Science Scene - Electric Cars and Charging Challenges

SAN FRANCISCO — If electric cars have any future in the United States, this may be the city where they arrive first.

The San Francisco building code will soon be revised to require that new structures be wired for car chargers.

The first wave of electric car buying is expected to begin around December, when Nissan introduces the Leaf, a five-passenger electric car that will have a range of 100 miles on a fully charged battery and be priced for middle-class families. Around the same time, General Motors will introduce the Chevrolet Volt, a vehicle able to go 40 miles on electricity before its small gasoline engine kicks in.

The California Public Utilities Commission, whose headquarters are in San Francisco, has brought together utilities, automakers and charging station companies in an urgent effort to write the new rules of the road. Success or failure could turn on more mundane matters, like the time it takes car buyers to navigate a municipal bureaucracy to have charging stations installed in their homes. At the headquarters of Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), utility executives are preparing “heat maps” of neighborhoods that they fear may overload the power grid in their exuberance for electric cars. “If you just allow willy-nilly random charging, are we going to have neighborhood blackouts?” asked a PG&E utility executive. He said a single car could consume three times as much electricity as a typical San Francisco home.

Later this year PG&E will lead a “smart charging” pilot project, connecting 200 cars to special charging stations that let utilities control the electrical demand at a given moment. To avoid problems in areas with high car concentrations, utility executives said they would encourage people to charge their vehicles at night or to use smarter electric meters that help control demand.

Before the first Nissan Leafs and Chevrolet Volts reach the show room, an electric car infrastructure is getting a test drive in the Bay Area, in a limited way. Google, which is talking to automakers about using its PowerMeter energy management software, has already become something of an electric transportation hub. At Google’s Mountain View headquarters, a handful of employees drive to work in Tesla Roadsters, and more drive a fleet of modified Priuses that Google owns. The employees pull into carports that are covered with solar panels and plug their cars into the 100 available charging stations. Nearby, in downtown San Jose, the city has reserved street parking for electric vehicles and installed charging stations. Nearby, at Adobe Systems' headquarters, an executive showed off a dozen charging stations in the parking garage. Eighteen more will be installed this year.

Science Scene - Out Of This World :o)

Another entry brought to you courtesy of Scientific American. As an engineer, can I say that I love this site, and if not, PI in your face :o)

The Japanese government is prepared to spend some 2 trillion yen on a one-gigawatt orbiting solar power station—and this week Mitsubishi and other Japanese companies have signed on to boost the effort.

Boasting some four kilometers of solar panels—maybe of the super efficient Spectrolab variety but more likely domestically sourced from Mitsubishi or Sharp—the space solar power station would orbit some 36,000 kilometers above Earth and transmit power via microwave or laser beam.The benefit? Constant solar energy production as the space-based power plant never passes out of sunlight. The downsides? Only enough power for roughly 300,000 Japanese homes at a price tag of $21 billion, according to Japan's science ministry (about 127 million people live in Japan in some 47 million households).

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) aims to have a system in space by 2030. The first step will be launching a test satellite that will gather solar power and beam it back to Earth, probably in 2015. Already, ground tests show that some solar power (180 watts) can be beamed successfully.

In the U.S., where space solar has been on the drawing board since at least the 1960s, California's Pacific Gas & Electric [Disclaimer, I used to work for PG&E] has pledged to buy power from a planned 200-megawatt space solar station put together by Solaren that is still being developed.

But the U.S. government has mixed feelings about space solar. Despite some $80 million spent over decades by NASA, the alternative energy source is no closer to fruition using public funds. And other government agency estimates put the price tag for space solar at $1 billion per megawatt—making this the most expensive power source identified to date in any solar system.

To save you from doing all the math and junk, at my utility, we use $1000/KW as a new generation number, which is $1/W. So, $1B per Megawatt (ten to the sixth) is $1000/W. Yes folks, that means this solution is 1000 times more expensive than other sources of energy. While coming up with alternatives to greenhouse gas producing power sources is getting more difficult, earth based solutions such as nuclear and carbon sequestration, are anticipated to be in the $2,500 - $3,500 per KW range. This is still much cheaper than mirrors in space.