Lithium-ion battery packs are the current favorite for electric cars.
(Credit: NASA)Battery technology presents the the biggest hurdle in going to electric vehicles. Current batteries don't provide the range of fossil-fuel-powered vehicles. Worse, batteries take a lot longer to recharge than the time it takes to fill a 16-gallon tank with gasoline. But this isn't the end of the story, as battery technology is still being developed. For 100 years we got along with lead-acid batteries, but research has gone into high gear to look at new battery compounds that might prove to be the breakthrough that lets electric vehicle performance equal or surpass that of gasoline-powered cars. Lithium ion is the current favored chemistry, but other, more exotic compounds are being researched, such as zinc-air and lithium-polymer. Electric car enthusiast Mike Thompson has compiled a chart of current battery and electricity storage technologies, along with various specifications. The most useful number in the chart is watt-hours per kilogram (Wh/kg), which shows the energy density of the power source. The more electricity you can pack into a battery, the better range you will get for an electric car.
Click through for the full chart
According to the chart, research on lithium-polymer batteries shows that they could hit 400 Wh/kg, the highest of any other technology. Zinc-air is second at 200 Wh/kg, while nickel-metal-hydride, used in hybrid vehicles, is at 80 Wh/kg.
It's been criticized for contributing to the obesity epidemic and condemned by PETA, but now a Burger King franchise in the New York metro area has announced that it wants in on the green movement. The high-traffic restaurant in Hillside, N.J., will install a speed bump designed to harness the kinetic energy produced by the hundreds of cars that pass through the drive-thru daily.
As they wait for their Double Whopper, customers will roll through a section of the drive-thru lane lined with metal plates that move down and up as cars head to the next window. The MotionPower technology developed by Burtonsville, Md.-based New Energy Technologies, could harness and capture the energy twice daily, the company reports.
"More than 150,000 cars drive through our Hillside store alone each year, and I think it would be great to capture the wasted kinetic energy of these hundreds of thousands of cars to generate clean electricity," said Andrew Paterno, co-owner of 12 N.Y. metro-area Burger Kings. In its report, New Energy Technologies said it is partnering with BK for "durability testing," so it may be awhile before energy is actually captured and put to use. Once active, it's possible that the energy would be routed directly to the power grid.
So how is Burger King benefiting from this? It's unlikely one "green" speed bump will attract more customers (unless it relieves the guilt of an unhealthy meal). Instead of offsetting the restaurant's already wasted energy, BK should focus on the many ways it can reduce its energy usage in the first place. For example, recycling used vegetable oil, installing solar panels on the roof and windows, or transporting their proteins on low-impact trucks, such as this one.
Will an energy-producing speed bump eclipse Burger King's bad rep with environmentalists? Probably not. But I'll give them credit for playing guinea pig. New Energy Technologies, which develops other renewable energy, has a larger plan to install speed bumps in toll booths, streets, border crossings, and other high-traffic areas.
Home-area network company Control4 wants you to control your energy consumption and home entertainment from the same box.
The Salt Lake City-based company on Wednesday said that it has raised $17.3 million to fund its expansion into energy monitoring and displays. The company plans to introduce its "energy controller," a thermostat that can connect to smart meters, early next year.
One of the investors is the venture arm of Best Buy, which indicated earlier this week that it is looking at offering products for managing climate-control systems in stores.
Control4 is best known for its products for managing a home theater, or music from a console or remote control. Devices are networked via Zigbee or Wi-Fi connections.
Control4's display for managing home energy along with some media.
(Credit: Control4 via Smart Grid News)The company already offers a networked thermostat, the Control4 Wireless Thermostat, that allows people to control temperature settings. With the new funding, the company plans to include smart meters, which have two-way communications built in, into the home-area network.
That integration will allow consumers to monitor their energy use in real time and find ways to save money, according to Control4. Also, Control4's system will allow people to program thermostats, lights, and big energy consumers like pools, according to the company.
There's a growing number of monitoring products, such as Google's Web-based PowerMeter, that show real-time energy usage and details, such as how much individual appliances consume. The idea is that surfacing the details makes consumers more conscious of energy consumption and helps scale it back.
Control4's push into energy monitoring is significant because there are few home energy displays that are appealing to the majority of consumers, wrote Jesse Berst, founding editor of SmartGridNews.com.
"If you look at the results from early pilots with primitive in-home displays, usage falls off after the first three months or so. First of all, who wants to peer at a dinky black-and-white LCD screen and decipher cryptic icons and abbreviated text messages? Second, who wants to tinker with settings every day?"Control4 has a 'cruise control' model instead. Customers set their preferences, who then sit back and relax while the system keeps things in bounds. Meanwhile the energy analytics start providing information customers can use to reduce their bills," he said.
Control4 has also developed a system so utilities can offer demand-response programs to consumers and businesses. That will allow a utility to dial down energy use through a smart meter in a person's home at peak times in exchange for some sort of discount.
Berst said that Control4 has not yet signed on any utilities to offer its home displays to consumers as part of smart-grid programs.
Imagine a refrigerator smart enough to cut your electricity bills.
Smart-grid start-up Tendril and General Electric later this year will test a smart-grid system that will allow GE's networked home appliances to take advantage of cheaper electricity rates, the companies announced Wednesday.
The joint development deal calls for GE to speak to Tendril's smart-grid software in a range of GE appliances--dishwashers, washing machines, refrigerators, and water heaters--over Zigbee wireless networks.
From GE's labs: a fridge that talks to smart meters to save energy.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)The integration will allow consumers to control their appliances from different points, such a Web browser, iPhone, or in-home display.
GE's support for Tendril's software for utilities will also allow consumers to take advantage of efficiency incentives offered by utilities, explained Adrian Tuck, the CEO of Tendril. The companies plan to test the system in the fourth quarter this year to measure the amount of energy savings possible, he said.
Tuck projected that reductions on the order of 30 percent for an individual appliance are possible if a utility offers demand-response programs to cut energy use during peak times. For a consumer, that would mean that a clothes drier will turn off the gas heat for a few minutes. In exchange, a consumer can get some sort of discount.
"People ask me all the time whether this is disruptive technology and I say that for most people it shouldn't be," Tuck said. "The vast majority of people just want to consume less electricity and they don't want to do it in ways that disrupt their lives."
To make this type of demand-response application possible, Tendril's software needs to communicate information on changing electricity prices from the utilities to GE's appliances through a smart meter or broadband connection. Based on that information, a refrigerator, for example, can decide to make ice at off-peak times.
Beyond the technical barriers, there need to be regulations that give incentives for utilities to promote efficiency and offer variable time-of-day pricing, Tuck added. "A lot of utilities don't like the idea of having customers consume less of what they sell," he said.
Also, how much consumers are willing to pay for in-home energy displays and grid-connected appliances in exchange for energy savings is still unclear. Tuck thinks consumers should not have to pay more than $100 to start out and not have ongoing fees.
Italy's Piaggio wants to clean up the image of scooters.
The company, which makes several lines of scooters, on Tuesday introduced a hybrid version of its three-wheeled MP3 scooter, which it claims is the first hybrid scooter.
Sign of more to come? Piaggio's MP3 hybrid scooter.
(Credit: Piaggio)The MP3 Hybrid improves mileage and reduces carbon emissions by 50 percent, according to the company. It should also reduce other air pollutants, which has led some European cities to keep scooters and other vehicles out of certain areas.
The company, which sells the iconic Vespa brand, plans to make the hybrid available in Europe by August for about $12,500 and in the U.S. by 2010, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal.
The MP3 Hybrid costs more than the gasoline MP3 scooters, which range from about $7,100 to $9,000 in the U.S. But the company is investing in the hybrid power train with an eye toward using the technology in other models, as Toyota has done with the power train in the Prius.
The hybrid MP3 operates as a typical hybrid car, optimizing fuel efficiency by using the gasoline engine and stored energy in its lithium ion batteries. When the vehicle decelerates and brakes, it charges the battery.
A driver can choose an all-electric mode for short trips and can view both the gas tank reserves and the amount of battery charge remaining from the dash.
In the U.S., purchases of hybrid and all-electric scooters, such as the Vectrix, qualify for a 10 percent tax rebate.
T. Boone Pickens' massive wind farm, planned for Texas, is looking for a new home.
The energy tycoon and wind advocate told the Dallas Morning News that a project to install hundreds of wind turbines in the Texas panhandle will not work because of a lack of transmission lines. Instead, Pickens' wind company is looking for other locations in the Midwest and possibly Texas.
"I don't think the first place we build, though, is where we thought we would because we don't have the transmission," Pickens said in an interview done last week.
T. Boone Pickens speaks at the Clean-Tech Investor Summit in Palm Springs, California in January.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)Pickens added that falling price of natural gas--now about $4 per million BTUs--is making it harder for his wind company, Mesa Power, to get the funds to build a wind farm. In 2008, Mesa Power announced it would purchase General Electric wind turbines capable of generating 1,000 megawatts worth of electricity.
"You had them standing in line to finance you when natural gas was $9 (per million BTUs)...Natural gas at $4 doesn't have many people trying to finance you," he told the Dallas newspaper (video). "I'm going to start receiving those turbines in the first quarter of '11 and I don't have that big of a garage to put them in there so I got to start getting ready to use them."
Pickens on Tuesday started a round of media interviews to commemorate the launch one year ago of the Pickens Plan, his proposal to invest massively in wind and natural gas vehicles to cut imports of oil. The campaign, financed by $58 million of Pickens' money, has attracted millions of followers, and Pickens himself has spoken to lawmakers about energy policy.
On CNBC's Squawk Box show Tuesday, he predicted that the price of oil will go from over $60 now to $75 by the end of the year.
He called natural gas a "bridge" to renewable energy and electric vehicles because it's available now and is 50 percent cleaner in terms of carbon emissions than gasoline and diesel.
"You can't move an 18-wheeler on a battery. It won't move. We have six and a half million trucks in America. I want to (convert) 100,000 a year on natural gas," he said. In addition to wind, Pickens has invested in natural gas vehicle companies.
He also said that a significant change in the last year is that U.S. politicians are now starting to take action on policies to reduce imports of oil.
Microsoft opened up its Hohm Web application on Monday to U.S. users, a site that gives people a starting point for cutting home energy use.
The launch of Hohm, still in beta, was marred at least for some people, including me, by a DNS problem on Microsoft's side, according to the Hohm product development team. An hour or two after the launch, a few other consumers on Twitter complained of sign-in problems that lasted a few hours.
Once that glitch was cleared up, I was able to finish creating a profile in Hohm for my old New England house. Overall, I'd say it's a useful service that meets its goal of being easy to use.
The "brains" behind Hohm's energy-efficiency recommendations is an existing database that Microsoft licensed from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy. That means much of the basic information on how to save money on energy bills has been available for some time from the Energy Department and other sources, if in a disjointed and less attractive form.
(Credit: Screen capture by Martin LaMonica/CNET)I was able to create a nearly complete profile because I've been chipping away at my home energy use for years. (How many of you know what your home's air leakage rate is?) I also did some on-the-spot estimating, which I would expect most people would need to do.
In fact, some of the questions are incredibly detailed, such as what's the capacity of your refrigerator expressed in cubic feet? Rather than pretend that I'd be able to find the manual, I went online and got an idea of what a fridge like mine typically holds.
There are also some places where inevitably there will be gaps and guesses. For instance, I have radiators so I couldn't say where my ducts are located (in conditioned space or not) and being very precise about say, programmable thermostat settings, can be tricky. Also, there are a lot of questions which will no doubt scare some people away.
That said, it's a worthwhile exercise to run through the roughly 200 questions, even if you can't answer them. Why? It offers strong clues as to what matters most when it comes to cutting your energy bills. Whether your PC and monitor uses power-management features is significant enough for Hohm to care.
Man versus machine
But on your first visit, it's really the energy report that you're after. Although Hohm's recommendations perplexed me a few times, on balance it provided solid information.
Put another way, I'd say Hohm echoed the advice of the three energy auditors who have traipsed through my house over the past few years. It also features a "library" with generic recommendations to help people get ready for the summer and there are tips sprinkled on the News section.
Not surprisingly, the recommendations are extremely unglamorous: replace (more) incandescent bulbs, insulate boiler pipes, lower the temperature on the water heater, and so on.
A few things threw me off. Get a high-efficiency boiler for $1,000? Not where I live. But when I clicked on that recommendation, Hohm notes that's the do-it-yourself price and offers a ballpark cost ($8,000) for a professional job.
Hohm doesn't quite measure up to a knowledgeable human being. I paid for an energy audit, complete with a blower door test, this past winter and the recommendations were specific to my situation and very detailed.
But that's OK. Most people just want some good ideas on greening their home and Hohm does that. What I like most is that it creates a list, from which you can develop a plan. Because let's face it, nobody's going to weatherize their home in one weekend.
Where to start? Hohm gives you a starting point for making a home energy-efficiency plan.
(Credit: Screen capture by Martin LaMonica/CNET)How does this compare to Google's PowerMeter or other home energy-monitoring tools?
Monitoring products tend to focus on providing a real-time read-out of energy use. In its first beta version, Google's PowerMeter, for example, surfaces information on how much electricity individual appliances consume and provides daily charts.
Down the road, both Microsoft and Google are interested in expanding their products so consumers can participate in demand-response programs, where a utility can remotely adjust appliances to save energy during peak times. In the meantime, though, many smart-grid products are just trying to give consumers more detailed information than a monthly bill.
Because my utilities aren't providing a data feed to Microsoft, I wasn't able to view my electric and natural gas use without manually entering the data. If a feed were available, I think I would use it to get a better feel for seasonal changes and improvements I've made.
Actual consumption data would also create a far more accurate profile for my home, particularly when comparing to others. For example, I had solar panels installed on my house last year, which has slashed my overall consumption but that's not reflected in the model Hohm creates.
If there were a feature that I'd like to have, on first blush I'd say it's the ability to add my own items to the recommendations so I could treat Hohm like my to-do list.
The community site is bare bones at this point though I could see that being useful and fun. But in the meantime, it's nice to see that, according to my profile, I'm no slacker on cutting energy compared to my neighbors
Toyota Motor plans to start mass-producing plug-in hybrid cars in 2012, according a report.
The Japanese business newspaper Nikkei said on Saturday that the first year's production is expected to be about 20,000 to 30,000 cars.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)Toyota earlier last year said that it plans to start testing 500 plug-in hybrid Priuses in 2010 for fleet owners.
Current Priuses use nickel metal hydride batteries, but for its plug-in vehicles Toyota plans to use lithium ion batteries developed and made through a joint venture with Panasonic.
The plug-in hybrid cars from Toyota will be able to go between 12 and 18 miles on a battery charge alone, according to the paper, which Reuters cited.
There will be a wave of plug-in electric sedans coming to market over the next two years. In addition to a plug-in Prius, Toyota is making an all-electric city car called the FT-EV, which is expected in 2012.
The highly anticipated 2011 Chevy Volt is scheduled to go into production in late 2010. Unlike a traditional hybrid, the Volt will run entirely off its batteries and use the internal combustion engine to charge the battery for rides longer than 40 miles.
Coming to shopping aisle near you: the Brammo Enertia electric motorcycle.
(Credit: Brammo)Would you like an electric bike to go with your new DVR?
Best Buy has started selling electric vehicles, including the Enertia electric motorcycle from Brammo, according to reports.
The company in May started offering electric bicycles, scooters, and Segway transporters at 21 of its West Coast stores, according to the Los Angeles Times. This month, the home products retailer will add the Enertia motorcycle to create an electric vehicle line with a range of speeds and range.
Although it may sound like a stretch to offer refrigerators and electric vehicles under the same roof, company representatives said that there is growing interest in electric transportation among its customers.
"Our business is already connecting in people's homes and lives with technology, appliances and computers," a Best Buy representative told the LA Times. "One of the things that's important for the future growth of [our company] is staying ahead of where technology is in people's lives."
From a product point of view, electric vehicles have a strong kinship to consumer electronics, according to Brammo CEO Craig Bramscher, who approached Best Buy about distributing the Enertia.
"What we're selling is a lot closer to consumer electronics than to transportation," Bramscher said at the Pacific Crest Clean Technology Conference in March. He said that the Enertia includes a built-in Web server, to run open-platform software applications with the potential for add-ons like onboard cameras that could download images to travel blogs.
The Enertia charges in about three hours from a regular wall outlet and can go up to about 50 miles per hour. It gets the equivalent of 373 miles per gallon and costs less than one cent per mile to run, according to Brammo.
With a retail cost of $11,995, the Enertia isn't likely to sell in high volumes like popular consumer electronics. But Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn said the move is part of the company's efforts to diversify its product mix to stay on top of new technologies.
"I'm not sure how it's going to do either," Dunn told The Wall Street Journal. "But I like the muscles we're exercising."
The Journal also reported that Best Buy is exploring selling home energy management systems that program air conditioning, lights, and appliances to cut energy use.
The Karma is a plug-in hybrid with four doors and a GT-style body.
(Credit: CNET)Among the different alternative-fuel strategies playing out, Henrik Fisker is betting big on plug-in hybrids. At a recent dinner speech, he said plug-in hybrids, or PHEVs, will be the dominant type of car for the next 10 to 15 years. And he has reason to hope that will be the case as his start-up company, Fisker Automotive, launches the Karma sedan, with its PHEV power train, in June of next year.
Fisker gained fame as an automotive designer for BMW, where he came up with the stunning Z8, and with Aston Martin, designing the DB9 and Vantage. This background explains the very nonsedan looks of the the Karma, which is styled like a GT.
Henrik Fisker speaks about his favorite topic, cars.
(Credit: CNET)But starting up a car company is no easy task, and Fisker says it wouldn't have been possible 10 years ago. And not only are the troubles of current major automakers creating an opening, but the pressing need to reduce our reliance on oil is allowing a new era of automotive innovation.
The big automakers have an infrastructure that would be very hard to build up without huge amounts of capital, so Fisker Automotive went about designing the Karma by looking for preexisting parts. Early on, the company partnered with Southern California-based Quantum Technologies, which had already built a series hybrid-drive concept for the military.
This hybrid system, called Q-Drive, uses two rear-drive motors, a lithium ion battery pack that runs longitudinally down the center of the car, and a gasoline engine as a range extender under the hood. The Q-Drive produces 400 horsepower and has already undergone significant testing by Quantum Technologies.
Fisker Automotive isn't building the engine, either, instead purchasing it from GM. It's a turbocharged four-cylinder currently being used in the Pontiac Solstice GXP. The battery pack will come from Enerdel, and the Karma will be built on a contract basis by the Finnish company, Valmet. Having another company actually build the cars might seem questionable, but Valmet already proved itself as a contract builder with the Porsche Boxster and Cayman.
The Karma is supposed to go 50 miles on electric power only, after which the engine will kick in to power the electric motor. The driver will be able to choose between stealth and sport modes, as Fisker calls them, with the latter relying on more electricity generated by the gas engine to go from 0 to 60 mph in under 6 seconds. Fisker pointed out that the power train is currently being tested around the company's Irvine, California headquarters in pick-up truck mules.
A solar roof will come standard in the vehicle, which, in a sunny climate, adds 7 to 8 miles per week of drive time. Cabin technology in the Karma is controlled with a 10.5-inch touch screen with haptic feedback.
The Karma will be offered in three trims, dubbed Eco Standard, Eco Sport, and Eco Chic, ranging from $80,400 to $98,900, after a $7,500 PHEV tax credit. The Eco Chic model does away with leather seats standard in the other models in favor of vegetarian-friendly materials and salvaged wood.
Fisker also said the company is working on a new model, with the idea that it would be an affordable mass-market car, but still using the Q-Drive PHEV system.
