Soros fund management backs electric-vehicle charging startup
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
<rant>
Because the electric utilities don't understand, and can't/won't adapt to, the electrification of transportation.
BEVs from skateboard- to class 8 truck- size are
a) an unimaginably vast opportunity for electricity distributors. They're going to get ALL THE GAS STATION BUSINESS in the next generation.
b) a time-shiftable load. For the BEV energy business to be viable at scale the time-shifting technology is mandatory. They need smart ways to spread out the electric load. If every good doobie battery car owner says, "I'll tell mine to charge at midnight" guess what happens when they all start drawing 8kW at midnight? The peaking generators have to kick on and the power gets really expensive. And "frequency control ancillary services?" They get costly with sudden large loads.
Tesla's already figured out a localized approach to the load-control: I now tell my car what time I need it rather than when to start charging, and it picks the time to start charging. But for load-balancing work at scale is going to require, basically, real-time capacity auctioning.
In Norway, the electric utilities use the FM radio text channel (the one that announces songs on fancy radios) to announce current electricity rates, and their meters pick it up and use it. That's a start.
If the electricity distributors won't build this smart grid, I guess third-party companies have to step into the breach. It's a lot of hands in the cookie jar.
</rant>
That's RDS.
It would also make more sense to install batteries like a Tesla Powerwall if it knows it's cheap to load it up now. I expect that exposing residential customers to the price fluctuations will help to flatten out the 'duck curve' that you typically see with heavy PV generation. It makes much more sense then to install such home batteries to dump your PV-electricity in when selling it directly doesn't pay much. Moreover when you can sell the stored electricity at a higher rate when it's needed.
Not sure if this set up would prevent transmission capacity limits from being hit as well.
The whole thing, and how its set up, is quite interesting from a basic game theoretic view.
This would be extremely unpopular for most residential customers though. Probably better to set it up as a rebate scheme where people get a credit if their EV charger is enrolled in the local Virtual Power Plant
A lot of large power generators/distributors have battery and EV teams.
Tbf they are still only 1 or 2 people in a comapny with 100s/1000s employees but they are there working on this problem.
NB. a lot of the work being done on this is financial modelling rather than any technical development, so it may be that the tech just isn't there for them to implement.
Hope those updates are cryptographically signed. Would be unfortunate if your car refuses to charge because someone dropped an FM transmitter outside...
Good smarthome gear shouldn't cause any harm (or major inconvenience, from that matter) just because the electricity price changes, but we all know the "S" in "IoT" stands for "security"...
This isn’t at all obvious. Putting aside the fact that it’s not exactly obvious when non-ICE cars will take over the majority of the market from ICE cars (I wouldn’t bet on it happening before my yet to be born children get their drivers licenses), it’s definitely not obvious that electric cars will be the ones to do it. I’ve driven both battery electric cars and hydrogen cars, and hydrogen cars offer a far superior driving experience. Charging an electric car simply sucks. It’s also not clear how you’d expect to manage charging stations at scale. It take 75 minutes for a full charge on a Tesla, nobody enjoys waiting that long for their car to charge, and the amount of Superchargers you’d need across the country/world would be insane if a majority of cars were electric. Hydrogen cars don’t have that problem, and they don’t have the same hard constraints on range.
You can say that hydrogen car tech, or the infrastructure, isn’t there yet. But it’s not there for electric cars either. If you want some evidence that hydrogen cars have serious potential, Elon Musk described them as “mind-bogglingly stupid”.
The trick is to get a « dryer socket » installed in your garage. Not an « EV » plug, otherwise the price goes up like flowers or a limo when you say « wedding ».
1. The fuel is relatively expensive and will be for the foreseeable future.
2. Likewise the fueling stations.
3. Not to mention the vehicles themselves - this is true for BEVs as well, but while it's possible to make a cheap BEV, the same doesn't hold for hydrogen cars due to the cost of tanks, pumps and plumbing.
4. A hydrogen station's failure mode is a giant fireball.
Sure, hydrogen wins on charging time now, but that advantage is diminishing.
Meanwhile battery tech is getting both better and cheaper. Who knows, perhaps the next gen of EVs, arriving around 2025 will have ranges comparable to what a normal human being can stay behind the wheel without rest?
BEVs were equally expensive when they first came onto the market. There’s no reason to think hydrogen cars won’t be able to match them on price in the future.
A gas stations failure mode is also a giant fireball, so is a BEV and ICE cars failure mode. We seem to be doing fine despite that.
I’m not predicting that hydrogen cars are going to replace BEVs. Just that they obviously have the potential to do so, that they better align with the existing value propositions of ICE cars, and that to say the future is 100% confirmed BEV is simply wrong.
I did the math and while it's possible, it's still not the case today. Even worse - hydrogen is more expensive per mile driven.
> There’s no reason to think hydrogen cars won’t be able to match them on price in the future.
I'll give you one then: expensive parts in the form of platinum catalysts and generally higher complexity, since all hydrogen cars which don't rely on combustion of hydrogen are actually hydrogen-electric hybrids with a buffer battery - something necessary due to the low power density of fuel cells.
> A gas stations failure mode is also a giant fireball
But would be rarer if we had enough cases to compare. Petrol being a fluid doesn't combust as easily - its NFPA flammability rating is 3, while hydrogen's is 4.
Sure, natural gas is also highly flammable, but has less than 40% of the energy density.
Really, you're looking at a specific use case (long-distance road trips) and generalizing. For trips under 200 miles a Tesla doesn't even need a supercharger either.
> nobody enjoys waiting that long for their car to charge
Honestly, I enjoy not being in my car more than I enjoy being in my car. Does anyone really enjoy being in a car for 12 hours straight without three to five 30 minute breaks? I've certainly done it but I honestly think it might not be a bad thing to have a car that prevents me from doing that.
People don’t buy cars that suit their most common use case. They buy cars capable of fitting any use case they might conceivably need it for over an average period of 6.5 years [1]. Its a pretty safe bet that most SUV owners don’t use their sports utility features, but they buy them anyway. The risk alone of being caught at a charging station for an hour or more, or the impracticality of longer trips is a major anti-feature.
You’re also missing one of the core value propositions of owning a car. For as long as cars have been sold, the freedom to get in your car and drive any place you want to at any time has been a core part of the value prop. For BEVs, it’s the exact opposite. You drive the car on terms set by the battery and your ability to charge it. That’s why range is still considered a significant constraint, even on BEVs that get 250-300 miles (10x your number of average daily drive). People simply don’t buy cars to meet 99% of their needs, they buy cars to meet 100% of the needs they know that have, and often a number of other needs that they don’t currently have, but think they might have at some point in the future.
And all of that is before you get into the issue that a lot of car owners don’t have off street parking, or live in places like apartments where they may not be able to install chargers.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/276419/best-selling-cars...
[1]: https://www.autonews.com/article/20161122/RETAIL05/161129973...
My guess is the first hydrogen car fireball in a city or gas station location will do worse things for hydrogen PR than the first self driving car running someone down did for self-driving cars.
What happens to hydrogen in the used car market? Electric risks you batteries that hold little charge, diesel risk a visible dripping fuel leak that won’t burn if you drop a match on it, hydrogen leak risks you an invisible gas cloud building over your car that turns into the Hindenburg at the static zap of you touching the door handle.
Everywhere already has electric infrastructure, and fancy new batteries like (vanadium redox flow?) can help grid long term storage and balance and electric power can easily be created and transported by solar and wind; nowhere has hydrogen infrastructure and it can’t easily be created or transported and by the time you’ve built that up and compressed enough hydrogen to be useful or chilled enough to a liquid, you’ve spent lots and wrecked its overall energy efficiency.
I’d more expect someone to come out with a fast charge 15mile graphene (or other panacea magic words) “battery” which handles commutes and hybrid with li-ion for longer journeys than hydrogen to get big within 30 years.
Even more compelling, BMW i3 has lithium ion with a petrol generator range extender, and that seems the perfect combination of short range electric with the option of topping up at any gas station for quick refuels, it completely solves the electric range problem - with a smaller simpler cheaper “engine” not coupled to the drive wheels. I don’t know why other makers haven’t offered that, but BMW are dropping it as an option because range is good enough now. But it’s a better fix than hydrogen - fits current infrastructure and driver understanding.
Volkswagen is going to be pumping out the all electric ID3 from 2025 in Volkswagen quantities. Not an electric conversion of a gas model, an all electric design. That’s my marker for “electric cars are mainstream, unquestionably”.
There's more which can go wrong, needs less to happen for it to go wrong, gives off more energy if it does go wrong, looks more spectacular (scary) if it does go wrong. This image [1] is Toyota's own video of what happens if the Hydrogen tank is safely vented, a five meter high flamethrower.
Over time, Li-Ion batteries lose charge capacity, so there's incentives to replace them with new ones. What would happen to Hydrogen tanks in a ten year old car, would you trust one? What would it take for you to trust one?
It's not that it can't work, or nobody is trying, but I'm siding against it. I think anything with high pressure is unlikely to become mainstream, and anything with high pressure Hydrogen even more so.
[1] http://asj.nolan-law.com/wp-content/themes/flashnews/images/...
On the other hand, hydrogen car sales have been stuck around 10,000 a year, and there is no prospect they will expand in the future to anything significant.
The reason for the difference in sales is BEV's are just way better. You know, when it first became clear a few decades ago that we needed to get off of fossil fuel cars, hydrogen seemed like a good idea and lithium-ion batteries were really poor in terms of capacity and cost.
But since then batteries have improved tremendously, but hydrogen cars much more slowly. And every year that goes by battery cars get further ahead. The future clearly belongs to BEV's.
I suspect that most people don’t really care when their car charges, they just need it to work in the morning.
Does Norway have a static electricity price? With PG&E the cost of electricity varies wildly household to household, and you need to decipher a labyrinth of different rate and “time of use plans”, and there’s baseline allowances... the whole thing is opaque. There’s never actually a “here’s what electricity cost right now” true answer.
Can we please just get a state government to start installing charging stations in all public lots so these charging companies have to give up their dreams of being a monopoly?
> Amply sets up the physical charging infrastructure for commercial fleets like school buses and uses its software to manage the charging.
CCS: https://www.charinev.org/index.php?id=170
CHAdeMO: https://www.chademo.com/
In LA, there’s no Superchargers in Beverly Hills or West Hollywood. There’s one in Culver City and one in Burbank. Some don’t tell you they’re “shared” so sometimes it says 30 mins to charge, other times 3 hours.
They were going to build a Supercharger in the Pacific Palisades but the Dept of Transportation said no.
Completely agree that the "sign up and use our app" approach is insufferable. But asking your state to build all the infrastructure doesn't solve the problem. Your state is not going to (a) manufacture charging stations or (b) build the software/payment interfaces needed to manage them. What you're proposing would have the gov sole-source from one of these "apps". Instead of letting the the market determine who can build the best user experience, you would be giving one company (probably ChargePoint) a government-granted monopoly.
No.
How about you give your business to a company that accepts credit card, like any gas station, instead?
This really is a question of basic, national infrastructure and I think it should be treated as such rather than this fractured marketplace we have.
I’d settle for requiring charging station operators to use existing financial infrastructure (cash, card, contactless device, etc.). It doesn’t seem like an onerous burden to place on a business and the cost to consumers is not substantially different than what they’re accustomed to.
I imagine that commercial power rates are less variable than residential rates. Nonetheless, providing fixed-cost charging, could get complicated across different states/regions/timezones.
Capital costs are currently sufficiently higher than charging costs that strategically over-provisioning yourself with fleet in order to reduce your average charging cost is not worth the money.
Besides more exposure to wholesale fluctuations and time-of-use, there's also things like demand charges, where there's a price component based on your maximum power draw rather than your consumption -- max kW in addition to sum kWh.
Demand charge management is a lot of what these commercial charging platforms do. It's fine when a single fleet vehicle comes up to charge, but when a couple show up to charge at the same time all with different times-to-departure, that's when you need to do some selective prioritization and optimization to not get ratcheted to your highest kW demand charge for the month.
Then, if you run any industrial-grade machines (or even elevator motors), that's when they start adding additional charges for things like uncorrected power factors -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_factor
[1]: All these things are coming to resi, though... time-of-use rates are increasingly common (it's now the default new rate in CA), and two or three states are experimenting with resi demand charges.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans
I haven't watched this episode of Rising yet but looks like a good follow up discussion
Wood would appear to be 0.98% of the US's fuel mix, vs 1.58% solar, 6.51% wind. So, this seems like, er, a dubious claim? Maybe they're just really bad at promoting it.
Eugenics is a terrible and terrifying "platform". It should be seen as either insane or hilarious that this is brought up at all. Mentioning it at all is severe "whataboutism" at best and most "harmless", and damaging and ethically evil at worst (and possibly most likely).
> burning more wood and coal to create electricity isn't solving pollution problems
Good news, use of wood and coal is way down in the world's electricity mix in 2020. (Any stats cited in the movie are at least a decade out of date.)
> The materials EVs are created out of need some serious changes
This is also severe "whataboutism", at least a decade out of date from proven reality and continually and constantly disproved. No EV car material is worse than anything in a traditional ICE car. Cobalt is a "waste product" out of "ordinary" copper, tin, and nickel mining. Lithium is common and often as easy as sifting a "salt brine". The damage in manufacturing an EV is the damage in manufacturing cars. Yes, we should probably manufacture less. Good news there too: EVs have fewer moving parts and longer maintenance cycles allowing for longer car ownership.
-The film is largely about the Sierra Club's involvement with condoning biomass burning of natural gas and wood to create electricity
-EV vehicles are minimally recyclable and made out of multiple toxic materials.
Where many modern cars are made out of aluminum, including EV's, in previous ICE generations predominantly steel vehicles were easily recyclable. Modern alloys have made cars throw away items rather than recyclable. We are arguably going backwards.
Eugenics is the "scientific" name for complaining that there are too many people. It's also the rubbish bin where Historians file most proposed and attempted experiments and "solutions" ("final" and otherwise).
There's no point in bringing up "there's too many people" if you aren't planning to present a solution to it, and if you are planning to present a solution to it, that's eugenics, by definition. I don't make the rules, I just call things by name.
> -The film is largely about the Sierra Club's involvement with condoning biomass burning of natural gas and wood to create electricity
Great? No Green advocate I know is actually "pro-biomass" as a long term solution, because wind and solar (and hydro) are doing really well right now and there's lots more option on the horizon.
Using biomass to condone all of Green energy projects isn't quite a strawman argument, but it is full of hay and I could see it scaring away crows in the field.
> Where many modern cars are made out of aluminum, including EV's, in previous ICE generations predominantly steel vehicles were easily recyclable. Modern alloys have made cars throw away items rather than recyclable. We are arguably going backwards.
A reduction in steel is a reduction in lead poisoning from car parts in landfills. Cars have always been terrible. I don't think we are "going backwards", I think there are just a lot of rose tinted glasses for a point in car history that never existed. There's no point in car manufacturing where cars were not "throw away items", and the recyclability of "classics" is hugely overstated (how many do you actually see on the road? Sure some collectors have put in time and effort, but do you know how small of a fraction collectors have kept "recycled" versus were manufactured in their time?). I am all for "ban cars, reforest parking lots", but blaming EVs for the problems of the vast history of manufacturing mistakes in cars is hilarious. It's cars and car culture that are the problem. EVs are an adequate solution for car culture that must have cars. They remain better alternatives than their contemporary ICE equivalents long term in every measure that counts.
Anyway, here's a well articulated hydrogeologist on the film: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/michael-moores-green...
I'm happy you enjoyed the film, but it isn't a good film and it made a lot of mistakes. I definitely wouldn't trust anything mentioning eugenics in 2020, even if not by name, but feel free to continue to disagree.
I happen to own a number of classic cars which are not daily drivers and machines I work on a lot. I am intimately aware of the recyclability of 100% steel over alloys. There was a period until the late 1970's when cars were crushed, melted down and produced enough steel to build multiple new vehicles. We have gone backwards in recycling terms as today most cars are plastic and alloys, which are very hard to reuse. Regarding the film, have you seen it? A central thrust is that raw greed is what's killing the planet and that greed is heavily invested in 'green' commercial ventures. There are far too many people on the planet, demonstrated with 'inconvenient truth' Gore style chart which shoots up vertically in recent years. The film is flawed but well worth watching imo