BNEF On Electric Cars: This Changes Everything

Michael Liebreich is chairman of the advisory board and Angus McCrone is editor in chief of Bloomberg New Energy Finance. This week, the pair wrote an article in BNEF that looks at the social and economic changes that will follow as a result of the transition to electric cars. The alterations, they predict, will be massive and will effect virtually every sector of the economy.

Liebreich and McCrone believe we are at a tipping point — one of those occasions when tiny changes add up to transformative alterations. Tipping points are hard to see in real time, but can usually be identified in hindsight. The two authors point to the mobile phone as one such transformation. One day, some trendy people started replacing their home phones with cell phones. Now they could place and receive calls anywhere on earth — just as long as there was a cell tower within range.

Before long, apps came along that allowed us to find highly recommended restaurants nearby, read our e-mail, plan a route from Okefenokee to Oskkosh, and keep track of how many steps we take each day. What was once a phone changed into a never before seen device. one that everyone wanted. As so often happens with technology, volume sales drove prices down to the point where virtually anybody could afford one. The latest cell phones are making the sharing economy possible. New industries like Uber and Lyft would not exist were it not for the GPS enabled smartphone.

The authors think the same thing is about to happen with electric cars. Here is a sampling of the changes they foresee.

Vehicle maintenance and retail:

Since electric cars require much less routine maintenance, both dealer service facilities and neighborhood repair shops will have less business. Auto body repair will be less in demand once autonomous cars learn how not to run into each other. The auto insurance industry may wither away.  Auto parts stores will see lower demand for their products.

People will prefer Tesla-like sales stores rather than traditional car dealers. Just those changes alone will be monumental, but Leibreich and McCrone aren’t done. In fact, they are just getting started.

Fueling and charging infrastructure:

More electric cars means lower demand for gasoline. Gas stations may no longer be profitable, so they will have to figure out new ways to sell things to people waiting to charge their cars. Private charging networks will proliferate. People who make home chargers and charging stations for work locations should thrive. The demand for electricians should increase.

Urban transportation:

Some of the most dramatic changes will occur in urban environments. Ride hailing and ride sharing services (enabled by smartphones) may take as much as 3/4 of all cars off the road, making congestion a thing of the past. Typically, an automobile is only in use about 10% of the day or less. If it can be put to work during that 90% of the time when it would normally sit idle, cities would be quieter, friendlier to pedestrians and bicyclists, with much lower carbon dioxide levels.

The electrical grid:

Demand for electricity should go up, but people who drive electric cars won’t want to recharge them using power that comes from burning fossil fuels. Renewables will continue to fall in price, making them the first choice of utility companies.

Vehicle to grid systems may allow millions of electric cars to store excess electrical power and feed it back into the grid as needed. The grid itself will change dramatically so it can accept small inputs from everywhere instead of massive inputs from a few centralized locations. Used EV batteries may be re-purposed as grid storage devices. New businesses will be created to recycle old batteries.

Pity the poor tax man:

Gasoline and diesel taxes generate substantial revenue for national and local governments. As sales of gasoline decline, governments will have to scramble to make up the deficit. We are already seeing the devastation that low oil prices and falling demand are causing in many oil producing nations. No one wants to predict armed conflict, but unstable governments may lead to revolutions.

Hindsight is 20/20. Foresight is far less accurate. But the changes Liebreich and McCrone predict may be just the beginning of the changes electric cars will bring. If you close your eyes and listen closely, you can almost sense the tipping point when electric cars go mainstream approaching. The changes have already begun and there is nothing anyone — not even Donald Trump — can do to stop them.

Source: Bloomberg New Energy Finance via TreeHugger

Electric car use would crash grid: Toronto Hydro chief

A Plug-In Prius Takes a Charge





These are the kinds of reports that drag down the adoption of electric cars. Here is a chief executive at Toronto Hydro channeling Chicken Little and telling us that 10% of the populace plugging in their EV's at night will bring down the grid. Really? How long will it be before 10 percent of the automobiles sold will be either EV's or PHEV's? 10 years? 20 years? Surely that is plenty of time to shore up the grid.

From The Star:

Anthony Haines looks toward the imminent arrival of the electric car with enthusiasm and apprehension.

Why? As chief executive of Toronto Hydro, he has to run the wires that, in a few years, will charge up the batteries of thousands of cars across the city.

And he knows that right now, he can’t do it.

“If you connect about 10 per cent of the homes on any given street with an electric car, the electricity system fails,” Haines told an audience at Ryerson University Wednesday. “It basically can’t handle that load.”

What to do? That’s part of the reason why Toronto Hydro, Hydro One and the Ontario Power Authority have pledged a total of $7 million over the next five years to kick-start Ryerson’s new Centre for Urban Energy.

Cities suck up most of the energy consumed in Canada, but they don’t produce much.

The centre will look at that conundrum, examining how urban areas can produce more energy, more cleanly; how they can use less energy; and how they can store and distribute it differently.

The electric car is an immediate issue. The province estimates 5 per cent of vehicles will be electric by 2020, Haines said; but he thinks it could be higher, and in any case electric vehicles will be concentrated in cities.

Recharging a car battery pulls about triple the amount of power used by a typical home, he said. Compounding the problem, most people will want to plug in their cars after work in the early evening, which is just when household demand for power hits its peak.

“You connect this huge load on the grid, and the grid simply won’t handle that type of load,” said Haines. “We need some innovative solutions.”

Clearly, shifting car-charging time into lower-use periods is among them, but someone has to figure out just how to go about it.

Ryerson’s Ravi Seethapathy, who pushed for the creation of the centre, said Toronto is a good example of another urban problem: Most of its power is generated many miles from where it’s used, and there are choke-points in the wires bringing power into the city.

“Ideally, renewable energy should be put in the city,” he said, but most of it is being generated in “moose pasture” and still has to be carried long distances to market.

And even if more power is generated within the city, he said in an interview, the system isn’t currently wired to handle it.

The centre won’t just look at electricity. Seethapathy said there’s no reason why more appliances, including air conditioners, couldn’t run on natural gas.

Geothermal energy has also been neglected in urban setting, he said.

GM Outlines Criteria for a Successful Volt Launch, Including Plug-In Ecosystem

Would you like to have an insight as to why General Motors is in such a piteous shape? The answer lies in the following ridiculous article headed up by GM's Tony Posawatz, Chevrolet Volt and Global Electric Vehicle Line Director.

Instead of just producing a plug-in vehicle for the public, GM wastes time drawing up criteria that are necessary for the Chevy Volt to have a successful launch. They claim that putting 1M plug-in vehicles on the road will require a "plug in ecosystem". Give me a break. GM has not produced ONE plug in vehicle and they want the public to be concerned about ONE MILLION? Furthermore, GM has NO plans to produce a million Volts anytime soon. In fact, even at a run rate of 100,000 Volts per year, it will be 10 years until they hit the 1M mark.

How can we take this company seriously when they have no real plans to produce this vehicle in significant numbers, yet they want municipalities to spend a fortune on charging stations? This is a classic example of getting the cart before the horse. Give us the vehicles first General Motors, then everything else will fall into place. The following article is a good read and points out the reality that our electrical grid is ready NOW for plug in vehicles.

From Green Car Congress:

In a conference call organized by GM, Tony Posawatz, Chevrolet Volt and Global Electric Vehicle Line Director; Mark Duvall, Director of Electric Transportation, EPRI; and Bob Hayden, Clean Transportation Advisor, Department of Environment, City and County of San Francisco described the nature and role of the “plug-in ecosystem” required to support one million and more plug-ins on the road in the US.

Posawatz (who wryly referred to having read “someplace” about the Chevy Volt having some challenges, earlier post) said that GM believes there are four pillars that make up a plug-in ecosystem and that must be in place to assure the Volt’s successful commercial launch:

Webchat With GM’s Britta Gross, Director of Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Commercialization
Date: Friday, 3 April Time: 4:00 PM EDT (1:00 PM PDT, 8:00 PM GMT)
GM’s Britta Gross, Director of Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Commercialization will participate in a webchat tomorrow to field questions about the development of the plug-in ecosystem.
Those wishing to participate will be able to tie into the multi-site webchat from Green Car Congress tomorrow, as well as directly on GM’s FastLane Blog, the EV World site, or the GM-Volt site.
Bookmark this post and return to it tomorrow if you wish to participate, the viewer is at the bottom.

• Relevant plug-in vehicles that drive customer demand and are connected;
• Enabling technologies like advanced batteries and sophisticated software controls;
• A capable/green grid; and,
• Plug-in ready communities with supporting policies.

GM is focused on the first two pillars: leading plug-in technology vehicles and the enabling technologies. For the others, it is partnering with organizations like the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to focus on electric power generation, delivery and use, and working with communities, such as San Francisco, to ensure the development of integrated policies that will streamline adoption for consumers.

“One million plug-ins don’t happen without significant partnering, coordination and effort.” —Tony Posawatz

At the Washington Auto Show in February, for example, GM suggested a partial draft checklist of stakeholders and enablers to help guide cities in making their regions plug-in friendly. (Earlier post.)

Percentage of 2010 electricity consumption required by 10M plug-ins. Source: EPRI. Click to enlarge.

Mark Duvall of EPRI said the grid would be able to handle “as many [plug-ins] as you want.” Ten million Chevrolet Volts (or equivalent) on the road would account for approximately 0.8% of projected 2010 electricity consumption in the US. There is, he said, “no real practical limit” as to how many vehicles the grid can handle because the grid is constantly adapting to new loads.

In addition, he said, the marginal sources that would handle the upswing from vehicle charging are “significantly cleaner” than the national average. Most new capacity is now combined cycle natural gas or renewable (almost entirely wind).

In the long-term, Duvall said, EPRI sees about a 500 million ton CO₂ per year reduction for auto industry “almost entirely due to replacement of gasoline with lower carbon electricity.”

The charging pyramid. Source: EPRI. Click to enlarge.

EPRI sees the charging infrastructure as a pyramid. Most charging will be residential; the lowest-cost electricity will be at home off-peak.

The most important place for utilities to engage is to help vehicle purchasers who are their customers and rate payers get the charging equipment installed as conveniently and as quickly as possible.

—Mark Duvall

Next is charging at the workplace, followed by “the most difficult problem” of public charging. “Public charging is difficult, expensive, and we’re not sure how we are going to handle it. We know we need it,” he said. Three possible approaches he outlined are:

• Municipalities handle it as a public good (similar to stoplights, etc.);
• Utilities do it; or
• Startup companies operate chargers in the area.

“There is a lot of coordination that has to take place to move forward in a systematic and comprehensive way.” —Bob Hayden

Based on San Francisco’s experience, Bob Hayden outlined a number of steps required for communities to become plug-in ready. First is having a champion would can lead the effort and bring together the requisite agencies. In San Francisco, the champion is Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is determined for the city to become a leading center for plug-ins. (One reason for that, Hayden noted, is that in San Francisco, transportation contributes more than 50% of the anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.)