What are the things to consider before buying an all-electric vehicle?

Going Electric: Things to Consider

What you should know before you buy an all-electric vehicle

By KATHY KOWALENKO 9 September 2011

Ford says its Focus Electric can go 160 kilometers with a full charge.

Photo: Ford Motor Co. 

There’s a lot of excitement about those new all-electric automobiles, but you may experience several drawbacks if you do buy one, according to Saifur Rahman, an IEEE Fellow and director of Virginia Tech’s Advanced Research Institute, in Arlington. For instance, several electric vehicles on one residential street can contribute to a brownout or even a blackout by overloading the local distribution transformer. If you are on the road, you may find it difficult to recharge your vehicle because even though EV charging stations are being built, they are still few and far between. And there are significant environmental concerns about the disposal of used up EV batteries in landfills. 


TRANSFORMER TROUBLE


Buy an all-electric and you may also have to pay for a home charging station to recharge your battery. The stations come in three varieties. A Level 1 charger plugs into a regular 110/120-volt, 20-ampere outlet. But it may take longer than one night to do its job. Anywhere from 10 to 21 hours is more like it, depending on the car model and the battery.


A Level 2 unit is heftier, a dedicated 220/240-V, 40-A unit that must be installed by an electrician. This is the type EV automakers recommend you use. It could take about three hours to charge a battery that’s half depleted and about eight hours to charge a battery that’s dead, depending on the car model. Rahman estimates a Level 2 charger will cost about US $2000 in the United States, plus the electrician’s fee.


Level 3 chargers will go into the quick-charging, 480-V stations that owners of all-electrics hope will be popping up everywhere. Chargers at such stations could bring a half-charged EV battery to full capacity in 10 to 30 minutes. Such setups, said to be in the planning stages in many cities, will be the “gas stations” for all-electrics.


But if your neighborhood has too many all-electrics plugged in and if no load-control programs are added, there is a chance the local transformers could be overloaded. Most pole-mounted transformers in the United States are rated at 50 000 volt-amperes (50 kVA) and typically serve four to eight homes. At any time, each home could be pulling in about 8 kilowatts, but plug in two or three EVs drawing 5 kW or more each, turn on a few 240-V appliances such as air conditioners, electric ovens, or clothes dryers—each of which draws from 5 to 7 kW—and you and your neighbors could be sitting in the dark.


“The impact of electric vehicles will be felt at the local distribution point—the home,” says Rahman, who does see a bright side. “Because the number of EV owners will be small at first and spread across different time zones, transmission- or generation-level overloads will not be a problem, as some claim.”


Installing larger pole-mounted transformers providing 100 kVA or more could help. Installed, each of these would cost several thousand dollars, but the question is, Who will pay for that? It’s unreasonable to ask consumers without an EV to come up with the money, Rahman says. Nor is it feasible to ask the few initial electric car owners. Rahman suggests that rather than upgrading the transformer, it makes more sense to add a control device on each charging station that turns off other 240-V appliances in the home when the EV needs to be charged, or delay charging the car.


“This station could be made intelligent enough to sense when other 240-V devices are running,” he explains. “If it senses two appliances are on and there’s not enough capacity in the transformer, it will either turn off the appliances or not charge the car. This will make the electric car transparent to the power company.” Such a feature, he says, could be added at a small cost.


CHARGING DILEMMA


Another problem is finding a place to put the charging station. If you live in a house with a garage, charging your car should be relatively simple. But you’ll have a real problem if you live in an apartment or town house and don’t have an assigned parking spot with room for a charging station.


The options are limited. A Level 2 home charging station would be hard-wired to your house, so you couldn’t take it with you to your sister’s or bring it to your workplace and plug in your car. That means you’ll probably need a public charging station. These will be expensive, so don’t expect to see them anytime soon in public garages, in your company parking lot, or sprouting along highways. Public stations will require a new infrastructure, involving 240-V lines with several hundred amperes of spare capacity for EVs—which might not always be available. A roadway station that can charge four to eight EVs at a time could cost upward of $25 000 to build, Rahman says.


“Running the lines costs money, and existing garages may not have the physical space and/or spare electrical capacity to add stations,” says Rahman, who calls building such stations “a significant bottleneck” to EV sales, one that will likely be overcome only by government incentives.


The slow speed of charging the battery will also affect the infrastructure, with cars potentially tying up Level 2 charging stations for several hours, though it’s expected that the roadway stations will use 480 V.


BATTERY BRIEFING


Cars such as the Chevrolet Volt, Ford Focus Electric [below], and Nissan Leaf warranty their proprietary battery packs for eight years or 161 000 km, whichever comes first. The Volt relies on a 16-kilowatt-hour manganese spinel lithium-polymer prismatic battery pack for its 64-km range. The Leaf uses a 24-kWh lithium-nickel-manganese polymer battery for a 160-km range. The Focus Electric can go 160 km with its 23-kWh lithium-ion battery pack.


But battery capability fades with time. A battery delivers less range after a couple of thousand charge-discharge cycles. Battery life is also affected by how people drive, whether the battery is charged in minutes or hours, and the climate. An EV’s range will decrease as it ages—and the more aggressively it is driven, the faster that happens.


As the batteries are improved, they could last 10 years, longer than the life of many vehicles. But replacing a failed battery could cost from $3000 to $12 000, depending on the car model.


“And if your battery goes dead, you can’t simply run to your local garage for a replacement,” Rahman points out.


Then there’s the dilemma of what to do with spent batteries. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, rechargeable batteries are not an environmental hazard if they are not dumped in landfills. But the European Union has a battery recycling law requiring vendors to reclaim for recycling at least a quarter of the batteries they manufacture and sell, including lithium-ion. 


“Because the ion of lithium is not a benign metal, it will have an impact on the environment,” Rahman says. 

As the EV batteries age, their ability to hold charge will diminish, but they can still be useful in homes and offices as backup sources of electricity, Rahman points out. “For example, if homeowners or small businesses want to have high-quality power for short durations (maybe several hours) for whatever reason or to avoid peaking charges by not using as much electricity when the power company faces supply crises, these discarded EV batteries can meet those needs. As these opportunities are identified and the value of such applications are realized, a secondary market will grow to trade for such batteries.”


Is it possible to power the world just using Wind, Water, and Solar technologies?

Wind, Water, and Solar Power for the World

Nix nuclear. Chuck coal. Rebuff biofuel. All we need is the wind, the water, and the sun

By Mark Delucchi  /  September 2011

Illustration: iStockphoto

We don’t need nuclear power, coal, or biofuels. We can get 100 percent of our energy from wind, water, and solar (WWS) power. And we can do it today—efficiently, reliably, safely, sustainably, and economically.

We can get to this WWS world by simply building a lot of new systems for the production, transmission, and use of energy. One scenario that Stanford engineering professor Mark Jacobson and I developed, projecting to 2030, includes:

• 3.8 million wind turbines, 5 megawatts each, supplying 50 percent of the projected total global power demand
• 49 000 solar thermal power plants, 300 MW each, supplying 20 percent
• 40 000 solar photovoltaic (PV) power plants supplying 14 percent
• 1.7 billion rooftop PV systems, 3 kilowatts each, supplying 6 percent
• 5350 geothermal power plants, 100 MW each, supplying 4 percent
• 900 hydroelectric power plants, 1300 MW each, of which 70 percent are already in place, supplying 4 percent
• 720 000 ocean-wave devices, 0.75 MW each, supplying 1 percent
• 490 000 tidal turbines, 1 MW each, supplying 1 percent.

We also need to greatly expand the transmission infrastructure in order to create the large supergrids that will span many regions and often several countries and even continents. And we need to expand production of battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, ships that run on hydrogen fuel cell and battery combinations, liquefied hydrogen aircraft, air- and ground-source heat pumps, electric resistance heating, and hydrogen for high-temperature processes.

To make a WWS world work, we also need to reduce demand. Reducing demand by improving the efficiency of devices that use power, or substituting low-energy activities and technologies for high-energy ones—for example, telecommuting instead of driving—directly reduces the pressure to produce energy.

Because a massive deployment of WWS technologies requires an upgraded and expanded transmission grid and the smart integration of the grid with battery-electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles—using both types of these vehicles for distributed electricity storage—governments need to carefully fund, plan, and manage a long-term, large-scale restructuring of the electricity transmission and distribution system. In much of the world, we’ll need international cooperation in planning and building supergrids that span across multiple countries, because many individual countries just aren’t big enough to permit enough geographic dispersion of generators to mitigate local variability in wind and solar intensity. The Desertec project proposes a supergrid to link Europe and North Africa, and 10 northern European countries are beginning to plan a North Sea supergrid for offshore wind power. Africa, Asia and Southeast Asia, Australia/Tasmania, China, the Middle East, North America, South America, and Russia will need supergrids as well.

Although this is an enormous undertaking, it does not need to be done overnight, and there are plenty of examples in recent history of successful large-scale infrastructure, industrial, and engineering projects.

During World War II, the United States transformed motor vehicle production facilities to produce over 300 000 aircraft, and the rest of the world was able to produce over 500 000 aircraft. In 1956, the United States began work on the Interstate Highway System, which now extends for about 47 000 miles (around 75 000 kilometers) and is considered one of the largest public works project in history. The iconic Apollo program, widely considered one of the greatest engineering and technological accomplishments ever, put a man on the moon in less than 10 years. Although these projects obviously differ in important economic, political, and technical ways from the project we discuss, they do suggest that the large scale of a complete transformation of the energy system is not in itself an insurmountable barrier.

Efficient and Reliable: A 100-percent wind, water, and solar power system can deliver all of the world’s energy needs efficiently. Jacobson and I estimated the potential supply and compared those estimates with projections of energy demand made by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. We calculated that the amount of wind power and solar power available in locations that can likely be developed around the world, excluding Antarctica, exceeds the projected world demand for power in 2030 for all purposes by more than an order of magnitude. On top of that, Jacobson and I estimate that converting to a WWS energy infrastructure can actually reduce world power demand by more than 30 percent (based on projected energy consumption in the year 2030), primarily because electric motors have less energy loss than do combustion devices.

But, the naysayers will retort, what about reliability? Can these resources deliver power reliably? Indeed they can. While it is true that no single wind-power farm or solar-photovoltaic installation can reliably match total power demand in a region, it is also true—and often not recognized—that no individual coal or nuclear plant can either.

Indeed, any electricity system must be able to respond to changes in demand over seconds, minutes, hours, seasons, and years, and must be able to accommodate unanticipated changes in the availability of generation due to outages, for example. Today’s mainly fossil-fuel electricity system responds with backup systems, power plants brought online only during periods of peak demand, and spinning reserves—that is, the extra generating capacity available by increasing the power output from already operating generators.

A WWS electricity system handles changes in demand far differently. To start with, WWS technologies generally suffer less downtime than do current electric power technologies. However, they face inherently more variability; the maximum solar or wind power available at a single location varies over minutes, hours, and days, and this variation generally does not match the demand pattern over the same timescales.

Dealing with this short-term variability can be challenging, but it is doable. Including hydropower—which is relatively easy to turn on and off as needed—in the generating package helps, as does managing demand (for example, by shifting flexible loads to times when more generating capacity is available) and forecasting weather more precisely; these have little or no additional cost. A WWS system also needs to interconnect resources over wide regions, creating a supergrid that can span continents. And it will probably need to have decentralized energy storage in residences, using batteries in electric vehicles. Finally, WWS generation capacity should significantly exceed the maximum amount of demand in order to minimize the times when available WWS power runs short. Most of the time, this excess generation capacity could be used to provide power to produce hydrogen for end uses not well served by direct electric power, such as some kinds of marine, rail, off-road, and heavy-duty truck transport.

Photo: iStockphoto

Economical and Safe: WWS power is economical. The private cost of generating electricity from onshore wind power is already less than the private cost of conventional fossil-fuel generation and is likely to be even lower in the future—less than US $0.05 per kilowatt-hour including some transmission costs, according to our calculations (this includes the fully amortized cost of capital and land).

By 2030, Jacobson and I estimate that the social cost (which includes the private or consumer cost, plus additional external costs: for example, the value of health damage from air pollution, which society bears but the individual consumer does not) of generating electricity from any WWS power source is likely to be less than the social cost of conventional fossil-fuel generation, and that includes the amortized cost of land acquisition, capital, and construction.

The cost of transmitting and managing—as opposed to generating—electricity will probably be somewhat higher in a wind, water, and solar system than in a conventional electricity system. In an intelligently designed and operated WWS system, the extra infrastructure and energy cost of sending electricity long distances over a supergrid and of vehicle-to-grid storage, along with demand management, hydropower, and weather forecasting, will probably add up to an average of $0.02/kWh generated. By comparison, conventional long-distance transmissions in the United States today cost about $0.01/kWh.

We don’t have to worry too much about the costs of the basic construction materials, because the supply of steel and concrete used in a wind, water, or solar power system is virtually unlimited—these materials are abundant and recyclable. The rarer materials, including neodymium (in electric motors and generators), platinum (in fuel cells), lithium (in batteries), and silver, tellurium, indium, and germanium (in different kinds of photovoltaic systems), are harder to get, more expensive, and limited in supply, so they will have to be reduced, recycled, or eventually replaced with less-scarce materials unless new sources emerge. However, the cost of reducing, recycling, or replacing neodymium, platinum, or the materials for photovoltaics is not likely to noticeably affect the economics of WWS systems.

WWS power is safe and sustainable. Wind, water, and solar power have essentially zero emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants over the whole life cycle of their systems. They do little to hurt wildlife, water quality, and terrestrial ecosystems; they are not catastrophic disasters waiting to happen in terms of waste disposal, terrorism, war, human error, or natural disasters; and they are based on natural resources and materials that are indefinitely renewable or recyclable.

Nuclear power, coal, and biofuels are anything but safe and sustainable. Biofuels and so-called clean coal systems still cause air pollution, water pollution, habitat destruction, and climate change; biofuels also contribute to higher food prices. Nuclear power already has had two catastrophic accidents, and even though the industry has improved the safety and performance of new reactors and has proposed even newer (but largely untested) ”inherently safe” reactor designs, the industry can’t guarantee that the reactors will be designed, built, and operated correctly. And catastrophic scenarios involving terrorist attacks are still conceivable. Furthermore, any nuclear-fuel cycle can contribute, even if very indirectly, to the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

With a wind-water-solar system, the risk of any such catastrophe is zero.

Finally, though critics envision sprawling solar installations or rows of wind turbines crowding out farms, a WWS power system won’t take a lot of land. The equivalent footprint area on the ground for enough WWS devices needed to power the world is about 0.74 percent of the global land area, and the spacing needed around wind turbines adds about 1.16 percent of global land area. However, the land used for such spacing is available for other purposes, including agriculture, ranching, and open space, and so is not ”used” in the way that land for biomass production or coal mining is used. Moreover, if we assume that one-half of wind devices will be placed over water, and recognize that all wave and tidal devices will be in water, that 70 percent of hydroelectric is already developed, and that rooftop solar power doesn’t require new land, then the additional footprint and spacing of devices on land will be only about 0.41 percent and 0.59 percent of the world land area, respectively.

The more extensive the supergrid, the less local fluctuations in power generation are a problem. However, more energy is lost in transmission, and infrastructure costs climb. Figuring out how to balance these factors in order to design the optimal grid and determine the best location of generation facilities will take additional research.

Getting in our way today is the fact that energy markets, institutions, and government policies support the production and use of fossil fuels. The world needs new policies to ensure that WWS systems develop quickly and broadly. The United States and other countries have adopted or discussed policies that stimulate production of renewable energy, including feed-in tariffs, which are subsidies to cover the difference between generation costs and wholesale electricity prices, investment subsidies, quotas requiring that a certain amount of generation be WWS power, and carbon and other environmental-damage taxes.

The obstacles to this transformation are primarily social and political, not technical or economic. If we continue to make decisions based on interest-group politics and muddle through with nuclear power, ”clean” coal, offshore oil production, and biofuels, then our energy system will continue to threaten the health and well-being of everyone on the planet. But with sensible broad-based policies and social changes, it indeed is possible to convert 25 percent of the current energy system to WWS in 10 to 15 years, 85 percent in 20 to 30 years, and 100 percent by 2050.

About the Author

Mark Delucchi is a research scientist at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, specializing in economic, environmental, engineering, and planning analyses of current and future transportation systems. He is a member of the Alternative Fuels Committee and the Energy Committee of the Transportation Research Board.

To Probe Further

The material for this article is based on the detailed analyses presented in ”Providing All Global Energy With Wind, Water, and Solar Power, Part II: Reliability, System and Transmission Costs, and Policies,” Energy Policy 39 (2011): 1170–1190 by M.A. Delucchi and M.Z. Jacobson, and
”Providing All Global Energy With Wind, Water, and Solar Power, Part I: Technologies, Energy Resources, Quantities and Areas of Infrastructure, and Materials,” Energy Policy 39 (2011): 1154–1169 by M.Z. Jacobson and M.A. Delucchi.

Copies of these papers are available from the author upon request by e-mail (madelucchi@ucdavis.edu).

How to protect yourself when using free public WiFi connections

How to minimize the risks of using free public WiFi hot spots

Surfing the Internet with a public WiFi connection can expose your laptop or tablet computer to digital eavesdroppers and malicious hackers. Here are some ways to protect yourself.

By Salvador Rodriguez

September 22, 2011

It seems you can surf the Internet and check your email from virtually anywhere these days — in coffee shops, hotel lobbies, airport terminals and airplane cabins.

More places are making it easier to turn on your laptop or tablet computer and connect to the Internet through free public WiFi hot spots.

But much like leaving your diary on a park bench, connecting to the Internet using a public WiFi allows anyone with the right software to see what you are doing. Worse, you risk being hit with malware and other virulent programs that can turn your computer into botnets controlled by hackers to attack websites.

Here are some tips to protect your computer from digital eavesdroppers and malicious hackers:

Before you leave home…

Enable SSL connections: One of the most effective ways you can to protect your Web surfing is to use secure connections. As you probably have noticed whenever you log into your bank's website, your browser displays a lock icon or adjusts the URL bar. This is your browser indicating that you are visiting the website over a Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, connection. An SSL connection encrypts the information exchanged between you and your bank, keeping others out.

SSL connections are usually enabled for bank websites and other sites that hold sensitive information, but they can be costly for large companies, which is why many don't have them turned on automatically. But you can enable an SSL connection easily on many of your most used sites:

Gmail: Most people have a Gmail account nowadays for their email, and it's always important to make sure your emails are safe. To enable an SSL connection for your Gmail account, click on the gear icon at the top right of the page, click Mail Settings, select Always Use HTTPS, and save.

Twitter: Go to your settings, scroll to the bottom of the Account tab, check the box for Always Use HTTPS and save.

Facebook: Some people stay logged on to Facebook throughout the day, so making sure your connection is secure can go a long way. To switch on the SSL connection, go to Account Settings and click the Security tab. Once there, edit Secure Browsing and check the box that offers browsing on a secure connection. Unfortunately for heavy Facebook app users, you will have to disable this when you run programs such as FarmVille.

Disable sharing: People often enable sharing to connect with printers and other devices wirelessly. As useful as this can be at home, leaving sharing on in public areas is like leaving your door unlocked in a bad neighborhood. Here's how to turn it off:

For Macs, launch your system preferences and click on the Sharing icon. Uncheck all of the boxes to disable sharing. To turn them back on, simply check whatever you're going to use.

For PCs, Windows will ask you if you are connecting to a home, work or public network when you connect to a new WiFi network. If you select public, Windows will disable sharing for you. If you'd like to do this yourself on Windows XP and 7, click the Start button and launch the Control Panel.

Here is where the method changes depending on your version of Windows. For Windows XP, click on Network Connections and right-click Local Area Connection. Click Properties and from there uncheck the box that offers file and printer sharing and then click OK. Check it to enable file and printer sharing again. For Windows 7, click Network and Sharing Center, and select Change Advanced Sharing Settings on the left. Click on the arrow of the network you'd like to disable sharing on, select Turn Off File and Printer Sharing, and save.

Turn off WiFi: One more precaution you can take is to turn off your WiFi before heading out to avoid having your computer latch on to an unsafe network on its own.

For Macs, click the WiFi icon on the top right corner called Airport. Select Turn Airport Off.

For PCs, right-click the wireless icon on the task bar and turn it off.

Once you're there….

Turn on WiFi: Follow the same steps to turn your WiFi on when you arrive at your destination and select the desired network.

Log in using a VPN: If you can log into a virtual private network, your online experience will be that much safer. Most companies give employees with network access at the office a way to log into the company VPN from outside. Enabling the company VPN will encrypt your browsing and work as a shield.

If you don't work for a company or have access to the company VPN, you can buy a VPN account with a third party. This will give you that same protection and encrypt your activity. Prices range from $8 to $10 a month.

Once you leave…

Turn off WiFi: Should you go to another public spot, this will prevent the computer from automatically connecting to an unsecured network.

business@latimes.com

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

Paris Combo - Living Room and other songs

What are the Leading Cordials/Liqueurs in the USA?

USA - Leading Cordials/Liqueurs (thousands of nine-liter case depletions)
					Percent Change
Brand	Company	2008	2009	2010	2008-2009	2009-2010
Jagermeister	Sidney Frank Importing Co Inc	2,880	2,700	2,700	-6.3%	0.0%
De Kuyper	Beam Inc	2,700	2,529	2,447	-6.3%	-3.2%
Baileys	Diageo North America	1,411	1,311	1,312	-7.1%	0.1%
Southern Comfort	Brown-Forman Beverages Worldwide	1,455	1,360	1,283	-6.5%	-5.7%
Kahlua	Pernod Ricard USA	1,100	1,029	998	-6.5%	-3.0%
Hiram Walker	Pernod Ricard USA	920	918	890	-0.2%	-3.1%
Grand Marnier	Moet-Hennessy USA (LVMH)	510	483	473	-5.3%	-2.1%
Total Leading Brands		10,976	10,330	10,103	-5.9%	-2.2%
Source: IMPACT DATABANK

How to make snow

2011 Labby Finalist—Tiny snow-makers from thescientistllc on Vimeo.

What are the fastest-growing whiskies in the USA?

USA - 10 Fastest-Growing Whiskies* (thousands of nine-liter case depletions)
Brand	Company	Type	2009	2010	Percent Change
Jameson	Pernod Ricard USA	Irish	815	1,037	27%
Makers Mark	Beam Global Spirits & Wine	Bourbon	805	915	14%
The Glenlivet	Pernod Ricard USA	Single-Malt	286	309	8%
Buchanan's	Diageo North America	Scotch	159	202	27%
Red Stag	Beam Global Spirits & Wine	Bourbon	85	191	125%
Woodford Reserve	Brown-Forman Beverages Worldwide	Bourbon	115	127	10%
Bulleit	Diageo North America	Bourbon	72	85	18%
The Balvenie	William Grant & Sons USA	Single-Malt	50	55	10%
Glenmorangie	Moet-Hennessy USA	Single-Malt	43	52	21%
Power's	Pernod Ricard USA	Irish	32	35	9%
Total Top Ten			2,462	3,008	22%
*based on 2009-2010 percent change, but ranked by 2010 depletions (25,000 cases minimum) Source: IMPACT DATABANK