It’s about a company, A123 Systems of Boston, that wants to build a factory in the United States to manufacture batteries that turn Priuses into plug-in hybrids that get more than 100 miles per gallon and recharge by plugging into a regular wall outlet.
From the Times story:
“So why are (A123 founder Yet-Ming) Chiang and his company, A123 Systems, having trouble moving to full-scale commercial production and creating thousands of new American jobs with his better mousetrap?
“The answer is a story of the obstacles to a rebirth of U.S. manufacturing, and of the tantalizing possibilities if such a rebirth could be achieved. For Chiang's company has one foot in China and the other in the U.S., reflecting the forces that drive manufacturers overseas and the potential for a renaissance at home.
“The obstacles here are rooted in the sad history of manufacturing's decline in the United States: Despite the promise of Chiang's batteries, many on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley were incredulous when he and other leaders at A123 asked for capital to build factories in America — Asia, yes, but Michigan, why would you want to?
“Even more daunting, nearly all of the world's battery manufacturing industry is in Asia, where plants can be built faster and supplies and equipment are much easier to get than in the United States. These days, it's hard to find Americans who even know how to build a battery factory.
“That's why A123 had to give in and build its first plants in China, where the company could move into production quickly to show auto industry customers that it could deliver on future contracts.”
Nissan unveiled the retail price for its all-electric Nissan LEAF this week and said it’ll start taking reservations for the car on April 20. It’ll sell for $32,780, or $25,280 with the federal tax credit.
That puts the LEAF in the clearly affordable range. But is it practical? With a maximum range of 100 miles on a full battery charge it’s not a car I’d buy.
Proponents argue most of us don’t drive that far most days. I'll grant them that. But some of us drive farther than that on some days. I’m one of them. I regularly drive 100 miles or more in a given day. In a city as spread out as Denver, it’s not hard to do.
The LEAF won’t get you from Denver to Colorado Springs and back. Depending on what part of town you live in, a trip from Denver to Boulder and back will push the car’s outer limits. And, of course, the 100 miles is the optimum range. You won’t get that far on a hot summer day or a cold winter day.
And someone who lives in the Los Angeles-San Diego freeway jungle would have to use the LEAF an extra car. There's no way the LEAF could be your primary transportation there.
At $32,780, the LEAF will be considerably cheaper than the $40,000 GM has said in the past is the likely price of the Chevy Volt.
My guess is price of the Volt will be lower than that when GM unveils its official pricing. Even if it’s not, the Volt has a lot more appeal to me.
The Volt will only go 40 miles in all-electric mode on a full battery charge. But the Volt will have a gasoline-powered generator to keep charging the batteries after that so you don’t have to worry about running out of juice before you get home. And 40 miles would be enough for me to stay in all-electric mode many days.
I wish the folks at Nissan well. But I think their car's going to flop. I just hope it doesn’t set back the transition to all-electric cars.
I want to own an all-electric car someday. But it has to be a real car. For me, that means being able to get as far on a battery charge as I can get on a tank of gas today. And it means being able to recharge the batteries in minutes, not hours.
One more quibble, this one with the folks marketing the LEAF. Why are they going to start taking orders on April 20? The 40th anniversary of Earth Day is two days later. Do you guys have any idea how much more publicity you would have gotten by taking your first orders on Earth Day 2010? Sigh.
It’s easy to develop a passion for flying when both your parents are pilots and own their own plane.
So, it’s no surprise George Bye has a passion for flying. After all, he’s been around planes since he was in grade school.
As CEO of Bye Energy, he’s also developed a passion for making planes fly without fossil fuels.
Bye expects to have an all-electric plane flying around the suburbs of Denver by the end of this year. He expects to be putting electric-powered airplanes into the hands of customers by 2012.
Bye plans to replace the internal combustion engine in a standard,
commercially available plane with a 90-pound, 168-horsepower electric
motor built by UQM Technologies of Frederick, Colorado.
“This will transform the industry,” Bye says. “This is not a small-scale change. We’re talking about a significant, large scale change.”
Initially, Bye’s “proof of concept” plane will be all electric, drawing power from four or five batteries installed behind the electric motor.
Ultimately, Bye expects to use non-fossil biofuel and solar power to extend the plane’s range.
The biofuel, also being developed by Bye Energy, will be used to power an auxiliary power unit -- a small generator that will charge the plane’s batteries during flight.
And Bye's working with Ascent Solar of Thornton, Colorado, to cover part of the plane’s wing and other parts of the plane’s exterior with a film of photovoltaic material thinner than a human hair that would also generate electricity for charging the plane’s batteries.
Bye says he has a few other tricks up his sleeve to extend the plane’s range even further. But he’s not talking about those just yet.
As Bye sees it, the electric motor has a number of advantages over the internal-combustion engine it’ll replace:
It’s more efficient -- 95 percent versus 25 percent for the internal combustion engine.
It’ll be cheaper to operate -- roughly $3 an hour for electric power versus $15 to $30 an hour for a gas-fueled plane.
It has only one moving part versus more than more than 900 moving parts in the internal combustion engine. That will mean cheaper maintenance costs.
And it’s both cleaner and quieter. The only sound comes from the rotation of the propeller, and Bye is working on noise-reduction technology to eliminate much of that noise.
Because he’ll be using a plane that’s already been approved for flight, Bye says, the only thing he has to prove to the Federal Aviation Administration before he can put an electric plane into the air is that the power plant works. The rest of the plane’s already been approved, he says.
I went for a ride in a Tesla this week. Most fun I’ve had in a car since high school.
L.A.-based writer Matthew DeBord described the all-electric Tesla Roadster Sport he spent two days test driving as “$130,000 of Electric Orange Sex.” My only quibble with that is that the one I rode in is white. I want one.
Forget every stereotype in your head about electric cars as glorified golf carts. The Tesla is an honest-to-goodness high performance sports car. According to the Tesla Web site, the Roadster Sport can go from 0 to 60 in 3.7 seconds. It’s not hype. You’ll be pinned to your seat while doing it.
Get behind the wheel and you’ll be driving one of the fastest cars on the road. I’d have a zillion speeding tickets within a month if I owned one.
Some observations after a visit to the Tesla Motors “gallery” in Boulder and a white knuckles ride on a steep, winding road through Boulder’s Sunshine Valley.
Observation #1: Tesla is a serious car, built and sold by a serious company.
Tesla is well financed by people who know how to start a successful business. They have the capital and the business savvy to succeed. The company’s roots are in Silicon Valley. PayPal founder Elon Musk is one of the three founders and serves as the company’s CEO. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are investors. And Tesla filed an S-1 statement with the SEC in January, a step toward taking the company public through an IPO. The company announced in July 2009 that it was making a profit.
Observation #2: The Tesla Roadster Sport is a kick-ass car.
I’ve already covered the 0-to-60-really-fast thing. The car’s also a design masterpiece, inside and out. And it’s not just electric, it’s electronic -- with remote diagnostics and a digital touch screen control console that will appeal to people who like electronic toys. You can have fun with this car even when you’re not stomping on the accelerator. Make no mistake, though. The main attraction is making this baby move.
Observation #3: These guys are smart marketers.
Tesla’s creators started from the premise that no one was buying electric cars because no one was building electric cars people want to buy. They got it exactly right. They’ve built a car people want to buy. The Tesla Motors Web site looks very much like the Web site of any other car company. They’re selling performance and sex appeal, not green-ery.
I’m not a sports car enthusiast. I’d buy this car if I could. Hey, maybe I’ll win the lottery
Observation #4: Say good-bye to gas stations, trips to the garage -- and stick shifts.
Without an internal combustion engine, exhaust system or a clutch and the traditional kind of transmission required to switch gears as you change speeds, most of the things that require regular trips to the mechanic are gone. The electric motor in the Tesla has one moving part – the rotor. There are four gears – drive, reverse, neutral, park. Older versions had a gear stick. The newer ones use buttons.
Even brake pads last longer because you won’t use your brakes as often to slow down. You just ease up on the accelerator. Take your foot off the accelerator and the car will slow down and eventually come to a stop, even on a moderate downhill slope. Taking your foot completely off the accelerator feels very much like shifting down to a very low gear. Except there are no gear changes involved. More RPMs, more speed. Fewer RPMs, less speed. Period.
Tesla suggests routine maintenance once a year or every 12,000 miles. Most of the maintenance involves software upgrades and electrical work. You don’t have to take your car into the garage. The technician comes to you.
You won’t be stopping at gas stations, of course. There’s no gas tank. Instead, you have to charge the batteries. A full charge costs about five bucks at current prices for electricity, Tesla says.
A standard 120-volt charger that plugs into any standard electric outlet. It takes 48 hours or 37 hours, depending on whether you pull 12 amps or 15 amps while charging the car. Ouch. You don’t want to wait until you’re on empty to use this thing. But works fine for topping off the charge when the car will be sitting for a while anyway. Comes standard. with the car.
A 240-volt mobile charger that plugs into a 240-volt outlet and will do a full charge in about 8 hours at 30 amps. You still don’t want to let your charge get to empty before you plug in your car. But you can use it at home or on the road if you can find a 240-volt outlet to plug into. This option will cost you about $1,500, plus the cost of having an electrician install a 240-volt outlet in your garage.
A High Power Connector. Hard-wired into a single location, will do a full charge in four hours. This option costs $1,950 plus installation. If you can afford $100K+ for a car, you can afford this, too.
The good news is that you’ll be able to drive 200 miles plus on a charge.
Observation #5: This car is really quiet.
It was spooky watching employees moving cars around in the Boulder “gallery.” The cars were completely silent. On the road, you can hear the low whir of the rotor -- if you listen for it. Mostly what you’ll hear is the wind whizzing past you as you zoom down the road. If you need the loud VROOM, VROOM of the muscle cars of yesteryear, this isn’t your car.
Observation #6: Model S will be the real “game changer.”
Impressive as it is, the Roadster Sport is the warm-up act for Tesla. The “game changer” as they see it will be the Model S, due out late next year.
The Model S will be a full-sized sedan / SUV style vehicle that will sell for about half as much as the Roadster Sport, get up to 300 miles on a full charge and carry up to seven passengers -- or a surfboard, fully assembled mountain bike and 42-inch plasma TV.
Tesla expects the Model S to appeal to families now buying high-end SUVs or similar vehicles. With a $60,000 price tag, they believe the Model S can compete with a standard vehicle selling for about $30,000 once the lower operating and maintenance costs of an all-electric vehicle are factored in. I think they’re right. I hope they’re right. I’d love to own an all-electric car that’s a real car. Realistically, I’ll never own a Roadster Sport. I might someday own a Model S. I suspect a lot of people fit that profile.
Observation #7: This is the future!?
The ambiguity of the punctuation at the end of the heading for this section is intentional. I believe -- and hope -- Tesla has opened the door to the cars of the future.
The one real question mark is batteries. Can batteries be made dense enough so electric cars will have a range that competes with the range of a full tank of gas with recharge times somewhat comparable to filling up your tank? If the answer is yes, Tesla is showing us the future. If the answer is no, Tesla is showing us what will turn out to be an interesting footnote in automotive history.
I believe it’ll happen. The pessimists say it’ll take a couple decades or more. My data-free prediction is five years or less. I expect to own an all-electric car someday. And I’m an old guy. I don’t have 20 years to wait for that to happen.
Bye Energy of Greenwood Village, Colorado, plans to prove hybrid airplanes can be "safe, viable and economic."
The company plans to put an electric plane into the air before the end of this year -- complete with solar panels in the wings to provide extra power.
The small, two-seat plane will be a “proof of concept” prototype. It involves "transforming a conventionally powered airplane to electric power" using an electric motor built by UQM Technologies of Frederick, Colorado. The solar panels will be built by Ascent Solar of Thornton, Colorado. Bye Energy calls the effort The Green Flight Project.
Bye Energy CEO George Bye said his goal is to move toward commercial production of hybrid planes. “Today is the beginning,” he said.
Bye Energy spent 18 months designing the motor to be used in the prototype. The motor and 90-pound battery needed to power it will weigh about the same as a standard internal combustion engine, the company said.
The new plane will start taxiing around Centennial Airport south of Denver this summer and start taking test flights by late fall or early winter, the company said. It’ll be housed in hangar space owned by the Wing of the Rockies Museum.
The prototype plane will cost about $1 million. Presumably they’ll be a lot cheaper if and when they go into commercial production. And the company plans to offer retrofit kits for existing planes.
Operating costs will be much cheaper than for a conventional plane, the company said -- $3 per hour compared to $15 to $30 for a gas-fueled plane. Recharging the battery will take about one hour for each hour of flight initially, but the company hopes to get that down to 10 minutes of battery charging per hour of flight time.
The first mass-produced all-electric cars could be on American highways by this fall. And they’ll be powered with motors built by a Colorado company.
CODA Automotive of Santa Monica, California, plans to be actively marketing a mass-produced electric sedan in California by late spring or early summer and be selling them in significant numbers by fall.
The CODA cars will be powered by motors produced by UQM Technologies of Frederick, Colorado, says UQM President Bill Rankin.
The CODA sedans will have a range of 90 to 120 miles and a top speed of 80 miles per hour, Rankin told members of the South Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce’s Renewable Energy Taskforce recently. Rankin said CODA hopes to have 20,000 of the new electric cars on the highways in California before the end of this year.
They’re expected to sell for somewhere around $30,000, he said.
UQM was founded in 1967 as Dune Buggies, Inc., “a serious producer of dune buggies,” Rankin says. The company was reborn as an electric motor company in 1983 and, Rankin says, it currently works with virtually every vehicle manufacturer in the world that’s working on electric vehicles.
An electric-car battery that’s powerful, long-lasting, cheap and rechargeable within minutes?
No, it’s not a fantasy. A new startup company co-founded by Cenergy, Colorado State University’s clean energy commercialization arm, hopes to have a prototype on the market this year.
The new battery is the brainchild of Amy Prieto, an assistant chemistry professor at CSU. And the company – the first startup produced by Cenergy – is Prieto Battery. Prieto will serve as the new company’s chief scientific offer. Bohemian Asset Management of Fort Collins supplied the first round of funding.
The new battery will be up to 1,000 times more powerful, 10 times longer-lasting and about half the cost of traditional batteries, according to CSU.
“The automobile and clean energy sectors are hamstrung by expensive, slow charging batteries that exhibit low-power densities,” Prieto says. “Resolving these issues will create explosive growth and resolve major obstacles to these markets.”
“We believe Prieto Battery has created a process that will transform the electric/hybrid vehicle marketplace,” adds Tim Reeser, CEO of Prieto Battery and chief operating officer of Cenergy. “Not only will it create a much more powerful battery that can be charged in minutes rather than hours, but it can be manufactured at half the price of current battery technologies.”
How important is the breakthrough promised by Prieto’s battery?
“Battery systems are the single most important component when it comes to reducing the cost” of electric vehicles, says L.G. Chavez, president and CEO of The Burt Automotive Network in Denver.
How it works
Here’s how CSU describes the technology behind the Prieto Battery:
“Using a process called electrodeposition, Prieto deposits or grows nanowires that make up the first key piece of the battery, the anode. She again uses electrodeposition to coat these tiny structures with polymers – organic materials – that conduct lithium ions but keep the anode and the cathode electrically separated.
“The separation is important for keeping the battery from shorting. The cathode material is added, and the result is a three-dimensional battery.
“The nanowires that make up the anode cover a surface area that is 10,000 times greater than a traditional battery. By comparison, roughly 1,000 nanowires could fit in the width of a human hair.
“This high number of three-dimensional wires creates a much larger surface area than any other current battery. The electrodeposition manufacturing method is fast and inexpensive, allowing the technology to be scaled up to create batteries that can be used for everything from pacemakers to automobiles.”
Jerry Brown: Denver-based writer and public relations consultant Jerry Brown has written for The Associated Press, Rocky Mountain News, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Arkansas Gazette, The Energy Daily and Coal Outlook. He was writing about energy back in the days when clean, sustainable energy was little more than a pipe dream. He’s returned to covering energy to write about the transition of clean, sustainable energy from pipe dream to reality.
I came across a story in the LA Times today that ticked me off.