[kEiThZ]

Shai Agassi's Better Place is setting up in Ontario with the support of Dalton McGuinty's government:

http://www.betterplace.com/global-progress/canada/

Here's what Better Place is about for those who don't know:

http://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html


I am impressed and incredibly excited that Ontario is getting on the ground floor of this idea. It has huge implications for our auto sector. On the other hand, it also has huge implications for our domestic transport sector.

If Agassi's math is accurate, the energy cost of driving in Ontario will drop to between 6 and 7 cents per km with taxes and exchange rates figured in. That means the average Ontario driver putting on about 20 000 km per year will spend $1400 on fuel maximum. For the average driver, this is equalent to paying $0.875 per litre. Not cheap. But definitely not expensive.

However, since batteries do fall under the spell of Moore's law, they will only get cheaper every year. That means that the fuel powering an electric car is getting cheaper every year. So if Agassi's predictions hold, we'll be down to about 1.5-2 cents per km (taxes and exchange rates in) in 2020. That driver doing 20 000 km per year incurs fuel charges of about $400 per year or $.25 per litre at today's fuel efficiencies.

Reducing the cost of transportation is great for our economy. Getting off carbon based fuels is great for our environment. And getting off depleting oil resources is also great for our economy. However, we are entering a stage now where driving could get cheaper every year. That presents a whole host of new issues. More congestion, more wear and tear on the roads, etc. I hope the government is ready to discuss that side of the equation as well.

 

[hkric88]

Electricity comes from somewhere, its made from something. That something often involves fossil fuels. Rubber tires tearing up asphalt roads represents high friction, which translates to high rolling resistance (compare to a train). The automobile network encourages and often requires vast distances between destinations (suburban sprawl). Traffic lights and many 90-degree changes in direction require frequent deceleration and acceleration (even with fancy regenerative breaking, overall efficiency is lost). Batteries are chemical storage of electrical energy, representing an extra energy conversion step, resulting in lost energy.

For a big picture example - Energy generated from natural gas:
Sunlight photosynthesized into sugars (EM to Chemical)
Sugars consumed through anaerobic bacterial digestions (just an example of a way it happens), producing natural gas (Chemical to Chemical)
Work done to extract gas, compress gas and ship gass (energy consumed)
Gas burned at power plant (chemical to thermal)
Gas turbine actuated by expanding gas (thermal to mechanical)
Turbine turns generator (mechanical to electrical)
Step up transformers to transmit electrical energy (induction transformers loose some of the energy as heat in the process)
Transmission (low loss, but still some thermal loss, related to distance of transmission)
Step-down transformers (more loss)
Plug-in car to charge battery (electrical to chemical)
Drive car (chemical to electrical to mechanical)

The more conversions of energy you have, the more energy will be lost, i.e. the less efficient the system is.

The solution is not electric cars. The solution is not to re-invent or 'fix' cars. The solution is to reorganize the transportation network and urban structure. Yeah I kno it sucks, but at least its realistic.

Lets also not forget that we're collecting the thick, black group from the bottom of the distillation stacks at refineries; a nasty, toxic waste product that has one use: Mix it with aggregate and slop it down over all sorts of fertile farm land so people can drive their 'green' cars everywhere and feel good about themselves.

This dude in the video is a great salesmen, but he's missing the key points. In fact, that's why he's a good salesmen: distraction from the big picture, fixation on the 'wow'.

 

[kEiThZ]

He's creating a 21st century oil company from the ground up. And there's a real environmental benefit in what he's doing. There's no doubt that we need to move away from car dependent communities. But that's not going to happen overnight. If this guy is successful in helping Ontario meet its' target of 1 in 20 cars being an electric vehicle by 2020, I'd say that'd be an amazing accomplishment.

 

[newuser2k9]

Total misrepresentation of facts, hkric. I had a full post written up but I clicked the wrong button.

Just see the chart: http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2008/01/electric-cars-versus-ice.html

Electric cars, which don't have to produce sound, heat, and vibrations ICE engines do, are 100% more efficient.

As you say, "distraction from the big picture, fixation on the 'wow'."

 

[newuser2k9]

Actually, only about half that overall. There's still a lot of progress to be made, but until we can figure out how to levitate a vehicle, we're not going to see high levels of efficiency.

 

[RedRocket191]

The solution is not electric cars. The solution is not to re-invent or 'fix' cars. The solution is to reorganize the transportation network and urban structure. Yeah I kno it sucks, but at least its realistic.

+1. Electric cars are good and all, but the social problems caused by cars remain.

 

[Second_in_pie]

Actually, only about half that overall. There's still a lot of progress to be made, but until we can figure out how to levitate a vehicle, we're not going to see high levels of efficiency.

Though a levitating vehicle would inherently be very, very inefficient from an energy perspective. There's really no way for the car to win. It's a terrible habit that Western society's grown accustomed to, but we can break away from it just as easily. People seem to have forgotten some cool contraptions invented about a century and a half ago called bicycles and mass transit.

I'm half an half on this issue. While it'll be good to get new electric vehicles on the road (I really think we should be looking much higher than 5%) it seems to be going towards the idea that renewable/green fuels will be the cure-all. Not so. In reality, we'll have to get many, many more people on public transit, and build up a real intercity and rural bus/train service. That will help with the province's goals of densification and anti-sprawl, and will encourage healthier transportation in both urban and rural areas.

The big drawback of an electric vehicle is it's range, which is currently capped at under (??) 150 km per charge, if I'm not mistaken. Actually, now that I think about it, that might be more like 300 km. But either way, that's pretty good for most urban commuting travel, added by the fact the vehicle has a good 6-8 hours to charge before being used again during a normal workday. In terms of Ontario, I'd hazard to guess that about... 10 million Ontarians live in the big urban areas. Even if we were to have a dream 60% of all urban livers in the province using some form of public transit, that's still a good 4 million that have an electric car as the best solution to their travel, or about 6 in 20. And of course, if there are people just not buying cars, that ratio will be higher. By this fact (compiled by the fact that there's no way in hell that 60% of all urban livers will be using public transit, especially when thinking of Windsor, London, Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Kingston, etc. too,) I don't see why something closer to 4 or 5 in 20 cars by 2020 isn't being pursued.

Ontario has a huge auto industry that's currently totally indebted to us, so what would be so hard about cranking up production of electric vehicles to suit our demand? Also, if we get in on it first, it'd allow us to build up a specialty in what would be a huge market for electric vehicles, allowing us to create a huge number of jobs without any of the guilt that the current auto industry gives us. If Ontario could control even a sizable amount of the electric auto industry for the Eastern US and Great Lakes region through experimentation with our own population, that'd be a huge market for decades into the future (even if us Canadians are able to lead a car-free lifestyle, there's tens of millions of Americans that'd still be craving an environmental guilt-free car.)

You know, just my two cents.

 

[kettal]

Ontario has a huge auto industry that's currently totally indebted to us, so what would be so hard about cranking up production of electric vehicles to suit our demand? Also, if we get in on it first, it'd allow us to build up a specialty in what would be a huge market for electric vehicles, allowing us to create a huge number of jobs without any of the guilt that the current auto industry gives us. If Ontario could control even a sizable amount of the electric auto industry for the Eastern US and Great Lakes region through experimentation with our own population, that'd be a huge market for decades into the future (even if us Canadians are able to lead a car-free lifestyle, there's tens of millions of Americans that'd still be craving an environmental guilt-free car.)

We need to demand GM and Chrysler make more small models. The Smart Fortwo is a hot seller, why are we still being told we need an SUV to get one person and a briefcase across the Don Valley Parkway? Promoting small cars would not only improve our energy consumption, but also traffic and parking problems, too. And it's not tomorrow's technology, it's yesterdays.

But Dalton McGuinty is so obsessed with shiny new things. I think he really wants to be a venture capitalist, not a premier.

 

[afransen]

No one is forced to buy an SUV. They sell because that is what people want and it is affordable at the price they are sold. To change that, we need to change the incentives, and that means higher gas taxes, or 'gas guzzler' taxes or feebates. I lean toward higher gas taxes, if anything.

I don't think we will ever eliminate the car (not until they invent teleportation, at least . It's too damned useful a technology. But we can reduce the impact that driving has by going to electric vehicles as replacing as many car trips as is feasible. I think PRT is a great option for that, along with more traditional mass transit. PRT has been tarred and feathered unfairly, I think, by previous, flawed proposals. The technology is not inherently flawed or useless. An intelligently designed system has enormous potential for reducing congestion, energy consumption, and infrastructure costs. The last is particularly important, as transit is just so debilitatingly expensive that I fear we will never have a 'good enough' network, even in our largest cities.

 

[kettal]

No one is forced to buy an SUV. They sell because that is what people want and it is affordable at the price they are sold.

If they sell so well, why is GM in bankruptcy?

 

[kEiThZ]

Did you guys actually read and see the videos on the links posted?

The whole point of Better Place is to overcome the range and cost issues associated with electric vehicles. The 150 km range is not a problem if you can swap a battery without getting out of your car in 2 mins. And while smaller cars do consume less energy, the difference isn't as drastic on an electric vehicle as it is on an gasoline burning one. Electric motors tend to scale much better than their fossil fuel powered counterparts. So getting people off SUVs is not nearly as critical (from a fuel consumption point of view...the other issues remain) if motorists are switching en masse to electric vehicles.

 

[kEiThZ]

It blows my mind that this announcement which is a year old wasn't more heavily publicized. If Better places manages to get its charging network up along the 401 corridor with some extensions (400, 402, 416...and some of the 417, QEW), Ontario will have for all intents and purposes covered the vast majority of the province's settled area with the ability to access and use electric vehicles. It would change the way Ontarians drive, at a minimum. The environmental benefits will be massive. As would be the economic implications for Ontario since it is really the first large non-American test market for Better place other than California. That's why I am surprised this wasn't put out more in the press.

 

[LAz]

Car users have not been paying much of the external negative cost that driving and their vehicles have created. Screw cars and the love of them. For success, a city needs a balanced transportation plan, one in which cars are discouraged and transit is promoted.



All these improvements to cars, addition of highway lanes, and other such b.s. does not help reduce congestion. If anything, it only helps get more cars onto the road and thus worsens the condition.

 

[kEiThZ]

It's not going to help reduce all externalities. But it will help reduce emissions drastically and it will speed up the adoption of EV technologies. If this catches on, we'll have fully electric buses in a few years. And fully electric delivery vehicles are already catching on.

 

[dunkalunk]

While I do appreciate the merits of full electric vehicles over vehicles powered by other fuels, this will do relatively nothing to reduce people's dependence on cars. This could well put more cars on the road, thereby increasing the need for highway and road infrastructure, and giving funding priority to construction of highways over rail service, transit, pedestrian, and cycling infrastructure. If the voters continue to value their road infrastructure as much as they do now, they will continue to vote for a government that will subsidize roads and parking lots. Regardless of the power source, I just don't see sustainability in the single occupancy vehicle model, at least when given priority over other methods. Its just my hope that the province doesn't see this model as the be-all and end-all of transportation infrastructure in Ontario. This needs to be done in conjunction with transit and active transport spending, and not just a substitute for it. I understand that a lot of this is an urban design issue caused by rapid growth in the age of the automobile, and a lot of it could be quite difficult to fix. But we tried the suburban commuter model for 60ish years; its time to go back to something that we know works.