Electric Vehicle Infrastructure: What’s It Going to Take to Go Electric?

Presented by: MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB)

Moderator: Wendy Tanaka, Forbes Senior Technology Writer

Speaker: Richard Lowenthal, Founder and CEO, Coulomb Technologies

Panelists:

• Gerd Goette, Managing Partner, Siemens Ventures
• Bryon Shaw, Managing Director, General Motors Advanced Technology Silicon Valley
• Jason Wolf, Business Development, Better Place, North America

Blog Tag: VLABNOV08

Public Charging Infrastructure

Richard Lowenthal, CEO, Coulomb Technology

• Toyota plug-in Prius coming 2009
• 247 million cars, 53 million garages
• Coulomb sets up charging stations for people that can’t charge at home
• Smart charging network provides opportunity to collect tax for road infrastructure
• 80% of revenue returned to business owner
• Charging stations networked which provides:
  • Method to pay
  • Value proposition for someone buying a station
  • Grid load management
  • Ability to find available stations
  • Remote maintenance
• In the US, 240 volt cords must be attached to the station by law
• Charging points needed:
  • Morgan Stanley: 2009-0, 2010-5,000, 2011-30,000,2012-100,00
  • TAM stations needed about 1 to 1 at first
  • Long term probably needs 1.8 or 2.5 stations per car
• Deployment in San Jose starts next month
• Austin has a policy that every other new parking space is wired for EVs
• Costs 5 times more to install charging station later without electricity, but can piggyback onto light poles
• Chicken-and-egg problem: people in apartments won’t buy electric car
• EV interest proceeded through: 1) Global warming, 2) price of gas, 3) national security
• They use GPRS and GSM networks for communication
• Usually have one cord per charging station, in San Jose has 4 connections per pole, some parking spaces have 2 connections and the station between stations

Better Place

Jason Wolf

• Converting private transportation from oil to electricity will save 20% of CO2 emissions at a cost of $350 ton/CO2 (?)
• $20 billion of health care costs due to pollution
• What is unique about Better Place?
  • Separate economic of car from battery
  • Solve range by implementing charge spots and battery exchange stations
  • Accelerate market for renewable energy
• Logo: Planet-People-Prosperity-Plug
• Launched, in Israel, Denmark, Melbourne
• Israel
  • High price of petrol
  • Total cars 2 million, new cars 200k per year
  • Transportation island
  • Sign up for a long term contract at $9 per gallon, they might give you the car
• Denmark
  • There is a 180% duty on cars so a $20k car costs almost $60
  • But EVs won’t have a duty
• California
  • 2020 deployment
  • 5 million cars
  • 400,000 new cars per year
  • 1 million drive over 15k miles per year
  • 30% of the drivers are burning 60% of the gas
  • Only 2 or 3% of people would drive more than 120 miles more than 10 times a year
• Idea is to keep people’s social contract with their car
• Battery range is 100 miles
• Will need to stock several different battery sizes for different cars, like SUVs, small cars, etc
• Their solution based on existing technology
• Ford would get $10 billion a year if they got $0.01 per mile for their cars driven

Panel Discussion

Obstacles to building charging stations?

• Richard: Chicken and egg problem
• Byron: Have to deal with lots of municipalities, over 2000 across the US
• Gerd: Need infrastructure that will cost in billions or trillions, this includes charging stations as well as power grid
  • Gerd: In Germany, if all 45 million cars were plugged in, it would need an addition more than the whole grid can supply
  • Richard: In CA, there is plenty of extra electricity at night
• Jason: Better Place solving this by providing both the EV and charging/swapping stations and building incrementally

Random questions:

• Richard: Coulomb makes charging stations a profit center so lots of businesses will participate
• Richard: Selling regulations services might be a way to get started but they don’t want to rely on it for their business model
• Richard: Coulomb and Better Place ready for smart grid
• Jason: Lithium supply should exceed what is needed for the next 10 years
• Jason: Both utilities and auto companies would like to own the charging market, but it is unlikely
• Byron: GM’s OnStar service will know the state of charge and communicate that to the network
• Byron: GM’s focus now is on efficiency and don’t care if it comes from EVs, advanced diesel, fuel cell
• Jason: Largest oil refiner in Israel and largest utility in Denmark are big investors. Would like oil companies to also take part
• Richard: Two gas pump suppliers are now calling themselves “fuel suppliers” and carrying Coulomb charging stations

Battery standardization?

• Byron: It is difficult to standardize on batteries
• Richard: It is bad to go from dependence on foreign oil to dependence on foreign batteries, so we need to figure out how to make them here