Hybrid Living

The American vehicle is entering a new era. On the same day that GM is waving the white flag by announcing its bankruptcy, Boston Power – a maker of lithium-ion batteries – announces that it will build its next big plant on American soil. Boston Power’s batteries will hopefully one day find their way into electric vehicles.

Boston Power makes two kinds of batteries –which they call the “Sonata” and the “Swing”. The Sonata is a smaller battery suited for laptops, made famous over this past winter when HP chose to put them in a new line of long-life, green-marketed computers. The Swing is a larger version, intended instead for electric vehicles.

And if you, like Boston Power, are in the business of making electric vehicle parts, it’s definitely an opportune time to ask for government funding. They are already getting $9 million from the State of Massachusetts, and hope to score big with another $100 million from Uncle Sam.

So for the old generation of cars, today is a sad day. It is a day that is going to end careers and threaten the wellbeing of communities. But it’s an exciting day for the new generation of cars. This battery factory will bring hundreds of jobs to Auburn, MA. Hopefully we can reach a point where electric vehicle companies can open up plants which instantly bring economic prosperity to towns, the way GM once did. And not just short term prosperity – the kind built on limited fuels from across the globe, but sustained prosperity – the kind built on renewable power.

Via Boston Globe

Ok, I admit that jet skis don’t exactly represent a sizeable demographic within the larger vehicle sector. But they are pretty dirty. They run on inefficient, fossil fuel engines, and they spew things into the water – like unused fuel and toxic chemicals. Swimmers and boaters hate them. And they are pretty noisy.

All of these are excellent reasons to make a jet ski that runs on electricity, which is precisely what ECO Watercraft is doing. They are planning on selling two electric jet ski models by late next year – a luxury version for a little over $30,000 that can go up to 50 mph and a more basic version for a little over $10,000 with speeds up to 40 mph.

Like most electric vehicles, they run silently on lithium ion batteries. The luxury model is supposed to get an hour and a half of battery life when speeding along at full blast, and three hours when lightly cruising; the cheaper version has a shorter battery life. If the device is anything like a cell phone, however, we can’t expect it to really get more than half its rated life.

Nothing exceptional about the technology here, other than the fact that it’s a really solid application for electric power. The only thing I’d worry about if I were riding one would be high voltage electricity and water – two things that don’t get along too well when they mix. But I’m sure that I’d forget my worries once I started darting around the water like the guy in this video.

Via ABG

“Walkable urbanism” is a catch-all phrase that means many things. It means building developments, towns and cities that put pedestrians first, rather than cars. It means putting retail and office space within walking distance of residential space. It means developing mixed use land, something that has traditionally been avoided by real estate developers. It means replacing suburban sprawl with… real communities. It’s a good thing.

So it’s exciting to hear that the City of Toronto has big, walkable plans for the hundreds of dreary high rise towers that house many of its residents. Right now, these buildings are energy inefficient, and exist in empty plots of land with little transportation and few businesses.

All that is about to change, though because the City plans on retrofitting the buildings with a slew of energy saving measures – improved insulation, better heating and cooling, solar panels, solar hot water… you name it. It’s estimated that these retrofits will cost a fraction of what it would cost to actually tear down the buildings and build new ones.

But besides the fact that the buildings are going to be new and sparkling green, the City is planning on making dynamic use of the previously bare, empty land around the high rises. They are bringing in businesses and farmer’s markets, putting in community gardens and open space, and even setting aside office space in some of the buildings themselves. And they plan on expanding their light rail also, to make these areas more connected.

When we think of the people most likely to bring about necessary green changes, we often think of energy companies or car companies. But let’s not forget that developers – and everyone else who plans how we use our space – can make an extraordinary amount of difference.

Via Inhabitat

Pelamis Power, the company putting large, snake-like devices off the coast of Portugal appears to be having money trouble. The company that owns them is, well, going bankrupt. Until Pelamis can find a new financial friend, it looks like they will have to wait on the sidelines.

It’s starting to look like ocean and wave power might just be one of those technologies that never really takes off; kind of the way algae looked after last week’s announcement that GreenFuel was closing shop. It’s frustrating, because when you look at the ocean you can’t help but thinking “Man! Why aren’t we tapping all that energy?”

The hard truth is: although it would be nice, it’s just technologically very difficult to build, operate and maintain these things at sea. Even Verdant Energy can’t seem to put turbines in New York’s East River yet. Granted, these are engineering challenges and they will eventually be overcome. But let’s not forget that even if we tapped all of our shores, it wouldn’t be that much. At a conference this year, Saul Griffith estimated the entire global tidal potential at 3.5 TW, which may sound like a lot, but is actually pretty low compared to other sources (he estimated global geothermal capacity, for example at 32 TW). So is wave power really worth the effort?

But there are those who are more optimistic, and see Pelamis’ failure simply as the inevitable consequence for an overambitious startup. This Green Inc. piece quotes one Robert Bedard of the Electric Power Research Institute (a think tank out in Palo Alto where scientists think about the future of electric power), who believes that PG&E and Ocean Power Technology have a chance to really succeed, as they have more money and experience.

Via Green Inc

Better Place is just one of many companies trying to make electric vehicles the status quo. At this point, though, they are the only ones who believe in the idea that a battery swap station will work.

First of all, a clarification: BP says that the vast majority of the time, swapping out your battery will NOT be necessary. Given the battery’s anticipated range (100 miles) combined with the widespread installation of charge points (little fire-hydrant-shaped hubs where you can plug your car in), a typical customer will never need more miles than the battery can provide. The swap station is only for occasional 100+ mile trips, or for situations where you’re running on empty, but you don’t have time to stop.

How does it work? Well, I’ll let the video above do most of the talking. But here are a couple of things to keep in mind as you watch (as verified by BP representatives):

• The swap station’s footprint is considerably smaller than that of a typical gas station.

• These stations could have more than one line; if enough cars passed through a given station, BP would build more lines.

• It may look like such a station could only service a single size/type of vehicle, but BP quite vocally insists this is not true. The track width, the alignment of the swapping robot, the battery size and shape… all these things can work. The fact is, most EV designers are working with a car architecture where the battery is mounted underneath. Modifying these vehicles to allow their batteries to swap in an out is not as great of a technical leap as one might think.

So is there any update on when will people actually start driving these cars? It’s tricky, because if too many people buy cars with not enough infrastructure, it won’t work. Likewise, if too much infrastructure is built with not enough customers, BP will go bankrupt. It’s a delicate balance, and the customer base and infrastructure need to grow together. Hundreds of charge points are already in place in Israel, with more to come; by 2011 people can start buying the cars themselves.

Folks, the term “EcoGeek” officially has new meaning. Oliver Goh, founder of startup company Shaspa, has created a video game which allows the players to control their home energy and water consumption.

Ok, maybe calling it a “video game” is a little misleading. Really, the OpenShaspa Home Energy Kit is just a program (plus a hardware kit) for remotely controlling all of the different power, water and gas consuming devices in your home. Plenty of other companies are rolling out programs and hardware that will do the same thing.

In this program, though, rather than executing these commands by clicking buttons, users get to control a little avatar which walks through a Second-Life-esque 3D environment. When your avatar turns off the porch lights, your actual porch lights turn off. And there’s a level of interaction with other players, too – your energy consumption is displayed for everyone else to see, bringing some competition into the picture.

This strikes me as the kind of thing that is 90% likely to fade into obscurity, but 10% likely to catch on as a fad. It certainly taps into the Second Life crowd, and even offers them something that they have never been offered before – the ability to actually use their avatars to manipulate things in the real world. Granted, turning the water up and down isn’t exactly high throttling action, but it’s more fun to do it in a virtual world than through a plain old display.

Via Earth2Tech
Image via seriousgamesinstitute’s Flickr

If Elon Musk is right, we might one day fly in electric planes. That day is probably far off, but there are still things that the airline industry can do to cut their fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emission (2% of the nation’s total). And a lot of those things are easy, low hanging fruit.

Naverus is a company founded by former Alaska Airline pilots. Naverus specializes in navigation technology that helps makes flights more direct. This makes flights better for us passengers, but it also burns less fuel. Their navigation method, called RNP (Required Navigation Performance) also helps minimize the time a plane spends waiting to take off or land.

How much difference do these methods make? Test flights using them were conducted in both Texas and Australia, and they managed to save, respectively, 8% and 18% of the fuel normally required for the trips.

It seems that those results are good enough for the Obama administration. The government is pledging $865 million to the Department of Transportation to incorporate these methods into our existing air traffic control infrastructure.

Via Greentech Media

It’s a good time to be Tata Motors. Tata has recently come out with the Tata Nano, a compact city car that seats 4 and costs about $2,000 for the basic version and a $3,300 for the higher end Nano LX. About 230,000 customers have placed orders.

This is, of course, more than Tata can produce at the moment. They can build about 100,000 cars this year, and will use a lottery system to decide which lucky customers will actually walk away with a car.

Is the Tata Nano clean? Not especially. Although there is speculation that Tata might one day come out with an electric version, the current Nano runs on gasoline. It’s a small car, but its footprint will be measured in the hundreds of thousands.

Obviously, the growing middle class in India and China provides an unprecedentedly huge market for no-frills, ultra cheap cars. The question is – what kind of gasoline-free car will work for the Indian market? China’s BYD is already selling cheap electric cars. But would those work in India? Is the infrastructure in place?

Electric cars in India might not work yet, but biodiesel probably would. India is rich in biomass, and the biofuel technology doesn’t require the same kind of overarching infrastructure that electric cars will need. According to a rumor on WheelsUnplugged, a diesel Nano might actually be in the works; if it gets the same kind of customer response as the current version, you can bet that a lot of people will start producing and selling biodiesel to make it run.

Via Green, Inc

Here’s an interesting article by Shyam Mehta, a contributor to Greentech Media. He argues that throughout 2008 we have built up a huge amount of PV supply – enough to produce about 14 GW of PV capacity. But it doesn’t look like we’re going to have nearly enough demand for all those gigawatts; only about 5 of them.

Thus, he does what any economist does and draws a supply and demand curve to figure out the price where they meet. If a company can sell PV at or below that price, says Mr. Mehta, it will survive the shakeout. If not… it can either try to get bought out or close up shop.

So who is going to survive? Who can produce cells cheap enough for 2009’s predicted demand?

• Those who produce Cadmium-Tellenium cells, like First Solar. CdTe delivers good efficiency and low costs.
• Those who make monocrystalline cells, like Sunpower and Sanyo. Monocrystalline is expensive to make, but achieves high efficiencies.

Who is not going to survive?

• Those who are making multicrystalline silicon cells on medium/small scale. There are better technologies out there, and if you can’t make it really cheap through economies of scale, no one is going to buy it.

Who’s in between?

• Those who make multicrystalline and amorphous silicon cells on a large scale. Actually, Mr. Mehta says that some of the large European companies that make this technology are secure enough to go in the first category. But for most of these companies, their fate is uncertain. If demand proves to be a little higher than expected, they can breathe a sigh of relief. If demand sags behind, though, they won’t be able to compete, especially with Asian competitors who can spend less on labor and can scale up tremendously.

The take away message here is that it’s not just about how many factories are coming online or how much capacity we have. t’s about finding the right price, which – in this environment of a roller coaster economy, bailouts, and ever changing policies – is essentially a guessing game.

Via Greentech Media

We told you last week about American Superconductor, Inc – the company that is trying to revolutionize the power grid by developing superconductors to deliver more power, more efficiently, through smaller wires.

What we didn’t tell you is that American Superconductor’s main business is not building power lines – it’s building electrical equipment for wind turbines. They build their superconductors into the very guts of the turbine, which boosts performance since the wires can carry 100 times more power than their copper counterparts.

In fact, at least one of the reasons that current wind turbine technology tops off at around 5 or 6 megawatts per turbine is that the wires couldn’t handle more power, at least according to American Superconductor vice president Daniel McGahn. He claims that his company’s superconductors will allow engineers to design a 10 megawatt turbine – something we haven’t seen thus far. Similar HTS (high temperature superconductor) wind turbine research is taking place in Demark, and at Zenergy Power, another superconductor company.

Realistically, though, there are other reasons why we don’t see any 10 megawatt turbines. They are the same reasons the vast majority of wind turbines out there are in the 1-3 megawatt range, even though we could go higher if we wanted: building humongous wind turbines is a pain in the butt. Just transporting the blades is a remarkable feat of engineering. Giant turbines are expensive to build, install and maintain. It’s usually worth your while to build 10 1.5 megawatt turbines than attempt to put all your eggs in one behemoth.

Via Physics Today