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Electric highway soon to be a reality on the I-5 Corridor, but will we like it?

Electric cars are certain to remain a green novelty/luxury item if there isn't a readily accessible network of charging stations to refuel them. On the other hand, no government will be willing to make the massive infrastructure investments needed to make charging stations as ubiquitous as the corner store if they believe no one will buy electric cars. Is it the chicken or the egg?

This is the dilemma that planners are facing as they develop an electric highway of 15 charging stations along I-5 in Washington State. Two charging stations will be located at either end of the Washington State border, including the highly-trafficked US-Canada crossing at Blaine.

The chargers will take 15-30 minutes for a complete charge and will be located on the private property of a for-profit business, replicating the experience of driving into any gas station - food, drinks, shopping, and car servicing could be part of the package.

The project is administered by WSDOT and a $1.3 million US Dept of Energy grant, and is part of the West Coast Green Highway program that one day hopes to extend from Canada to Mexico along I-5. Washington could become a springboard for other, more advanced EV infrastructure if this initial spur - the first of the WCGH - is a success. Not slow to follow suit, the State of Oregon has recently secured a $2 million federal TIGER II grant to do a project of the same scale within its borders. 

Unfortunately, the program is far from a complete solution to the problem of lack of EV infrastructure. 

There are currently no plans to create any EV options for East-West highway traffic. So any EV drivers attempting to Seattle from Spokane or Idaho (which has exactly zero charging stations in the entire state) would be shit outta luck. 

Hawaii was originally conceived as the poster child for EV infrastructural success, as it is an island where no single car trips could possibly exceed the battery range of the vehicle. However, news coming out of Hawaii after four EV charging stations were installed there is hardly encouraging:

To date, four public charging stations have opened in Hawaii. “It's pretty sad,” Leone said. “Nobody wants to install them because the cars aren't here, and people are reluctant to buy the cars because the infrastructure isn't there yet.”

San Francisco-based Better Place's revolutionary battery-swapping technology was briefly considered as a solution to the impediment of having to wait 15-30 minutes for a full battery charge. However, WSDOT turned this option down, allegedly due to problems with the standardization of battery models in the more popular EVs on the market today: the Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt, and electric Ford Focus.

According to the project manager,

“In theory, it seems like a good idea, and it might work” in countries smaller than the United States, such Israel and Denmark, where swapping programs are in fact underway and technologies are more homogeneous. "

Until these technical issues are resolved, it may be that the I-5 electric highway will end up being about as useful as the Seattle Center monorail or the South Lake Union Trolley (SLUT) - expensive, privately-financed toys that are flashy, high-tech, and contribute about zero to getting us out of our gas-guzzlers.

For more info, be sure to check out updates from the West Coast Green Highway project.

Via: Crosscut

SF Taxi Cabs the First Wave of EV Revolution in the Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area has been at the forefront of the electric vehicle (EV) innovation wave that has gotten major venture capitalists involved on an unprecedented scale. Back in May, I wrote about the SF-based firm Better Place and their (well-funded) project to bring $1.4 billion of investment to create a neighborhood level electric charging station network state-wide. There's also an established "electric highway" of EV charging stations on Hwy. 101 designed to service exclusively the Tesla Roadster, however limited that project may be in scope.

One of the first, and most highly visible, manifestations of the EV revolution in San Francisco will come in the form of a fully-electric fleet of taxi cabs throughout the city, funded by the US Dept. of Transportation. Over the next three years, four battery charging stations will be placed across the city. These stations will swap the taxi's batteries in as little as 45 seconds. To be practical for wide application, the charging stations must be efficient and lightning-quick; no taxi cab company in its right mind would let its vehicles sit idle for hours charging under the dominant EV charger technology in place in most cities today.

The project is a replication of an earlier system Better Place executed in Tokyo, using one of that megacity's largest taxi cab companies, Nihon Kotsu. The taxicabs in that experimental project drove over 25,000 miles using fully electric power from the Better Place charging stations.

This remarkable project implementation from Better Place is just one more reason why Inhabitat calls San Francisco "set to lead the electric vehicle revolution."

Via: Inhabitat

New Partnership between Toyota and Tesla Motors to Catalyze the Electric Car Market in the US

According to a recent report from Reuters, Toyota has purchased a $50 million share in Tesla Motors, a move that not only will help Toyota improve its damaged reputation following a series of product recalls in late 2009 but will also help to catalyze the development of the American electric car market. The $50 million share is estimated to be 2.5% of Tesla's net worth, although this figure cannot be confirmed until Tesla goes public later this year.

As I have described earlier, some enormous barrier to the development of electric car market-share have been the lack of supporting infrastructure in the built environment, as well as a lack of government and major corporate support for green car development.

Toyota's partnership with Tesla dovetails with important developments in electric car innovation. One of the most significant has been the venture capital investment of Shai Agassi's Better Place in a network of electric vehicle charging stations in California and Hawaii. A second has been the "Electric Highway" already developed for Tesla vehicles along California's Highway 101.

In addition, President Obama's recent executive order to improve the fuel efficiency of America's car fleet by raising the CAFE standards to a combined 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016, according to a New York Times article published 5/21/10, will provide a legislative impetus for green car infrastructure that can meet the new federal standards.

Specifically, this exciting new partnership between Toyota and Tesla Motors will take place at the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc’ (aka Nummi) in Fremont, CA — a recently shuttered GM/Toyota auto plant which will re-open under the Tesla/Toyota partnership to produce the Model S sedans, according to Inhabitat.  The Model S sedans have received federal tax exemptions, as the Department of Energy has encouraged green car development as part of the 2009 stimulus package (ARRA). The Model S is slated to have a range of 300 miles (after a 45 minute charge) and cost $49,900 after tax rebates when they are released in 2012. Tesla has the added benefit of a $465 million federal loan to build this lower-cost electric model.

This partnership will allow for a creative synergy between the two companies - with the major market share and production capacity of Toyota and the innovative expertise of Tesla - that could eventually lead Toyota to outpace Chevrolet and Nissan, whose electric models, the Volt and Leaf, respectively, are slated for release in Fall 2010. In addition, the re-opening of the Nummi plant in California will greatly contribute to the regional economy and produce an estimated 1,000 jobs.

Via: Inhabitat

Proliferation of Private Electric Vehicle Initiatives Shows Need for More Government Leadership

Amidst the current proliferation of electric vehicle initiatives, funded privately through venture capital, is an astonishing lack of government leadership of green fleets policy nationwide.


The State of California already has Better Place, Solar City, and Coulomb Technologies competing to provide residents with an electric vehicle charging station network. So far, however, Coulomb Technologies is the only firm of the three to explicitly provide resources to form partnerships with local governments, for both city planners and fleet managers. Coulomb has provided distinct resources for each set of stakeholders in the process, a key concern that has not received enough attention in earlier enterprises. Coulomb has begun to operate electric vehicle charging stations in San Jose, CA, out of streetlamps. With fierce competition coming from Better Place and Solar City, it should be interesting to see which of these firms has the most successful implementation of electric charging grids. As California is the nation's largest commercial market, success here means a great deal of transferrability to other regions and will attract significant international attention as well.

Currently (as of March 2010) Evergreen Fleets remains the only regional Green Fleets certification regime in the United States to follow the conceptual model of LEED, with set benchmarks for emissions reduction and alternative fuel investment. Evergreen Fleets is a pilot project of the Puget Sound Clean Cities Coalition, one of over 70 similar programs in metro areas throughout the US that are administered by the US Department of Energy's Clean Cities Program. However, due to limited national and state funding, similar programs are difficult to coordinate and maintain in many areas. Evergreen Fleets, for instance, has no full-time staff or even a dedicated office, like the LEED program. Important national initiatives like Obama's stimulus package are an important first step in spurring innovation, as their $200 million grant to Better Place has shown. Without adequate regulatory enforcement at the state and local, however, there is no guarantee that this investment is publicly accountable or even financially sound.

Further, while it is true that the venture capital and startup sectors have far more innovative capacity to offer in terms of green fleet solutions than any public agency initiative, public agencies play an important role in shaping the commercial markets by their sheer size and visibility alone. By creating economies of scale, public agencies can make certain vehicle technologies more affordable (and therefore more successful) simply by increasing the demand for them. 

Instead of blindly "recommending" that candidate agencies invest in electric vehicles and awarding points for those that do, Evergreen Fleets (and any certification regimes that emerge elsewhere) should specify in greater detail which applications of this technology are most appropriate and for whom.

America's First "Electric Highway" Takes Shape Along Highway 101 in California

Commuters between San Francisco and Los Angeles, along Highway 101, will no longer have to worry about the lack of electric vehicle charging infrastructure along this key California artery. 


While innovators like Shai Agassi of Better Place are still testing large-scale electric charging networks in a few prototype locations, Solar City, a Foster City, CA startup, has already created approximately 2,500 charging stations across the US, five of which are arrayed along the famously picturesque Highway 101, in what is now being dubbed "the Electric Highway." 

According to a story on the green technology blog Inhabitat, SolarCity's charging stations along Highway 101 are each located at Rabobank locations, one of their key patrons. Part of the reason Solar City's efforts have not garnered more public attention is because their stations, for the moment, are only compatible with the Tesla Roadster. The Roadster is a gorgeous driving machine whose starting price tops $100,000, making it in many ways a status symbol of the environmentally-conscious elite. The charging stations also have limited practicality, taking up to 3 hours to fully charge up a Roadster, though thankfully for Roadster owners, the vehicle's battery has a 300-mile range, meaning that intermittent stops along the Electric Highway need not be anywhere near three hours long. 

Three of the five charging stations - the Salinas, Atascadero, and San Luis Obispo locations - along the Electric Highway are solar-powered, offering a challenge to up-and-coming charging station providers to ensure, for publicity's sake, that their stations draw their electric energy from renewable sources. Currently Solar City has been offering its charging station services for free, although that may change as soon as it adopts a universal electric plug that any electric vehicle can use. As soon as that becomes a reality, the idea of "electric highways" and "green commuting corridors" may become the new status quo of transportation planning.

New Commitments to Electric Vehicle Charging Networks

Municipal and private fleets may have more reason to investigate electric vehicles soon to arrive on commercial markets, thanks in large part to new agreements in several key regions to build vast networks of charging stations for electric vehicles.

Israel, home to the electric charging station empresario Shai Agassi, has already built several hundred charging stations capable of swapping the lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles in as little as 45 seconds. The batteries are expected to have a life of 7,000 charges, far more than the 150,000 miles of an average car's lifespan.

The State of Hawaii has also committed to officially endorsing Mr. Agassi's first round of electric charging stations.

Both Israel and Hawaii, as well as other demonstrations in Denmark, demonstrate how the network of charging stations could be ideal for communities with shorter vehicle trips and high gas prices. On Hawaii, for instance, drivers rarely make trips than 100 miles, due to the islands' confining geography. The one characteristic these areas share in common is that they are each considered "island economies" with above average energy prices, making them ideal testing grounds for electric vehicles. Once these charging station networks become established locally and increase their market share, the supply of charging stations will have increased sufficiently to become more affordable for larger regions with lower energy prices.

For fleets looking to reduce the environmental impacts, regardless of where they are located, the "island economy" narrative is a fitting metaphor. Fleets are, due to their size (for larger cities, many thousands of vehicles) have a disproportionate influence on local commercial vehicle markets. If large fleets were able to commit to significant number of these electric fueling stations, they could easily create an economy of scale, reducing the overall price and making the purchase of these stations more affordable for private consumers.

This "island economy" approach is a contrast to Evergreen Fleets' Best Practices, which tend to focus on purchasing and retrofitting existing vehicles. Often this approach leads to the manufacture of new vehicles or equipment, which adds to the fleet's overall carbon footprint yet is not calculated against the fleets as an environmental externality in Evergreen Fleets certification. A new focus on green vehicle infrastructure over vehicle purchasing, as Agassi's partnerships demonstrate, may be a more effective method for making electric vehicles widely practical and available, thereby reducing fleet emissions.

SF Bay's Electric Vehicle Charging Network Receives a Huge Dose of Funding

According to a recent New York Times article, the San Francisco-based venture capital firm Better Place has committed an additional $350 million to research and development for its network of charging stations for electric vehicles, such as the network under development for the Bay Area. This new investment brings Better Place's total investment in the charging station networks to nearly $1.4 billion, in addition to $200 million in federal stimulus funding earmarked specifically for California. Of this amount, $700 million has already been allocated. This funding will complete research and development on project sites in Israel and Denmark, where the Better Place charging stations are scheduled to become publicly available in early 2011. 


The Israeli-born entrepreneur and chief executive of Better Place, Shai Agassi, has framed his massive investment in the Bay Area charging network in terms of innovation and economic competitiveness:

“We’ve demonstrated that our network is deployable,” Mr. Agassi said. “We’re ready for a big breakthrough, and there is not one country that doesn’t need to get off oil.”

Often compared to early efforts by Google and Microsoft to change the world of personal computing, Better Place faces major operational hurdles to enacting its electric charging networks, most especially in the heavily auto-oriented United States. If Agassi's investments in California and other innovative regions are successful, 

"consumers would buy electric vehicles made by the big automakers but get the batteries from Better Place and pay a fee according to the distance they drive. The blueprint calls for thousands of conventional charge points, as well as switching stations where a robotic device could replace a battery in less time than it takes to fill a tank of gas. These stations are needed because batteries have a range of only about 100 miles...and recharging takes up to five hours. Changing batteries en route would make long journeys more convenient."

Major questions still remain about the source of the vehicle charging networks' electricity. If the source is a renewable fuel, such as solar, hydropower, or wind energy, the charging network has great potential for reducing the carbon emissions from personal vehicle use. However, if the source is a conventional fossil fuel, as is more likely in most countries, the net carbon savings of these electric vehicles - regardless of how commercially popular they may become - could be negligible. Furthermore, the lithium ion batteries powering new models like the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt themselves have large carbon footprints involved in the mining and manufacture of their components. The impacts of these supply chain processes is still in need of intensive investigation.

SF Bay Area to Build the Nation's First Electric Vehicle Charging Network

Electric vehicles have been identified as a crucial technology for reducing the carbon footprint of our nation's fleets, above all because they produce no greenhouse gas emissions.

Evergreen Fleets has defined electric vehicles as the preferred option for "neighborhood vehicles" (NEVs) designed for short trips in their Best Practices section, due to the current market shortage of vehicles capable of traveling on freeways. This market shortage is poised to dramatically change in the coming months, as the Nissan Leaf (fully electric) and the Chevy Volt (plug-in hybrid-electric) are introduced as affordable, freeway-capable models.

However, even when new plug-in hybrid and fully electric models are introduced to the market, the question of the availability of an adequate charging infrastructure remains.

According to a recent EPA study, the Chevy Volt would only achieve a fuel efficiency of 48 miles per gallon, assuming its electric battery has been fully charged. The fully-electric battery has a range of 40 miles, after which a gas-electric generator kicks in for the remaining 300 miles until the vehicle needs to be refueled. While the vehicle is in its fully electric mode, its fuel efficiency approaches 100 miles per gallon.  After the initial 40 mile range of fully electric power, the vehicle's efficiency drops dramatically, bringing its aggregate fuel efficiency to the figure of 48 m.p.g. cited above. While the 40-mile range of fully-electric power covers the average commuting distance for over 75% of Americans, to be truly practical, an inter-metropolitan network of electric charging stations outside of the home must be created to facilitate this vehicle's optimal fuel efficiency range.

This is even more  true of the Nissan Leaf, whose fully electric range is only 100 miles and lacks a gas-electric powertrain - when the Leaf runs out of electric charge, the driver has no choice but to pull over and search for the nearest charging station. An 8 hour charge is needed for the Leaf, suggesting that to be truly effective and convenient for drivers it must be charged periodically throughout the day.

A Bay Area venture capital firm, Better Place, in November 2008 committed to a $1 billion investment for the first electric vehicle charging network in the United States. The Mayors of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose each threw their support behind the network partnership. The network is anticipated to become operational in 2012.

In response to the regional plans for this electric vehicle charging network, the City of San Francisco recently announced a change to its building code that would require new buildings to have an outlet for charging electric vehicles. As a New York Times article pointed out, there is serious concern among public utilities that the rapidly expanding demand for electricity due to the charging of electric vehicles could overwhelm local electric grids if vehicles like the Nissan Leaf become widely popular. City officials anticipate having 60 charging stations operational within San Francisco by the end of 2010 and more than 1,000 throughout the Bay Area by 2011. In addition to venture capital funding, large portions of this network will be funded by a $200 million subsidy from Obama's stimulus package.

Two key concerns over the introduction of this electric vehicle charging grid are 1) the true reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, which depend on the electricity's source and 2) the popularity of electric vehicles in regions outside of the relatively wealthy Bay Area (a 240watt home charging kit for an electric vehicle can run up to $1,500).