Plug-in hybrids rule; PHEV Hypercars rule even more

Let’s go all the way 22

When David pointed out that plug-in electric hybrids (PHEVs) can reduce carbon emissions in all possible futures, two main arguments were raised in opposition -- practicality, and the possibility that they will provide too low a reduction, while blocking the path to something better.

Hypercar

The way commercial plug-ins look to be implemented within the next five years is that normal hybrids will be built with large batteries and the ability to plug into a socket in your dedicated parking space. They will travel the first twenty miles or so on electricity and then turn on their gasoline engine around the 21st mile or so. Even with our current grid, they will emit less CO2 per mile than when they switch to their gasoline engine.

Like hobbyists, who manually convert existing hybrids, these will have to be more expensive than a normal hybrid, because they have every expense a normal car has plus the extra battery cost. If gasoline prices rise high enough, I suppose they may pay for themselves in fuel savings, but mostly they will sell on the "cool" factor.

However, there is another way to implement plug-ins, one we could begin now with a large enough investment, which produces savings comparable to a full electric car -- and which, if run on wind, or sun, or other ultra-low-carbon electricity sources, could actually provide a 98 percent emissions reduction.

The idea of the HypercarTM has been around longer than the name. Build an ultralight car that is reasonably aerodynamic. (No, it does not have be a tear drop; you have a choice of a lot of shapes.) Drive it with electricity -- even if the electricity is generated from an on-board gasoline-powered generator. You still end up with better efficiency than using straight gasoline to power light normal internal combustion cars. Alternatively, you can make an all-electric HypercarTM, like the prototype Sunrise that Solectria demonstrated back in 1997, which ran off a 30-kWh battery pack and had a 216-mile range (a bit more than the Tesla with its 56-kWh pack). Let's look at the economics of a PHEV and an EV car with today's technology.

Tesla chose to use thousands of commodity laptop LiON batteries combined in special packs that provide cooling, safety, and battery management. These packs cost around $20,000 for 56 kWh, or $280 per kWh, and are expected to last about 600 cycles (in the Sunrise, around 130,000 miles). So if we were pricing the Sunrise today, its battery pack would cost about $11,400. A carbon-fiber body would run around $6,400 at current prices, according to an article highly critical of lightweighting. Add the rest of the cost of a car, including O&M, marketing, and profit, and you would end up with an all-electric HypercarTM today for a cost of $25,000 to $30,000. That range is above that of the Prius. It would NOT pay for itself in energy savings, even if gasoline rises to $5 per gallon.

However, it is also not that far from the median price of today's automobile. I suspect that it would have a nice niche market -- people who bought it for the cool factor, to be environmentally conscious. Even with our current grid it would get the equivalent of about 90 mpg. (It would actually get more, because the Sunrise runs on NiMH batteries; LiON are much lighter.) With a low-carbon grid, the emissions would be about 98-99 percent less than a conventional gasoline-powered car. (This combines a grid that produces power with 5 percent of the emissions of our current grid with cars that use that energy three to five times more efficiently than our current "average" car uses gasoline.)

Note that the cost difference between an all-electric HypercarTM and a normal hybrid is real, but small. That is because the cost effects of driving a car by electricity are not all one way. An all-electric car needs no engine; since much of the speed control comes from the amount of electricity fed to the motor, it can either do without gears or (as with the Tesla) use a much more limited gearing system than a normal car. In general, the combination of a unibody and less mass to move saves really large costs.

Note that the largest cost here is the battery pack. You can reduce the cost of this electric HypercarTM to that of a Prius or below by reducing the size of the battery pack and adding a small, variable-speed, gasoline-powered generator to send electricity to the motor when the battery pack is low. Note that, unlike normal hybrids, this would basically remain an electric car. You are not running a battery in parallel with a gasoline engine. The car is always driven by electricity. It is just that that electricity is produced by gasoline or diesel fuel when the battery is low. Full electric drive, regardless of how the electricity was generated, was the original intention behind the HypercarTM concept.

So what would the economics look like? If you decided on a 18-kWh pack (140-mile range) instead of a 30-kWh pack, this would cut about 4,600 off your battery costs. You are adding back $2,000 for motor and generator, so your net savings is $2,650. Instead of a $25,000-$30,000 price range, you now have a $23,000 to $28,000 price range, around the cost of a Prius. And you could make cars at this price in large niche-market quantities -- volume 10,000 per year.

There is one problem; the same 600 cycles that could last 130,000 miles with a 216-mile range would only last 80,000 miles with a 140-mile range. So you have to change your battery pack after eight years. LiON costs are dropping about 7 percent a year, and we do have major technical innovations in the works that may lower costs as well. So the cost of a replacement battery pack will probably run about $4,000 with labor and tax, in eight years. By that time, the replacement pack should be good for a thousand or more cycles.

What about the emissions cut? Well, such a car would have a range of about 130 electric miles using the NiMH batteries of the original Sunrise, probably at least 140 miles with the new LiON packs. Most estimates suggest that about 85 percent of miles are driven on trips under 60 miles. A 140-mile range ought to allow 95 percent of miles on such cars to be driven from the battery. It should get about 75 mpg when the gasoline engine comes on.

With a low-carbon grid (and we are not going to solve the climate chaos crisis without a low-carbon grid), this means you can drive 95 percent at a 99 percent reduction, and drive the other 5 percent at a 66 percent reduction; this averages out to better than a 98 percent reduction in both carbon emissions and oil use. That means that the PHEV HypercarTM is not just a transitional technology. Ninety-eight percent per capita exceeds both the emission reductions Monbiot proposes to avoid frying the planet and the reductions most peak-oil theorists suggest.

The cost difference compared to a $18,000 conventional car is small enough to pay for itself with $5-per-gallon gasoline, or a feebate comparable to current hybrid tax rebate.

It is another example of something where we have the means, we just don't have the will. Yes, technology breakthroughs would be wonderful -- cheaper batteries and cheaper carbon fiber. But we just need to make the decision, as a society, to buy this.

I've seen some commenters who suggest they are going to wait for PHEV before they buy a new car. The problem with that is: we don't know then they will be available. If we as a society wanted them to be, they would be here soon. But as it stands, they are going to take a while to get here, and the first ones may come from companies who have trouble building anything too different from a standard IC engine. The GM Volt, if it ever really arrives, won't have a very long electric range, won't run much more efficiently than a hybrid on electricity, and will probably run less efficiently than a hybrid on gasoline.

In short, if you are driving a really inefficient car now, better to get the most efficient cars available today than wait for breakthroughs Detroit won't deliver in the near future. Note that there are a fair number of both non-hybrid and hybrid cars that get over 30 mpg you can buy today.

Gar Lipow, a long time environmental activist and journalist with a strong technical background has spent years immersed in the subject of efficiency and renewable energy. He has written extensively on the economics of solving the global warming, and why pricing externalities (though important) cannot be the main driver of such solutions.

His on-line reference book compiling information on technology available today, “No Hair Shirt Solutions to Global Warming”, is available at http://www.nohairshirts.com.

His articles on the economics and politics of solving the climate crisis have been published in Z magazine and a number of small journals.

Related Stories

Advertisement
Advertisement
  1. Jon Rynn's avatar

    Jon Rynn Posted 6:22 am
    26 Jul 2007

    So if everyone had an electric hypercar......you would definitely need a nation-wide network of intercity trains, no? Because the cars couldn't do long-distance travel.

    Permalink

  2. Gar Lipow's avatar

    Gar Lipow Posted 6:30 am
    26 Jul 2007

    Electric Hypercars>So if everyone had an electric hypercar you would definitely need a nation-wide network of intercity trains, no? Because the cars couldn't do long-distance travel.
    Unless gas stations started adding electric charging stations which could charge batteries in 15 minutes -- true.
    However PHEV electric cars (and with  a 140 mile range they really are predominantly electric) have an unlimited range, because when the batteries are a bit less than 85% discharged you start using the gasoline engine. When the tank near is empty you stop at a gas  station and refuel it. But we need trains anyway.  Trains require less infrastructure the automobiles per passenger mile. They relieve congestion. A decent train system light cybertran would a more convenient way to travel for all sorts of purposes. Heck that is even true of comparatively primitive light rail like the Maxx. When I lived in Beaverton Oregon, I never wanted to hassle of taking a car to Portland. I'd normally take the Max  as close to my destination as it went, then walk or bus the rest of the day. This was a matter of convenience. I mean ecological impact crossed my mind,but mainly I was avoiding a hassle.

    Permalink

  3. Delay And Deny's avatar

    Delay And Deny Posted 3:33 am
    27 Jul 2007

    H8ters

    I though Grist was coming around but it still seems like its full of Hydrogen Haters.
    Look at it this way: Electricity is great -- but you have to carry around pounds of gear to store it in.  Even if you could make the batteries really "efficient" you're still adding weight to carry the "fuel".
    Contrast any high energy material, such as gasoline or hydrogen.  It has weight, but the weight is in proportion to the fuel....and Hydrogen, of course, is extremely light.  In fact, it's the most potent fuel per pound of any.
    Also, as you use the fuel, there is less weight...that's not true with batteries.



    John Bailo


    Supratext:

    Permalink

  4. Gar Lipow's avatar

    Gar Lipow Posted 4:38 am
    27 Jul 2007

    HydrogenTakes heavy tanks to store it, and heavy fuel cells to convert it to electricity to drive the car.No not as heavy as batteries - but the overall thermodynamic efficiency of battery driven cars has been demonstrated. Even the overpowered and not very aerodynamic Tesla get the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon. A car built for travel rather than racing can easily do better than a 200 mpg equivalent with a renewable grid.  The problem with batteries is not inefficiency but cost and range. So if the numbers I gave add up that answers that objection.

    Permalink

  5. Jon Rynn's avatar

    Jon Rynn Posted 5:08 am
    27 Jul 2007

    What about electricity in the street?......maybe this sounds nutty, but I urge you, for many reasons, to read Jerome a paris's series on light rail at daily kos, here is part 4, if you look at the photo of the Bordeaux train, they actually did away with the catenary and put a third rail under street level and in-between the other tracks.  Could we have a similar system with cars? Then you wouldn't even need a battery in the car. Note: I'd prefer a world without cars, but I'm trying to be realistic.

    Permalink

  6. Gar Lipow's avatar

    Gar Lipow Posted 5:18 am
    27 Jul 2007

    third railsI've heard proposals like this before. The advantage of PHEV especially  mostly electric PHEVs are that they work with existing infrastructure, and existing technology. In way the "third rail for cars" is harder to implement than Cybertran. With a system like that you would be putting up infrastructure for cars that don't exist. If you built the cars first you would be building cars needing an infrastructure that does not exist. With trains, at least you have a way of getting from point A to B when done.
    The advantage of PHEV is that  once you get cars with an electric component, you now have incentive for gas stations to put in charging stations (which should be cheaper to install than gas pumps.) Once you have significant numbers of quick charge stations, the need for a backup gas tank is reduced. Also the demand for BEV quality batteries, PHEV creates could help increase production and bring down the price of BEV quality batteries. At any rate a  PHEV Hypercar seems to be practical now.
    I still think in the long run we can shift a lot of traffic automated ultra-light rail.  A lot of journeys are from the same point to the same point every day. For a high percent of the population being able to sit and read the paper on the way to and from work would be enough incentive to give up driving there and back - especially if they guaranteed a seat, and were available 24 hours. And rail is one of the best ways to attact the development style that creates walkable, bike-able cities.

    Permalink

  7. Jon Rynn's avatar

    Jon Rynn Posted 5:37 am
    27 Jul 2007

    If the cars were small and light enough......it might make sense to have some train cars that carry automobiles, I believe they do this on the cross-english channel train.  Then it's easier for people to go long distance without driving their car, so less need for gasoline.  It seems to me that if automobiles aren't going long distance, as I suggested in a previous comment, you might need several spokes of rail lines coming out from the center of a city so that people from the suburban rings could easily get to a rail station.

    Permalink

  8. Gar Lipow's avatar

    Gar Lipow Posted 5:45 am
    27 Jul 2007

    MaybeThe big thing I see on MEVs (mostly electric vehicles) is that they are a transitional step that cold reduce energy use very quickly. That is I think they could be on sale very quickly - maybe within 5 to 7 years, and could be the majority of automobile traffic within 12 or 14 years. In contrast, a train network would take ten or twelve years to get off the ground. If you wanted to deploy next generation trains, you would need a beta test of some of the systems in various cities (and even that is long making the decisions, picking routes, actual construction.) And then once the beta tests were done and you knew the pluses and minuses of various sytems in real world deployment, then you have to go through the process again on a large scale. It would take 15 or 20 years until a majority of people had acess to a decent transit system even if we started today.  You could short cut it a bit on an emergency basis by plotting routes and accquiring while testing systems (because route requirements are the same for most feasible systems) . But it would still be ten or twelve years before most systems were in place.   And the time from that to people actually using them.

    Permalink

  9. Jon Rynn's avatar

    Jon Rynn Posted 5:54 am
    27 Jul 2007

    Assuming we have 20 or 30 years......before global warming/peak oil hit with full force, then, it would seem to be a prudent thing to do, or at least start to plan for, and could dovetail with an EV transition, it seems to me.  We could also get started by electrifying the current train system; about 10 years back, an engineer friend estimated this to cost about $100 billion.  Also, interstate highways could be used for right-of-ways for planning a high-speed rail network (here's a huge discussion of a "high-speed passenger rail act").  
    By the time global warming/peak oil hit, we'd have EV's, a train network, your $1.7 trillion wind energy system, and badabing! a sustainable economy would be possible (just throw in sustainable agriculture and manufacturing).

    Permalink

  10. Jon Rynn's avatar

    Jon Rynn Posted 12:38 pm
    29 Jul 2007

    Electric drive transportation organization......fyi,
    here it is

    Permalink

  11. Rune Posted 4:10 am
    30 Jul 2007

    Why charging stations?Gar, I have mentioned several times in several threads in which you have participated that the basic technology for quickly swapping out electric car batteries was patented so long ago that it is (or is about to be) public domain.  All that is missing is the initiative to standardize battery packages so that recharging stations can be built to quickly remove and replace them when long distance drivers are ready for more juice.  Why do you cling to the notion that recharging stations that require people to wait at least 15 minutes for a rapid charge are the way to go?
    [Jon - I have been offline and have not had a chance to follow up on our last exchange.  Busy looking for options to relocate the family and business at the moment, so not much play time.  Mo' later.]

    Permalink

  12. Gar Lipow's avatar

    Gar Lipow Posted 5:08 am
    30 Jul 2007

    Swapping stationsYou have a point about swapping stations. I guess the thing is for most people that if you are traveling a 100 miles a day or less, and you know stop to sleep sometimes, charging overnight will work most of the time. Given that charging on the go will be a rare thing, I suspect the lower capital costs of a charging station will make more sense than swapping batteries on the go. There are all sorts of implications with a batter swapping stations. For example do you pay extra if the battery to you get has fewer cycles than the one you take. Do you get a refund of the battery you get has consumed more cycles of its life than the battery you swap.
    I think the most common charge for electric vehicles will be overnight from the dedicated parking space while you sleep, or from some on street coin operated electric meters.

    Permalink

  13. Jon Rynn's avatar

    Jon Rynn Posted 5:56 am
    30 Jul 2007

    Rune ---Not to worry! Been there, done that, it's a total time hog.

    Permalink

  14. kduble Posted 8:44 pm
    30 Jul 2007

    Northerners already equiped for plug-insI've always suspected a good place to introduce plug-in hybrids would be in Minnesota and the Dakotas -- places where people are already in the habit of plugging in their cars during the winter months to keep their engines from freezing.

    Ken Duble

    Permalink

  15. amazingdrx Posted 10:27 pm
    30 Jul 2007

    Hyper conversion GarThat's the way to beat the cost problem.  lightweight a conventional used economy car.  With plastic and aluminum parts replacing steel.
    Get one weith a bad engine then convert to electric with a 40 mile range.  Add a diesel backup generator.  When tyhe batteries get depleted, run the driving electric motor off the generator.  Recharge the batteries with reghenerative braking energy.
    This efficiency scheme is hard to beat.  And the cost would be around 10k for the parts.  Not bad.

    http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

    Permalink

  16. Rune Posted 1:41 pm
    31 Jul 2007

    Battery exchange stationsGar, I agree that most of the time, most of the people will not need to swap their battery to keep on motoring along.  However, given that most people will on occasion want to drive 250+ miles in a day at least once in a while, the limited range and relatively slow refueling (recharging) times of electric vehicles have been very effective arguments to kill the true electric cars and come back with wasteful hybrids that perpetuate the petrol economy.  I think it is important to point out that there is a simple and reasonable way to address the issue head on without any added inconvenience or risk to the would be electric car owners and operators.  Standardized battery swapping stations would do the trick.
    Yes, it would make sense to have some standardized smart technology on each battery that provides a record of how it has been used and how it is holding up.  That information, along with a quick estimate of the remaining charge in the battery being turned in for a new one should go into figuring the appropriate price of a given exchange.  And when a battery seems well past its prime, it should be retired and recycled.  I should think that making it painless and quick for the driver to address such matters, rather than being stuck with a major expense and complicated decision making process about where, when, and how to get rid of a dying battery would be another major selling point over the present situation.
    Finally, Gar, I think you are very much underestimating the perceived cost of having to wait 15 minutes or more for a recharge on the go.  Consider the risks people will routinely take by speeding to shave what turns out to be ten or fifteen minutes of a trip of two or three hours.  Now consider the implications of waiting for a few cars in front of you to finish their 15 minute or more charging cycles before you can even begin on a busy holiday weekend when most people are most likely to want to charge up on the go.  A quick and easy battery swap would solve that problem and others, as noted.  I think it is an idea worth pushing, for it can be done and it pretty much puts to rest the few remaining arguments against an immediate shift to electric cars with their much better energy efficiency, even without going to the lengths necessary to create hypercars.  We need to find ways to get this show on the road, so to speak, instead of endlessly dreaming and jaw boning about what might be possible to begin ten years from now, which looks to me to be a part of the strategy of Toyota and others that do just enough to look serious about true electric vehicles in mass production while reinforcing the standard arguments about why consumers won't be happy with what can be done today.  Let's not help them out by pretending that relatively slow recharging and waiting is a given for electric vehicle operators.  It just ain't so.

    Permalink

  17. GreyFlcn Posted 3:11 pm
    31 Jul 2007

    Not fast enough for ya?Why do you cling to the notion that recharging stations that require people to wait at least 15 minutes for a rapid charge are the way to go?
    How about an 80% battery charge in 1 minute?

    http://www.altairnano.com/documents/NanoSafeBackgrounder0 ...
    Hard to fill up on gasoline that fast.

    Permalink

  18. GreyFlcn Posted 3:14 pm
    31 Jul 2007

    That saidPHEVs will be a lot more likely than either of those solutions. Since the infrastructure already exists.
    Main reason battery swap-out stuff won't happen is safety and liability concerns.
    I can't imagine how a swapout system like that would survive any federal crash test.

    Permalink

  19. GreyFlcn Posted 3:20 pm
    31 Jul 2007

    Besides whichUntil we get a LOT of PHEVs out there, there's not going to be enough demand to create EITHER a quickcharge or a battery swapout infrastructure.
    Whats even more likely is that batteries will just get cheap enough that you can't possibly drive that far in one day.

    Permalink

  20. Gar Lipow's avatar

    Gar Lipow Posted 3:40 pm
    31 Jul 2007

    BEC'sSecond Greyfcn on Battery Exchange Stations. Tesla had to bury their batteries so deep for safety reasons that it takes longer to change batteries than to charge the all-electric car. While that may not always be needed, a battery swapping system might be hard to make save. I used to strongly prefer all-electrics too - until a I realized that a plug-in Hypercar with a really long range,  anything over 100 miles essentially reduced emissions for practical purposes as much as an all-electric. With a 100 mile range,your fleet gets over 95% of its mile from electricity. If the remaining 5% comes from burning electricity reasonably efficiently you have reduced automobile carbon emissions by more than 95% per mile. You still have to avoid mileage per capita rising, as it does in the current trend, but you would need to do that with all electric cars too.  In my example I chose a really long electric range of 140 miles because it seems to be the sweet spot with reasonably priced batteries. A longer range costs too much in batteries. A shorter range burns up the cycles too fast, so you end spending thousands on batteries per year.  
    The day you can buy an Altairno battery pack for $500 per kWh the sweet spot will be in at the 90-100 mile range. (And only that high to minimize emissions - from a pure cost standpoint, it will be more like 75 miles.)
    There are other batteries that may beat the Altairno to market. But I'm pretty sure we will have 1k-2k cycle lightweight batteries in $300-$500 dollar range eventually. The point is we know how to do this with batteries you can buy to today at a reasonable price. And one of the reasons this is true is the breakthrough Tesla has  made by building a decent BEV pack out commodity lithium batteries.

    Permalink

  21. GreyFlcn Posted 3:54 pm
    31 Jul 2007

    Well either way ya slice itWell either way ya slice it.
    PHEVs aren't perfect, but we're gonna have to have a LOT of electric demand before we even start to see a couple quickcharge electric stations.
    All we really need to know is that the option is out there, and that we can build towards that target.
    _
    Or basically that the one competative advantage of hydrogen no longer exists, and we can forget that vapor ware.

    Permalink

  22. GreyFlcn Posted 3:54 pm
    31 Jul 2007

    Kill all hope for hydrogen so we can move on :P

    Permalink

Add a Comment

You are not logged in. Thus, you cannot post a comment. If you have an account, log in. If you don't have an account, well, by all means go make one! Meet you back here in five.

Hello, Visitor!    Why not register?

Viewed
More
Commented
More
Advertisement