This is part two of a blog I began http://www.dailykos.com/... because I was incensed by the report published by the National Academies Press titled Transitions to Alternative Transportation Technologies--Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles and created by the Committee on Assessment of Resource Needs for Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Technologies, National Research Council (NRC). http://books.nap.edu/... The report was highly inaccurate in its assessment of battery pricing and technology. Part II focuses on the rest of the report which deals with electric power infrastructure issues. The only fault I could come up with was taken from the quote below.
"Drivers paying a constant rate per kilowatt-hour of electricity are likely to charge their vehicles whenever they have convenient access to an electric outlet, potentially increasing electricity demand during peak hours. Smart meters with time-of use pricing would be one way of encouraging drivers to delay charging until electricity demand is lower."
Overall what the NRC report had to say about infrastructure was positive. However, the only caution they offer is that because of constant rate per kilowatt-hour charging they believe that EV owners would charge anytime they have access to an outlet. I have heard this argument before, but it seems illogical to me. To try to bring the parallel in gasoline, what the report puts forward would be the equivalent of a gasoline car owner stopping at every gasoline station every time they pass one. The reason we see this scenario as absurd is because there isn’t any need to do that since there typically is range left in the car’s gasoline tank. When you are running out of gas and there isn’t the range in the gasoline tank is when you "plug-in" to a gasoline station. Why then would it be necessary for an electric vehicle that still has plenty of range in its "tank" to do that? Especially since electric cars have access to charging at night and when you think of it, an electric car owner wakes up to a "full tank of gas" every morning. A convenience that isn’t available to the gasoline car. Since typically people don’t use their personal vehicles more than 40 miles a day, there isn’t any need to charge during the day if an electric car has a range of 40 miles or more.
Let me bring in some outside sources to understand the nature of the real problem and when it might occur instead of using blanket, unsupported statements which I found in the report.
In the graphs above I compare a study done by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) on how Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEV) will charge and a typical example of pricing based on use put forward by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The only place where these two graphs indicate that there will be an increase in energy output that might extend the peak production of a power plant (not overwhelm it) is between the hours of 9 pm and 10 pm at night. The NRDC graph also indicates that less than 10% of a plug-in vehicle’s charging would take place during that time so the impact per vehicle would be less than 2 kilowatts for a full electric vehicle with a 14 kwh battery pack and less than one kilowatt for a PHEV. Basically what it says is that the impact won’t overwhelm the power grid or a particular power plant to have these vehicles charging up even at the hour where there is a convergence in the graphs.
In the end this report is simply not of value for law makers, business people and citizens a like who are trying to understand the impact of electric and plug-in vehicles on the use of petroleum and the environment. It, for some reason, is highly biased towards the status quo, however, the report also attempts to weave in hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles as part of their conclusion, which frankly doesn’t make any sense since fuel-cells weren’t ever fully brought into the argument of the report. The report in essence attempts to say that we should stay doing what we are doing only work on fuel efficiency, which is in itself a misunderstanding between efficiency versus displacement, and if we can’t do that we should do fuel-cells. If fuel-cells were fully scrutinized in this report, I doubt that this report could ever come close to endorsing it over electric vehicles. If the report weren’t incorrect on battery technology fuel-cell vehicles would appear even more unlikely a technology when compared to plug-in vehicles. This report was simply too biased and too poorly argued to be worth the stamp of approval of the NRC. It is also so inaccurate that it should not be listed under the National Academy of Science Press catalog, which gives it an air of scientific legitimacy when nothing in this report seems to be based on real science.
**************
If you read the report and feel as I do that it does not rise to the standard of the NRC, please send an Email and ask them to withdraw the report and redo the research with another unbiased group. You can use the Email below as a model and send it to the email address below. Thank you.
To: Dr. Ralph J. Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Sciences and Chair of the National Research Council,
Dear Dr. Cicerone,
The report titled Transitions to Alternative Transportation Technologies--Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles created by the Committee on Assessment of Resource Needs for Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Technologies does not rise to the usual level of quality of National Research Council reports. There are some large gaps in research. One example is that the cost of batteries reported was overstated. A simple search of the Internet shows the retail price of Lithium batteries to be a third the cost quoted in the report. The report must have missed that prices of large size Lithium batteries have dropped at a faster rate then the committee anticipated. It seems that the report has missed some important details in its research. For the reputation of the NRC to be preserved it may be best if it were withdrawn until a new more accurate report can be fully researched and published.
naspresident@nas.edu