shaped lithium-ion battery consists of several cells and is built into the bottom of the Chevy Volt’s passenger cabin, with the cross bar being located under the back seat. The battery can power the car for about 40 miles in the city and has to be recharged. That’s the plug-in electric portion of the car. The Volt also has a gasoline tank to go another 300 miles. That’s the hybrid portion of the car.
The two power sources make the Chevy Volt the most fuel-efficient car on the market with a fuel economy of 90 miles per gallon to 95 mpg on the highway, according to the Edmunds.com review.
Battery cell above rear tire powers an e-bike.
How long it takes before a battery becomes available for reuse only time will tell. GM’s warranty on the battery is for eight years or 100,000 miles and after 10 years, the Volt’s battery retains about 70 percent of its capacity. But GM and ABB intend to figure out where else the batteries can be used once they come out of the cars.
One idea is to break down the battery and use single cells to power electric motors on bicycles.
Another is to use the batteries as storage - for renewable energy or as backup for electric outages. Renewable energy is dependent on the sun and the wind, which follow their own schedule. But stored in batteries, renewable energy would be available to flatten peaks and valleys in power consumption and allow utilities to run their power plants more evenly, and therefore more efficiently.
“The utilities love that,” Valencia said.
Power customers might like a backup system during power outages. The engineers estimated that 33 Chevy Volt batteries have enough storage capacity to power up to 50 homes for about four hours during a power outage.
What does a plug-in vehicle have in common with the iPad?
Thursday, August 5, 2010, 9:58 pm No Comments | Post a Comment
Duke Energy's Tesla
Duke Energy’s silver Tesla in the parking lot at Research Triangle Park headquarters was off-limits - you could touch and take pictures but not drive it or ride in it.
In that respect, Wednesday’s forum on plug-in electric vehicles resembled events featuring 20th century combustion engine technology with expensive sports cars spurring unattainable dreams amongst autophiles.
That the Tesla remained parked was unfortunate. It’s exactly the driving of a plug-in electric vehicle, or PEV, that would have provided a clue how shifting from fossil fuel to electricity might change daily life.
PEVs come in different flavors, from hybrids like the plug-in version of the Toyota Prius and the Chevy Volt to all-electric cars like the Tesla and the Nissan Leaf. But as the Leaf, the first mass-produced, affordable electric car, hits U.S. roads in December and January, the future of driving might feel more and more like the future of reading.
So, does the all-electric car promise to be to driving what the iPad or the Kendle promise to be to reading?
That’ll depend on how many people will buy the Leaf and whether they like what they buy, panel members at the forum, from Nancy Mansfield, Nissan’s electric vehicle regional manager, to Duke Energy’s John Langston and Progress Energy’s Mike Waters, agreed.
Nissan Leaf
More than 17,000 people in the U.S. have spent $99 each to reserve a spot on the list to order one of the first 50,000 Leafs, Mansfield said. The cars, which will be imported from Japan until U.S. production starts in 2012, will not be sold through dealerships.
First orders will be accepted by the end of the month and filled by December, Mansfield said. Orders from Tennessee, California, Arizona, Oregon and the state of Washington will be taken and filled first.
Of the 288 reservations in North Carolina, 139 came from the Research Triangle area, she said. The first local deliveries are projected in April.
That may not sound like a lot, considering that the National Auto Dealers Association put the number of cars on North Carolina roads at more than 3.6 million. But the Leaf sets the stage. In the next two years, automakers plan to bring to market about two dozen PEV models and despite lingering concerns about battery technology and ability of the electric grid to keep up, the number of federal incentives is set to increase.
Already, federal tax credits reduce the price of the Leaf and the cost of installing a charging station at home, because PEVs promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and fossil fuel imports.
But PEVs are more than cars without tailpipes. Owning one will change habits and routines. For starters, an electrical engine makes no noise and needs neither a transmission nor an oil change.
PEVs do need charging stations, however, in homes, parks, public parking lots, schools, hospitals and shopping centers. The RTP area is projected to get about 200 of them within the next 18 months, according to Jeffrey Barghout, director of Transportation Initiatives at Advanced Energy in Raleigh.
But the bulk of the charging is expected to be done overnight at home. Forget the stop at the gas station on the way home. Many PEVs will be refueled in the garage or at neighborhood charging stations. To completely recharge the Leaf’s batteries on a 110 Volt circuit takes up to 21 hours, so Nissan recommends installation of a 220 Volt charging station. That costs about $2,200 and requires a city permit.
The permitting process attracted officials from Cary, Raleigh, Durham and other communities in the RTP area to the forum. Some of them, like the Town of Cary, also reserved a spot to order a Leaf.
For more information about PEVs, check out Web sites by the Electric Drive Transportation Association, the industry’s lobby group; EV World, an online publication by electric vehicle aficionados; Plug-In America, an online publication by clean energy advocates; and Project Get Ready, an initiative of the Rocky Mountain Institute to prepare for the arrival of PEVs.
Still, a test drive is the best way to get a feel for how different PEVs are. Check out this video of a Tesla test drive (not Duke Energy’s car):
