Why we should support electric cars

The UK budget is coming around again next week, and as a preview the government announced plans this week to subsidise motorists up to £5000 to encourage them to buy electric or plug-in hybrid cars. We support the move as it sets a long term market shift for the industry which is sorely needed.

“There is a near-global consensus that something has to replace internal combustion engines, which account for 20% of the world’s carbon emissions, and it needs to happen fast. A perfect storm of technology, design and political will suggests 2009 will be the year the electric car begins its takeover in earnest.” (Guardian, 16 April 2009)

To set the context, the car companies are in a real pickle. Through years of poor strategic planning as well as the global economic decline, many find themselves struggling to stay alive.  On top of that there is a limited reserve of oil and so they simply have to change from the internal combustion engine design. Then there is climate change - the UK government has to reduce CO2 emissions quite dramatically (about 22% of the UK’s carbon emissions come from transport, with 13% of these from private cars). And on top of that the UK has to meet air quality standards for PM10 and NOx (currently the government is in breach of EU limits). The only solution available so far to address all three is to create a giant shift in the design and promotion of cars to electric vehicles.

And judging on how long it takes car makers to alter course, we need to start that change now. Luckily there are several models being put into production already - The Tesla Roadster & the Chevy Volt being two examples.

“Having a lot of batteries plugged into the grid would help the grid with ‘balancing’ the intermittancy of having lots more renewables plugged into it. We have far more wind, tide and wave potential in the UK than we need, but not at the right time, so finding storage is an issue, and having cars plugged in, to be charged when we have spare juice and serve as a buffer when we are short could potentially be a major benefit.” (Sian Berry, Sky news debate, April 2009)

While there are many criticisms of electric cars, including hydrogen and battery technology, incentives like the one proposed by the government are helping to promote innovation in the technologies. In the field of batteries alone there is a spectrum of new solutions, from battery ’service stations’ (Project Better Place) to break throughs in design (new bateries that charge in seconds, not hours).

Blake, for We Are Futureproof

Battery news

One of the big sticking points in any debate on electric cars comes when the issue of the time it takes to charge a battery rears its slow and complex head.  Put simply, a petrol driven car can be ‘recharged’ with enough fuel to last it hundreds of miles in a matter of minutes, whereas electric cars currently need to be plugged in overnight, or while you’re at work.  Improving the performance, durability and charge-speed of batteries is going to be a necessary step on the road to practical electric vehicles.

That’s why these two recent stories on new battery technology are so exciting.  The first suggests that with only a slight change in the manufacturing process, lithium ion batteries can be constructed to charge in minutes rather than hours - or even seconds rather than minutes, in the case of a mobile phone battery.  The rapid discharge time these batteries exhibit is also of benefit to electric vehicles, where a sudden demand for power (during acceleration) is quite common.

The second story initially confused me as it came out on 2nd April, and the headline looked like a hangover from the day before.  ‘Virus battery could power cars‘ does look like a spoof, but the science seems sound, and the great benefit of this battery is that because it’s technically alive, it can’t be made from toxic materials.  Although the nervous sci-fi fan in me does worry about the idea of genetically engineered viruses that are programmed to evolve and create electricity.

Owen, for We Are Futureproof

Electric car plans need new energy source first

There is an interesting debate on about electric cars at the moment.

At first glance I thought that everyone would support a transition to electric vehicles (EV’s). They are the future, aren’t they? Who could resist, for instance, the allure of owning a new Tesla Roadster?

These are exciting times for electric cars. There are many projects across Europe to support new EV technology. Denmark is partnering with Project Better Place and has raised € 130 million to build a new  electric car charging network by 2011. The network will consist of around 100 stations where drivers of electric vehicles can swap out or top up their depleted batteries. In France the government has pledged €400m (about £310m) to help carmaker Renault and French energy firm EDF get a nationwide electric recharging network off the ground by 2011, and Paris is set to introduce a new rental scheme for electric cars by 2010, similar to the succesful Velib bike hire scheme. Ireland recently announced that 10% of vehicles will be powered by electricity in 2020, and has set aside more than $1 million for demonstration projects. In the US, Obama’s stimulus bill announced major new funding for plug-in vehicles, including $600m for federal procurement of plug-in and alternative fuel vehicles, $400m for state procurements of acquisition of alternative fueled vehicles or fuel cell vehicles and a $1bn advanced battery loan guarantee scheme. Hong Kong is renewing the tax break for electric vehicles for a further 5 years, while in Portugal, drivers of electric cars aren’t charged for vehicle  registration. And in Sweden, fast food giant McDonalds plans to roll out recharging points at its outlets.

Electric technology has a lot of good things going it. Electric (battery) engines are 65% efficient compared to old internal combustion engines (ICE), which are at best 23% efficient. The batteries can be recycled, where an ICE can’t.

But not everyone supports EVs. In fact, in a recent meeting in Brussels, some environmental NGOs were resolutely against them. While at We Are Futureproof, we remain optimistic and supportive, we ask, what are the issues?

Perhaps the most obvious gripe is that electric cars are increasingly tagged as ‘green’, which in fact they aren’t. Electric cars still have a ‘carbon footprint’ from their manufacturing stage, as well as from the energy they use (more on that below). There are also concerns about the production of the electric batteries - this process is apparently quite polluting, and uses rare materials like lithium.

In terms of the energy they use, critics point out that if you drive an electric car but charge up on electricity produced from dirty coal power (brown energy), then you may as well be driving a petrol vehicle which will get a lower overall emissions. What’s important is to look at the future carbon intensity of the energy mix.

The argument often used that electricity from nuclear is somehow ‘clean and green’ also gets the shackles up. Very few campaigners would like to see electric vehicles promoted if this resulted in a green light for new nuclear stations.

So what is the way forwards? The only way to ensure that electric cars emit as little CO2 as possible is to make sure the electricity comes from alternative energy sources - solar, wind, biogas and tidal.

Professor Julia King recently reported that if all the cars in the UK were converted to EVs, then the extra demand on the energy grid would increase only by 17%. Whist that figure still seems significant, she said that with the use of smart metering systems, cars could be powered up at night when the demand on the grid was low.

It’s obvious that the electric technology needs to develop and grow. At this point we should embrace the evolution to EVs, whilst also monitoring the energy sources used for electrical charging points.

Blake, for We Are Futureproof

TH!NK City

Following on from last month’s blog about Project Better Place, here’s an electric car company that’s closer to starting production, and closer to home.  (Well, Norway).

The company is TH!NK (yes!  With an exclamation mark!) and if all goes to plan, it’ll be shipping some of its TH!NK City electric cars to lucky UK consumers this summer.  Here’s how they look:

TH!NK, with a different name and in a different incarnation, has been around since 1990, but it was accidentally almost-destroyed by Ford who bought the company in 1999.  They set about throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at it in the hope it would be the goose that laid the golden egg when California’s Zero Emission Vehicle mandate came into force.  However, as ‘Who Killed The Electric Car?’ showed, this mandate was repealed and Ford lost no time in dumping TH!NK on a Swiss electronics firm and turning back to producing more polluting cars. Having subsequently been through bankruptcy, the company is now back in business, and gearing up for production.

There are similarities with Project Better Place, in that the batteries would be owned and maintained by the company, and leased to the car owners for a monthly “mobility fee”.  This looks like being in the 200 Euro range, which - last year - would have been a very attractive £130-ish.  Now, it’s more like £200, but that’s still less than many people pay for petrol a month.  The website also states, ambitiously, that this fee “includes a full maintenance service agreement, carbon offset payments and in some countries even all electricity used, and insurance.”  Which would make the running costs even lower.

As the TH!NK City is a brand-new design for a car, built around its battery, it has a number of other innovative features.  Although it’s available in lovely bright colours (the photos show ‘Red Energy’ and ‘City Citrus’), those are unpainted plastic panels you’re looking at, not toxic paint.  Incidentally, this also makes any scratches or scrapes (god forbid) easier to repair.  The vast majority of its components are recyclable, and a good proportion are recycled in the first place.

Also innovative is its sales strategy.  If you click the ‘Buy a TH!NK’ link on the website, you’re apologetically informed that the car is currently only available in Norway.  However, they will start shipping overseas soon, with the rider that “the initial distribution of TH!NK city will be targeted to the most `EV friendly’ cities in Europe.”  So your chances of getting one depend very much on whether you live in a bad, good, or better place.

In fact, coming soon is TH!NK’s ‘EV Friendliness Index’, where they will rank European cities depending on how amenable to electric cars they are.  It’s explained here, but the basic gist is that if your city has decent tax breaks, good availability of charging points and free parking, and is making an effort to provide electricity from renewable sources, then you might just qualify to be one of the lucky owners of a TH!NK City.

Owen, We Are Futureproof