Chevrolet believes it has a way to load a lithium-ion battery with renewable energy. The question, though, is whether the automaker's new technique, or any similar method, will produce meaningful results.
Last week, Chevy announced that it was teaming with GM's OnStar subsidiary and with PJM Interconnection LLC to create a service that would manage the Volt's recharging, depending on how much renewable energy is available on the grid. In the service, which hasn't been officially introduced, OnStar would grab PJM's renewable energy forecast off the OnStar cloud and use it to direct the car's recharging process.
The biggest question surrounding Chevy's plan to load lithium-ion batteries with renewable electrons is whether the plan is meaningful. Shown here is the 2012 Chevy Volt.
(Source: Chevy)
"Owners wouldn't have to do anything," OnStar spokesman Adam Dennison told us. "They would just get a notification, either through a mobile app or through email, saying that the renewable energy is now available."
Because the service is sure to have great appeal to environmentally conscious consumers, it's likely that other automakers will follow suit. Still, there's that big question: Is it meaningful?
To better understand the app, it's best to look at PJM's Renewable Energy Dashboard. The company, which manages electric power systems serving 60 million people in 13 states and the District of Columbia, offers an up-to-the-minute wind power graph on its Web-based "dashboard." Using data from the graph, the OnStar app would decide when renewable energy is plentiful, and then it would direct the recharging process.
But in today's fossil-fuel-heavy energy diet, renewable energy is rarely plentiful. As this article was being written, PJM's wind power graph showed about 500MW of availability -- a paltry sum compared to the total demand.
"You'd expect our peak demand to be about 100,000MW on a day like this," PJM spokesman Ray Dotter told us on Jan. 26. That means the PJM wind power figure represents significantly less than 1 percent of the peak demand.
At the Electric Power Research Institute, the news wasn't much better. Engineer Revis James said that between 5 percent and 7 percent of our national energy is renewable. "Even if it's fluctuating around 5 percent, it means that the other 95 percent is going to be nuclear, coal, and natural gas, depending on where you are."
You've got the right idea, William. But you can't spray paint electrons, as it might be a questionable environmental practice. It would be better, environmentally speaking, to put little hats on them.
No, you're not off base here, Alex. This is essentially a marketing effort. I think it's really targeted at those who want to feel that they're not using coal to power their Volt. They hope they're using renewables. But it's impossible to know where your particular energy is coming from and the chances that it's coming from renewables is very, very slim today.
I agree with Beth's first comment. Obviously we're not "there" yet, whether "there" means having enough energy in the smart grid to power up our electric cars, replacing all petro-based plastics with bio-based ones, recycling all plastics, or making all plastic items only out of recycled plastics (note those last two are not the same thing). But if we don't start we'll never get there, either. Many European countries, as well as Japan, started tackling some of these issues 20 years ago (*only* 20 years after the first Earth Day) and they are much more advanced than anything we've got going in the US after 40 years of dithering or ignoring the problems instead of working on their possible solutions.
I would have to agree with you, Alex. I interpreted it as a fancy way of referring to the smart grid which we hear so much about, and more about apps that allow you tap into on-demand energy capabilities, not any real engineering innovation that had any to do with physical electrons.
For me this begs the question as to what's the definition and/or usage of the term "Renewable Electrons." Looking at it in an engineer sense, I would say that this is really a marketing term that refers to power sourced in a certain way --i.e., excess energy available from the grid, incrementally cost essentially zero (other than the adjudication of the delivery via apps, Onstar etc.) because on a pure technical basis the term doesn't on the face of it make any sense. Am I off base here?
So I'm guessing that Renewable Energy generators will voluntarily spray paint their electrons blue while there will be additional regulations passed requiring dirty (Natural gas, Coal, Nuclear) Energy generators to paint their electrons red. And then the lithium-ion recharging station will preferentially utilize the "good" electrons according to color?
I think this is a very interesting development, whether or not it ever bears fruit today or takes a while to do so. One of the things well noted at the end of Chuck's piece by Dotter is "this is just the beginning." The only way we are ever going to see any sustainable innovation around renewable energy and EV battery development is to try things out, refine them, work out the bugs, throw out what doesn't work, and move on to the next development.
Not everything will work, not everything will stick. But each little move is progress. So with that in mind, I think this is a great development, even if it just inches us a tiny bit closer down the path to harvesting renewable energy. Also a great example of the intersection of automotive technology and mainstream IT technology, but that's fodder for another comment!!
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