Fwd: EV Headlines Seem to be Daily Occurances - Stories from yesterdays Seattle and LA Times

[John Christian-4]

Interesting, even if it is Seattle.....

 Sunday, October 25, 2009 

Seattle expected to be key market for electric cars

By Katherine Long

MARK HARRISON / THE SEATTLE TIMES

A Ford electric car recharges at a sustainable-communities conference at Microsoft on Friday.

MARK HARRISON / THE SEATTLE TIMES

U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee views an electric car: "We're trying to make Washington the epicenter of this revolution."

 

After years of hype, it looks like the mass-produced, all-electric car is really on its way.

Puget Sound is poised to become one of the key markets for the initial wave of electric cars, in part because of plans to begin building next year a network of more than 2,000 charging stations throughout the region.

Funded by part of a $100 million federal Department of Energy (DOE) economic-stimulus grant, the charging stations are to the electric car what the cellphone-tower network was to the cellphone. Just as the phones needed towers to make them functional, the network of charging stations will make it practical to own a car that does not use gas.

By December 2010, drivers in our area should be able to buy mass-produced, plug-in electrics that create no emissions and run for pennies a mile.

"It's going to blow people's doors off how fast this transition is going to happen," predicted U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee, who took a spin around the Microsoft campus Friday in an all-electric Ford Focus.

As part of the DOE grant, the Puget Sound area has been promised 1,000 Nissan LEAF all-electric cars, which will be sold here beginning in December 2010.

But that's only the start.

Because of the charging network, the Seattle area will be one of the major markets for other brands of electric cars, said Steve Marshall, a senior fellow at the Cascadia Center, a Seattle-based transportation think tank. Ford, for example, plans to bring an electric commercial van to the area in 2010, one that will run for about 3 cents a mile and is designed for small-business owners and package-delivery fleets.

The electric Focus will hit the market in 2011, as will the Chevy Volt, a car that can drive the first 40 miles on electricity before a gasoline-powered engine kicks in, driving a generator that provides electric power beyond 40 miles.

Inslee predicts that within a decade, a significant portion of the American car fleet will be made up of electric cars, and "we're trying to make Washington the epicenter of this revolution," he said.

The car companies know it. "Washington is a lot more aggressive and more hep on this than any part of the country," said David Berdish, manager of sustainable business development for Ford Motor Co.

Meeting at Microsoft

On Friday, state and federal officials and business leaders gathered at the Microsoft campus for a Cascadia-sponsored conference called "Beyond Oil." They talked about building sustainable communities and ensuring the electrical grid could handle the power draw if thousands of people all tried to recharge their cars at the same time.

Outside, a half-dozen Tesla roadsters — all-electric sports cars that cost about $100,000 — were lined up in the parking area. But it was the somewhat homely Ford Focus, which arrived on a flatbed truck after an overnight trip from San Francisco, that attracted the buzz, in part because it's price is expected to be within the reach of the average family when it comes to market in 2011.

The Seattle area is expected to be a leader in electric cars for a couple of reasons.

For one, we get most of our power from relatively cheap, carbon-neutral sources. Statewide, hydroelectric accounts for about 66 percent of our energy; for Seattle City Light, it accounts for about 90 percent, according to city and state statistics.

We also have a mild climate, with summers that don't require power-sucking air conditioning and winters that don't involve battery-killing temperature plunges.

And already we're crazy about hybrids, cars like the Prius that top gas mileage. Washington ranks fourth among states in the number of hybrids per 1,000 people. About 50 of the Tesla roadsters have been sold here.

Finally, government officials are working to streamline the process of getting car-charging plugs installed. The state Legislature this year passed a law encouraging state and locals to develop the infrastructure to accommodate electric cars.

The $100 million DOE grant is being shared by five other areas around the country: Portland, Salem, Corvallis and Eugene, Ore.; San Diego, Calif.; Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz.; and Chattanooga, Knoxville and Nashville, Tenn.

Because the Portland area is also getting grant money, it's likely that the Interstate 5 corridor between Seattle and Portland will have a string of charging stations, making it possible to go between the two major cities on nothing but electricity, said Colin Read of Ecotality, the parent company of Electric Transportation Engineering (eTec), which will build the charging stations.

Powered by Metro

King County Metro is getting ready for the change. It has installed 39 110-volt public-charging stations at park-and-ride lots throughout the area, said Ron Posthuma, assistant director for Metro's Office of Regional Transportation Planning.

Next year, as part of the DOE grant, Metro will put in more powerful, 240-volt charging stations at park-and-ride lots. That's the standard voltage needed to charge an all-electric car, requiring a plug that resembles the one you use for your clothes dryer.

For legions of electric-car buffs in the Seattle area, the future can't come fast enough. A number of drivers have bought extra battery kits to turn regular hybrids into plug-in electric hybrids, which can dramatically increase the car's miles per gallon if driven carefully.

Toyota Prius driver Stephen Jensen, who lives on the Sammamish Plateau, installed a second battery in his 2004 Prius, allowing him to drive the car at higher speeds on all-electric power. He plugs it in at a Metro park-and-ride lot while he takes the bus to work in Seattle. If he drives carefully, he can average 90 to 95 miles a gallon.

Charging your car at a park-and-ride is still in its infancy. Just four drivers tap into them regularly, and the county is not yet asking users to pay. Posthuma said the charging stations won't remain free in the future, although how to charge for them is another puzzle to be worked out.

Bruce Agnew, director of the Cascadia Center, has seen electric cars go from a quirky passion shared by some Northwest drivers to a mainstream interest.

Six years ago, during the institute's first conference on transportation, technology and energy, the parking lot was full of funny-looking cars, Agnew said, and the institute could barely find enough people to fill a one-day agenda.

This year, Ford came courting. The lot was full of electric cars. And the institute had to turn participants away.

Katherine Long: 206-464-2219 or klong@...

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LA Times

Electric vehicles are charging up the automotive industry

A dozen all-electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles are expected to hit the market in the next three years. They promise to combine blinding fuel efficiency, radical new technology and futuristic styling.

Although Nissan will start mainly with fleet sales, a few all-electric Leafs (Leaves?) will be available to individuals before a larger rollout in 2012. Nissan hopes to eventually build this relatively low-cost entrant in Tennessee. (Itsuo Inouye / Associated Press)

Next time you're filling up the cavernous fuel tank of the gas-gulping family jalopy, imagine getting 230 miles per gallon.

Better yet, how about never buying another gallon of gas?

After years of hope and hype, electron-powered driving finally appears to be on the verge of reality.

In the next three years, at least a dozen pure electric or plug-in hybrid cars are slated to hit the market in the U.S. Electricity-driven vehicles from giants such as General Motors Co. and Nissan Motor Co., as well as start-ups like Fisker Automotive Inc. in Irvine, will provide consumers with a wide variety of choices. These new vehicles promise to combine blinding fuel efficiency, radical new technology and futuristic styling that makes the hybrid Toyota Prius look downright staid.

Battery makers and automakers alike are tooling up factories to produce big volumes of electric vehicles. Meanwhile, power utilities and regulators are scrambling to figure out just how big the market will be.

"This is happening and it's happening soon," said Mark Duvall, director of electric transportation at the Electric Power Research Institute, an independent, nonprofit research group. "By the end of 2011, consumers will have more choices in vehicles they can plug in than they currently do for hybrids."

The electric vehicles will be arriving at a good time. With gasoline prices creeping up once again and federal regulations calling for huge fuel economy gains in the next half-decade, there's increasing demand for cars that burn less fuel, make less noise and push automotive technology forward.

In August, President Obama set a national goal of getting 1 million plug-in vehicles on the road by 2015. It took about twice as long to get a million hybrids rolling on U.S. streets and highways.

But any new technology that involves high-voltage, exotic battery chemistries and 3,500-pound objects hurtling forward at high speed is bound to hit some potholes. Early adopters, experts say, will have to contend with charging infrastructure challenges and some pretty long waiting lists.

And did we mention price? Even the least expensive electric or plug-in car will cost more than $25,000, and most will come in closer to twice that.

"There will be some real challenges at first," said Roland Hwang, vehicle policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "These are going to cost more than conventional cars. The infrastructure is not going to take care of itself. These issues will determine whether this is a trickle or a massive flood."

For those willing to take the leap, however, there is plenty to be excited about.

Restarting electrics

Electric cars are hardly new. In fact, a century ago, around the time of the dawn of the automobile, there were as many electric as gasoline-powered cars.

But technological limitations eventually killed those early EVs, and electric cars didn't truly raise their heads again until the late 1990s. That's when a smattering of electrics, including the much-lamented GM EV1, were made available in California as part of a government-mandated test program.

Wildly popular among a select group of enthusiasts, they were officially declared unfeasible and unprofitable by automakers. Today, only a few hundred are still on the road, among them a Toyota RAV4 EV driven by Paul Scott, co-founder of electric vehicle activist group Plug In America.

Nobody was happier than Scott when Tesla Motors Inc., a San Carlos, Calif., automaker, last year began selling its all-electric Roadster, a rocket of a two-seater that noiselessly goes from zero to 60 mph in less than four seconds. True, the Roadster costs $109,000. And it has a waiting list longer than Sunset Boulevard. But to people like Scott, its arrival signaled the coming of a new electric era.

"This time electric cars are here to stay," said Scott, who envisions charging cars using solar power, making them essentially cost-free to operate.

Tesla and other nimble start-ups have helped jump-start the industry. Now big automakers are getting their electric programs in gear. That's no minor development considering the titanic capital costs involved in developing high-volume-production vehicles.

For Ford Motor Co., better batteries were key. Previous technologies were just too heavy and inefficient, said Nancy Gioia, the automaker's director of global electrification. "They weren't ready for mass production," she said.

But in the last couple of years, huge improvements and new battery chemistries "opened the opportunity" for ambitious product plans, she said. Gioia predicts that as many as a quarter of new vehicles sold by 2020 will be electrics, plug-in hybrids or traditional hybrids.

Challenges ahead

Yet even the fiercest electric advocates admit that battery reliability still has room for improvement.

Arthur Krieger, a retired police officer in Los Angeles, drives a Prius powered by a relatively small nickel metal hydride battery to assist the gasoline engine. The battery needed replacement after nine years on the road. That's when Krieger got a nasty surprise: A new one would cost more than $4,800.

"That cost will wipe out the entire cost savings of having a hybrid in the first place," Krieger said.

The price would be even higher on an all-electric vehicle using the latest chemistry: lithium ion.

Already widely used in cellphones, watches and laptops, those batteries have storage, charging and weight characteristics that make them superior to previous technologies -- with premium prices to match. A replacement battery for a Tesla Roadster costs $30,000, and it can move the car only 200 or so miles before it needs to be recharged. That's a 3 1/2 -hour process on a high-powered charger, 30 hours on regular household current.

Then there is the matter of exactly where to re-juice all those electrics.

Some experts believe that public charging stations will be the best solution, either those put up by state and local governments or, perhaps, private for-profit companies. At present there is almost no such infrastructure. Building a nationwide network would cost tens of billions of dollars.

That means most electric owners will be charging at home initially. Plug-in hybrids, which primarily run on batteries but also have gasoline-powered engines to supplement range and power, can get by on standard household current. They're ready to roll in five or six hours.

All-electric cars, however, can take well over a day to charge unless owners invest thousands of dollars in home electrical upgrades.

That's because a fully electric vehicle calls for a 240-volt, 40-amp circuit, far above the limits of the socket in a typical garage, said Ed Kjaer, director of electric transportation at Southern California Edison.

Another issue, he added, is that "not everyone has access to a garage or other place to plug into," including apartment dwellers or people in urban areas that depend on street parking.

"Plug-in cars are not for everybody at this point," said Kjaer, who expects that infrastructure such as public charging stations will eventually help level the playing field.

A rewarding experience

For those willing (and able) to take the plunge, however, the rewards of owning electrified cars could include the financial kind.

Thanks to a provision in last year's $700-billion Wall Street bailout legislation, buyers of electric or plug-in hybrid cars can qualify for a tax credit of as much as $7,500.

Routine maintenance could be a bargain too. Since these vehicles use simple electric motors rather than complex gasoline or diesel engines, as well as pared-down or in some cases nonexistent transmissions, they are far easier to service than conventional vehicles. There's no oil to change, no radiator to flush.

There are other perks as well. In California, electric vehicles still qualify for special stickers that permit their drivers to travel solo in the state's carpool lanes. The stickers expire in 2011, but lawmakers are considering extending the privilege until 2016. It's unclear whether plug-in hybrids will qualify.

With all the excitement brewing over electric vehicles, it's easy to forget that 98% of the cars sold in America still have traditional drivetrains.

Simply put, the gasoline engine isn't going to disappear overnight. Even the most vociferous boosters of plug-in vehicles admit that the greater range and lower cost of internal combustion-powered cars and trucks mean they'll dominate vehicle sales for at least another decade or two. And for some applications, like hauling a trailer over the Rockies, they may never go away.

But for people like Chelsea Sexton, who drove an EV1 and now advises Silicon Valley firm VantagePoint Venture Partners on electric transportation, the next few years offer a tantalizing glimpse of a future with a lot less internal combustion.

"I really relate to the pure electric experience," said Sexton, who has test-driven the Chevy Volt, due out late next year, and liked it. "If I had a magic wand, we'd have four different configurations of electric cars and plug-ins to choose from tomorrow."

ken.bensinger@...

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

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