Tag Archives: hybrid

Bright Automotive can’t get federal loan after four year wait, folds

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 Michael Giberson

In other transportation alternatives news, Bright Automotive is folding after spending $15 over four years in an effort to secure a $450 million low-interest loan from the U.S. Department of Energy through the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program.

The Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program was created in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. The law passed in December, and a month later the company was formed. According to the company website:

In January 2008, Bright Automotive launched from Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) with the goal of building on the work of a consortium of organizations to map an automotive solution to tackle the challenges of our economy, air pollution and diminishing oil supplies.

Enter: Bright Automotive

We are an American company comprised of automotive entrepreneurs, including some of the most experienced hybrid-electric vehicle and battery pack engineers in the industry. We created in less than 12 months what some automotive companies take years to achieve: an all-new, efficient, plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that customers want to buy and can afford.

It is efficient, customers want to buy it, customers can afford it, so what could possibly go wrong? This, from news reports:

After failing to secure a federal loan to finance its operation and production costs to build a hybrid delivery vehicle, Bright Automotive said Tuesday that it will cease operations….

“Bright has not been explicitly rejected by the DOE; rather we have been forced to say ‘uncle.’ As a result, we are winding down our operations,” Bright CEO Reuban Munger and Chief Operating Officer Mike Donoughe said in a scathing letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

The company spent three years and $15 million negotiating with the DOE for the loan, said Michael Brylawski, vice president of corporate strategy. Each time the company submitted a proposal, he said, the government responded with more onerous requirements. [...]

“Last week, we received the fourth ‘near final’ Conditional Commitment Letter since September 2010. Each new letter arrived with more onerous terms than the last,” Munger and Donoughe wrote. “The first three were workable for us, but the last was so outlandish that the most rational and objective persons would likely conclude that your team was negotiating in bad faith.” [...]

In November 2010, Bright officials announced the opening of a research plant in Rochester Hills and, a year later, a production facility in Mishawaka.

Neither choice was in Bright’s original loan application, Brylawski said. The company’s original plan was to locate all its facilities at the Flagship Business Center.

“We were told by the DOE in August 2010 that Bright would get the ATVM loan ‘within weeks, not months’ after we formed a strategic partnership with General Motors (Corp.) as the DOE had urged us to do,” the two executives wrote.

“We lined up and agreed to private capital commitments exceeding $200 million — a far greater percentage than previous DOE loan applicants. Finally, we signed definitive agreements with state-of-the-art manufacturer AM General that would have employed more than 400 union workers in a facility that recently laid-off 350 workers.”

And then the company waited.

“We continued to play by the rules, even as you and your team were changing those rules constantly — seemingly on a whim,” the letter said.

Obviously the “efficient,”  ”customers want to buy it,” and “customers can afford it” claims stretched the truth just a bit, else sometime in the last four years they would have found a willing investor. Instead, the project lived on dreams of a federal loan and died when the company woke up to reality.

Jaguar proposes a luxury turbine hybrid vehicle

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Lynne Kiesling

Yes, you saw that correctly, a turbine. According to Wired:

Jaguar Land Rover is working on the car with British gas turbine manufacturer Bladon Jets and electric motor manufacturer SR Drives. The Technology Strategy Board, which funds business development in the U.K., is underwriting the first serious attempt at a turbine car since Volvo built the Hybrid Environmental Concept in 1993. The goal, according to Bladon, is the “world’s first commercially viable – and environmentally friendly – gas turbine generator designed specifically for automotive applications.”

… But the Jag — like the Volvo — would use a miniature gas turbine only to generate juice for the electric motor. Bladon says its axial flow turbines are small, lightweight and run on anything from natural gas to biofuel. That, it says, makes them a great alternative to the conventional engines used in range-extended hybrids like the Chevrolet Volt.

That’s pretty cool! Previous turbine vehicles didn’t make it because they were noisy, so it will be interesting to see if this venture fares any better.

And I love that one of the commenters on the post told one of my favorite jokes:

Q: Why is it the British don’t make computers?

A: Because they haven’t found a way to make them leak oil yet.

When I was a kid my dad had a 1967 Jaguar XKE (burgundy, with black leather seats). I think it spent more time in the shop than on the road, but it was a gorgeous car.

Will V2G prove profitable to PHEV owners?

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Michael Giberson

When I read someone suggesting that “vehicle-to-grid” (V2G) operations will make money for owners of plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEV), I wonder how carefully they’ve thought through all the implications.*  The analyst might assume a particular battery technology and characteristics, for example, and then run a simulation against market data to see how much value can be produced in energy arbitrage.

V2G energy arbitrage requires a real-time rate (or at least a variable rate of some sort), and the profit depends on the round-trip efficiency of the battery system and the difference in peak and off-peak prices.  In the simplest case, the consumer uses the stored power to offset her own consumption at peak and isn’t selling power back to the grid (avoiding the related transaction costs).

I see two related problems with the modeling approach.  First, it may be reasonable to assume historic differences between peak and off-peak prices if few PHEV will engage in arbitrage, but even modest penetration of the market will add enough storage capability to start equalizing prices.  The more dramatic peak locational prices are driven by transmission constraints and the cost of starting up high-cost peak power plants, and it just wouldn’t take much in the way of PHEV storage to reduce or avoid many transmission constraints.   A good estimation should include consideration of the elasticity of supply and demand in order to assess the degree to which arbitrage will tend to reduce arbitrage opportunities.

Second, when battery technology advances sufficient to make PHEV economical, won’t have battery technology also have advanced enough to make grid-dedicated battery storage applications economical too?  A PHEV battery will be optimized for vehicle operations, with energy arbitrage sort of an afterthought, while grid-dedicated batteries will obviously be optimized for providing grid services.  And PHEV technology is the much harder problem because of the size and weight constraints.  By comparison, grid-dedicated energy story is easy.  Is it likely that V2G can out-arbitrage grid dedicated devices?

(Yes, V2G-based arbitrage has one big advantage if you assume that the cost of the energy storage device is fully justified by transportation, and is in effect freely available while parked to engage in some energy day-trading.  Maybe this consideration saves V2G.  But dedicated grid-storage devices are available 24/7, while PHEV will have competing uses.)

Some V2G analysis also proposes that PHEV supply high value grid services like reserves, frequency control, voltage support, and so on.  I think the same considerations apply. If there are thousands of little PHEV energy storage devices connected to the grid supplying these services at very little additional cost to the owners, then the price will fall.  If PHEV devices can provide these services at low cost, then dedicated grid-connected devices should be cheaper.

In short, some of these PHEV V2G value calculations are at best numbers for the early movers.  Once everybody is doing it, it won’t pay to do it anymore.

*Of course I could actually read the more serious reports on V2G** and see for myself how carefully they’ve thought through all the implications, but it is late Friday afternoon and with classes beginning next week I have a million other things to do.

**Actually, I was just reading a new working paper from the CMU Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, but since the paper was prominently stamped “DRAFT: Do Not Cite Or Quote” on every page, I am not citing or quoting it.  Technically speaking, it doesn’t say “Do Not Link To The Abstract.”

Plug-in hybrid vehicles and the New York electric power system

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Michael Giberson

The New York Independent System Operator – the folks the manage the electric power transmission system in the state – has released a report on the potential effects of plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEV) on New York power systems  operations.  Given the very early stage of technology development – if there are any PHEV’s in the state now they are likely experimental research vehicles or hobbyist homebrews – a lot of the report comes down to saying “it depends on how things eventually work out.”

From the point of view of the power system, the most important issues concern how and where and when the vehicles recharge. As the report points out, consumer recharging choices will be significantly affected by retail rate designs. A flat rate means that consumers will not be dissuaded from adding to overall electric load at peak times, when the transmission system is congested and high-cost generation units must run to keep the system operating. Time-of-use rates or market-driven prices will encourage consumers to shift charging to off-peak periods.

The flat rate scenario will require additional investment in electric generation, transmission and distribution systems, while the more reasonable pricing systems may allow the power system to accomodate significant numbers of PHEV with little or no additional investment in supply-side capacity.

It should go without saying that smart grid systems (devices and commercial practices) could play a critical role in getting the most consumer value out of a PHEV.

The NYISO report draws from three much more detailed technology analyses, one by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, another by the Electric Power Research Institute  and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the third by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and several other studies. Despite the tentative nature of the NYISO report, it provides a concise, readable introduction to the issues addressed at more length in the technical studies.  In addition, the NYISO report includes an extensive bibliography.

Not a bad place to start if you are interested in understanding these issues.

RELATED: EPRI and PJM conducted a “PHEV Summit” in January of this year, exploring these same issues.