PHEV

Reporting from Tel Aviv, Israel

Better Place, the electric car start-up, made clear when it unveiled its first vehicle demo center near Tel Aviv this week that far more is at stake in its Israel transportation trial than green clout.

"Israel is detaching itself from oil," said Shai Agassi (photo), the 41-year-old, Israeli-born founder of the company. The government "really wants this to happen," he said. "It is a national project."

Electric vehicles held the spotlight at this week's Frankfort Auto Show, with Volkswagon, Daimler and Renault all announcing new EVs and Mercedes introducing a new plug-in hybrid. Along with Nissan's announcement that it intends to sell 150,000 Leaf electric cars in the United States by 2012, the news is raising high hopes for an electric auto industry on the rise.

But as this transportation technology hits the market in coming years, it will raise an interesting question for consumers: What do we do with that battery pack after it stops holding enough charge to power a car?

The auto industry aims to provide batteries that will last for the lifespan of the car—at least 10 to 15 years. But some experts predict that consumers will opt to replace their EV batteries with newer, better ones as the performance degrades.

“When we see some deterioration—when we’ve lost 20% of the battery’s capability in terms of power and energy content—then the question is, will customers accept that kind of deterioration? That’s pretty much our standard for functional end-of-life,” said Ted Miller, senior manager of energy storage strategy and research for Ford Motors.

So what exactly will happen to “spent” EV battery packs?

Part I of a two-part series on the development of electric energy storage, starting with the storage we need and continuing Part II on Aug. 31 with a look at the technologies and the political challenges they face.

Unlike our information system with its local hard drives and remote data centers, our electric grid has virtually no storage.

At our peak energy-using hours, or when the weather calls for indoor warming or cooling, the grid must generate more power in order to meet more demand. It does this by turning on more capacity — “peaker plants,” which cost significantly more to run than bulk power plants.

Similarly, about 15% of the energy in the grid is always kept in reserve to ensure power performance when a grid flow needs balancing. The reserve is very rarely used and so, as it can't be stored, it is usually wasted. Yet its business and its emissions costs must be paid.

This huge waste has always been accepted by utilities. Running peaker plants or just excess of bulk power has been arguably cheaper and certainly less risky than investments in experimental storage — or in other kinds of efficiency.

With little policy constraint on energy production or use, there's been little incentive for reform. But this is beginning to change, driven by forecasts of rising demand, by pressures (CO2-based and otherwise) on supply, and by the first shifts of a centrally-organized and hierarchical system toward a more distributed model.

Large-scale electric-car adoption is widely seen as a green way to clean up the world's auto emissions problem and cut global warming gases.

But will it work everywhere?

How about in a dirty energy place like Alberta, Canada, home to the climate-toxic tar sands, where about 90 percent of the electrical grid is powered by fossil-based sources?

The answer is yes, according to a new report by three engineering professors at the University of Calgary.

"Even in a thermal-dominated system like Alberta, we can still benefit significantly in terms of environmental impacts by using plug-in hybrid electric vehicles [PHEVs]. If we plan to charge them in a smart way, we can reduce a significant amount of emissions in the transportation system," says Hamid Zareipour, one of the report's authors.

The researchers found that if 30 percent of Albertans were driving PHEVs, tailpipe emissions would shrink by about 40-90 percent, with no game-changing breakthroughs needed.

A new report claims the world can scale up eight clean technologies so massively and rapidly they could meet 60 percent of new energy demand and abate more CO2 than is necessary for climate stabilization in just 10 years.

Naturally, this scale-up won't come cheap. The report estimates that annual private investment worldwide would need to triple between now and 2020 to reach $500 billion to $800 billion per year:

At this scale, clean energy investments would be in line with fossil-fuel investments.

This is not as far-fetched as it seems. Current global investment plans for maintaining and expanding energy infrastructure are on the order of $13 trillion over the next 10 years. The United States alone has a planned investment of close to $1 trillion.

Shift a sizable chuck of that money into ready cleantech solutions, the authors argue, and the results would be world changing: climate mitigation, energy security and 5 million new jobs planetwide.