California is not getting it done when it comes to public charging infrastructure for electric vehicles. The stations are too few and far between, unreliable, and crowded. Brett Hauser, CEO of charging company Greenlots, described the overall problem (for non-Tesla drivers) at a recent California Energy Commission hearing, citing a PlugShare.com survey of EV drivers:
[I]n terms of driver satisfaction or dissatisfaction is the confidence [for EV drivers] in knowing that wherever they’re going, that if they’re trying to plan a trip that is of significant range that there is a great risk that that charge station, when they get there, is either not going to be available or, in fact, will be broken. I think, as a matter of fact, when they surveyed, I think it was about 547 drivers, those drivers that were Tesla drivers, 93 percent of those drivers actually had confidence that that charge station would be up. But all others it was down to 33 percent. Okay, I mean and that’s on all of us.
At the same Energy Commission hearing, many of the major players on EV infrastructure in the state spoke about the lack of progress to date, particularly with respect to publicly funded infrastructure. The transcript is available on-line [PDF].
Perhaps the most striking revelation from the hearing was eVgo’s inability even to come close to meeting the $100 million settlement terms on EV infrastructure spending [PDF] that it agreed to in 2012. NRG, eVgo’s parent company, had reached the terms with the state for the devious corporate behavior of one of its acquired subsidiaries back in the rolling blackout days circa 2000. These charts from the California Public Utilities Commission presentation [PDF] sum up the dismal state of eVgo progress:
It’s gotten so bad that the agency is now hiring an auditor to determine the causes of the non-compliance.
So what gives? NRG/eVgo representative Terry O’Day explained that the siting process for these charging facilities has been extraordinarily complicated. He described it as a multi-step process that typically takes 9-12 months:
And the steps along the way include host approvals for retail tenants and for landlords. It includes utility interconnection. It includes permitting.
He also described some critical gaps in the system, such as in West Los Angeles and San Francisco’s peninsula and East Bay where there’s an “older building stock” that makes siting more difficult. He also noted a big gap in rural Northern California around the faux state of Jefferson. Safety, lighting, and handicap accessibility are all big factors:
You know, we need to plan these stations to consider this edge case of a single mom, with two kids, at 11:00 at night, in rural Northern California, when it’s raining. And that station better work because we took — we convinced that driver to come out to that station in the middle of a rural community. That means it also has to be available.
But even in overcoming these challenges, a larger problem emerges: the lack of a viable business model for private sector ownership of the stations. As Charlie Botsford, project manager for the West Coast Electric Highway, described:
One of our stations took two years to develop. It was on Forest Service property. Don’t ever, whatever you do, put something on government property, especially Forest Service. That was Mt. Hood Ski Resort, so it was really, really difficult. So, I can give you all kinds of horror stories, war stories about siting fast chargers, and getting into lease agreements. A lot of it has to do with why, you know, what’s the motivation for putting a fast charger at a particular site. And, you know, because the business model is — to say that it’s weak is an understatement. It’s even weaker, by the way, for level 2. But for DC fast chargers, it’s a pretty weak business model.
Actually, the best business model that I’ve seen so far is Tesla and they do it for completely different, self-serving reason, purely for the convenience of their drivers. Wow, what an idea.
Complicating matters, the major automakers plan to introduce cheaper 200-mile range, all-battery electric vehicles in the next two years. Drivers’ charging needs are therefore about to rapidly change, as they’ll need more local overnight charging opportunities if they can’t charge at home or work and more interstate-based charging sites between major cities.
So it may be time to rethink how the public supports charging infrastructure in general. Tony Williams, R&D manager for Quick Charge Power LLC, drafted an open proposal to the Energy Commission:
I propose that our state fund a logical California West Coast Electric Highway system comprised of 40 multi-charger (2 minimum) “Plazas” that are powered by onsite batteries, and the batteries are replenished with solar, wind power where applicable, and “single” phase sub-20kW grid power to mitigate or eliminate “demand charges”. These sites would cost approximately $250,000 per site and be placed at 60-100 miles apart along the major corridors that already have freeways:
1) Los Angeles to Sacramento, via 5 and 99
2) Los Angeles to Las Vegas, via 15
3) Los Angeles to Phoenix, via 10
4) Los Angeles to San Francisco via 101
5) San Francisco to Reno via 80
6) San Francisco to Oregon via 101
7) Sacramento to Oregon via 99 and 5
8) San Diego to Yuma via 8These are the logical routes the Californians actually drive to already. With numerous 100-200 mile electric cars on the horizon from major auto manufacturers like General Motors and Nissan, and also premium auto makers like Tesla and Jaguar, these routes must be planned for the near future, but made capable with existing cars that have sub-100 miles ranges. For those cars, I recommend placing small 20kW DC chargers in between each Plaza site, which will not need batteries or infrastructure to eliminate demand charges.
Williams argues that the investment would be relatively small, or “just half the amount of money devoted to hydrogen cars for just one year (just $10 million) by our state,” with an additional $2.5 million to fund 50 additional low powered sites at $50,000 per site.
Of course, this plan won’t necessarily help condo and apartment dwellers who lack home charging options. But that could be addressed in part through new technologies, like chargers on streetlights and chargers that don’t need to be hard-wired but can roam around a parking lot. Plus greater utility involvement in funding urban chargers. Overall, if you combine this interstate charging plaza idea with improved local deployment, then California would be on its way to solving many of the EV infrastructure challenges.
For anyone in the Portland, Oregon area, I’ll be speaking this afternoon about second-life electric vehicle batteries at a Drive Oregon event in downtown. Here’s the blurb from the event organizers:
Created from heavy metals and rare earth elements, the lithium-ion batteries used in today’s electric vehicles are challenging to recycle. However, these batteries and packs are extremely valuable, so the race is on to develop innovative ways to recycle battery cells at the end of their useful lives and provide “second life” applications for these batteries.
Our February event will review the opportunities and challenges in battery recycling and reuse. Our first speaker, Steve Sloop of Bend-based OnTo Technologies, will share the latest developments in battery material recycling and his own company’s unique approach, that is both more effective and less environmentally damaging. Our second speaker, Ethan Elkind of UC – Berkeley School of Law and UCLA School of Law, will discuss current research and pilot projects in the second-use market for battery packs. A lithium-ion battery can retain up to 80% of its original capacity for holding a charge even at the end of its life in a car. Research suggests that discarded batteries aggregated together can serve as inexpensive energy storage for our power grid – a critical component needed to support the integration of more renewable energy sources.
Much of my talk will be based on the UC Berkeley / UCLA Law report “Repurpose and Repower.” You can register to attend here for $25 (non-Drive Oregon members), while Oregon wine, beer and light refreshments will be provided at no additional cost.
Some interesting nuggets from the EV Iron Man. For example, it sounds like the falcon doors on the new all-electric SUV — the Model X — caused the big-time delays on getting the vehicle rolled out:
Getting that right and making sure it works really well and isn’t a gimmick but is a fundamental improvement in utility and aesthetics for the cars, is extremely difficult. There’s a reason other people haven’t done this. And then the second row seats on the Model X are a piece of sculptural beauty. They’re amazing. They’re the nicest second row seats you’ve ever seen in any car, ever. That actually might have been harder than the door. And there are some other things about the X that people don’t know about yet.
Now I’m curious about being a backseat driver in that car. And then Musk discusses the need to hurry up his mass-market EV, the $35,000 Model III that will go 200 miles on a charge but won’t be delivered until 2017 (if we’re lucky):
There are things we could do with the Model III platform that are really adventurous but would put the schedule at risk. So what we’re going to do is have something that’s going to be an amazing car but it won’t be the most adventurous version the Model III to being with. But we will then have the more different version of the Model III, on the Model III platform, following the initial version.
David Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle criticized Musk’s admission here that later models of the III will be better, arguing that it will scare people away from buying the first year’s model. But I disagree. There’s so much pent-up demand for a mass-market EV that Tesla won’t have any difficulty selling this model.
Finally, there’s Tesla’s play to be an energy storage provider: Musk promises to deliver home batteries in about six months, with an unveiling in another month or so.
All in all, lots happening at the company trying to change the world.
I guess the Bay Area didn’t want to be bested by Kansas City. Now Pacific Gas & Electric, Northern California’s primary investor-owned utility (and the state’s largest) wants to get in on EV charging. As David Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle reports:
PG&E on Monday announced plans to install 25,000 electric car chargers across Northern and Central California, in what the company billed as the nation’s largest charger deployment project yet. The utility, based in San Francisco, described the $653.8 million effort as an important step toward reaching Gov. Jerry Brown’s goal of having 1.5 million zero-emission vehicles on the state’s roads by 2025.
So should all ratepayers have to subsidize these installations, even if they don’t drive EVs? Certainly there’s an argument to be made that everyone benefits from cleaner air and a cleaner grid (from EV batteries used as energy storage). And therefore some level of public investment is justifiable. But it seems to me that part of the equation has to be convenient and accurate pricing and payment mechanisms to cover more of these costs. In California, SB 454 (Corbett, 2014) took a step in this direction by requiring open access to charging stations for those who didn’t sign up for a subscription to a particular charging network.
But ultimately, the charging companies will have to figure out a viable business model, such as the gas station revenue from concessions, that minimizes the need for this kind of public investment. In the meantime, and where such a model just doesn’t work, utility money like this will be necessary to transition all of society to cleaner transportation.
Naomi Klein, not your typical gun-toting Canadian.
I haven’t read her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, but I finally caught her interview with Bill Maher back in September (I can’t embed the video but it’s available at that link). I certainly like her focus on climate change and critique of what endless resource exploitation has done to the planet. But I can’t help but feel that climate change for her just presents more evidence in support of her agenda for wholesale economic reform — namely, rolling back capitalism in some undefined way to punish big businesses and allow the rest of us to live more collectively.
And as a result, you get interviews like this one, where she spends over eight minutes talking in vague generalities about the limits of capitalism but not offering any constructive solutions — perhaps other than encouraging Harvard to divest from coal and polluters to pay (for what spending purposes she doesn’t say). Instead, she attacks a “liberal” strawman for claiming that we can solve the environmental problems of our day by simply changing light bulbs and driving hybrids.
As someone who works closely with dedicated policy makers in California and beyond who are quite serious and focused on reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, I don’t recognize her caricature at all. No climate change fighters that I know of would argue that we can reduce our emissions sufficiently just by making easy fixes. Certainly switching to LED light bulbs and driving efficient cars can make an important difference, but we need fundamental changes in our energy system, including massive deployment of renewables, smart grid/demand response technologies, electric vehicles and energy storage, as well as much more housing and jobs located near robust transit systems, with greater energy efficiency throughout our economy.
But maybe Klein doesn’t want to talk about these wholesale, technology-based solutions because they rely very much on our capitalist system. Indeed, California incentives have sparked a competitive, capitalist gold rush to deploy renewables at a rapid scale, as well as electric vehicles and more recently energy storage. We’re trying to do the same for sustainable real estate developers but are limited by local control over land use, which too often are determined by the loudest NIMBYs in any community.
To be sure, California’s program involves some sticks that Klein might like — regulations on the carbon content of fuel, limits (if not de facto bans) on heavy emitters like cement manufacturers, and a cap-and-trade program that adds costs to carbon polluters like fuel providers and other manufacturers.
But ultimately, unless we want to deindustrialize and shiver in the dark, it’s going to take a new, focused capitalism to rescue us from the excesses of the old. And that’s a reality that Klein should acknowledge, unless she has a better plan she wants to unveil.
Yes, you read that right. The city in America’s conservative heartland is about to take the initiative on public charging installations for electric vehicles:
Over the next several months, Kansas City Power & Light (KCP&L) will install more than 1,000 charging sites in the greater Kansas City area. It’s the largest such installation by an electric utility in the U.S. to date, it says.
Called the Clean Charge Network, it will offer free 240-volt Level 2 and DC fast charging to electric-car drivers for the first two years of operations. The network will include 15 fast-charging stations provided by Nissan.
They are reportedly “combination” units that charge that can recharge an electric car using either the CHAdeMO standard (found largely in the Nissan Leaf) and the Combined Charge Standard (CCS) that is supported by all U.S. and German automakers.
The rest of the network will consist of Level 2 stations built and maintained by ChargePoint. All of the charging locations will be part of its national network of charging stations.
I’ve said it before, but it’s about time California let electric utilities take on some of this infrastructure deployment. Private companies, with the exception of Tesla and its Supercharger network, are not getting the job done at a sufficient rate. At least in this one policy area, I hope California takes its cue (or ‘cue?) from Kansas City.
Yesterday’s Superbowl featured two car commercials that couldn’t have been from more opposite ends of the spectrum. The first was from BMW, promoting its new all-electric i3. The spot features Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric, circa 1994, discussing the internet like they were from a cave. Then they end up in 2015 discussing the all-electric BMW like they still live in a cave — making the point that new, transformative technologies take getting used to at first.
I like the spot because it makes that technology connection to EVs, although I think BMW could have played up the performance of the car rather than focus so much on the wind-powered BMW factory (who hasn’t heard of wind turbines? That’s an old technology). But it’s nice to see all-electrics get Superbowl attention (you may recall the plug-in hybrid Cadillac ELR ran a controversial spot last year). Here’s the BMW ad:
But then Jeep aired an ad for its Renegade SUV that was ultimately galling. Over a pensive rendition of “This Land Is Your Land,” it featured shots of beautiful spots around the world, including Southeast Asian waterways, redwood forests, and North African deserts. At the end, the message is: “The world is a gift. Play responsibly.” And then: “America’s smallest, lightest SUV.”
Only a car company would ask people to celebrate our natural world as a gift while it simultaneously burns the gases that are destroying it. Keep in mind that just 90 companies may ultimately be responsible for two-thirds of the greenhouse gases emitted since the dawning of the industrial age, and the big contributors are oil companies that exist in large part to fuel vehicles like the Renegade.
You can watch the Jeep spot here:
From Business Green’s summary of BCC Research:
The global market for electric vehicle power sources is set to rise to around $21bn by 2019, a new analysis has predicted. In 2013 the market stood at more than $11.9bn, but it is now expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 11 per cent between 2014 and 2019, according to BCC Research.
The company says the expected growth is a combination of electric vehicle (EV) use becoming more widely established and well-financed private and government-backed plans to introduce large numbers of the vehicles to urban streets.
The predictions follow recent evidence that sales are electric cars and vans are starting to gain momentum. For example, in the UK electric car sales quadrupled over 2014.
The big growth is expected from electric bikes and scooters in East Asia, which use lead acid batteries. It’s a solid reminder that electrification covers not just traditional cars and trucks. The U.S. would certainly benefit from diversifying our electric mobility to include these lower-cost options. And for countries like China, hopefully the electrification movement will spread to the passenger vehicle sector like it has in states like California and Georgia and countries like Norway.
Green Car Reports looked into it, and the numbers aren’t pretty. From a recent study of charging station hosts in North Carolina:
Host sites were responsible for both installation and operating costs, and electric-car drivers could charge for free.
The charging stations themselves were also provided free, but applicants still had to pay $20,000 to $60,000 to install them. That was cited as one of the reasons why–out of a pool of 16 applicants–only five sites ended up installing the fast-charging sites.
One factor that boosts costs for DC fast charging–as well as 240-Volt AC Level 2 charging–is digging a trench or otherwise connecting stations to a power source. In addition, DC fast charging comes with far higher power requirements–sometimes enough to trigger demand fees from utility companies.
Fast charger at the Kauai Hyatt — paid for with stimulus money but installed and operated by the hotel
Meanwhile, the revenue from these sites is typically not sufficient to cover costs. For example, the ideally located San Juan Capistrano fast-charging station between Los Angeles and San Diego only netted $10,000 in revenue over 18 months, with a $10-15 fee per hour of charging. That amount is not enough to cover operating costs, let alone pay back the cost of installation.
Perhaps site hosts with a retail shop can make up for it, as customers waiting to charge buy coffee or snacks like at a gas station convenience store. But you’d have to sell a lot of big gulps to break even.
To me, all of this adds up to the need for a serious look at having utilities enter the charging market, as California regulators are considering. Because otherwise, the numbers just aren’t there to encourage charging infrastructure at the scale we need.
Good news for those who can’t afford a Tesla but want to or currently drive a battery electric:
The [charging] stations will be built and operated by ChargePoint, the nation’s largest charging provider, which already has about 20,000 stations in place. Prices vary, but about $.50 per kilowatt-hour is standard, which means “filling” the e-Golf will run you 12 bucks if you’ve managed to completely drain the 24 kwHr pack.
In the east, the network will let drivers go from Boston to Washington on I-95. Out west, you’ll be able to drive from Portland, Oregon, to San Diego. The stations will offer 50-kW fast chargers, which can get most EVs up to 80 percent charge in 30 minutes, and slower 24-kW Level 2 stations.
It’s great to see the automakers collaborating like this, and the charging stations will be open to any compatible EV car (unlike Tesla’s network, which only works on Tesla batteries). It’s also badly needed given the slow pace of infrastructure deployment here in California. EVgo is using state settlement money from the “rolling blackouts” of the turn-of-the-century, but the charger rollout is slow and mostly focused within urban areas, as opposed to between them. So we need those fast chargers on key highways between major cities, or else all-battery EVs of the 80-mile range variety are basically stuck as commuter cars.
