 |
| wireless charging concept |
First of all, did you know that a range of 100 miles (typical of today's electric cars) is sufficient for about 97% of all journeys? If your EV is your second car however (and most EVs will initially be part of multi-car personal fleets), then in practice it is useful for 100% of journeys, because you would use your conventional car if you need to travel further. As Better Place's Shai Aggassi puts it: 'If you want a range extended vehicle, drive your other car'. Better still and probably much quicker, why not get the train? OK, I know, too radical.
To ease range anxiety and make charging less of a hassle, electric car manufacturers are introducing clever new technologies that use the latest telematics and 3G technologies to make life more stress free when driving an EV. Range available map displays (Nissan leaf) and smart phone apps that tell you time-to-charge and distance available (Ford Focus electric) are the two most notable examples, whilst OnStar have an exciting development programme and Mahindra Reva demonstrated an SMS emergency charge prototype called REVive at the Frankfurt International Auto Show as far back as September 2009.
What about charging stations? Well, most people, most of the time, will charge from home (something like 80% to 95%). Plug in when you get home at night using off peak electricity and the car will be fully charged the next morning. (By the way, the new Ford Focus has a claimed charge time of just 4 hours, half that of the Nissan Leaf). Clipper Creek in the US has shipped 4,000 home charging units to date, many for the Tesla, but it also works with GM, Ford, Mercedes, Nissan, Mitsubishi and BMW Mini. Ford has partnered with Best Buy in the US, and your $1,499 home charging unit will be installed from one of Best Buy's 1200 stores - and notably not by Ford's dealers. Mitsubishi have a similar programme in Japan, where they are trialling home charging kit purchase and installation via 17 Yamada-Denki stores in the main cities.
Charging top-ups will be available increasingly at public places - in car parks and at roadside parking and charging spaces. Whilst this is more of a convenience than a necessity, it will increase the visibility of EVs and give motorists confidence that they will never be far from a top-up. Today there are no more than a few thousand public charging stations in any country - China for example has approximately 6000 installed units, the US about 2,000, the UK and France a few hundred each.
In London you pay a £100 annual fee to access the 'free' parking and charging stations under the Source London brand, which is rolling out a further 1300 stations in London over the next two years and has an unlikely target of 25,000 stations by 2015. UK charging pioneer Elektromotive has now logged more than 1 million hours of charging history from its Elektrobay public charging points.
Ireland also has an aggressive target, where the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) has committed to installing 1500 public charging stations and 30 fast charging units by the end of this year. Looking to the heavy hitters, the State Grid Corporation of China has announced plans to build 10,000 charging stations and produce 500,000 charging outlets, part of a state plan to create 10 million EV park and charge spaces by 2020 (that's right, TEN MILLION PARK AND CHARGE SPACES BY 2020). Beijing alone has already announced a programme to build 36,000 charging stations including 100 fast charging stations in the city by 2015. In the US, Coulomb Technologies $37m ChargePoint America programme partners with Chevrolet, Ford and smart and will provide 4,600 charging stations to nine regions by September this year (Austin Texas, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Orlando Florida, Sacramento California, San Jose/San Francisco Bay Area, Redmond Washington and Washington D.C.). Nissan meanwhile is working with Ecototality to bring 11,210 chargers to five states (Arizona, Califormia, Oregon, Washington and Tennessee) assisted by a $99.8m grant to underwrite The Electric Vehicle Project. Ecotality calls it “the largest deployment of electric vehicles and charging infrastructure in history.”
The big omission that I see currently is any firm programmes for charging at work. If you live in a flat (as most city folk do) and do not have reserved parking, then today you cannot own an EV. However, if parking and charging was available at the workplace then this would help to change this situation. This is where the CSR programmes of the larger corporations should facilitate such projects and I am sure that as employees call for this then the facility will gradually be introduced.
In London you pay a £100 annual fee to access the 'free' parking and charging stations under the Source London brand, which is rolling out a further 1300 stations in London over the next two years and has an unlikely target of 25,000 stations by 2015. UK charging pioneer Elektromotive has now logged more than 1 million hours of charging history from its Elektrobay public charging points.
Ireland also has an aggressive target, where the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) has committed to installing 1500 public charging stations and 30 fast charging units by the end of this year. Looking to the heavy hitters, the State Grid Corporation of China has announced plans to build 10,000 charging stations and produce 500,000 charging outlets, part of a state plan to create 10 million EV park and charge spaces by 2020 (that's right, TEN MILLION PARK AND CHARGE SPACES BY 2020). Beijing alone has already announced a programme to build 36,000 charging stations including 100 fast charging stations in the city by 2015. In the US, Coulomb Technologies $37m ChargePoint America programme partners with Chevrolet, Ford and smart and will provide 4,600 charging stations to nine regions by September this year (Austin Texas, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Orlando Florida, Sacramento California, San Jose/San Francisco Bay Area, Redmond Washington and Washington D.C.). Nissan meanwhile is working with Ecototality to bring 11,210 chargers to five states (Arizona, Califormia, Oregon, Washington and Tennessee) assisted by a $99.8m grant to underwrite The Electric Vehicle Project. Ecotality calls it “the largest deployment of electric vehicles and charging infrastructure in history.”
The big omission that I see currently is any firm programmes for charging at work. If you live in a flat (as most city folk do) and do not have reserved parking, then today you cannot own an EV. However, if parking and charging was available at the workplace then this would help to change this situation. This is where the CSR programmes of the larger corporations should facilitate such projects and I am sure that as employees call for this then the facility will gradually be introduced.
And the future? Researchers at New York State's Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have developed a new type of material made from “nanoscoops”, which could increase the charging speed of small lithium-ion batteries by 40-60 times. At the same time, wireless inductive charging was proof of concept demonstrated at the recent 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by Fulton Innovation. A couple of decades from now the current state of EV technology is going to look very dated indeed.
