August 19, 2009, 3:14 pm
Where Recycling Plastic Bags Is Mandatory
By Kate Galbraith
Earlier today I posted about how, despite Seattle voters’ rejection of a 20-cent tax on plastic and paper bags, the bag wars are likely to continue.
After publication, the American Chemistry Council (which represents plastic bag makers and bankrolled the successful Seattle opposition) sent me an e-mail message with some data I had requested about which localities have enacted mandatory bag recycling legislation.
Delaware’s governor signed legislation this week requiring plastic bag recycling in the state (meaning that large stores must have bag recycling stations). Similar legislation has passed in California (2006), New York (2008) and Rhode Island (2008).
Several cities have also adopted mandatory bag recycling policies: Tuscon, Chicago, Red Bank, N.J., and San Juan Capistrano, Calif. (New York City and several counties in New York state also moved last year to require bag recycling, but this has now been preempted by statewide rules.)
The group also provided a list of places where plastic bag feesbans or taxes have been enacted:
1. San Francisco, Calif., bag ban (2007)
2. Malibu, Calif. (2008)
3. Maui County, Hawaii (2008)
4. Westport, Conn. (2008)
5. Fairfax, Calif. (2008)
6. Palo Alto, Calif. (2009)
7. North Carolina Outer Banks (Currituck, Dare and Hyde Counties) (2009)
8. Edmonds, Wash. (2009)
9. Bethel, Alaska (2009)
10. District of Columbia (2009)
As for the Seattle vote, “most Seattle residents already reuse plastic bags, and many also are aware that they can recycle them,” said Steve Russell, a vice president of plastics for the American Chemistry Council, in a statement.
Comment
Seattle voters are pretty sophisticated and aware so maybe they rebelled against the 20 cents as an involuntary tax that would hurt poor people. Its very possible they would be more amenable to a five cent recycle fee. If the 20-cent tax was meant to discourage plastic bags altogether, and encourage reusable bags, it didnt work.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Nudging Recycling From Less Waste to None
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
Sara Marshall peers into a drop-off point for recycling in Nantucket. The town is a leader in "zero waste."
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Published: October 19, 2009
At Yellowstone National Park, the clear soda cups and white utensils are not your typical cafe-counter garbage. Made of plant-based plastics, they dissolve magically when heated for more than a few minutes.
Brimming Landfills
At Ecco, a popular restaurant in Atlanta, waiters no longer scrape food scraps into the trash bin. Uneaten morsels are dumped into five-gallon pails and taken to a compost heap out back.
And at eight of its North American plants, Honda is recycling so diligently that the factories have gotten rid of their trash Dumpsters altogether.
Across the nation, an antigarbage strategy known as “zero waste” is moving from the fringes to the mainstream, taking hold in school cafeterias, national parks, restaurants, stadiums and corporations.
The movement is simple in concept if not always in execution: Produce less waste. Shun polystyrene foam containers or any other packaging that is not biodegradable. Recycle or compost whatever you can.
Though born of idealism, the zero-waste philosophy is now propelled by sobering realities, like the growing difficulty of securing permits for new landfills and an awareness that organic decay in landfills releases methane that helps warm the earth’s atmosphere.
“Nobody wants a landfill sited anywhere near them, including in rural areas,” said Jon D. Johnston, a materials management branch chief for the Environmental Protection Agency who is helping to lead the zero-waste movement in the Southeast. “We’ve come to this realization that landfill is valuable and we can’t bury things that don’t need to be buried.”
Americans are still the undisputed champions of trash, dumping 4.6 pounds per person per day, according to the E.P.A.’s most recent figures. More than half of that ends up in landfills or is incinerated.
But places like the island resort community of Nantucket offer a glimpse of the future. Running out of landfill space and worried about the cost of shipping trash 30 miles to the mainland, it moved to a strict trash policy more than a decade ago, said Jeffrey Willett, director of public works on the island.
The town, with the blessing of residents concerned about tax increases, mandates the recycling not only of commonly reprocessed items like aluminum, glass and paper but also of tires, batteries and household appliances.
Jim Lentowski, executive director of the nonprofit Nantucket Conservation Foundation and a year-round resident since 1971, said that sorting trash and delivering it to the local recycling and disposal complex had become a matter of course for most residents.
The complex also has a garagelike structure where residents can drop off books and clothing and other reusable items for others to take home.
The 100-car parking lot at the landfill is a lively meeting place for locals, Mr. Lentowski added. “Saturday morning during election season, politicians hang out there and hand out campaign buttons,” he said. “If you want to get a pulse on the community, that is a great spot to go.”
Mr. Willett said that while the amount of trash that island residents carted to the dump had remained steady, the proportion going into the landfill had plummeted to 8 percent.
By contrast, Massachusetts residents as a whole send an average of 66 percent of their trash to a landfill or incinerator. Although Mr. Willett has lectured about the Nantucket model around the country, most communities still lack the infrastructure to set a zero-waste target.
Aside from the difficulty of persuading residents and businesses to divide their trash, many towns and municipalities have been unwilling to make the significant capital investments in machines like composters that can process food and yard waste. Yet attitudes are shifting, and cities like San Francisco and Seattle are at the forefront of the changeover. Both of those cities have adopted plans for a shift to zero-waste practices and are collecting organic waste curbside in residential areas for composting.
Food waste, which the E.P.A. says accounts for about 13 percent of total trash nationally — and much more when recyclables are factored out of the total — is viewed as the next big frontier.
When apple cores, stale bread and last week’s leftovers go to landfills, they do not return the nutrients they pulled from the soil while growing. What is more, when sealed in landfills without oxygen, organic materials release methane, a potent heat-trapping gas, as they decompose. If composted, however, the food can be broken down and returned to the earth as a nonchemical fertilizer with no methane by-product.
Green Foodservice Alliance, a division of the Georgia Restaurant Association, has been adding restaurants throughout Atlanta and its suburbs to its so-called zero-waste zones. And companies are springing up to meet the growth in demand from restaurants for recycling and compost haulers.
Steve Simon, a partner in Fifth Group, a company that owns Ecco and four other restaurants in the Atlanta area, said that the hardest part of participating in the alliance’s zero-waste-zone program was not training his staff but finding reliable haulers.
“There are now two in town, and neither is a year old, so it is a very tentative situation,” Mr. Simon said.
Still, he said he had little doubt that the hauling sector would grow and that all five of the restaurants would eventually be waste-free.
Packaging is also quickly evolving as part of the zero-waste movement. Bioplastics like the forks at Yellowstone, made from plant materials like cornstarch that mimic plastic, are used to manufacture a growing number of items that are compostable.
Steve Mojo, executive director of the Biodegradable Products Institute, a nonprofit organization that certifies such products, said that the number of companies making compostable products for food service providers had doubled since 2006 and that many had moved on to items like shopping bags and food packaging.
The transition to zero waste, however, has its pitfalls.
Josephine Miller, an environmental official for the city of Santa Monica, Calif., which bans the use of polystyrene foam containers, said that some citizens had unwittingly put the plant-based alternatives into cans for recycling, where they had melted and had gummed up the works. Yellowstone and some institutions have asked manufacturers to mark some biodegradable items with a brown or green stripe.
Yet even with these clearer design cues, customers will have to be taught to think about the destination of every throwaway if the zero-waste philosophy is to prevail, environmental officials say.
“Technology exists, but a lot of education still needs to be done,” said Mr. Johnston of the E.P.A.
He expects private companies and businesses to move faster than private citizens because momentum can be driven by one person at the top.
“It will take a lot longer to get average Americans to compost,” Mr. Johnston said. “Reaching down to my household and yours is the greatest challenge.”
Sara Marshall peers into a drop-off point for recycling in Nantucket. The town is a leader in "zero waste."
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Published: October 19, 2009
At Yellowstone National Park, the clear soda cups and white utensils are not your typical cafe-counter garbage. Made of plant-based plastics, they dissolve magically when heated for more than a few minutes.
Brimming Landfills
At Ecco, a popular restaurant in Atlanta, waiters no longer scrape food scraps into the trash bin. Uneaten morsels are dumped into five-gallon pails and taken to a compost heap out back.
And at eight of its North American plants, Honda is recycling so diligently that the factories have gotten rid of their trash Dumpsters altogether.
Across the nation, an antigarbage strategy known as “zero waste” is moving from the fringes to the mainstream, taking hold in school cafeterias, national parks, restaurants, stadiums and corporations.
The movement is simple in concept if not always in execution: Produce less waste. Shun polystyrene foam containers or any other packaging that is not biodegradable. Recycle or compost whatever you can.
Though born of idealism, the zero-waste philosophy is now propelled by sobering realities, like the growing difficulty of securing permits for new landfills and an awareness that organic decay in landfills releases methane that helps warm the earth’s atmosphere.
“Nobody wants a landfill sited anywhere near them, including in rural areas,” said Jon D. Johnston, a materials management branch chief for the Environmental Protection Agency who is helping to lead the zero-waste movement in the Southeast. “We’ve come to this realization that landfill is valuable and we can’t bury things that don’t need to be buried.”
Americans are still the undisputed champions of trash, dumping 4.6 pounds per person per day, according to the E.P.A.’s most recent figures. More than half of that ends up in landfills or is incinerated.
But places like the island resort community of Nantucket offer a glimpse of the future. Running out of landfill space and worried about the cost of shipping trash 30 miles to the mainland, it moved to a strict trash policy more than a decade ago, said Jeffrey Willett, director of public works on the island.
The town, with the blessing of residents concerned about tax increases, mandates the recycling not only of commonly reprocessed items like aluminum, glass and paper but also of tires, batteries and household appliances.
Jim Lentowski, executive director of the nonprofit Nantucket Conservation Foundation and a year-round resident since 1971, said that sorting trash and delivering it to the local recycling and disposal complex had become a matter of course for most residents.
The complex also has a garagelike structure where residents can drop off books and clothing and other reusable items for others to take home.
The 100-car parking lot at the landfill is a lively meeting place for locals, Mr. Lentowski added. “Saturday morning during election season, politicians hang out there and hand out campaign buttons,” he said. “If you want to get a pulse on the community, that is a great spot to go.”
Mr. Willett said that while the amount of trash that island residents carted to the dump had remained steady, the proportion going into the landfill had plummeted to 8 percent.
By contrast, Massachusetts residents as a whole send an average of 66 percent of their trash to a landfill or incinerator. Although Mr. Willett has lectured about the Nantucket model around the country, most communities still lack the infrastructure to set a zero-waste target.
Aside from the difficulty of persuading residents and businesses to divide their trash, many towns and municipalities have been unwilling to make the significant capital investments in machines like composters that can process food and yard waste. Yet attitudes are shifting, and cities like San Francisco and Seattle are at the forefront of the changeover. Both of those cities have adopted plans for a shift to zero-waste practices and are collecting organic waste curbside in residential areas for composting.
Food waste, which the E.P.A. says accounts for about 13 percent of total trash nationally — and much more when recyclables are factored out of the total — is viewed as the next big frontier.
When apple cores, stale bread and last week’s leftovers go to landfills, they do not return the nutrients they pulled from the soil while growing. What is more, when sealed in landfills without oxygen, organic materials release methane, a potent heat-trapping gas, as they decompose. If composted, however, the food can be broken down and returned to the earth as a nonchemical fertilizer with no methane by-product.
Green Foodservice Alliance, a division of the Georgia Restaurant Association, has been adding restaurants throughout Atlanta and its suburbs to its so-called zero-waste zones. And companies are springing up to meet the growth in demand from restaurants for recycling and compost haulers.
Steve Simon, a partner in Fifth Group, a company that owns Ecco and four other restaurants in the Atlanta area, said that the hardest part of participating in the alliance’s zero-waste-zone program was not training his staff but finding reliable haulers.
“There are now two in town, and neither is a year old, so it is a very tentative situation,” Mr. Simon said.
Still, he said he had little doubt that the hauling sector would grow and that all five of the restaurants would eventually be waste-free.
Packaging is also quickly evolving as part of the zero-waste movement. Bioplastics like the forks at Yellowstone, made from plant materials like cornstarch that mimic plastic, are used to manufacture a growing number of items that are compostable.
Steve Mojo, executive director of the Biodegradable Products Institute, a nonprofit organization that certifies such products, said that the number of companies making compostable products for food service providers had doubled since 2006 and that many had moved on to items like shopping bags and food packaging.
The transition to zero waste, however, has its pitfalls.
Josephine Miller, an environmental official for the city of Santa Monica, Calif., which bans the use of polystyrene foam containers, said that some citizens had unwittingly put the plant-based alternatives into cans for recycling, where they had melted and had gummed up the works. Yellowstone and some institutions have asked manufacturers to mark some biodegradable items with a brown or green stripe.
Yet even with these clearer design cues, customers will have to be taught to think about the destination of every throwaway if the zero-waste philosophy is to prevail, environmental officials say.
“Technology exists, but a lot of education still needs to be done,” said Mr. Johnston of the E.P.A.
He expects private companies and businesses to move faster than private citizens because momentum can be driven by one person at the top.
“It will take a lot longer to get average Americans to compost,” Mr. Johnston said. “Reaching down to my household and yours is the greatest challenge.”
Energy Awareness Month
Three easy ideas to save energy and money, while helping the planet, too
October is Energy Awareness Month: an opportunity to discover new energy-saving ideas or put into practice what you may already know about saving energy, but haven't had the chance to implement. Here are three low-cost, high-impact solutions that will help you trim cooling and heating electricity costs and SAVE as much as 75 percent on the electricity your business uses for lighting.
Make the switch to compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and save over $30 for each light you change
Consider changing incandescent lights with Energy Star qualified compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), where appropriate. An ENERGY STAR qualified CFL will save about $30 over its lifetime and pay for itself in about 6 months. It uses 75 percent less energy and lasts about 10 times longer than an incandescent bulb. Choose the lighting that's right for your business and learn where to buy them.
If each person in America replaced just one incandescent light bulb with an ENERGY STAR qualified CFL, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes and help the planet by preventing greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to that of 800,000 cars.
If CFLs are not right for your business, you may also consider upgrading to T-8 (1" diameter) fluorescent lamp tubes with solid-state electronic ballasts that are more energy-efficient than older T-12 (1.5" diameter) tubes with magnetic ballasts.
Save 20 to 75 percent on the energy used for lighting by installing occupancy sensors. Lighting can account for 20 to 50 percent of your business electricity consumption. One way to reduce lighting costs is to install occupancy sensors in areas such as: break rooms, conference areas, private offices, corridors, storage areas and bathrooms. Occupancy sensors automatically turn off lighting when employees depart and back on when they return.
Occupancy sensors can save 20 to 75 percent on lighting energy usage depending on the space, cost approximately $50 to $150 and generally pay for themselves within two to three years. Saving energy by using occupancy sensors also helps to reduce carbon emissions, which is good for the planet.
When choosing an occupancy sensor for your business, there are three types to consider. Infrared sensors detect temperature changes in a room, and work well where the entire room is within the sensor's field of view. Ultrasonic sensors use high frequency sound to detect motion (even around corners). Dual-technology sensors use both methods, increasing accuracy and flexibility, but at a higher price. An Electrical contractor that specializes in business lighting can help you choose the option that's right for your business.
Give your heating and cooling system a tune-up and save up to $60 per year
Before the weather gets cooler, it's a good time to think about making an appointment for routine maintenance with a contractor that specializes in Heating, Ventilating and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems. An HVAC system, like a new car, will decline in performance without regular maintenance. Just as a tune-up for your car can improve your gas mileage, a yearly tune-up of your heating and cooling system can improve the energy efficiency of your equipment and comfort of your facilities – saving you money on your electric bills, while helping to reduce carbon emissions.
An easy thing you can do to keep your HVAC system running optimally is to change the filter monthly (or clean it if it's reusable), especially during heavy use (winter and summer). A dirty filter can slow down airflow and make the system work harder to keep your customers and employees warm or cool — wasting energy. Each dirty heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning filter can cost your business up to $5 per month in energy and may shorten the service life of your equipment, leading to expensive maintenance and/or early system failure.
Consider implementing one or more of these ideas to help you save energy and money, while doing your part to help the planet. Remember to get your employees involved, too. Hold regular conversations with your employees about energy conservation. Ask for their energy-saving ideas, provide training to eliminate energy waste and give awards to your most-committed employees.
To learn more tips to help your business, take FPL's FREE Online Business Energy Evaluation
October is Energy Awareness Month: an opportunity to discover new energy-saving ideas or put into practice what you may already know about saving energy, but haven't had the chance to implement. Here are three low-cost, high-impact solutions that will help you trim cooling and heating electricity costs and SAVE as much as 75 percent on the electricity your business uses for lighting.
Make the switch to compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and save over $30 for each light you change
Consider changing incandescent lights with Energy Star qualified compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), where appropriate. An ENERGY STAR qualified CFL will save about $30 over its lifetime and pay for itself in about 6 months. It uses 75 percent less energy and lasts about 10 times longer than an incandescent bulb. Choose the lighting that's right for your business and learn where to buy them.
If each person in America replaced just one incandescent light bulb with an ENERGY STAR qualified CFL, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes and help the planet by preventing greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to that of 800,000 cars.
If CFLs are not right for your business, you may also consider upgrading to T-8 (1" diameter) fluorescent lamp tubes with solid-state electronic ballasts that are more energy-efficient than older T-12 (1.5" diameter) tubes with magnetic ballasts.
Save 20 to 75 percent on the energy used for lighting by installing occupancy sensors. Lighting can account for 20 to 50 percent of your business electricity consumption. One way to reduce lighting costs is to install occupancy sensors in areas such as: break rooms, conference areas, private offices, corridors, storage areas and bathrooms. Occupancy sensors automatically turn off lighting when employees depart and back on when they return.
Occupancy sensors can save 20 to 75 percent on lighting energy usage depending on the space, cost approximately $50 to $150 and generally pay for themselves within two to three years. Saving energy by using occupancy sensors also helps to reduce carbon emissions, which is good for the planet.
When choosing an occupancy sensor for your business, there are three types to consider. Infrared sensors detect temperature changes in a room, and work well where the entire room is within the sensor's field of view. Ultrasonic sensors use high frequency sound to detect motion (even around corners). Dual-technology sensors use both methods, increasing accuracy and flexibility, but at a higher price. An Electrical contractor that specializes in business lighting can help you choose the option that's right for your business.
Give your heating and cooling system a tune-up and save up to $60 per year
Before the weather gets cooler, it's a good time to think about making an appointment for routine maintenance with a contractor that specializes in Heating, Ventilating and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems. An HVAC system, like a new car, will decline in performance without regular maintenance. Just as a tune-up for your car can improve your gas mileage, a yearly tune-up of your heating and cooling system can improve the energy efficiency of your equipment and comfort of your facilities – saving you money on your electric bills, while helping to reduce carbon emissions.
An easy thing you can do to keep your HVAC system running optimally is to change the filter monthly (or clean it if it's reusable), especially during heavy use (winter and summer). A dirty filter can slow down airflow and make the system work harder to keep your customers and employees warm or cool — wasting energy. Each dirty heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning filter can cost your business up to $5 per month in energy and may shorten the service life of your equipment, leading to expensive maintenance and/or early system failure.
Consider implementing one or more of these ideas to help you save energy and money, while doing your part to help the planet. Remember to get your employees involved, too. Hold regular conversations with your employees about energy conservation. Ask for their energy-saving ideas, provide training to eliminate energy waste and give awards to your most-committed employees.
To learn more tips to help your business, take FPL's FREE Online Business Energy Evaluation
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Government funds, VCs boost green-tech start-ups
October 29, 2009 8:54 AM PDT
by Martin LaMonica
Data on third-quarter venture capital shows that green-technology companies are attracting dollars from both investors and government programs.
Ernst & Young on Thursday said that venture investing in green tech rose 46 percent compared to the prior quarter to total $965 million in 50 deals. Solar, auto, green buildings, and biofuels continue to be fast-growing segments within the overall category, according to the Ernst & Young analysis of data from Dow Jones VentureSource.
The numbers show that companies shipping products are garnering more money and that a mix of investors, including private equity firms and corporations, are increasingly part of the picture. Because energy-related businesses are expensive to scale up, venture capital companies need to invest with large corporations, such as GE and Siemens, or late-stage equity companies.
Money from the federal government stimulus program is starting to be disbursed which is also aiding new green-tech companies. On Tuesday, the Department of Energy announced $3.4 billion worth of grants for smart-grid programs. The money is aimed primarily at utilities, but they then contract with smart-grid companies such as meter manufacturers or software providers which do in-home energy management systems.
Another large program is $2.4 billion in grants to promote plug-in electric-vehicle battery manufacturing. New Energy Finance estimates that $9.5 billion in stimulus money has been already spent and that government money will continue to enter the market for two more years.
These programs, including state-level efficiency mandates and ARPA-E research grants, add to the confidence in the overall market, according to Ernst and Young.
Investors and entrepreneurs are also keeping an eye on an energy and climate bill which is now being debated in Congress. One of the key pieces of the bill is a cap and trade system for regulating greenhouse gases. Under this system, large polluters, such as utilities, have a certain number of permits to emit carbon dioxide. To stay under a government-set cap, they can buy and trade these permits.
A survey by law firm Cooley Godward Kronish of green-tech executives found that 80 percent believe that cap and trade would help the U.S. economy. But investors and entrepreneurs are not expecting passage to affect business plans in the short term, according to the survey which was released on Tuesday
by Martin LaMonica
Data on third-quarter venture capital shows that green-technology companies are attracting dollars from both investors and government programs.
Ernst & Young on Thursday said that venture investing in green tech rose 46 percent compared to the prior quarter to total $965 million in 50 deals. Solar, auto, green buildings, and biofuels continue to be fast-growing segments within the overall category, according to the Ernst & Young analysis of data from Dow Jones VentureSource.
The numbers show that companies shipping products are garnering more money and that a mix of investors, including private equity firms and corporations, are increasingly part of the picture. Because energy-related businesses are expensive to scale up, venture capital companies need to invest with large corporations, such as GE and Siemens, or late-stage equity companies.
Money from the federal government stimulus program is starting to be disbursed which is also aiding new green-tech companies. On Tuesday, the Department of Energy announced $3.4 billion worth of grants for smart-grid programs. The money is aimed primarily at utilities, but they then contract with smart-grid companies such as meter manufacturers or software providers which do in-home energy management systems.
Another large program is $2.4 billion in grants to promote plug-in electric-vehicle battery manufacturing. New Energy Finance estimates that $9.5 billion in stimulus money has been already spent and that government money will continue to enter the market for two more years.
These programs, including state-level efficiency mandates and ARPA-E research grants, add to the confidence in the overall market, according to Ernst and Young.
Investors and entrepreneurs are also keeping an eye on an energy and climate bill which is now being debated in Congress. One of the key pieces of the bill is a cap and trade system for regulating greenhouse gases. Under this system, large polluters, such as utilities, have a certain number of permits to emit carbon dioxide. To stay under a government-set cap, they can buy and trade these permits.
A survey by law firm Cooley Godward Kronish of green-tech executives found that 80 percent believe that cap and trade would help the U.S. economy. But investors and entrepreneurs are not expecting passage to affect business plans in the short term, according to the survey which was released on Tuesday
Plug-in electric cars: New technology, familiar feel
October 29, 2009 4:00 AM PDT
by Martin LaMonica
In the past few weeks, I've had an opportunity to experience the cutting edge in plug-in electric vehicle technology. In some cases, you'd think you're just driving a regular car.
The bulk of production plug-in electric vehicles available now are either utility trucks, small cars that top out at 25 miles per hour, or the pricey Tesla Roadster sports car. Now automakers are building plug-in sedans and SUVs with lithium ion batteries designed for the mass market.
Judging from the cars I've driven, automakers are trying to strike a balance between enticing consumers with new technology but not asking them to make sacrifices. So even though electrification is shaking up the auto industry, the biggest learning curve for owners may be around fueling rather than driving. And if the goal is to make plug-ins mainstream, that's probably a good thing.
Consider the electric Ford Focus which is due out in 2011. It runs entirely on batteries for a range of about 100 miles and will be manufactured side-by-side with the gasoline edition.
During my drive two weeks ago, I was eager to feel the acceleration. Vehicles that run off electric motors have "instant torque," which means you get the car's top acceleration at all speeds. The Focus was indeed zippy and responsive, but when I asked if it was better than the gasoline Focus, Ford's director of global electrification Nancy Gioia told me that it'd be the same--on purpose.
Ford dialed back the potential acceleration of the electric Focus so drivers can expect the same from the gasoline and electric versions. The same is true for braking.
"That makes the technology less scary and more familiar--and, actually, safer. Because if you jump from an (electric car) to a regular car, you don't want to have to remember very different (conditions)," she said. Limiting the maximum available acceleration also saves the batteries to help deliver on expected range.
Electric drive
Another car in the all-electric category is the Think City, made by Think of Norway, which I got a chance to drive last week. From a design point of view, it's almost the polar opposite of the high-end Tesla Roadster. The Think City can go about 100 miles on its batteries and it's highway capable with a top speed of 60 miles per hour. In its first iteration, it only has two seats in the front and a hatchback.
Once again, I found the acceleration pretty good and responsive during my quick loop around a parking lot roof. But don't expect sports car-caliber handling. It struck me as a car simply designed to get you from one place to the next, but on electric charge. The company expects to start selling the Think City in Europe later this year and build a plant for the U.S. market next year.
Nissan, Tesla Motors, and Coda Automotive are among the other automakers betting on all-electric sedans. The thinking is that the limited range is acceptable for people who would rather fuel up on electricity than oil for their daily commutes. GM executives, for example, project that more than 90 percent of drivers could do 90 percent of their driving in electric mode.
Photos: Plug-in vehicles in Motor City
If you drive 50 miles a day, all-electric cars probably aren't the best fit for your primary car. That said, a 100-mile range with daily charging can meet a lot of Americans' daily driving needs and rental cars are always available for long road trips.
Auto industry executives say it will be substantially cheaper to drive on an electric charge, but the high cost of batteries and power electronics raise the upfront cost. Ford's electric Focus, for example, will cost more than the gasoline version, although it should be eligible for a tax credit for plug-ins. The Chevy Volt is said to cost about $40,000, and Nissan's Leaf is said to cost in the $25,000 to $35,000 range, although the company is looking at options, such as battery leasing, to lower that upfront cost.
Plug-in hybrids
Analysts project electrics to be a very small slice of the overall market for hybrids and electric vehicles in the next five years because of the limitations on range and the anticipated higher cost associated with the new technology.
Sales of hybrids, meanwhile, are projected to grow. But what remains to be seen is how much traction plug-in hybrids will get. Toyota, Ford, and General Motors are preparing plug-in hybrids, which will start arriving in showrooms over the next two or three years. Initially, plug-in hybrids are being tested with fleet operators.
After taking the Focus for a ride, I took a spin in a prototype of a plug-in hybrid Ford Escape SUV being tested by utilities gauging the impact of plug-ins on the grid. The driving, again, was familiar; acceleration, handling, and the interior is all what I'd expect in an SUV. What was different is that I was quickly drawn to the fuel-efficiency feedback system.
In this case, the Escape drives mostly on its 10 kilowatt-hour battery (compared to a 1.5 kilowatt-hour battery in a regular hybrid) for the first 30 miles or so. But when you need an extra boost of power, the gasoline engine will kick in, which you can hear and see on the in-car display.
The big advantage of gas-electric vehicles, of course, is that you can fuel up away from an electrical socket. Overall, fuel economy will improve the more often you can charge up. In a test of its fleet of converted plug-in Priuses, Idaho National Labs found that its average mileage was 55 miles per gallon, but fuel economy dropped significantly if cars were not charged every day.
The technological twist on the plug-in hybrids is the extended-range electric vehicle or a series hybrid--an approach being used by the Chevy Volt and Fisker Automotive luxury sedans. In this case, it's the electric motor that moves the car all the time and the gas engine is used to run a generator for the motor. When I was taken for a drive in the Volt by a GM auto engineer this summer, I found the Volt had a lot of pep and handled turns well.
Having driven a number of plug-in vehicle variants over the past year, it's clear that these cars will work just fine for everyday driving. The technology of lithium ion batteries leaves plenty of room for both utilitarian and performance cars. Nobody can say how much more the average consumer will be willing to pay for fuel efficiency from the new technology, but the biggest change to daily habits may come when drivers fuel up by plugging in rather than filling 'er up
by Martin LaMonica
In the past few weeks, I've had an opportunity to experience the cutting edge in plug-in electric vehicle technology. In some cases, you'd think you're just driving a regular car.
The bulk of production plug-in electric vehicles available now are either utility trucks, small cars that top out at 25 miles per hour, or the pricey Tesla Roadster sports car. Now automakers are building plug-in sedans and SUVs with lithium ion batteries designed for the mass market.
Judging from the cars I've driven, automakers are trying to strike a balance between enticing consumers with new technology but not asking them to make sacrifices. So even though electrification is shaking up the auto industry, the biggest learning curve for owners may be around fueling rather than driving. And if the goal is to make plug-ins mainstream, that's probably a good thing.
Consider the electric Ford Focus which is due out in 2011. It runs entirely on batteries for a range of about 100 miles and will be manufactured side-by-side with the gasoline edition.
During my drive two weeks ago, I was eager to feel the acceleration. Vehicles that run off electric motors have "instant torque," which means you get the car's top acceleration at all speeds. The Focus was indeed zippy and responsive, but when I asked if it was better than the gasoline Focus, Ford's director of global electrification Nancy Gioia told me that it'd be the same--on purpose.
Ford dialed back the potential acceleration of the electric Focus so drivers can expect the same from the gasoline and electric versions. The same is true for braking.
"That makes the technology less scary and more familiar--and, actually, safer. Because if you jump from an (electric car) to a regular car, you don't want to have to remember very different (conditions)," she said. Limiting the maximum available acceleration also saves the batteries to help deliver on expected range.
Electric drive
Another car in the all-electric category is the Think City, made by Think of Norway, which I got a chance to drive last week. From a design point of view, it's almost the polar opposite of the high-end Tesla Roadster. The Think City can go about 100 miles on its batteries and it's highway capable with a top speed of 60 miles per hour. In its first iteration, it only has two seats in the front and a hatchback.
Once again, I found the acceleration pretty good and responsive during my quick loop around a parking lot roof. But don't expect sports car-caliber handling. It struck me as a car simply designed to get you from one place to the next, but on electric charge. The company expects to start selling the Think City in Europe later this year and build a plant for the U.S. market next year.
Nissan, Tesla Motors, and Coda Automotive are among the other automakers betting on all-electric sedans. The thinking is that the limited range is acceptable for people who would rather fuel up on electricity than oil for their daily commutes. GM executives, for example, project that more than 90 percent of drivers could do 90 percent of their driving in electric mode.
Photos: Plug-in vehicles in Motor City
If you drive 50 miles a day, all-electric cars probably aren't the best fit for your primary car. That said, a 100-mile range with daily charging can meet a lot of Americans' daily driving needs and rental cars are always available for long road trips.
Auto industry executives say it will be substantially cheaper to drive on an electric charge, but the high cost of batteries and power electronics raise the upfront cost. Ford's electric Focus, for example, will cost more than the gasoline version, although it should be eligible for a tax credit for plug-ins. The Chevy Volt is said to cost about $40,000, and Nissan's Leaf is said to cost in the $25,000 to $35,000 range, although the company is looking at options, such as battery leasing, to lower that upfront cost.
Plug-in hybrids
Analysts project electrics to be a very small slice of the overall market for hybrids and electric vehicles in the next five years because of the limitations on range and the anticipated higher cost associated with the new technology.
Sales of hybrids, meanwhile, are projected to grow. But what remains to be seen is how much traction plug-in hybrids will get. Toyota, Ford, and General Motors are preparing plug-in hybrids, which will start arriving in showrooms over the next two or three years. Initially, plug-in hybrids are being tested with fleet operators.
After taking the Focus for a ride, I took a spin in a prototype of a plug-in hybrid Ford Escape SUV being tested by utilities gauging the impact of plug-ins on the grid. The driving, again, was familiar; acceleration, handling, and the interior is all what I'd expect in an SUV. What was different is that I was quickly drawn to the fuel-efficiency feedback system.
In this case, the Escape drives mostly on its 10 kilowatt-hour battery (compared to a 1.5 kilowatt-hour battery in a regular hybrid) for the first 30 miles or so. But when you need an extra boost of power, the gasoline engine will kick in, which you can hear and see on the in-car display.
The big advantage of gas-electric vehicles, of course, is that you can fuel up away from an electrical socket. Overall, fuel economy will improve the more often you can charge up. In a test of its fleet of converted plug-in Priuses, Idaho National Labs found that its average mileage was 55 miles per gallon, but fuel economy dropped significantly if cars were not charged every day.
The technological twist on the plug-in hybrids is the extended-range electric vehicle or a series hybrid--an approach being used by the Chevy Volt and Fisker Automotive luxury sedans. In this case, it's the electric motor that moves the car all the time and the gas engine is used to run a generator for the motor. When I was taken for a drive in the Volt by a GM auto engineer this summer, I found the Volt had a lot of pep and handled turns well.
Having driven a number of plug-in vehicle variants over the past year, it's clear that these cars will work just fine for everyday driving. The technology of lithium ion batteries leaves plenty of room for both utilitarian and performance cars. Nobody can say how much more the average consumer will be willing to pay for fuel efficiency from the new technology, but the biggest change to daily habits may come when drivers fuel up by plugging in rather than filling 'er up
Nuclear power in France
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nuclear power plants in France (view)
Active plants
Closed plants
Electricity production in France has been dominated by Nuclear power ever since the early 80s with a large portion of that power exported today.
thermofossil
hydroelectric
nuclear
Other renewablesIn France, as of 2002[update], Électricité de France (EDF) — the country's main electricity generation and distribution company — manages the country's 59 nuclear power plants. As of 2008[update], these plants produce 90% of both EDF's and France's electrical power production (of which much is exported),[1] making EDF the world leader in production of nuclear power by percentage. In 2004, 425.8 TWh out of the country's total production of 540.6 TWh was from nuclear power (78.8%).[2]
France is the world's largest net exporter of electric power, exporting 18% of its total production (about 100 TWh) to Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, and Germany, and its electricity cost is among the lowest in Europe.[2][3]
In 2006, the French Government asked Areva and EDF to build a next generation nuclear reactor, the EPR (European Pressurized Reactor), at the Flamanville Nuclear Power Plant. This was followed in 2008 by an Presidential announcement of another new EPR, spurred by high oil and gas prices.[4] A site for that unit should be selected in 2009, and construction should start in 2011.
Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Technical overview
2.1 900 MWe class
2.2 1300 MWe class
2.3 1450 MWe (N4) class
2.4 European Pressurized Reactor
2.5 Fusion reactors
2.6 Cooling
2.7 Fuel cycle
3 Incidents
4 Limitations
5 Public opinion
6 References
7 See also
8 External links
History
France has a long relationship with nuclear power, starting with Henri Becquerel's discovery of natural radioactivity in the 1890s and continued by famous French nuclear scientists like Pierre and Marie Curie.
Before World War II, France had been heavily involved in nuclear research through the work of the Joliot-Curies. In 1945 the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF) created the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA) governmental agency, and Nobel prize winner Frédéric Joliot-Curie, member of the French Communist Party (PCF) since 1942, was appointed high-commissioner. He was relieved of his duties in 1950 for political reasons, and would be one of the 11 signatories to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955.
The CEA was created by Charles de Gaulle on October 18, 1945. Its mandate is to conduct fundamental and applied research into many areas, including the design of nuclear reactors, the manufacturing of integrated circuits, the use of radionucleides for medical treatments, seismology and tsunami propagation, and the safety of computerized systems.
Nuclear research was discontinued for a time after the war because of the instability of the Fourth Republic and the lack of finances available.[5] However, in the 1950s a civil nuclear research program was started, a byproduct of which would be plutonium. In 1956 a secret Committee for the Military Applications of Atomic Energy was formed and a development program for delivery vehicles started. In 1957, soon after the Suez Crisis and the diplomatic tension with both the USSR and the United States, French president René Coty decided the creation of the C.S.E.M. in the then French Sahara, a new nuclear tests facility replacing the C.I.E.E.S.[6] See France and nuclear weapons.
In 2001, Areva, the world leading company in nuclear energy, was created by the merger of CEA Industrie, Framatome and Cogema (now Areva NC). Its main shareholder is the French owned company CEA, but the German government also holds, through Siemens, 34% of the shares of Areva's subsidiary, Areva NP, in charge of building the EPR (third-generation nuclear reactor).[7]
Technical overview
Drawing such a large percentage of overall electrical production from nuclear power is unique to France. This reliance has resulted in certain necessary deviations from the standard design and function of other nuclear power programs. For instance, in order to meet changing demand throughout the day, some plants must work as load following plants, whereas most nuclear plants in the world operate as base load plants, and allow other fossil or hydro units to adjust to demand. Nuclear power in France has a total capacity factor of around 77%, which is low due to load following. However availability is around 84%, indicating excellent overall performance of the plants.
The first 8 power reactors in the nation were gas cooled reactor types (UNGG reactor), whose development was pioneered by CEA. Coinciding with a uranium enrichment program, EdF developed pressurized water reactor (PWR) technology which eventually became the dominant type. The gas-cooled reactors located at Brennilis, Bugey, Chinon, and Marcoule have all been shut down.
All operating plants today are PWRs with the exception of the Phénix, which was part of an initiative to develop sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor technology. The Superphénix, a larger, more ambitious version, has been shut down.
The PWR plants were all developed by Framatome (which is now Areva) from the initial Westinghouse design[citation needed]. All of the PWR plants are one of three variations of the design, having output powers of 900 MWe, 1300 MWe, and 1450 MWe. The repeated use of these standard variants of a design has afforded France the greatest degree of nuclear plant standardization in the world.
900 MWe class
The Saint-Laurent site, showing two 900 MWe class reactors and the turbine halls on the rightThere are a total of 34 of these reactors in operation; most were constructed in the 1970s and the early 1980s. In 2002 they had a uniform review and all were granted a 10 year life extension.
This three loop design (three steam generators and three primary circulation pumps) was also exported to a number of other countries, including:
South Africa - 2 units at the Koeberg nuclear power station
South Korea - 2 units at the Ulchin Nuclear Power Plant
Peoples' Republic of China
2 units at the Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant
4 units at the Ling Ao Nuclear Power Plant (2 units under construction)
2 units at the Hongyanhe Nuclear Power Plant (under construction)
1 unit at the Ningde Nuclear Power Plant (under construction)
[edit] 1300 MWe class
The Cattenom site houses four 1300 MWe class reactorsThere are 20 reactors of this design (four steam generators and four primary circulation pumps) operating in France.
1450 MWe (N4) class
The Civaux site houses two 1450 MWe class reactors, the most recent design operating todayThere are only 4 of these reactors, housed at two separate sites: Civaux and Chooz. Construction of these reactors started between 1984 and 1991, but full commercial operation did not begin until between 2000 and 2002 because of thermal fatigue flaws in the heat removal system requiring the redesign and replacement of parts in each N4 power station.[8] In 2003 the stations were all uprated to 1500 MWe. It is unlikely that more of this class will be built because it is expected to be succeeded by the larger 1650 MWe EPR design.
European Pressurized Reactor
The next generation design for French reactors will be the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR), which will have a broader scope than just France with a pilot plant in Finland undergoing construction and with marketing activities extending to the United States and China. The site for first French EPR is undergoing groundwork at the Flamanville Nuclear Power Plant, which should be operational in 2012.
This reactor is one of the newest reactor designs in the world. It was developed by Areva contributing its N4 reactor technology and the German company Siemens contributing its Konvoi reactor technology. Keeping with the French rationale of a highly standardized plant and proven technology, it uses more traditional active safety systems and is more similar to current plant designs than international competitors such as the AP1000 or the ESBWR.
In 2005 EdF announced plans to replace the current nuclear plants with new 1600 MWe units as they reach the end of their licensed life, starting around 2020. This decisions confirms that France will continue indefinitely to use nuclear power as its primary electricity source. In order to replace the current 58 reactors, one new large unit will have to be built about every year for about 40 years.
Fusion reactors
While fusion power is not expected to be feasible for many more decades, France has shown promise to be a forerunner in the technology by winning the bid to host the ITER reactor in Cadarache. The ITER should start actual fusion around 2016.
Cooling
The majority of nuclear plants in France are located away from the sea coasts and obtain their cooling water from rivers. These plants employ cooling towers to reduce their impact on the environment. The temperature of emitted water carrying the waste heat is strictly limited by the French government, and this has proved to be problematic during recent heat waves.[9]
4 plants, equaling 14 reactors are located on the coast:
Gravelines Nuclear Power Plant
Penly Nuclear Power Plant
Paluel Nuclear Power Plant
Flamanville Nuclear Power Plant
These 4 get their cooling water directly from the ocean and can thus dump their waste heat directly back into the sea, which is slightly more economical.
Fuel cycle
Active work going on for the ultimate underground repository.France is one of the few countries in the world with an active nuclear reprocessing program, with the COGEMA La Hague site. Enrichment work, some MOX fuel fabrication, and other activities take place at the Tricastin Nuclear Power Center. Enrichment is completely domestic and is powered by 2/3rds of the output of the nuclear plant at Tricastin. Reprocessing of fuel from other countries has been done for the United States and Japan, who have expressed the desire to develop a more closed fuel cycle similar to what France has achieved. MOX fuel fabrication services have also been sold to other countries, notably to the USA for the Megatons to Megawatts Program, using Plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons.
While France does not mine Uranium for the front end of the fuel cycle domestically, French companies have various holdings in the Uranium market. Uranium for the French program totals 10,500 tonnes per year coming from various locations such as:
Canada - 4500 tU/yr
Niger - 3200 tU/yr
Final disposal of the high level nuclear waste is planned to be done at the Meuse/Haute Marne Underground Research Laboratory deep geological repository.
[edit] Incidents
In July 2008, 18,000 litres (4,755 Gallons) of Uranium solution containing natural uranium were accidentally released from Tricastin Nuclear Power Center. Due to cleaning and repair work the containment system for a uranium solution holding tank was not functional when the tank filled. The inflow exceeded the tank's capacity and 30 cubic meters of Uranium solution leaked with 18 cubic meters spilled to the ground. Testing found elevated uranium levels in the nearby Gaffière and Lauzon rivers. The liquid that escaped to the ground contained about 75kg of unenriched uranium which is toxic as a heavy metal while possessing only slight radioactivity. Estimates for the releases were initially higher, up to 360kg of natural uranium, but revised downward later.[10]
French authorities have banned the use of water from the Gaffière and Lauzon for drinking and watering of crops. Swimming, water sports and fishing were also banned. This incident has been classified as Level 1 on the International Nuclear Event Scale.[11]
Again in July 2008, approximately 100 employees of were exposed to radioactive particles that escaped from a pipe in a reactor that had been shut down.[12]
[edit] Limitations
France's nuclear reactors comprise 90 per cent of EDFs capacity and so they are used in load-following mode and some reactors close on weekends because there is no market for the electricity.[1][13] This means that the capacity factor is low by world standards, usually in the high seventies as a percentage. This is not an ideal economic situation for nuclear plants.[1]
During periods of high demand EDF has been routinely "forced into the relativly expensive spot and short-term power markets because it lacks adequate peak load generating capacity".[13]
All but four of EDFs plants are inland and require fresh water for cooling. Eleven of these 15 inland plants have cooling towers, using evaporative cooling, while the others user lake or river water directly. So in very hot summers, generation output may be restricted.[1]
It is sometimes said that nuclear power in France has reduced the country's dependence on oil. However, 70 per cent of the total energy consumed in france during 2006 was from fossil fuels.[13]
It has also been suggested that France has over-invested in nuclear, which has meant that underpriced electricity has been exported to other countries or "dumped" on the French market, encouraging the use of electrcity for space heating and water heating. This can be regarded as an environmentally wasteful practice.[1]
[edit] Public opinion
Image of a modern protest against new French nuclear plants.Historically, nuclear power was supported by the Gaullists, the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. A 2001 Ipsos poll found that 70% of the French population had a "good opinion" of nuclear energy in France and 63% want their country to remain a nuclear leader.[14] According to reporter Jon Palfreman, the construction of the Civaux Nuclear Power Plant was welcomed by the local community in 1997:
In France, unlike in America, nuclear energy is accepted, even popular. Everybody I spoke to in Civaux loves the fact their region was chosen. The nuclear plant has brought jobs and prosperity to the area. Nobody I spoke to, nobody, expressed any fear.[15]
A variety of reasons are cited for the popular support; a sense of national independence and reduced reliance on foreign oil, reduction of greenhouse gases, and a cultural interest in large technological projects (like the TGV and Concorde).[15][16]
At the time of the 1973 oil crisis, most of France's electricity came from foreign oil. While France was strong in heavy engineering capabilities, it had few indigenous energy resources,[3] so the French government decided to invest heavily in nuclear power, and France installed 56 reactors over the next 15 years.[15] President of Electricite de France Laurent Striker said, "France chose nuclear because we have no oil, gas or coal resources, and recent events have only reinforced the wisdom of our choice".[17]
Areva NC claims that, due to their reliance on nuclear power, France's carbon emissions per kWh are less than 1/10 that of Germany and the UK, and 1/13 that of Denmark, which has no nuclear plants. Its emissions of nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide have been reduced by 70% over 20 years, even though the total power output has tripled in that time.[18] In the same Ipsos poll, 88 percent of the population believe that reducing the greenhouse effect was a major reason to continue using nuclear power.[14] French environmentalist Bruno Comby started the group Environmentalists For Nuclear Energy, and says, "If well-managed, nuclear energy is very clean, does not create polluting gases in the atmosphere, produces very little waste and does not contribute to the greenhouse effect".[19]
Various anti-nuclear movements have appeared over the years, starting with the emergence of the environmentalist movement in the 1970s which opposed the creation of the Superphénix nuclear power station, culminating in a rocket attack on the containment building in 1982. In June 1997, one of the first actions of socialist Lionel Jospin on becoming Prime Minister was to announce the closure of the plant "because of its excessive costs", in accordance to electoral deals with the The Greens, created in the beginning of the 1980s. After the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, the network Sortir du nucléaire (Nuclear phase-out) was also created. Greenpeace has consistently opposed the use of nuclear power, and has been campaigning since 1997 for the shutdown of La Hague reprocessing site.
[edit] References
^ a b c d e Steve Kidd. Nuclear in France - what did they get right? Nuclear Engineering International, June 22, 2009.
^ a b EnerPub (2007-06-08). "France: Energy profile". Spero News. http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idarticle=9839&t=France%3A+Energy+profile. Retrieved 2007-08-25.
^ a b World Nuclear Association (August 2007). "Nuclear Power in France". http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.htm. Retrieved 2007-08-25. (alternate copy)
^ "Second new reactor for France". World Nuclear News. 3 July 2008. http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN_Second_new_reactor_for_France_0307082.html. Retrieved 2009-07-10.
^ Notice on France on Global Security (English)
^ Sahara on the website of the French Minister of Defence (French)
^ Lomazzi, Marc (13 August 2007). "Nucléaire: les dessous de l'accord entre la France et la Libye" (in (French)). Le Parisien. http://www.leparisien.fr/search/article.html?ID=DISPLAY1_0&index=1&DI_INDEX=1&docid=0708138285886.xml@LPA&titre='Nucl%E9aire%20:%20les%20dessous%20de%20l%20accord%20entre%20la%20France%20et%20la%20Libye.
^ "Facts about Olkiluoto 3 financing". olkiluoto.info. http://www.olkiluoto.info/en/13/3/74/. Retrieved 2009-07-10.
^ Robin Pagnamenta (3 July 2009). "France imports UK electricity as plants shut". The Times. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/utilities/article6626811.ece. Retrieved 2009-07-10.
^ Angelique Chrisafis (10-7-2008). "River use banned after French uranium leak". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/10/nuclearpower.pollution.
^ "France bans water consumption over nuclear leak". 2008-07-09. http://www.expatica.com/fr/articles/news/France-bans-water-consumption-over-nuclear-leak.html. Retrieved 2008-07-24.
^ "French workers contaminated by nuclear leak". New Zealand Herald. 2008-07-24. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10523246.
^ a b c Stephanie Cooke (2009). In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age, Black Inc., p. 359.
^ a b "Nuclear Notes from France Nº70". Embassy of France. http://www.ambafrance-us.org/intheus/nuclear/n2f2/summer2001.asp. Retrieved 2007-08-25.
^ a b c Palfreman, Jon (1997). "Why the French Like Nuclear Energy". Frontline (Public Broadcasting Service). http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html. Retrieved 2007-08-25.
^ Rene de Preneuf. "Nuclear Power in France — Why does it Work?". http://www.npcil.nic.in/nupower_vol13_2/npfr_.htm. Retrieved 2007-08-25.
^ "France Presses Ahead with Nuclear Power". Eleanor Beardsley (Reporter). Morning Edition. National Public Radio. Transcript. Retrieved on 2007-08-25.
^ "Nuclear energy and the green house effect". AREVA NC. http://www.areva-nc.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=cogema_en%2FPage%2Fpage_html_libre_full_template&c=Page&cid=1042823465548. Retrieved 2007-08-25.
^ "France's nuclear response to Kyoto". BBC. 2005-02-18. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4276461.stm. Retrieved 2007-08-25.
[edit] See also
nuclear technology portal
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Category:Nuclear power plants in France
List of nuclear reactors#France
Politics of France
Nuclear energy policy
Anti-nuclear movement in France
Death of Sebastien Briat
Companies
Électricité de France (EdF)
Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA)
[edit] External links
Wikinews has related news: Two nuclear leaks in two weeks trigger security and safety reviews in France
French Nuclear Power Program by the World Nuclear Association
The reality of France's aggressive nuclear power push in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
[show]v • d • eNuclear power in France
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List of nuclear reactors in France
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Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France"
Categories: Politics of France | Nuclear energy in France | Electricity in France | Nuclear technology in France
Hidden categories: Articles containing potentially dated statements from 2002 | All articles containing potentially dated statements | Articles containing potentially dated statements from 2008 | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements from August 2008
Nuclear power plants in France (view)
Active plants
Closed plants
Electricity production in France has been dominated by Nuclear power ever since the early 80s with a large portion of that power exported today.
thermofossil
hydroelectric
nuclear
Other renewablesIn France, as of 2002[update], Électricité de France (EDF) — the country's main electricity generation and distribution company — manages the country's 59 nuclear power plants. As of 2008[update], these plants produce 90% of both EDF's and France's electrical power production (of which much is exported),[1] making EDF the world leader in production of nuclear power by percentage. In 2004, 425.8 TWh out of the country's total production of 540.6 TWh was from nuclear power (78.8%).[2]
France is the world's largest net exporter of electric power, exporting 18% of its total production (about 100 TWh) to Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, and Germany, and its electricity cost is among the lowest in Europe.[2][3]
In 2006, the French Government asked Areva and EDF to build a next generation nuclear reactor, the EPR (European Pressurized Reactor), at the Flamanville Nuclear Power Plant. This was followed in 2008 by an Presidential announcement of another new EPR, spurred by high oil and gas prices.[4] A site for that unit should be selected in 2009, and construction should start in 2011.
Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Technical overview
2.1 900 MWe class
2.2 1300 MWe class
2.3 1450 MWe (N4) class
2.4 European Pressurized Reactor
2.5 Fusion reactors
2.6 Cooling
2.7 Fuel cycle
3 Incidents
4 Limitations
5 Public opinion
6 References
7 See also
8 External links
History
France has a long relationship with nuclear power, starting with Henri Becquerel's discovery of natural radioactivity in the 1890s and continued by famous French nuclear scientists like Pierre and Marie Curie.
Before World War II, France had been heavily involved in nuclear research through the work of the Joliot-Curies. In 1945 the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF) created the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA) governmental agency, and Nobel prize winner Frédéric Joliot-Curie, member of the French Communist Party (PCF) since 1942, was appointed high-commissioner. He was relieved of his duties in 1950 for political reasons, and would be one of the 11 signatories to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955.
The CEA was created by Charles de Gaulle on October 18, 1945. Its mandate is to conduct fundamental and applied research into many areas, including the design of nuclear reactors, the manufacturing of integrated circuits, the use of radionucleides for medical treatments, seismology and tsunami propagation, and the safety of computerized systems.
Nuclear research was discontinued for a time after the war because of the instability of the Fourth Republic and the lack of finances available.[5] However, in the 1950s a civil nuclear research program was started, a byproduct of which would be plutonium. In 1956 a secret Committee for the Military Applications of Atomic Energy was formed and a development program for delivery vehicles started. In 1957, soon after the Suez Crisis and the diplomatic tension with both the USSR and the United States, French president René Coty decided the creation of the C.S.E.M. in the then French Sahara, a new nuclear tests facility replacing the C.I.E.E.S.[6] See France and nuclear weapons.
In 2001, Areva, the world leading company in nuclear energy, was created by the merger of CEA Industrie, Framatome and Cogema (now Areva NC). Its main shareholder is the French owned company CEA, but the German government also holds, through Siemens, 34% of the shares of Areva's subsidiary, Areva NP, in charge of building the EPR (third-generation nuclear reactor).[7]
Technical overview
Drawing such a large percentage of overall electrical production from nuclear power is unique to France. This reliance has resulted in certain necessary deviations from the standard design and function of other nuclear power programs. For instance, in order to meet changing demand throughout the day, some plants must work as load following plants, whereas most nuclear plants in the world operate as base load plants, and allow other fossil or hydro units to adjust to demand. Nuclear power in France has a total capacity factor of around 77%, which is low due to load following. However availability is around 84%, indicating excellent overall performance of the plants.
The first 8 power reactors in the nation were gas cooled reactor types (UNGG reactor), whose development was pioneered by CEA. Coinciding with a uranium enrichment program, EdF developed pressurized water reactor (PWR) technology which eventually became the dominant type. The gas-cooled reactors located at Brennilis, Bugey, Chinon, and Marcoule have all been shut down.
All operating plants today are PWRs with the exception of the Phénix, which was part of an initiative to develop sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor technology. The Superphénix, a larger, more ambitious version, has been shut down.
The PWR plants were all developed by Framatome (which is now Areva) from the initial Westinghouse design[citation needed]. All of the PWR plants are one of three variations of the design, having output powers of 900 MWe, 1300 MWe, and 1450 MWe. The repeated use of these standard variants of a design has afforded France the greatest degree of nuclear plant standardization in the world.
900 MWe class
The Saint-Laurent site, showing two 900 MWe class reactors and the turbine halls on the rightThere are a total of 34 of these reactors in operation; most were constructed in the 1970s and the early 1980s. In 2002 they had a uniform review and all were granted a 10 year life extension.
This three loop design (three steam generators and three primary circulation pumps) was also exported to a number of other countries, including:
South Africa - 2 units at the Koeberg nuclear power station
South Korea - 2 units at the Ulchin Nuclear Power Plant
Peoples' Republic of China
2 units at the Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant
4 units at the Ling Ao Nuclear Power Plant (2 units under construction)
2 units at the Hongyanhe Nuclear Power Plant (under construction)
1 unit at the Ningde Nuclear Power Plant (under construction)
[edit] 1300 MWe class
The Cattenom site houses four 1300 MWe class reactorsThere are 20 reactors of this design (four steam generators and four primary circulation pumps) operating in France.
1450 MWe (N4) class
The Civaux site houses two 1450 MWe class reactors, the most recent design operating todayThere are only 4 of these reactors, housed at two separate sites: Civaux and Chooz. Construction of these reactors started between 1984 and 1991, but full commercial operation did not begin until between 2000 and 2002 because of thermal fatigue flaws in the heat removal system requiring the redesign and replacement of parts in each N4 power station.[8] In 2003 the stations were all uprated to 1500 MWe. It is unlikely that more of this class will be built because it is expected to be succeeded by the larger 1650 MWe EPR design.
European Pressurized Reactor
The next generation design for French reactors will be the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR), which will have a broader scope than just France with a pilot plant in Finland undergoing construction and with marketing activities extending to the United States and China. The site for first French EPR is undergoing groundwork at the Flamanville Nuclear Power Plant, which should be operational in 2012.
This reactor is one of the newest reactor designs in the world. It was developed by Areva contributing its N4 reactor technology and the German company Siemens contributing its Konvoi reactor technology. Keeping with the French rationale of a highly standardized plant and proven technology, it uses more traditional active safety systems and is more similar to current plant designs than international competitors such as the AP1000 or the ESBWR.
In 2005 EdF announced plans to replace the current nuclear plants with new 1600 MWe units as they reach the end of their licensed life, starting around 2020. This decisions confirms that France will continue indefinitely to use nuclear power as its primary electricity source. In order to replace the current 58 reactors, one new large unit will have to be built about every year for about 40 years.
Fusion reactors
While fusion power is not expected to be feasible for many more decades, France has shown promise to be a forerunner in the technology by winning the bid to host the ITER reactor in Cadarache. The ITER should start actual fusion around 2016.
Cooling
The majority of nuclear plants in France are located away from the sea coasts and obtain their cooling water from rivers. These plants employ cooling towers to reduce their impact on the environment. The temperature of emitted water carrying the waste heat is strictly limited by the French government, and this has proved to be problematic during recent heat waves.[9]
4 plants, equaling 14 reactors are located on the coast:
Gravelines Nuclear Power Plant
Penly Nuclear Power Plant
Paluel Nuclear Power Plant
Flamanville Nuclear Power Plant
These 4 get their cooling water directly from the ocean and can thus dump their waste heat directly back into the sea, which is slightly more economical.
Fuel cycle
Active work going on for the ultimate underground repository.France is one of the few countries in the world with an active nuclear reprocessing program, with the COGEMA La Hague site. Enrichment work, some MOX fuel fabrication, and other activities take place at the Tricastin Nuclear Power Center. Enrichment is completely domestic and is powered by 2/3rds of the output of the nuclear plant at Tricastin. Reprocessing of fuel from other countries has been done for the United States and Japan, who have expressed the desire to develop a more closed fuel cycle similar to what France has achieved. MOX fuel fabrication services have also been sold to other countries, notably to the USA for the Megatons to Megawatts Program, using Plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons.
While France does not mine Uranium for the front end of the fuel cycle domestically, French companies have various holdings in the Uranium market. Uranium for the French program totals 10,500 tonnes per year coming from various locations such as:
Canada - 4500 tU/yr
Niger - 3200 tU/yr
Final disposal of the high level nuclear waste is planned to be done at the Meuse/Haute Marne Underground Research Laboratory deep geological repository.
[edit] Incidents
In July 2008, 18,000 litres (4,755 Gallons) of Uranium solution containing natural uranium were accidentally released from Tricastin Nuclear Power Center. Due to cleaning and repair work the containment system for a uranium solution holding tank was not functional when the tank filled. The inflow exceeded the tank's capacity and 30 cubic meters of Uranium solution leaked with 18 cubic meters spilled to the ground. Testing found elevated uranium levels in the nearby Gaffière and Lauzon rivers. The liquid that escaped to the ground contained about 75kg of unenriched uranium which is toxic as a heavy metal while possessing only slight radioactivity. Estimates for the releases were initially higher, up to 360kg of natural uranium, but revised downward later.[10]
French authorities have banned the use of water from the Gaffière and Lauzon for drinking and watering of crops. Swimming, water sports and fishing were also banned. This incident has been classified as Level 1 on the International Nuclear Event Scale.[11]
Again in July 2008, approximately 100 employees of were exposed to radioactive particles that escaped from a pipe in a reactor that had been shut down.[12]
[edit] Limitations
France's nuclear reactors comprise 90 per cent of EDFs capacity and so they are used in load-following mode and some reactors close on weekends because there is no market for the electricity.[1][13] This means that the capacity factor is low by world standards, usually in the high seventies as a percentage. This is not an ideal economic situation for nuclear plants.[1]
During periods of high demand EDF has been routinely "forced into the relativly expensive spot and short-term power markets because it lacks adequate peak load generating capacity".[13]
All but four of EDFs plants are inland and require fresh water for cooling. Eleven of these 15 inland plants have cooling towers, using evaporative cooling, while the others user lake or river water directly. So in very hot summers, generation output may be restricted.[1]
It is sometimes said that nuclear power in France has reduced the country's dependence on oil. However, 70 per cent of the total energy consumed in france during 2006 was from fossil fuels.[13]
It has also been suggested that France has over-invested in nuclear, which has meant that underpriced electricity has been exported to other countries or "dumped" on the French market, encouraging the use of electrcity for space heating and water heating. This can be regarded as an environmentally wasteful practice.[1]
[edit] Public opinion
Image of a modern protest against new French nuclear plants.Historically, nuclear power was supported by the Gaullists, the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. A 2001 Ipsos poll found that 70% of the French population had a "good opinion" of nuclear energy in France and 63% want their country to remain a nuclear leader.[14] According to reporter Jon Palfreman, the construction of the Civaux Nuclear Power Plant was welcomed by the local community in 1997:
In France, unlike in America, nuclear energy is accepted, even popular. Everybody I spoke to in Civaux loves the fact their region was chosen. The nuclear plant has brought jobs and prosperity to the area. Nobody I spoke to, nobody, expressed any fear.[15]
A variety of reasons are cited for the popular support; a sense of national independence and reduced reliance on foreign oil, reduction of greenhouse gases, and a cultural interest in large technological projects (like the TGV and Concorde).[15][16]
At the time of the 1973 oil crisis, most of France's electricity came from foreign oil. While France was strong in heavy engineering capabilities, it had few indigenous energy resources,[3] so the French government decided to invest heavily in nuclear power, and France installed 56 reactors over the next 15 years.[15] President of Electricite de France Laurent Striker said, "France chose nuclear because we have no oil, gas or coal resources, and recent events have only reinforced the wisdom of our choice".[17]
Areva NC claims that, due to their reliance on nuclear power, France's carbon emissions per kWh are less than 1/10 that of Germany and the UK, and 1/13 that of Denmark, which has no nuclear plants. Its emissions of nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide have been reduced by 70% over 20 years, even though the total power output has tripled in that time.[18] In the same Ipsos poll, 88 percent of the population believe that reducing the greenhouse effect was a major reason to continue using nuclear power.[14] French environmentalist Bruno Comby started the group Environmentalists For Nuclear Energy, and says, "If well-managed, nuclear energy is very clean, does not create polluting gases in the atmosphere, produces very little waste and does not contribute to the greenhouse effect".[19]
Various anti-nuclear movements have appeared over the years, starting with the emergence of the environmentalist movement in the 1970s which opposed the creation of the Superphénix nuclear power station, culminating in a rocket attack on the containment building in 1982. In June 1997, one of the first actions of socialist Lionel Jospin on becoming Prime Minister was to announce the closure of the plant "because of its excessive costs", in accordance to electoral deals with the The Greens, created in the beginning of the 1980s. After the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, the network Sortir du nucléaire (Nuclear phase-out) was also created. Greenpeace has consistently opposed the use of nuclear power, and has been campaigning since 1997 for the shutdown of La Hague reprocessing site.
[edit] References
^ a b c d e Steve Kidd. Nuclear in France - what did they get right? Nuclear Engineering International, June 22, 2009.
^ a b EnerPub (2007-06-08). "France: Energy profile". Spero News. http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idarticle=9839&t=France%3A+Energy+profile. Retrieved 2007-08-25.
^ a b World Nuclear Association (August 2007). "Nuclear Power in France". http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.htm. Retrieved 2007-08-25. (alternate copy)
^ "Second new reactor for France". World Nuclear News. 3 July 2008. http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN_Second_new_reactor_for_France_0307082.html. Retrieved 2009-07-10.
^ Notice on France on Global Security (English)
^ Sahara on the website of the French Minister of Defence (French)
^ Lomazzi, Marc (13 August 2007). "Nucléaire: les dessous de l'accord entre la France et la Libye" (in (French)). Le Parisien. http://www.leparisien.fr/search/article.html?ID=DISPLAY1_0&index=1&DI_INDEX=1&docid=0708138285886.xml@LPA&titre='Nucl%E9aire%20:%20les%20dessous%20de%20l%20accord%20entre%20la%20France%20et%20la%20Libye.
^ "Facts about Olkiluoto 3 financing". olkiluoto.info. http://www.olkiluoto.info/en/13/3/74/. Retrieved 2009-07-10.
^ Robin Pagnamenta (3 July 2009). "France imports UK electricity as plants shut". The Times. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/utilities/article6626811.ece. Retrieved 2009-07-10.
^ Angelique Chrisafis (10-7-2008). "River use banned after French uranium leak". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/10/nuclearpower.pollution.
^ "France bans water consumption over nuclear leak". 2008-07-09. http://www.expatica.com/fr/articles/news/France-bans-water-consumption-over-nuclear-leak.html. Retrieved 2008-07-24.
^ "French workers contaminated by nuclear leak". New Zealand Herald. 2008-07-24. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10523246.
^ a b c Stephanie Cooke (2009). In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age, Black Inc., p. 359.
^ a b "Nuclear Notes from France Nº70". Embassy of France. http://www.ambafrance-us.org/intheus/nuclear/n2f2/summer2001.asp. Retrieved 2007-08-25.
^ a b c Palfreman, Jon (1997). "Why the French Like Nuclear Energy". Frontline (Public Broadcasting Service). http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html. Retrieved 2007-08-25.
^ Rene de Preneuf. "Nuclear Power in France — Why does it Work?". http://www.npcil.nic.in/nupower_vol13_2/npfr_.htm. Retrieved 2007-08-25.
^ "France Presses Ahead with Nuclear Power". Eleanor Beardsley (Reporter). Morning Edition. National Public Radio. Transcript. Retrieved on 2007-08-25.
^ "Nuclear energy and the green house effect". AREVA NC. http://www.areva-nc.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=cogema_en%2FPage%2Fpage_html_libre_full_template&c=Page&cid=1042823465548. Retrieved 2007-08-25.
^ "France's nuclear response to Kyoto". BBC. 2005-02-18. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4276461.stm. Retrieved 2007-08-25.
[edit] See also
nuclear technology portal
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Category:Nuclear power plants in France
List of nuclear reactors#France
Politics of France
Nuclear energy policy
Anti-nuclear movement in France
Death of Sebastien Briat
Companies
Électricité de France (EdF)
Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA)
[edit] External links
Wikinews has related news: Two nuclear leaks in two weeks trigger security and safety reviews in France
French Nuclear Power Program by the World Nuclear Association
The reality of France's aggressive nuclear power push in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
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Clean Power Now?
Indonesia is growing acacia and eucalyptus for cellulose for biofuels, which will add a new market to their economy. They are also developing palm oil micro-refineries which will make it much easier to get the fruit to a refinery within 24 hours of harvesting. Palm oil is seen as a biofuel that could be produced that doesn't come from petroleum. Plantations are being grown in S America to produce larger volumes for general consumption.
Germany is a world leader in wind and solar technology, which provides 15% of its energy. They are currently discussing the future of their 17 nuclear power plants, which provides almost 25% of their electricity. The older ones are more prone to breakdowns, and the environmentalists want to phase them out all together over the next decade or so, as clean energy ramps up. Thirty one percent of Germans want the phase-out maintained; 32% want it sped up. Only 17% of Germans in that survey wanted to maintain nuclear power. Half of Germany's power comes from coal. The geography for solar in Germany is not optimal and the only other alternative seems to be to become more dependent on Russia for natural gas, something Germans are rightfully hesitant to do.
Germany is a world leader in wind and solar technology, which provides 15% of its energy. They are currently discussing the future of their 17 nuclear power plants, which provides almost 25% of their electricity. The older ones are more prone to breakdowns, and the environmentalists want to phase them out all together over the next decade or so, as clean energy ramps up. Thirty one percent of Germans want the phase-out maintained; 32% want it sped up. Only 17% of Germans in that survey wanted to maintain nuclear power. Half of Germany's power comes from coal. The geography for solar in Germany is not optimal and the only other alternative seems to be to become more dependent on Russia for natural gas, something Germans are rightfully hesitant to do.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
India's water crisis
When the rains fail
Sep 10th 2009 |
From The Economist print edition
Many of India’s problems are summed up in its mismanagement of water. Now a scanty monsoon has made matters much worse
Reuters
RAINFALL last month encouraged Haniya, a middle-aged member of the Lambada tribe of southern Andhra Pradesh (AP), to inspect his one-acre (0.4-hectare) field. Some speckles of green, to show the red earth had held enough water for weeds to shoot, would have tempted him to sow cotton. But, towards the end of AP’s monsoon rainy season, the field was parched and bare. If it rains again, Haniya may sow. If not? He gave the reply of peasant farmers in India and poor, dry places everywhere: “Only God knows.”
Back in his village of Veeralapalam, light-skinned Lambadi farmers gathered. Most had scattered some cotton or lentil seed after the rain. But it had better rain again: none had access to irrigation from a dozen wells sunk 90 metres into central India’s lava bedrock by richer high-caste Hindu farmers. A few expected to buy a dousing or two of costly piped water, brought by the same neighbours from a nearby storm-creek. Even if affordable, said Saidanayak, this would not sustain his hoped-for acre of cotton. Without more rain, it will fail, adding to his 125,000-rupee ($2,500) debt—a big sum, when the dowry for a Lambada bride is $1,200.
With no crop, no money and three daughters to marry off, he would join the only reliable flood in AP in these drought days: of thousands of tough, skinny peasants into Hyderabad, the state capital, in search of a day-wage. Asked what he would do there, Saidayanak pushed out his fists and shifted from foot to foot, as if cycling a rickshaw—and laughter diluted the gloom.
Many Indians share his worries. Around 450m live off rain-fed agriculture, and this year’s monsoon rains, which between June and September provide 80% of India’s precipitation, have been the scantiest in decades. Almost half India’s 604 districts are affected by drought, especially in the poorest and most populous states—such as Bihar, which has declared drought in 26 of its 38 districts. Uttar Pradesh (UP), home to 185m, expects its main rice harvest to be down by 60%. The outlook for the winter wheat crop is also poor, with India’s main reservoirs, a source for irrigation canals, one-third below their seasonal average. That also means less water for thirsty cities, including Delhi, where 18m people live and the water board meets around half their demand in a good year.
Belated cloudbursts in AP and other states have brought relief. But late sowing tends to produce a thin harvest. AP counted some 20 farmer suicides last month, and there will be more. A short drive from Hyderabad, Koteswara Rao watched as four Hindu outcasts and two blue-horned bullocks ploughed his 16 acres (14 of them leased) for cotton. If it fails he will be left with a $4,000 debt and, being of lofty caste, he said, he could never sweat it out as a labourer. “Suicide would be easier.”
No one should starve, at least. None of India’s previous five big post-independence droughts caused famine. And after two bumper years, the government says it has enough wheat and rice in store to prevent serious food-grain price inflation. With agriculture accounting for only 18% of GDP, compared with 30% in 1990, the drought will in fact cause relatively little damage to India’s economy; it should still grow by over 5% this year. Lavish spending on rural welfare since 2004, when the Congress party won power in Delhi, will also help. Almost 30m people have benefited from the government’s chief public-works project, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS).
Yet the drought underlines a grim truth. India’s extremes of hydrology, poverty and population present vast difficulties for water management which it has never mastered. And they are growing. Increasingly frequent droughts may be a sign of this—if, as some think, climate change is to blame. It will accentuate India’s problems, with the monsoon rains, which supply over 50% of much of India’s annual precipitation in just 15 days, predicted to become even more contracted and unpredictable. At the same time, the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers promises to deprive the great rivers of the Indian sub-continent, the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra, of their summertime source. This threatens a triple whammy: of longer dry seasons, in which these rivers do not flow, and more violent wet seasons. That would mean more bad news for flood-prone eastern India, including Bihar, where over 3m were displaced last year when the Kosi river burst a crumbling embankment.
India’s water future was worrying even without climate change. Despite daunting seasonal and regional variations, it should have ample water for agricultural, industrial and household use. But most of it falls, in a remarkably short time, in the wrong places. India’s vast task is therefore to trap and store enough water; to channel it to where it is most needed; and, above all, to use it there as efficiently as possible. And on all three counts, India fares badly. Without huge improvements, according to a decade-old official estimate, by 2050, when its population will be a shade under 1.7 billion, India will run short of water.
There are already signs of the conflict this would cause. Having bickered for decades over their rights to the Krishna river, AP and upstream Maharashtra and Karnataka are now furiously building dams and diversions that the river might not support even in flood. In Orissa 30,000 farmers—for whom over 80% of India’s water is reserved—laid siege to a reservoir in 2007 to try to stop factories using its waters. The desert state of Rajasthan has seen similar protests against the diversion of water to its growing cities. In one, five farmers were shot dead by police.
The government is worried: “2050 is a very frightening sort of a picture,” says A.K. Bajaj, chairman of India’s central water commission, which provides technical support to the state governments who control India’s water. Its main solution is to build more large dams (390 are under construction), and river diversions, including a long-mooted extravaganza of 30 linkages which would unite most of India’s river basins. Indeed, India needs more water storage: it has 200 cubic metres per person, compared with 1,000 cubic metres in China. But given the decrepitude of much of its existing water infrastructure, and its profligate ways with water, its more urgent priorities are to repair and reform.
Worshipping old gods
Famine-prone for most of its history, India’s attachment to dams is understandable. Its ability to feed itself owes much to a splurge on big dams and canal projects in the 1950s-70s—for example, the colossal Bhakra dam in Himachal Pradesh, completed in 1963 and described by the then prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, as a “new temple” of India. The Bhakra brought 7m hectares of north-west India, chiefly Punjab and Haryana, under irrigation. This prepared the way for the Green Revolution of the 1960s, when the introduction of new seeds and chemical fertilisers hugely boosted farm yields in those states and in the coastal region of AP—which was irrigated in the 19th century by a British engineer, Sir Arthur Cotton, who is still worshipped there as a god.
But, the world over, without expensive maintenance to prevent siltation in reservoirs and leakage from canals, grand dams and irrigation schemes tend to be as inefficient as they are environmentally destructive. And India’s corrupt, underfunded and overmanned state irrigation departments—UP’s, for example, employs over 100,000 people—often provide no maintenance at all. As a result, each year India is estimated to lose the equivalent of two-thirds of the new storage it builds to siltation. Bad planning, often as a result of inter-state rivalries, causes more waste. Thus, between 1992 and 2004 India built 200 large and medium-sized irrigation projects—and the area irrigated by such schemes shrank by 3.2m hectares.
The village of Veeralapalam offers a snapshot of this, and of the losers in a political economy where water is the main currency. From the early 1960s it received occasional water in a small canal, at the tail-end of a system off the Krishna river. But this has been dry since 1985 because of leakage up-channel and, the Lambadi farmers say, illegal tapping by members of a more favoured community. The canal was re-dug last year under the NREGS, but seems unlikely to get any water.
A few miles up-channel in Ulisaipalam, a village dominated by high-caste Hindus, there is water, but more problems. Wading shin-deep, P. Venkat Reddy transplants dark green paddy into his two acres of irrigated, but undrained, land. When there is water in the canal, for around four months each year, it is waterlogged, fit only for paddy. But in recent years the canal has held insufficient water for a full paddy crop—forcing Mr Reddy to supplement it with groundwater. He pumps this, with electricity given free to farmers in AP, from a borehole drilled 45 metres into his land.
Since the 1970s, when affordable water pumps became available and electricity reached many more places, millions have done the same. India is the world’s biggest user of groundwater, with some 20m bore-holes providing water for over 60% of its irrigated area. Being entirely in farmers’ hands, this is up to three times more productive than canal irrigation. In 2002, by a conservative estimate, it was worth $8 billion a year to the Indian economy—more than four times what the central and state governments spend on irrigation schemes.
Groundwater irrigation has transformed the lives of millions. It has also rectified problems, of water-logging and salination, caused by canals. But in many places, including productive Punjab and Haryana, whose rather well-off farmers also get free or cut-price electricity, the rate of groundwater extraction is unsustainable. Nearly a third of India’s groundwater blocks were defined in 2004 as “critical, semi-critical or over-exploited”. The World Bank reckons that 15% of India’s food is produced by “mining”—or unrenewable extraction of—groundwater, including in 18 of Punjab’s 20 districts. Satellite maps released by America’s NASA last month showed that north-western India’s aquifers had fallen by a foot a year between 2002 and 2008: a loss of 109 cubic km (26 cubic miles) of water, or three times the volume of America’s biggest man-made reservoir.
This is storing up trouble. As bore-holes run dry, as those over the hardrock aquifers of southern-central India do on a monthly basis, many poor people may be deprived of safe drinking water. Currently, 220m Indians lack this. Not all India’s groundwater is potable anyway; in places, it is getting seriously polluted. And India’s groundwater reserves will be especially missed when climate change makes surface-water sources even more sporadic. Their depletion will accentuate this, with springs, which could have provided a trickle of run-off during the extended dry seasons, increasingly failing.
Pump and be damned
Some excuse this resolute destruction by saying that India’s farmers do not understand groundwater. But they know when it is running out, as an impromptu conclave in the Punjabi village of Lubana Teku showed. “Punjab will become a desert, like Rajasthan,” said Jarnail Singh, a stately, orange-turbaned grower of rice. When Mr Singh began pumping groundwater in 1973, turning his 14 acres from cotton to paddy, it took a three-horsepower engine to bring it up from 1.5 metres. Now the groundwater is 20 metres down, and he requires a 15-horsepower pump to sluice his green paddy-fields. “We know the water is going,” said Mr Singh. “But we’re not going to change our ways unless the government makes us.”
Rather, it encourages him to keep pumping. Besides paying nothing for his water or electricity—seven hours of it a day—Mr Singh knows the government will buy all the rice he can grow, at a pre-ordained “minimum support price”. Set against this package, Punjab’s efforts to conserve its groundwater, mainly by telling farmers not to transplant paddy before the monsoon rains, are rather puny.
State governments know that this is madness. Over a quarter of India’s electricity is given free or cut-price to farmers. As a result, the state power utilities are bust. Understandably, however, politicians balk at reform. Two chief ministers recently tried charging farmers for electricity, in AP and Madhya Pradesh, and were kicked out of office. The Congress party chief minister of Haryana, which is going to the polls in October, will not make that mistake. He is demanding $200m from India’s Congress-led central government as a contribution to Haryana’s agricultural-power subsidy.
The subsidy raj is not confined to farmers. Many municipal governments price water well below cost, and therefore struggle to supply it. Delhi, where the water board’s revenues cover only 40% of its operating costs, should have plenty of water. It draws 220 litres per citizen, more than Paris. But half of it disappears from leaky pipes. To mend these, workmen, having no underground maps, must dig up and sift through a tangled mass of pipes and cables, like untrained surgeons manhandling intestines.
Predictably, for a couple of hundred rupees a month, posh south Delhi gets the best water supply. When its taps run dry, the locals, including India’s political and bureaucratic elite, pump groundwater—often illegally. By one estimate, bore-holes provide 40% of the capital’s water; and south Delhi’s groundwater, which underlies the offices of India’s Central Groundwater Authority, is being depleted by up to three metres a year. But tube-wells, which cost around $600, are no option for Delhi’s poor, including 4m slum-dwellers. To augment their supply they must buy water, of dubious quality and at extortionate prices, from a well-connected water mafia.
In fiery June residents of Sangam Vihar, a poor suburb of south Delhi, rioted after getting no water for two weeks. In normal times, according to Vishnu Sharma, a 36-year-old resident, he and his family receive, at unpredictable times, around an hour and a half of muddy piped water each week. They pay $2 for this, he said—and another $20, or a quarter of his factory wage, to private water-sellers in cahoots with corrupt water-board officials. “So why bother complaining?” he said angrily.
EPA
An increasingly precious load
Who could deny that rich Delhiites must pay more for water, so the city’s poor can get more? The rich, of course. In 2005 a World Bank-sponsored effort to reform the water board was shot down by local NGOs. As well as worrying, reasonably, about the bidding process for contracts, they were outraged to discover that, in return for round-the-clock clean water, the targeted households would be charged about $20 a month—or what Mr Sharma pays his local water don.
Pay more, use less
To make farmers use less water, they must pay, or pay more, for electricity. The longer state governments wait to institute this, the higher the cost of pumping groundwater will go—and the more difficult reform becomes. Nor is pricing alone a panacea. According to a World Bank study, farmers are already paying rather a lot for subsidised but poor-quality electricity. In Haryana, farmers with electricity spent 25% of their incomes on it and on repairing burnt-out pump-engines; those without electricity spent 31% of their incomes on diesel. To charge farmers more for electricity, utilities will have to improve supply. And farmers must learn to use water more efficiently.
Selling groundwater to cities, as farmers outside Chennai have done, is one possible answer. Another, to keep up India’s food production, is to spread the use of modern seeds and other technologies—such as an improved system of paddy cultivation that uses half as much water and has boosted yields in Tamil Nadu and AP. Ideally, commercial cultivation of thirsty sugar-cane and paddy should also be shifted eastwards, to the poor and sodden parts of Bihar and West Bengal. For now, alas, the political trade-offs and mammoth infrastructure development this would require make it seem unimaginable.
Farmers on arid, rain-fed land need help of other sorts. Even if they had electricity—which 400m Indians do not—they could hardly pay for it. Nor would it be altogether desirable for them to pump groundwater unless they could be enjoined to sow appropriate crops, such as pulses and millet, and water them wisely. In dry areas, where profligate water-use by one farmer can make many wells run dry, farmers have been persuaded to share information on rainfall, groundwater levels and cropping, and so collectively regulate themselves. One attempt at this in central AP involves 25,000 farmers.
And India must have more dams. These need not be large; indeed, given problems of maintenance and resettlement, it would be better if they were not. For these and other reasons, most experts also seem to want the ambitious river-basin-linkage idea to be scrapped. In most places, urban and rural, India’s state governments would do better to concentrate on building and restoring millions of small water storages, tanks and mini-reservoirs, and put local governments in charge of them. There is no simple solution to India’s complicated water crisis. But if prayers are necessary, let them be offered in small shrines, not vast concrete temples.
Comment
India is in a drought. So is Australia. better water management is needed everywhere, or I believe there will be wars over water.
Sep 10th 2009 |
From The Economist print edition
Many of India’s problems are summed up in its mismanagement of water. Now a scanty monsoon has made matters much worse
Reuters
RAINFALL last month encouraged Haniya, a middle-aged member of the Lambada tribe of southern Andhra Pradesh (AP), to inspect his one-acre (0.4-hectare) field. Some speckles of green, to show the red earth had held enough water for weeds to shoot, would have tempted him to sow cotton. But, towards the end of AP’s monsoon rainy season, the field was parched and bare. If it rains again, Haniya may sow. If not? He gave the reply of peasant farmers in India and poor, dry places everywhere: “Only God knows.”
Back in his village of Veeralapalam, light-skinned Lambadi farmers gathered. Most had scattered some cotton or lentil seed after the rain. But it had better rain again: none had access to irrigation from a dozen wells sunk 90 metres into central India’s lava bedrock by richer high-caste Hindu farmers. A few expected to buy a dousing or two of costly piped water, brought by the same neighbours from a nearby storm-creek. Even if affordable, said Saidanayak, this would not sustain his hoped-for acre of cotton. Without more rain, it will fail, adding to his 125,000-rupee ($2,500) debt—a big sum, when the dowry for a Lambada bride is $1,200.
With no crop, no money and three daughters to marry off, he would join the only reliable flood in AP in these drought days: of thousands of tough, skinny peasants into Hyderabad, the state capital, in search of a day-wage. Asked what he would do there, Saidayanak pushed out his fists and shifted from foot to foot, as if cycling a rickshaw—and laughter diluted the gloom.
Many Indians share his worries. Around 450m live off rain-fed agriculture, and this year’s monsoon rains, which between June and September provide 80% of India’s precipitation, have been the scantiest in decades. Almost half India’s 604 districts are affected by drought, especially in the poorest and most populous states—such as Bihar, which has declared drought in 26 of its 38 districts. Uttar Pradesh (UP), home to 185m, expects its main rice harvest to be down by 60%. The outlook for the winter wheat crop is also poor, with India’s main reservoirs, a source for irrigation canals, one-third below their seasonal average. That also means less water for thirsty cities, including Delhi, where 18m people live and the water board meets around half their demand in a good year.
Belated cloudbursts in AP and other states have brought relief. But late sowing tends to produce a thin harvest. AP counted some 20 farmer suicides last month, and there will be more. A short drive from Hyderabad, Koteswara Rao watched as four Hindu outcasts and two blue-horned bullocks ploughed his 16 acres (14 of them leased) for cotton. If it fails he will be left with a $4,000 debt and, being of lofty caste, he said, he could never sweat it out as a labourer. “Suicide would be easier.”
No one should starve, at least. None of India’s previous five big post-independence droughts caused famine. And after two bumper years, the government says it has enough wheat and rice in store to prevent serious food-grain price inflation. With agriculture accounting for only 18% of GDP, compared with 30% in 1990, the drought will in fact cause relatively little damage to India’s economy; it should still grow by over 5% this year. Lavish spending on rural welfare since 2004, when the Congress party won power in Delhi, will also help. Almost 30m people have benefited from the government’s chief public-works project, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS).
Yet the drought underlines a grim truth. India’s extremes of hydrology, poverty and population present vast difficulties for water management which it has never mastered. And they are growing. Increasingly frequent droughts may be a sign of this—if, as some think, climate change is to blame. It will accentuate India’s problems, with the monsoon rains, which supply over 50% of much of India’s annual precipitation in just 15 days, predicted to become even more contracted and unpredictable. At the same time, the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers promises to deprive the great rivers of the Indian sub-continent, the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra, of their summertime source. This threatens a triple whammy: of longer dry seasons, in which these rivers do not flow, and more violent wet seasons. That would mean more bad news for flood-prone eastern India, including Bihar, where over 3m were displaced last year when the Kosi river burst a crumbling embankment.
India’s water future was worrying even without climate change. Despite daunting seasonal and regional variations, it should have ample water for agricultural, industrial and household use. But most of it falls, in a remarkably short time, in the wrong places. India’s vast task is therefore to trap and store enough water; to channel it to where it is most needed; and, above all, to use it there as efficiently as possible. And on all three counts, India fares badly. Without huge improvements, according to a decade-old official estimate, by 2050, when its population will be a shade under 1.7 billion, India will run short of water.
There are already signs of the conflict this would cause. Having bickered for decades over their rights to the Krishna river, AP and upstream Maharashtra and Karnataka are now furiously building dams and diversions that the river might not support even in flood. In Orissa 30,000 farmers—for whom over 80% of India’s water is reserved—laid siege to a reservoir in 2007 to try to stop factories using its waters. The desert state of Rajasthan has seen similar protests against the diversion of water to its growing cities. In one, five farmers were shot dead by police.
The government is worried: “2050 is a very frightening sort of a picture,” says A.K. Bajaj, chairman of India’s central water commission, which provides technical support to the state governments who control India’s water. Its main solution is to build more large dams (390 are under construction), and river diversions, including a long-mooted extravaganza of 30 linkages which would unite most of India’s river basins. Indeed, India needs more water storage: it has 200 cubic metres per person, compared with 1,000 cubic metres in China. But given the decrepitude of much of its existing water infrastructure, and its profligate ways with water, its more urgent priorities are to repair and reform.
Worshipping old gods
Famine-prone for most of its history, India’s attachment to dams is understandable. Its ability to feed itself owes much to a splurge on big dams and canal projects in the 1950s-70s—for example, the colossal Bhakra dam in Himachal Pradesh, completed in 1963 and described by the then prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, as a “new temple” of India. The Bhakra brought 7m hectares of north-west India, chiefly Punjab and Haryana, under irrigation. This prepared the way for the Green Revolution of the 1960s, when the introduction of new seeds and chemical fertilisers hugely boosted farm yields in those states and in the coastal region of AP—which was irrigated in the 19th century by a British engineer, Sir Arthur Cotton, who is still worshipped there as a god.
But, the world over, without expensive maintenance to prevent siltation in reservoirs and leakage from canals, grand dams and irrigation schemes tend to be as inefficient as they are environmentally destructive. And India’s corrupt, underfunded and overmanned state irrigation departments—UP’s, for example, employs over 100,000 people—often provide no maintenance at all. As a result, each year India is estimated to lose the equivalent of two-thirds of the new storage it builds to siltation. Bad planning, often as a result of inter-state rivalries, causes more waste. Thus, between 1992 and 2004 India built 200 large and medium-sized irrigation projects—and the area irrigated by such schemes shrank by 3.2m hectares.
The village of Veeralapalam offers a snapshot of this, and of the losers in a political economy where water is the main currency. From the early 1960s it received occasional water in a small canal, at the tail-end of a system off the Krishna river. But this has been dry since 1985 because of leakage up-channel and, the Lambadi farmers say, illegal tapping by members of a more favoured community. The canal was re-dug last year under the NREGS, but seems unlikely to get any water.
A few miles up-channel in Ulisaipalam, a village dominated by high-caste Hindus, there is water, but more problems. Wading shin-deep, P. Venkat Reddy transplants dark green paddy into his two acres of irrigated, but undrained, land. When there is water in the canal, for around four months each year, it is waterlogged, fit only for paddy. But in recent years the canal has held insufficient water for a full paddy crop—forcing Mr Reddy to supplement it with groundwater. He pumps this, with electricity given free to farmers in AP, from a borehole drilled 45 metres into his land.
Since the 1970s, when affordable water pumps became available and electricity reached many more places, millions have done the same. India is the world’s biggest user of groundwater, with some 20m bore-holes providing water for over 60% of its irrigated area. Being entirely in farmers’ hands, this is up to three times more productive than canal irrigation. In 2002, by a conservative estimate, it was worth $8 billion a year to the Indian economy—more than four times what the central and state governments spend on irrigation schemes.
Groundwater irrigation has transformed the lives of millions. It has also rectified problems, of water-logging and salination, caused by canals. But in many places, including productive Punjab and Haryana, whose rather well-off farmers also get free or cut-price electricity, the rate of groundwater extraction is unsustainable. Nearly a third of India’s groundwater blocks were defined in 2004 as “critical, semi-critical or over-exploited”. The World Bank reckons that 15% of India’s food is produced by “mining”—or unrenewable extraction of—groundwater, including in 18 of Punjab’s 20 districts. Satellite maps released by America’s NASA last month showed that north-western India’s aquifers had fallen by a foot a year between 2002 and 2008: a loss of 109 cubic km (26 cubic miles) of water, or three times the volume of America’s biggest man-made reservoir.
This is storing up trouble. As bore-holes run dry, as those over the hardrock aquifers of southern-central India do on a monthly basis, many poor people may be deprived of safe drinking water. Currently, 220m Indians lack this. Not all India’s groundwater is potable anyway; in places, it is getting seriously polluted. And India’s groundwater reserves will be especially missed when climate change makes surface-water sources even more sporadic. Their depletion will accentuate this, with springs, which could have provided a trickle of run-off during the extended dry seasons, increasingly failing.
Pump and be damned
Some excuse this resolute destruction by saying that India’s farmers do not understand groundwater. But they know when it is running out, as an impromptu conclave in the Punjabi village of Lubana Teku showed. “Punjab will become a desert, like Rajasthan,” said Jarnail Singh, a stately, orange-turbaned grower of rice. When Mr Singh began pumping groundwater in 1973, turning his 14 acres from cotton to paddy, it took a three-horsepower engine to bring it up from 1.5 metres. Now the groundwater is 20 metres down, and he requires a 15-horsepower pump to sluice his green paddy-fields. “We know the water is going,” said Mr Singh. “But we’re not going to change our ways unless the government makes us.”
Rather, it encourages him to keep pumping. Besides paying nothing for his water or electricity—seven hours of it a day—Mr Singh knows the government will buy all the rice he can grow, at a pre-ordained “minimum support price”. Set against this package, Punjab’s efforts to conserve its groundwater, mainly by telling farmers not to transplant paddy before the monsoon rains, are rather puny.
State governments know that this is madness. Over a quarter of India’s electricity is given free or cut-price to farmers. As a result, the state power utilities are bust. Understandably, however, politicians balk at reform. Two chief ministers recently tried charging farmers for electricity, in AP and Madhya Pradesh, and were kicked out of office. The Congress party chief minister of Haryana, which is going to the polls in October, will not make that mistake. He is demanding $200m from India’s Congress-led central government as a contribution to Haryana’s agricultural-power subsidy.
The subsidy raj is not confined to farmers. Many municipal governments price water well below cost, and therefore struggle to supply it. Delhi, where the water board’s revenues cover only 40% of its operating costs, should have plenty of water. It draws 220 litres per citizen, more than Paris. But half of it disappears from leaky pipes. To mend these, workmen, having no underground maps, must dig up and sift through a tangled mass of pipes and cables, like untrained surgeons manhandling intestines.
Predictably, for a couple of hundred rupees a month, posh south Delhi gets the best water supply. When its taps run dry, the locals, including India’s political and bureaucratic elite, pump groundwater—often illegally. By one estimate, bore-holes provide 40% of the capital’s water; and south Delhi’s groundwater, which underlies the offices of India’s Central Groundwater Authority, is being depleted by up to three metres a year. But tube-wells, which cost around $600, are no option for Delhi’s poor, including 4m slum-dwellers. To augment their supply they must buy water, of dubious quality and at extortionate prices, from a well-connected water mafia.
In fiery June residents of Sangam Vihar, a poor suburb of south Delhi, rioted after getting no water for two weeks. In normal times, according to Vishnu Sharma, a 36-year-old resident, he and his family receive, at unpredictable times, around an hour and a half of muddy piped water each week. They pay $2 for this, he said—and another $20, or a quarter of his factory wage, to private water-sellers in cahoots with corrupt water-board officials. “So why bother complaining?” he said angrily.
EPA
An increasingly precious load
Who could deny that rich Delhiites must pay more for water, so the city’s poor can get more? The rich, of course. In 2005 a World Bank-sponsored effort to reform the water board was shot down by local NGOs. As well as worrying, reasonably, about the bidding process for contracts, they were outraged to discover that, in return for round-the-clock clean water, the targeted households would be charged about $20 a month—or what Mr Sharma pays his local water don.
Pay more, use less
To make farmers use less water, they must pay, or pay more, for electricity. The longer state governments wait to institute this, the higher the cost of pumping groundwater will go—and the more difficult reform becomes. Nor is pricing alone a panacea. According to a World Bank study, farmers are already paying rather a lot for subsidised but poor-quality electricity. In Haryana, farmers with electricity spent 25% of their incomes on it and on repairing burnt-out pump-engines; those without electricity spent 31% of their incomes on diesel. To charge farmers more for electricity, utilities will have to improve supply. And farmers must learn to use water more efficiently.
Selling groundwater to cities, as farmers outside Chennai have done, is one possible answer. Another, to keep up India’s food production, is to spread the use of modern seeds and other technologies—such as an improved system of paddy cultivation that uses half as much water and has boosted yields in Tamil Nadu and AP. Ideally, commercial cultivation of thirsty sugar-cane and paddy should also be shifted eastwards, to the poor and sodden parts of Bihar and West Bengal. For now, alas, the political trade-offs and mammoth infrastructure development this would require make it seem unimaginable.
Farmers on arid, rain-fed land need help of other sorts. Even if they had electricity—which 400m Indians do not—they could hardly pay for it. Nor would it be altogether desirable for them to pump groundwater unless they could be enjoined to sow appropriate crops, such as pulses and millet, and water them wisely. In dry areas, where profligate water-use by one farmer can make many wells run dry, farmers have been persuaded to share information on rainfall, groundwater levels and cropping, and so collectively regulate themselves. One attempt at this in central AP involves 25,000 farmers.
And India must have more dams. These need not be large; indeed, given problems of maintenance and resettlement, it would be better if they were not. For these and other reasons, most experts also seem to want the ambitious river-basin-linkage idea to be scrapped. In most places, urban and rural, India’s state governments would do better to concentrate on building and restoring millions of small water storages, tanks and mini-reservoirs, and put local governments in charge of them. There is no simple solution to India’s complicated water crisis. But if prayers are necessary, let them be offered in small shrines, not vast concrete temples.
Comment
India is in a drought. So is Australia. better water management is needed everywhere, or I believe there will be wars over water.
In the pipeline
Oct 27th 2009
From Economist.com
A new system could save water by sealing small but pervasive leaks
WATER is precious, yet much is wasted. The World Bank estimates that 88 billion litres of treated water is lost from leaking urban pipelines every day, a quantity split evenly between rich and poor countries. Now an Israeli company called Curapipe has developed a system that aims to seal leaks cheaply with only a small disruption to the water supply.
Much of the wasted water is lost through what the International Water Association, an industry body, calls “background leakage”—that is, small but widespread cracks that drip water continuously. Indeed, background leakage is so pervasive that water suppliers accept 3,500 litres of water per kilometre of pipe per day as the minimum achievable loss. Short of replacing the entire water main, which is both expensive and disruptive, the only way to cut background leakage below these levels has been to reduce the water pressure.
Curapipe’s system piggybacks, as it were, on the system of “pigs” commonly used to clean urban water mains. This cleaning regime works by suspending the supply for a couple of hours while a bullet-shaped, spongy object allegedly resembling a pig is inserted into the pipe and then forced through it using water pressure, taking mineral scale and sediment with it.
The device developed by Curapipe consists of a train of two pigs with a viscous composite trapped between them. This composite acts as the sealant. The train is forced through the system in the usual way. When it reaches a crack, the sealant is sucked out of the train and into the crack in the same way that water is lost. The composite fills the crack and then hardens in situ. Once the pipe has been flushed, the water supply can be restored.
And not only water. Oil and gas pipelines are more closely monitored and more thoroughly maintained than water mains, yet Peter Paz, Curapipe’s boss, thinks the firm’s system could also be used to prevent small but devastating leaks in such pipelines. Big leaks in oil and gas pipelines are tackled immediately, but “pinhole” leaks can go undetected and result in a larger spill than a rupture would produce. In August, for example, some 4m litres of oil were spilt at the Coussouls de Crau nature reserve close to the Camargue, in the south of France. Although the pipeline was monitored, the leak went undetected until a park warden discovered it. If the system developed by Curapipe had been used, Mr Paz reckons it would have prevented the spill, thereby saving wetlands as well as water.
Comment
"88 billion litres of treated water is lost from leaking urban pipelines every day". This is water that we need to drink.
From Economist.com
A new system could save water by sealing small but pervasive leaks
WATER is precious, yet much is wasted. The World Bank estimates that 88 billion litres of treated water is lost from leaking urban pipelines every day, a quantity split evenly between rich and poor countries. Now an Israeli company called Curapipe has developed a system that aims to seal leaks cheaply with only a small disruption to the water supply.
Much of the wasted water is lost through what the International Water Association, an industry body, calls “background leakage”—that is, small but widespread cracks that drip water continuously. Indeed, background leakage is so pervasive that water suppliers accept 3,500 litres of water per kilometre of pipe per day as the minimum achievable loss. Short of replacing the entire water main, which is both expensive and disruptive, the only way to cut background leakage below these levels has been to reduce the water pressure.
Curapipe’s system piggybacks, as it were, on the system of “pigs” commonly used to clean urban water mains. This cleaning regime works by suspending the supply for a couple of hours while a bullet-shaped, spongy object allegedly resembling a pig is inserted into the pipe and then forced through it using water pressure, taking mineral scale and sediment with it.
The device developed by Curapipe consists of a train of two pigs with a viscous composite trapped between them. This composite acts as the sealant. The train is forced through the system in the usual way. When it reaches a crack, the sealant is sucked out of the train and into the crack in the same way that water is lost. The composite fills the crack and then hardens in situ. Once the pipe has been flushed, the water supply can be restored.
And not only water. Oil and gas pipelines are more closely monitored and more thoroughly maintained than water mains, yet Peter Paz, Curapipe’s boss, thinks the firm’s system could also be used to prevent small but devastating leaks in such pipelines. Big leaks in oil and gas pipelines are tackled immediately, but “pinhole” leaks can go undetected and result in a larger spill than a rupture would produce. In August, for example, some 4m litres of oil were spilt at the Coussouls de Crau nature reserve close to the Camargue, in the south of France. Although the pipeline was monitored, the leak went undetected until a park warden discovered it. If the system developed by Curapipe had been used, Mr Paz reckons it would have prevented the spill, thereby saving wetlands as well as water.
Comment
"88 billion litres of treated water is lost from leaking urban pipelines every day". This is water that we need to drink.
Solar is getting cheap
Solar is getting cheap: costs state by state
October 21, 2009 4:23 PM ET
The Associated Press
(AP) - Solar companies offer rooftop panels at wildly different prices, depending on where they're being installed and the kind of incentives available. Here's how much installers say customers in different states would pay for a 5-kilowatt solar system.
_New Jersey: $2,625. The original $37,500 sticker price drops after applying a state tax rebate of $8,750 from the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, Clean Energy Program, a federal tax credit of $8,625 and a loan program through the Public Service Enterprise Group that's worth up to $17,500 for customers with excellent credit, according to Rumson, N.J.-based installer Gaurav Naik.
_New York: $13,228. The $40,250 cost is slashed after applying a federal tax credit of $8,243, a state tax credit of $5,000, a city property tax abatement worth $2,404 and other local incentives worth $12,775, according to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.
_Massachusetts: $21,350. The original $36,500 price tag gets cut down after applying a federal tax credit of $9,150 and state incentives of $6,000, according to San Francisco-based home solar service company SunRun Inc., which does business in the state.
_California: $22,610. The original $40,000 sticker price would be cut after applying a federal tax credit of $9,690 and a rebate through Southern California Edison, according to Foster City, Calif.-based installer Solar City.
_Arkansas: $35,000. The $50,000 price is cut by $15,000 after applying a federal tax credit, according to Bob Moore, a solar panel dealer in Ft. Smith, Ark.
Comment
I assume that 5kw is enough to power 100% of most homes. Didnt see the costs for Florida but would imagine they would be comparable. Still fairly pricy, except in Jersey and New York.
October 21, 2009 4:23 PM ET
The Associated Press
(AP) - Solar companies offer rooftop panels at wildly different prices, depending on where they're being installed and the kind of incentives available. Here's how much installers say customers in different states would pay for a 5-kilowatt solar system.
_New Jersey: $2,625. The original $37,500 sticker price drops after applying a state tax rebate of $8,750 from the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, Clean Energy Program, a federal tax credit of $8,625 and a loan program through the Public Service Enterprise Group that's worth up to $17,500 for customers with excellent credit, according to Rumson, N.J.-based installer Gaurav Naik.
_New York: $13,228. The $40,250 cost is slashed after applying a federal tax credit of $8,243, a state tax credit of $5,000, a city property tax abatement worth $2,404 and other local incentives worth $12,775, according to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.
_Massachusetts: $21,350. The original $36,500 price tag gets cut down after applying a federal tax credit of $9,150 and state incentives of $6,000, according to San Francisco-based home solar service company SunRun Inc., which does business in the state.
_California: $22,610. The original $40,000 sticker price would be cut after applying a federal tax credit of $9,690 and a rebate through Southern California Edison, according to Foster City, Calif.-based installer Solar City.
_Arkansas: $35,000. The $50,000 price is cut by $15,000 after applying a federal tax credit, according to Bob Moore, a solar panel dealer in Ft. Smith, Ark.
Comment
I assume that 5kw is enough to power 100% of most homes. Didnt see the costs for Florida but would imagine they would be comparable. Still fairly pricy, except in Jersey and New York.
Duke Energy and China-Based ENN Group to Build Solar Power Projects in U.S.
Duke Energy and China-Based ENN Group to Build Solar Power Projects in U.S.
October 23, 2009 7:00 AM ET
LANGFANG, China, Oct. 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- China-based ENN Group and Duke Energy DUK will jointly develop commercial solar power projects in the U.S.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20040414/DUKEENERGYLOGO )
Under an agreement signed today, ENN and Duke Energy will concentrate on two types of solar photovoltaic designs: large "utility-scale" solar farms and commercial distributed generation solar projects. Distributed generation systems produce electricity close to where the energy is used, rather than at large, central power plants.
This joint development agreement builds upon a memorandum of understanding announced Sept. 23 at the Clinton Global Initiative's annual meeting at which time the companies pledged to work together to accelerate the development of low-carbon and clean energy technologies.
"China is investing heavily in clean energy and we can make greater progress in the U.S. by joining forces and working together," said Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers. "Duke Energy and ENN seek to not only accelerate the development of solar power in the U.S., but help achieve economies of scale and drive down the cost of renewable energy."
"ENN and Duke Energy have very complementary strengths," said ENN Chairman Wang Yusuo. "We are both dedicated to the development and use of low-carbon, clean energy sources to combat the climate change crisis facing all humanity."
Duke Energy Generation Services (DEGS), a commercial business unit of Duke Energy, will team with ENN to develop, own and operate the solar projects.
The joint development agreement will expand DEGS' existing investments in renewable energy - including wind and biopower - and commercial transmission. DEGS owns and operates more than 630 megawatts (MW) of wind power projects in the U.S. and plans to add another 350 MW by the end of 2010. In the biopower market, DEGS is developing wood-waste-to-electricity power plants in the U.S. through ADAGE, the company it formed in 2008 with French-based AREVA.
Keith Trent, president and group executive of Duke Energy's Commercial Businesses, and Wouter van Kempen, president of DEGS, joined ENN Chairman Wang Yusuo and Vice Chairman and Chief Scientist Gan Zhongxue in Langfang for the signing of the agreement.
About ENN:
ENN is committed to clean energy for China and the world. Since its founding 20 years ago, ENN has grown into an integrated group of companies that delivers clean energy to tens of millions of customers and provides overall clean energy solutions to city governments and heavy industry. ENN has more than 100 subsidiaries in over 80cities across China and around the world, and employs more than 24,000 people.
ENN Solar Energy is an international company that produces world-leading silicon thin
film solar modules. It has also created an innovative system of integrated solar power stations.
Additional information about ENN is available on the Internet at: http://www.enn.cn/en/index/index.html.
About Duke Energy Generation Services:
Duke Energy Generation Services (DEGS), part of Duke Energy's Commercial Businesses, is a leader in developing innovative renewable energy solutions, including wind, solar and biopower projects. DEGS builds, owns and operates electric generation for large energy consumers, municipalities, utilities and industrial facilities. DEGS is also working to build commercial transmission capacity to help the U.S. meet its energy needs of the future.
Comment
It is the distributed power systems that interests me the most because the power is generated close to the ones who need it. A significant portion of all power generated is lost in the transmission process. I believe this distributed process puts solar on rooftops of large stores, warehouses, buildings, etc. in towns. The stores allow the solar panels to be placed there and agree to buy X amount of energy that is produced by the panels. the business doesnt have to pay the high costs to install the panels and gets energy at very favorable rates. The utility gets clean solar power at locations that dont require much transmission.
October 23, 2009 7:00 AM ET
LANGFANG, China, Oct. 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- China-based ENN Group and Duke Energy DUK will jointly develop commercial solar power projects in the U.S.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20040414/DUKEENERGYLOGO )
Under an agreement signed today, ENN and Duke Energy will concentrate on two types of solar photovoltaic designs: large "utility-scale" solar farms and commercial distributed generation solar projects. Distributed generation systems produce electricity close to where the energy is used, rather than at large, central power plants.
This joint development agreement builds upon a memorandum of understanding announced Sept. 23 at the Clinton Global Initiative's annual meeting at which time the companies pledged to work together to accelerate the development of low-carbon and clean energy technologies.
"China is investing heavily in clean energy and we can make greater progress in the U.S. by joining forces and working together," said Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers. "Duke Energy and ENN seek to not only accelerate the development of solar power in the U.S., but help achieve economies of scale and drive down the cost of renewable energy."
"ENN and Duke Energy have very complementary strengths," said ENN Chairman Wang Yusuo. "We are both dedicated to the development and use of low-carbon, clean energy sources to combat the climate change crisis facing all humanity."
Duke Energy Generation Services (DEGS), a commercial business unit of Duke Energy, will team with ENN to develop, own and operate the solar projects.
The joint development agreement will expand DEGS' existing investments in renewable energy - including wind and biopower - and commercial transmission. DEGS owns and operates more than 630 megawatts (MW) of wind power projects in the U.S. and plans to add another 350 MW by the end of 2010. In the biopower market, DEGS is developing wood-waste-to-electricity power plants in the U.S. through ADAGE, the company it formed in 2008 with French-based AREVA.
Keith Trent, president and group executive of Duke Energy's Commercial Businesses, and Wouter van Kempen, president of DEGS, joined ENN Chairman Wang Yusuo and Vice Chairman and Chief Scientist Gan Zhongxue in Langfang for the signing of the agreement.
About ENN:
ENN is committed to clean energy for China and the world. Since its founding 20 years ago, ENN has grown into an integrated group of companies that delivers clean energy to tens of millions of customers and provides overall clean energy solutions to city governments and heavy industry. ENN has more than 100 subsidiaries in over 80cities across China and around the world, and employs more than 24,000 people.
ENN Solar Energy is an international company that produces world-leading silicon thin
film solar modules. It has also created an innovative system of integrated solar power stations.
Additional information about ENN is available on the Internet at: http://www.enn.cn/en/index/index.html.
About Duke Energy Generation Services:
Duke Energy Generation Services (DEGS), part of Duke Energy's Commercial Businesses, is a leader in developing innovative renewable energy solutions, including wind, solar and biopower projects. DEGS builds, owns and operates electric generation for large energy consumers, municipalities, utilities and industrial facilities. DEGS is also working to build commercial transmission capacity to help the U.S. meet its energy needs of the future.
Comment
It is the distributed power systems that interests me the most because the power is generated close to the ones who need it. A significant portion of all power generated is lost in the transmission process. I believe this distributed process puts solar on rooftops of large stores, warehouses, buildings, etc. in towns. The stores allow the solar panels to be placed there and agree to buy X amount of energy that is produced by the panels. the business doesnt have to pay the high costs to install the panels and gets energy at very favorable rates. The utility gets clean solar power at locations that dont require much transmission.
Duke receives $204M for 'smart' grid technology
Duke receives $204M for 'smart' grid technology
October 27, 2009 5:39 PM ET advertisement
Associated Press news
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) - Power company Duke Energy said Tuesday it has been awarded federal grants of $204 million, much of it to go toward modernizing its utility operations in Indiana and Ohio.
The award is part of the $3.4 billion in government support for 100 projects announced Tuesday by President Barack Obama.
Charlotte-based Duke said $200 million will go toward its plans to install new "smart" meters for its 700,000 electric and 450,000 natural gas customers in Ohio and 800,000 electric customers in Indiana along with improvements to its power grid that include its transmission system. A separate grant of $4 million will make improvements to the grid for Duke's operations in the Carolinas.
Duke plans to spend $1 billion on the improvements in Ohio and Indiana as it looks to make its system more efficient and reliable.
Comment
It has taken a while but its good to see the government energy monies starting to flow to enhance the grid. Duke is one of the leaders in the efficient energy transmission field. its also good to see this money supplementing Duke's money, and not just waiting for the government to foot the entire bill.
October 27, 2009 5:39 PM ET advertisement
Associated Press news
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) - Power company Duke Energy said Tuesday it has been awarded federal grants of $204 million, much of it to go toward modernizing its utility operations in Indiana and Ohio.
The award is part of the $3.4 billion in government support for 100 projects announced Tuesday by President Barack Obama.
Charlotte-based Duke said $200 million will go toward its plans to install new "smart" meters for its 700,000 electric and 450,000 natural gas customers in Ohio and 800,000 electric customers in Indiana along with improvements to its power grid that include its transmission system. A separate grant of $4 million will make improvements to the grid for Duke's operations in the Carolinas.
Duke plans to spend $1 billion on the improvements in Ohio and Indiana as it looks to make its system more efficient and reliable.
Comment
It has taken a while but its good to see the government energy monies starting to flow to enhance the grid. Duke is one of the leaders in the efficient energy transmission field. its also good to see this money supplementing Duke's money, and not just waiting for the government to foot the entire bill.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Water Use by Solar Projects Intensifies
October 27, 2009, 9:19 am
Water Use by Solar Projects Intensifies
By Todd Woody
California Energy Commission
Two proposed projects in the California desert will require millions of gallons of water to operate.
The West’s water wars are likely to intensify with Pacific Gas and Electric’s announcement on Monday that it would buy 500 megawatts of electricity from two solar power plant projects to be built in the California desert.
The Genesis Solar Energy Project would consume an estimated 536 million gallons of water a year, while the Mojave Solar Project would pump 705 million gallons annually for power-plant cooling, according to applications filed with the California Energy Commission.
With 35 big solar farm projects undergoing licensing or planned for arid regions of California alone, water is emerging as a contentious issue.
The Genesis and Mojave projects will use solar trough technology that deploys long rows of parabolic mirrors to heat a fluid to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine. The steam must be condensed back into water and cooled for re-use.
Solar trough developers prefer to use so-called wet cooling in which water must be constantly be replenished to make up for evaporation. Regulators, meanwhile, are pushing developers to use dry cooling, which takes about 90 percent less water but is more expensive and reduces the efficiency –- and profitability – of a power plant.
NextEra Energy Resources, a subsidiary of the utility giant FPL Group, is developing the Genesis project in the Chuckwalla Valley in the Sonoran Desert. The twin solar farms would tap about 5 percent of the valley’s available water.
“Substantial depletion of water resources is not anticipated,” NextEra wrote in its application.
State energy regulators are already tangling with NextEra over its request to pump drinking-water-quality groundwater to cool another solar farm it plans to build near Bakersfield, Calif.
“Staff will be carefully reviewing water aspects of this proposal,” officials at the California Energy Commission wrote in a memorandum about the Genesis project.
The Mojave Solar Project will be built northeast of Los Angeles by the Spanish developer Abengoa Solar. The site is near two older-style wet-cooled solar trough plants that have been operating for nearly two decades. Abengoa will pump groundwater previously used to grow alfalfa in the desert.
“The proposed use of the land for electrical power generation is a more sustainable use and has fewer environmental impacts than if the project were not to go forward and the agricultural use were to continue,” according to Abengoa’s application.
But at least one big solar trough power plant developer, Solar Millennium of Germany, has waived the white flag in the water wars. After local water officials refused to turn on the taps for its planned solar farm in Ridgecrest Calif., Solar Millennium decided to dry cool all of its power plants projects in California.
Water Use by Solar Projects Intensifies
By Todd Woody
California Energy Commission
Two proposed projects in the California desert will require millions of gallons of water to operate.
The West’s water wars are likely to intensify with Pacific Gas and Electric’s announcement on Monday that it would buy 500 megawatts of electricity from two solar power plant projects to be built in the California desert.
The Genesis Solar Energy Project would consume an estimated 536 million gallons of water a year, while the Mojave Solar Project would pump 705 million gallons annually for power-plant cooling, according to applications filed with the California Energy Commission.
With 35 big solar farm projects undergoing licensing or planned for arid regions of California alone, water is emerging as a contentious issue.
The Genesis and Mojave projects will use solar trough technology that deploys long rows of parabolic mirrors to heat a fluid to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine. The steam must be condensed back into water and cooled for re-use.
Solar trough developers prefer to use so-called wet cooling in which water must be constantly be replenished to make up for evaporation. Regulators, meanwhile, are pushing developers to use dry cooling, which takes about 90 percent less water but is more expensive and reduces the efficiency –- and profitability – of a power plant.
NextEra Energy Resources, a subsidiary of the utility giant FPL Group, is developing the Genesis project in the Chuckwalla Valley in the Sonoran Desert. The twin solar farms would tap about 5 percent of the valley’s available water.
“Substantial depletion of water resources is not anticipated,” NextEra wrote in its application.
State energy regulators are already tangling with NextEra over its request to pump drinking-water-quality groundwater to cool another solar farm it plans to build near Bakersfield, Calif.
“Staff will be carefully reviewing water aspects of this proposal,” officials at the California Energy Commission wrote in a memorandum about the Genesis project.
The Mojave Solar Project will be built northeast of Los Angeles by the Spanish developer Abengoa Solar. The site is near two older-style wet-cooled solar trough plants that have been operating for nearly two decades. Abengoa will pump groundwater previously used to grow alfalfa in the desert.
“The proposed use of the land for electrical power generation is a more sustainable use and has fewer environmental impacts than if the project were not to go forward and the agricultural use were to continue,” according to Abengoa’s application.
But at least one big solar trough power plant developer, Solar Millennium of Germany, has waived the white flag in the water wars. After local water officials refused to turn on the taps for its planned solar farm in Ridgecrest Calif., Solar Millennium decided to dry cool all of its power plants projects in California.
The electric-fuel-trade acid test
The electrification of motoring
Sep 3rd 2009
From The Economist print edition
After many false starts, battery-powered cars seem here to stay. Are they just an interesting niche product, or will they turn motoring upside down?
Tesla
A plug for an electric car
IN 1995 Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen, two researchers at the Harvard Business School, invented a new term: “disruptive technology”. This is an innovation that fulfils the requirements of some, but not most, consumers better than the incumbent does. That gives it a toehold, which allows room for improvement and, eventually, dominance. The risk for incumbent firms is that of the proverbial boiling frog. They may not know when to switch from old to new until it is too late.
The example Dr Bower and Dr Christensen used was a nerdy one: computer hard-drives. But unbeknown to them a more familiar one was in the making. The first digital cameras were coming on sale. These were more expensive than film cameras and had lower resolution. But they brought two advantages. A user could look at a picture immediately after he had taken it. And he could download it onto his computer and send it to his friends.
Fourteen years on, you would struggle to buy a new camera that uses film. Some of the leading camera-makers, such as Panasonic, are firms that had little interest in photography when Dr Bower and Dr Christensen published. And an entire industry, the manufacturing and processing of film, is rapidly disappearing.
Substitute “car” for “camera” and you have a story that should concern thoughtful bosses in the motor and oil industries. Internal-combustion engines have dominated mechanised road transport for a century, but the past year or so has seen the arrival of a dribble of vehicles driven by electric motors. That these are the products of small, new firms, or of established non-carmaking companies, supports the Bower-Christensen thesis. But next year the big boys, encouraged by legislative pressure to produce low-emission vehicles, will leap out of the boiling water and join in. Their progress towards greenery will be an important theme of the Frankfurt motor show this month.
Bold claims are being made. Carlos Ghosn, who leads the Renault-Nissan alliance, thinks 10% of new cars bought in 2020 will be pure-battery vehicles. A report by IDTechEx, a research consultancy based in Cambridge, England, reckons a third of the cars made in 2025 will be electrically powered in one way or another. If that trend continues, liquid fuels might become as obsolete as photographic film.
The Li-ion roars
The technological breakthrough that led to digital cameras was the charge-coupled device, or CCD. The equivalent for electric cars is the lithium-ion battery, or Li-ion. Just as CCDs were used first in specialist applications, such as television cameras, so Li-ion batteries have been used in laptop computers and mobile phones. By 2003, however, their price had dropped to a level where Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who had helped launch PayPal, an online payments service, thought that they might be cheap enough to form the basis of an all-electric sports car.
The “killer app” of this car would be its acceleration. Unlike internal-combustion engines, electric motors have full torque, as pulling-power is called, from zero revs. They are thus predisposed to go like a bat out of hell without the aid of a gearbox. Mr Musk’s brainchild is known as the Tesla Roadster (pictured above). The sports version goes from zero to 100kph (62mph) in 3.7 seconds—not much slower than a top-line Ferrari.
The desire for acceleration at any price ($121,000, since you ask) is a niche market, but niche markets are the classic way in for a disruptive technology. Tesla’s next vehicle, the Model S, is a more mainstream family car. At about $50,000 it will still not be cheap, but it should be cheap enough to appeal to those who like to think of themselves as early adopters, but who also have spouses and children to worry about.
Another reason for the high price of Tesla’s cars is their range. According to its maker, the Roadster can travel almost 400km between charges. The Model S should be able to do even better. But cheaper electric cars have to make a trade-off between range, price and convenience. Since batteries can be recharged only slowly (the process takes hours, not minutes), a car’s effective range is limited by the size of its battery. And batteries are expensive.
A lot of researchers are working on making them cheaper and faster to charge, of course. In the meantime, though, there are three approaches to the trade-off, each of which has its champions. One is to accept the range limit and design small, thrifty vehicles specialised for city use. This has the virtue of simplicity and the vice of inflexibility. The second is to add a petrol-driven generator known as a “range extender”. This complicates the mechanics, but provides the driver with a security blanket, for he knows he will never be stranded if he can find a petrol station. The third answer is to keep the car all-battery, but to introduce a network of battery-exchange stations similar to the existing network of petrol stations, so that someone who is running out of juice can pull in, swap over and pull out.
Celling the future
A leading contender in the first category is Mitsubishi’s i-MiEV, which should go on sale next year. Its initial price will be ¥4.6m ($49,000), although that is expected to be cut in half once the car goes on sale outside Japan. That halving (and potential quartering) of price compared with a Tesla Roadster is achievable because the i-MiEV’s battery has only 88 Li-ion cells, rather than the Tesla’s 1,800. It uses its limited resources well, however. Its quoted range is 160km. Other electric city cars are expected from firms such as Fiat and Toyota. And in November Daimler (which also owns 6% of Tesla) plans to start producing a Li-ion-powered version of its Smart Fortwo. In Germany, a full charge will cost about €2 ($2.80) and keep the vehicle going for around 115km—although there is room in the car, as the name suggests, for only two people.
City cars are all very well as runabouts, but for electric vehicles to become widely adopted and displace fossil fuels they will have to crack the saloon-car market, too. To do that with an all-battery car will be a tall order, as the price of the Model S suggests. Most carmakers are taking a more conservative approach than Tesla’s, and it is here that the second answer, a battery plus a generator, heaves into view.
Rex Features
A plug for an electric carIn an existing hybrid, such as the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight, the wheels can be turned directly by both the petrol engine and the electric motor (and all the energy is supplied originally as petrol). Such vehicles are known as “parallel” hybrids as a result. In the new battery-plus-generator designs, also known as “series” hybrids, the wheels are driven only by the electric motor. The petrol engine is there to create more electricity, if it is needed, but the batteries are usually recharged from the mains.
The most talked-about of the battery-plus-generator models is General Motors’ Chevrolet Volt (to be sold in Europe as the Ampera). This car, which should be in the showrooms next year at a price of around $40,000, has an all-battery range of 65km, after which the range-extender will kick in. GM reckons 65km is enough to cover 80% of daily usage in America, and similar figures pertain to other countries. Mitsubishi says 90% of drivers in Japan cover less than 40km on weekdays and 80% cover less than 60km at weekends. Robert Bosch, a German car-parts firm, reckons that in Germany the 90% figure is less than 80km.
Most of the big carmakers have series hybrids under development. In some cases the range-extenders could be offered as an extra on a battery-powered model, leaving it up to the customer to decide what sort of range he wants. Daimler is taking this approach with its BlueZero cars. These five-seater vehicles will be available in three versions. A battery-only model will have a range of 200km. Another will offer 100km of battery-powered range, but will also have a petrol generator to extend it. A third will use a hydrogen-powered fuel cell to generate electricity.
The third answer, though, is perhaps the most radical. Instead of a petrol engine, with its widespread infrastructure of filling stations providing the security blanket, why not build new infrastructure to refuel cars with new, fully charged batteries?
The leading proponent of this idea is Better Place. This firm, which is based in California, has been scouring the world for car markets that are, in its terminology, “islands” and offering to fit them with networks of car-charging and battery-swapping stations that will use robots to exchange exhausted batteries for fully charged ones in seconds.
Better Place defines an island as a place with an edge that motorists rarely cross, and the first to be picked by Shai Agassi, the firm’s founder, was Israel. Though more of the country’s edge is land than sea, few cars leave by either route. Israel is now being fitted out with the Better Place infrastructure. Meanwhile, Nissan is tooling up to start building cars with batteries of the appropriate dimensions, for sale starting next year, and Tesla plans to offer swappable batteries on the Model S.
Other “islands” that Better Place has signed deals with include Denmark, Hawaii and Australia. The firm also has a partnership with Tokyo’s largest taxi operator, Nihon Kotsu, to provide swappable batteries for a new fleet of electric taxis which will take to the streets of the Japanese capital. With some 60,000 taxis in Tokyo, this could turn into a huge market.
Besides providing drivers with secure refuelling, the Better Place approach has a second advantage. Separating ownership of the battery from ownership of the car changes the economics of electric vehicles. If you rent the battery rather than buying it, that becomes a running cost (like petrol) and the sticker price of the car drops accordingly. This might not matter to a sophisticated economist, who would amortise the battery cost over the life of the vehicle. Many people, though, are swayed by the number they write on the cheque that they give to the dealer.
Better Place, indeed, plans to go further. It will charge for its services (battery and electricity) by the kilometre travelled. The cost per kilometre will be lower than for petrol vehicles, and if you sign up for enough kilometres a month, it will throw in the car for nothing.
Watt’s up
That is possible in part because electric cars are efficient. According to Bosch’s calculations, a conventional internal-combustion-engined car can travel 1.5-2.5km on a kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy. A hybrid with a combined electric and diesel engine would go up to 3.2km. But a battery-powered car can travel 6.5km.
On top of that, the energy put into them is cheaper. Owners with garages or driveways can top up at night using the domestic supply. The long recharge time will thus not be an issue, and the electricity will be cheap, off-peak power. Even if more expensive daytime power is needed (some office and supermarket car parks are already being fitted with recharging points, in anticipation of mounting demand), the cost of such juice is still favourable compared with petrol.
Only for garageless owners does recharging become complicated. They will need street-based electrical infrastructure, and a lack of this will limit the spread of electric vehicles to start with. That said, the batteries are expected to get better quite fast. No one is talking of Moore’s Law—a doubling of capacity every 18 months or so. But an improvement of about 8% a year into the foreseeable future is on the cards. A doubling in a decade, in other words.
Bosch, for example, calculates that a car fitted with a 40kW motor capable of speeds of up to 120kph would need a Li-ion battery with a capacity of 35kWh. Today such a battery might cost around €17,000. With the technology and economies of scale Bosch expects to be available in 2015, that could drop to €8,000-12,000. As Ford recently pointed out, if the industry were to move towards a common standard for battery packs, this would help boost production volumes and so bring prices down even more. Bosch reckons that for electric cars to become universally popular, a threefold increase in energy density and a fall of two-thirds in the price of batteries will be needed. To that end, it has set up a joint venture with Samsung of South Korea to develop and produce Li-ion batteries for automotive use.
Indeed, battery firms, both old and new, are coming up with innovations that add up to the 8% annual gains. These involve changes to the lithium chemistry of batteries, their mechanical properties and the electronics that control them. Among the newcomers are two American firms, A123 Systems and Boston Power, both of which are based in Massachusetts.
A123 was founded in 2001 and is backed by General Electric. It uses nanoscale materials to boost the performance of its batteries (making an electrode out of nanoparticles increases its surface area, which in turn decreases the battery’s internal resistance and improves its ability to store and deliver energy). Its batteries are already used in power tools, and the company has formed alliances to supply Chrysler and SAIC Motor Corporation of Shanghai with car-sized versions. Its batteries were also being considered for the Volt, but GM eventually picked ones made by LG Chem, a South Korean firm.
Boston Power, founded in 2005, makes fast-charging Li-ion cells for consumer products, including some Hewlett-Packard laptops. The company, which has a factory in Taiwan and plans for one in Massachusetts, is developing a Li-ion battery called Swing for automotive use.
Some carmakers are forming partnerships with battery-makers to ensure supplies and gain access to technology. Others are building their own battery factories. And some are doing both: Nissan has formed a joint venture with NEC to produce advanced Li-ion batteries that use a laminated structure to improve cooling.
The firm is planning to put the batteries in a new five-seater family car called the Leaf that it intends to launch late next year in Japan and America as part of its alliance with Renault. The group plans to build 200,000 a year, the most ambitious production target so far for a pure-battery car. The Leaf will be powered by an 80kW electric motor and will have a range of at least 160km on a full charge. It can be charged to 80% capacity in 30 minutes with high-powered quick chargers which Nissan hopes will be installed in petrol stations and other public places.
At least one battery-maker, though, has loftier ambitions than merely supplying carmakers with its wherewithal. BYD, a Chinese firm, seems to have Panasonic’s success in the world of cameras in mind. Earlier this year it launched the first of what it promises will be a range of electric cars that will undercut those made by American and European producers, in part by using a novel material in the batteries’ electrodes. It claims this will make those batteries both cheaper than conventional types, and faster charging. BYD started with fleet sales in China and plans to begin private sales there later this month and launch its first vehicle in America next year. The company is being watched closely, not least by Warren Buffett, a celebrated American investor who has taken a 10% stake in it.
This will be an interesting experiment. There is a lot more to an electric car than its battery, of course. But established car firms that think their know-how in other parts of carmaking will save them may find themselves in the same position as those 19th-century carriage-makers who thought a “horseless carriage” would, literally, be that. For, once the engine block and the gearbox are gone, the game of car design changes. And batterification could bring about other changes, too.
Which frogs will live?
A number of carmakers and component companies are, for example, looking at getting rid of drive trains, and fitting electric motors directly into cars’ wheels. Such systems would be operated electronically, so they would also provide traction control.
Michelin, in particular, is developing what it calls the Active Wheel. This gives the firm the ability to provide a complete power, braking and suspension package for electric cars. One of the set-ups on which Michelin is working has two motors mounted within each wheel. One turns the wheel. The other works an active-suspension system that dampens the usual pitching and rolling of a car as it drives along. Besides traction control, the driver (or the vehicle’s computer) would be able to select different suspension settings to suit motoring conditions.
One of the first cars to use Michelin’s four-wheel-drive ActiveWheel set-up is likely to be the Venturi Volage. A Li-ion battery gives this a range of around 320km and a top speed of 150kph. It is designed to accelerate to 100kph in under five seconds, according to Venturi, a specialist carmaker based in Monaco. Like the Tesla Roadster, it is not expected to be cheap.
With wheel-mounted motors that mix motive power, braking and active suspension, more of the things conventionally fitted to a car become unnecessary. Because a gearbox, clutch, transmission and differential unit are no longer needed, and springs and other suspension items will probably go, too, vehicles could assume all sorts of shapes and sizes.
Without the cost and complexity of many of the parts hitherto required to make a car, the shape of the automotive industry could be transformed as much as cars are. As for the oil companies, if the visionaries are correct, they risk finding themselves in the wrong business. Some researchers already have battery materials they reckon could be recharged in the time it takes to freshen up and have a snack at a service station. If they are right, the need for even a range-extender vanishes.
That is still a biggish “if”, of course. The efficiency of internal-combustion engines is improving, too—and as the advert above shows, electric cars have come and gone in the past. But propelling modern transport by means of serial explosions in an array of tin-cans does seem an incredibly primitive way of doing things. The time is ripe for a change
Comment
Excellent article. Very thorough. The plug-ins usually take overnight to recharge and rerquire high voltage lines to do it. My Prius has no transmission and gear box but is fairly agile when necessary.
Sep 3rd 2009
From The Economist print edition
After many false starts, battery-powered cars seem here to stay. Are they just an interesting niche product, or will they turn motoring upside down?
Tesla
A plug for an electric car
IN 1995 Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen, two researchers at the Harvard Business School, invented a new term: “disruptive technology”. This is an innovation that fulfils the requirements of some, but not most, consumers better than the incumbent does. That gives it a toehold, which allows room for improvement and, eventually, dominance. The risk for incumbent firms is that of the proverbial boiling frog. They may not know when to switch from old to new until it is too late.
The example Dr Bower and Dr Christensen used was a nerdy one: computer hard-drives. But unbeknown to them a more familiar one was in the making. The first digital cameras were coming on sale. These were more expensive than film cameras and had lower resolution. But they brought two advantages. A user could look at a picture immediately after he had taken it. And he could download it onto his computer and send it to his friends.
Fourteen years on, you would struggle to buy a new camera that uses film. Some of the leading camera-makers, such as Panasonic, are firms that had little interest in photography when Dr Bower and Dr Christensen published. And an entire industry, the manufacturing and processing of film, is rapidly disappearing.
Substitute “car” for “camera” and you have a story that should concern thoughtful bosses in the motor and oil industries. Internal-combustion engines have dominated mechanised road transport for a century, but the past year or so has seen the arrival of a dribble of vehicles driven by electric motors. That these are the products of small, new firms, or of established non-carmaking companies, supports the Bower-Christensen thesis. But next year the big boys, encouraged by legislative pressure to produce low-emission vehicles, will leap out of the boiling water and join in. Their progress towards greenery will be an important theme of the Frankfurt motor show this month.
Bold claims are being made. Carlos Ghosn, who leads the Renault-Nissan alliance, thinks 10% of new cars bought in 2020 will be pure-battery vehicles. A report by IDTechEx, a research consultancy based in Cambridge, England, reckons a third of the cars made in 2025 will be electrically powered in one way or another. If that trend continues, liquid fuels might become as obsolete as photographic film.
The Li-ion roars
The technological breakthrough that led to digital cameras was the charge-coupled device, or CCD. The equivalent for electric cars is the lithium-ion battery, or Li-ion. Just as CCDs were used first in specialist applications, such as television cameras, so Li-ion batteries have been used in laptop computers and mobile phones. By 2003, however, their price had dropped to a level where Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who had helped launch PayPal, an online payments service, thought that they might be cheap enough to form the basis of an all-electric sports car.
The “killer app” of this car would be its acceleration. Unlike internal-combustion engines, electric motors have full torque, as pulling-power is called, from zero revs. They are thus predisposed to go like a bat out of hell without the aid of a gearbox. Mr Musk’s brainchild is known as the Tesla Roadster (pictured above). The sports version goes from zero to 100kph (62mph) in 3.7 seconds—not much slower than a top-line Ferrari.
The desire for acceleration at any price ($121,000, since you ask) is a niche market, but niche markets are the classic way in for a disruptive technology. Tesla’s next vehicle, the Model S, is a more mainstream family car. At about $50,000 it will still not be cheap, but it should be cheap enough to appeal to those who like to think of themselves as early adopters, but who also have spouses and children to worry about.
Another reason for the high price of Tesla’s cars is their range. According to its maker, the Roadster can travel almost 400km between charges. The Model S should be able to do even better. But cheaper electric cars have to make a trade-off between range, price and convenience. Since batteries can be recharged only slowly (the process takes hours, not minutes), a car’s effective range is limited by the size of its battery. And batteries are expensive.
A lot of researchers are working on making them cheaper and faster to charge, of course. In the meantime, though, there are three approaches to the trade-off, each of which has its champions. One is to accept the range limit and design small, thrifty vehicles specialised for city use. This has the virtue of simplicity and the vice of inflexibility. The second is to add a petrol-driven generator known as a “range extender”. This complicates the mechanics, but provides the driver with a security blanket, for he knows he will never be stranded if he can find a petrol station. The third answer is to keep the car all-battery, but to introduce a network of battery-exchange stations similar to the existing network of petrol stations, so that someone who is running out of juice can pull in, swap over and pull out.
Celling the future
A leading contender in the first category is Mitsubishi’s i-MiEV, which should go on sale next year. Its initial price will be ¥4.6m ($49,000), although that is expected to be cut in half once the car goes on sale outside Japan. That halving (and potential quartering) of price compared with a Tesla Roadster is achievable because the i-MiEV’s battery has only 88 Li-ion cells, rather than the Tesla’s 1,800. It uses its limited resources well, however. Its quoted range is 160km. Other electric city cars are expected from firms such as Fiat and Toyota. And in November Daimler (which also owns 6% of Tesla) plans to start producing a Li-ion-powered version of its Smart Fortwo. In Germany, a full charge will cost about €2 ($2.80) and keep the vehicle going for around 115km—although there is room in the car, as the name suggests, for only two people.
City cars are all very well as runabouts, but for electric vehicles to become widely adopted and displace fossil fuels they will have to crack the saloon-car market, too. To do that with an all-battery car will be a tall order, as the price of the Model S suggests. Most carmakers are taking a more conservative approach than Tesla’s, and it is here that the second answer, a battery plus a generator, heaves into view.
Rex Features
A plug for an electric carIn an existing hybrid, such as the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight, the wheels can be turned directly by both the petrol engine and the electric motor (and all the energy is supplied originally as petrol). Such vehicles are known as “parallel” hybrids as a result. In the new battery-plus-generator designs, also known as “series” hybrids, the wheels are driven only by the electric motor. The petrol engine is there to create more electricity, if it is needed, but the batteries are usually recharged from the mains.
The most talked-about of the battery-plus-generator models is General Motors’ Chevrolet Volt (to be sold in Europe as the Ampera). This car, which should be in the showrooms next year at a price of around $40,000, has an all-battery range of 65km, after which the range-extender will kick in. GM reckons 65km is enough to cover 80% of daily usage in America, and similar figures pertain to other countries. Mitsubishi says 90% of drivers in Japan cover less than 40km on weekdays and 80% cover less than 60km at weekends. Robert Bosch, a German car-parts firm, reckons that in Germany the 90% figure is less than 80km.
Most of the big carmakers have series hybrids under development. In some cases the range-extenders could be offered as an extra on a battery-powered model, leaving it up to the customer to decide what sort of range he wants. Daimler is taking this approach with its BlueZero cars. These five-seater vehicles will be available in three versions. A battery-only model will have a range of 200km. Another will offer 100km of battery-powered range, but will also have a petrol generator to extend it. A third will use a hydrogen-powered fuel cell to generate electricity.
The third answer, though, is perhaps the most radical. Instead of a petrol engine, with its widespread infrastructure of filling stations providing the security blanket, why not build new infrastructure to refuel cars with new, fully charged batteries?
The leading proponent of this idea is Better Place. This firm, which is based in California, has been scouring the world for car markets that are, in its terminology, “islands” and offering to fit them with networks of car-charging and battery-swapping stations that will use robots to exchange exhausted batteries for fully charged ones in seconds.
Better Place defines an island as a place with an edge that motorists rarely cross, and the first to be picked by Shai Agassi, the firm’s founder, was Israel. Though more of the country’s edge is land than sea, few cars leave by either route. Israel is now being fitted out with the Better Place infrastructure. Meanwhile, Nissan is tooling up to start building cars with batteries of the appropriate dimensions, for sale starting next year, and Tesla plans to offer swappable batteries on the Model S.
Other “islands” that Better Place has signed deals with include Denmark, Hawaii and Australia. The firm also has a partnership with Tokyo’s largest taxi operator, Nihon Kotsu, to provide swappable batteries for a new fleet of electric taxis which will take to the streets of the Japanese capital. With some 60,000 taxis in Tokyo, this could turn into a huge market.
Besides providing drivers with secure refuelling, the Better Place approach has a second advantage. Separating ownership of the battery from ownership of the car changes the economics of electric vehicles. If you rent the battery rather than buying it, that becomes a running cost (like petrol) and the sticker price of the car drops accordingly. This might not matter to a sophisticated economist, who would amortise the battery cost over the life of the vehicle. Many people, though, are swayed by the number they write on the cheque that they give to the dealer.
Better Place, indeed, plans to go further. It will charge for its services (battery and electricity) by the kilometre travelled. The cost per kilometre will be lower than for petrol vehicles, and if you sign up for enough kilometres a month, it will throw in the car for nothing.
Watt’s up
That is possible in part because electric cars are efficient. According to Bosch’s calculations, a conventional internal-combustion-engined car can travel 1.5-2.5km on a kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy. A hybrid with a combined electric and diesel engine would go up to 3.2km. But a battery-powered car can travel 6.5km.
On top of that, the energy put into them is cheaper. Owners with garages or driveways can top up at night using the domestic supply. The long recharge time will thus not be an issue, and the electricity will be cheap, off-peak power. Even if more expensive daytime power is needed (some office and supermarket car parks are already being fitted with recharging points, in anticipation of mounting demand), the cost of such juice is still favourable compared with petrol.
Only for garageless owners does recharging become complicated. They will need street-based electrical infrastructure, and a lack of this will limit the spread of electric vehicles to start with. That said, the batteries are expected to get better quite fast. No one is talking of Moore’s Law—a doubling of capacity every 18 months or so. But an improvement of about 8% a year into the foreseeable future is on the cards. A doubling in a decade, in other words.
Bosch, for example, calculates that a car fitted with a 40kW motor capable of speeds of up to 120kph would need a Li-ion battery with a capacity of 35kWh. Today such a battery might cost around €17,000. With the technology and economies of scale Bosch expects to be available in 2015, that could drop to €8,000-12,000. As Ford recently pointed out, if the industry were to move towards a common standard for battery packs, this would help boost production volumes and so bring prices down even more. Bosch reckons that for electric cars to become universally popular, a threefold increase in energy density and a fall of two-thirds in the price of batteries will be needed. To that end, it has set up a joint venture with Samsung of South Korea to develop and produce Li-ion batteries for automotive use.
Indeed, battery firms, both old and new, are coming up with innovations that add up to the 8% annual gains. These involve changes to the lithium chemistry of batteries, their mechanical properties and the electronics that control them. Among the newcomers are two American firms, A123 Systems and Boston Power, both of which are based in Massachusetts.
A123 was founded in 2001 and is backed by General Electric. It uses nanoscale materials to boost the performance of its batteries (making an electrode out of nanoparticles increases its surface area, which in turn decreases the battery’s internal resistance and improves its ability to store and deliver energy). Its batteries are already used in power tools, and the company has formed alliances to supply Chrysler and SAIC Motor Corporation of Shanghai with car-sized versions. Its batteries were also being considered for the Volt, but GM eventually picked ones made by LG Chem, a South Korean firm.
Boston Power, founded in 2005, makes fast-charging Li-ion cells for consumer products, including some Hewlett-Packard laptops. The company, which has a factory in Taiwan and plans for one in Massachusetts, is developing a Li-ion battery called Swing for automotive use.
Some carmakers are forming partnerships with battery-makers to ensure supplies and gain access to technology. Others are building their own battery factories. And some are doing both: Nissan has formed a joint venture with NEC to produce advanced Li-ion batteries that use a laminated structure to improve cooling.
The firm is planning to put the batteries in a new five-seater family car called the Leaf that it intends to launch late next year in Japan and America as part of its alliance with Renault. The group plans to build 200,000 a year, the most ambitious production target so far for a pure-battery car. The Leaf will be powered by an 80kW electric motor and will have a range of at least 160km on a full charge. It can be charged to 80% capacity in 30 minutes with high-powered quick chargers which Nissan hopes will be installed in petrol stations and other public places.
At least one battery-maker, though, has loftier ambitions than merely supplying carmakers with its wherewithal. BYD, a Chinese firm, seems to have Panasonic’s success in the world of cameras in mind. Earlier this year it launched the first of what it promises will be a range of electric cars that will undercut those made by American and European producers, in part by using a novel material in the batteries’ electrodes. It claims this will make those batteries both cheaper than conventional types, and faster charging. BYD started with fleet sales in China and plans to begin private sales there later this month and launch its first vehicle in America next year. The company is being watched closely, not least by Warren Buffett, a celebrated American investor who has taken a 10% stake in it.
This will be an interesting experiment. There is a lot more to an electric car than its battery, of course. But established car firms that think their know-how in other parts of carmaking will save them may find themselves in the same position as those 19th-century carriage-makers who thought a “horseless carriage” would, literally, be that. For, once the engine block and the gearbox are gone, the game of car design changes. And batterification could bring about other changes, too.
Which frogs will live?
A number of carmakers and component companies are, for example, looking at getting rid of drive trains, and fitting electric motors directly into cars’ wheels. Such systems would be operated electronically, so they would also provide traction control.
Michelin, in particular, is developing what it calls the Active Wheel. This gives the firm the ability to provide a complete power, braking and suspension package for electric cars. One of the set-ups on which Michelin is working has two motors mounted within each wheel. One turns the wheel. The other works an active-suspension system that dampens the usual pitching and rolling of a car as it drives along. Besides traction control, the driver (or the vehicle’s computer) would be able to select different suspension settings to suit motoring conditions.
One of the first cars to use Michelin’s four-wheel-drive ActiveWheel set-up is likely to be the Venturi Volage. A Li-ion battery gives this a range of around 320km and a top speed of 150kph. It is designed to accelerate to 100kph in under five seconds, according to Venturi, a specialist carmaker based in Monaco. Like the Tesla Roadster, it is not expected to be cheap.
With wheel-mounted motors that mix motive power, braking and active suspension, more of the things conventionally fitted to a car become unnecessary. Because a gearbox, clutch, transmission and differential unit are no longer needed, and springs and other suspension items will probably go, too, vehicles could assume all sorts of shapes and sizes.
Without the cost and complexity of many of the parts hitherto required to make a car, the shape of the automotive industry could be transformed as much as cars are. As for the oil companies, if the visionaries are correct, they risk finding themselves in the wrong business. Some researchers already have battery materials they reckon could be recharged in the time it takes to freshen up and have a snack at a service station. If they are right, the need for even a range-extender vanishes.
That is still a biggish “if”, of course. The efficiency of internal-combustion engines is improving, too—and as the advert above shows, electric cars have come and gone in the past. But propelling modern transport by means of serial explosions in an array of tin-cans does seem an incredibly primitive way of doing things. The time is ripe for a change
Comment
Excellent article. Very thorough. The plug-ins usually take overnight to recharge and rerquire high voltage lines to do it. My Prius has no transmission and gear box but is fairly agile when necessary.
Sticker shock
Aug 21st 2009
From Economist.com
Ignore the 230 miles-per-gallon claims being touted for GM's plug-in hybrid
Bloomberg
SO, THE Chevrolet Volt—the plug-in hybrid car on which General Motors is pinning its resurrection—will get a staggering 230 miles per American gallon (or 97 kilometres per litre) in stop-go city driving? Well, er, no. That is just marketing hype, albeit prose that is permissible under the draft guidelines for “extended range” electric vehicles that America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently working on. When it is launched, late in 2010, motorists who have bought the dream will awaken to find their shiny new Chevy Volts get around 50mpg in traffic.
True, 50mpg is still pretty good for a roomy five-seater. Though slightly smaller and a good deal cheaper than the $40,000 Volt, Toyota’s latest Prius already boasts 50mpg for combined motorway and city driving in the United States—and considerably more in Japan, where the method of calculating fuel consumption is different. And that is the problem. There is no easy way to compare the efficiency of an electric vehicle—plug-in hybrid or pure electric—with a fossil-fuelled equivalent.
Comparing the performance of self-charging hybrids like the Toyota Prius and the Ford Fusion is easy. As far as their fuel bills are concerned, the motorist pays only for the bit that comes from the pump. The regenerative energy captured during braking—which is used to charge a hybrid’s battery—is, in effect, free. Like any other fossil-fuelled car, a self-charging hybrid’s official fuel consumption is simply the number of miles it can eke from a gallon of petrol while being tested on the EPA’s cycles that mimic driving on city routes and faster roads.
Not so the hybrid’s plug-in siblings. The Volt, for instance, has enough electrical storage to travel 40 miles (64 kilometres) on battery power alone. GM reckons that is enough to enable three out of four Americans to travel to work and back on a single charge. But if owners were to restrict their motoring to trips of less than 40 miles between charges from the grid, the Volt would give them, not the claimed 230mpg, but an almost infinite number of miles per gallon. Such quirks make a mockery of the EPA’s tests.
The EPA has yet to reveal its draft methodology for testing the Volt and other plug-ins. It clearly takes into account some contribution from the vehicle’s petrol-powered generator. It also seems to factor in the cost of the electricity (a national average of 11 cents per kilowatt-hour is quoted) used to recharge the battery. But how 230mpg can be claimed for the Volt is difficult to fathom.
Start with what is known about the vehicle’s traction system. GM reckons the platform needs only 25 kilowatt-hours of energy to cover 100 miles of city driving. At 11 cents a kilowatt-hour, that would cost $2.75 for 100 miles. If petrol costs $3 a gallon (as regular does today), then the Volt would be able to travel 109 miles for the same price as that of a gallon of petrol.
What if the owner does 50 miles between charges instead of 40 miles? Then the Volt’s 1.4 litre petrol-engine has to kick in to cover the extra ten miles—not to drive the wheels directly, like the Prius’s engine does, but to recharge the battery, which then feeds juice to the electric motor, which, in turn, drives the wheels.
If that were an efficient way of delivering torque to the wheels, all cars would have electric transmission systems instead of mechanical ones. They don’t, for good reason. So expect no more than 20mpg for a car the size and weight of the Volt when running under petrol power. In that case, the fuel used for a 50-mile journey would be half a gallon and the efficiency would be 100mpg. (Alternatively, you could take the figures for the price of motoring given above, and calculate an efficiency of 58mpg.) Go 60 miles and it would drop to 60mpg using the first measure, or 44mpg using the second.
And this assumes that no power-sapping components are switched on and the owner drives with a featherlight foot. In the real world the Volt’s 40-mile range on battery power alone is likely to be 30 miles at best—and perhaps half that if driver is in a hurry, the terrain is hilly and the lights, wipers and air-conditioning are turned on. Any reduction in battery-only motoring hits the Volt’s overall fuel economy hard.
The efficiency ratings that makers are claiming for their plug-in hybrids are nonsense. They are little more than figures plucked from the air because they depend on specific sets of circumstances. That makes comparisons with fossil-fuelled cars almost impossible.
Petrol cars and diesels can also get more or fewer miles to the gallon depending on how they are driven, but irrespective of the distance the owner drives. And they are, of course, oblivious to electricity rates. So if any meaningful comparison is to be made (and one needs to be, so customers can make intelligent choices), the best way would be to determine how many miles could be driven for the energy used—that is, the miles per kilowatt-hour. In those terms, a plug-in hybrid that uses 25 kilowatt-hours of energy to go 100 miles would have a “fuel” consumption of four miles per kilowatt-hour.
To find out what that is equivalent to in miles per gallon, you need to compare the energy content of the natural gas or coal used to generate, say, 25 kilowatt-hours of electricity with the energy content of the gallons of petrol needed to go 100 miles. To be meaningful, however, the calculation must account, on one side of the equation, for all the energy wasted in turning natural gas or coal into electricity, transporting it over the grid and then pumping it into a battery. To ensure apples are compared with apples, the other side of the equation has to take into account all the energy wasted in refining and transporting the petrol and pumping it into a car.
Such an analysis has actually been done by engineers at AC Propulsion, a firm in the Los Angeles area that makes parts for electric cars. Their conclusion was that around eight miles per kilowatt-hour is the equivalent of 100mpg. So forget GM’s outlandish claims: the Chevy Volt will get at best 50mpg in the city. As your correspondent noted at the beginning, that is not at all bad—but it is nowhere near the preposterous 230mpg being touted.
Comment
I get 45.5 mpg on my 2009 Prius, and that is with the AC on all the time. I havent figured out how to set the AC yet, so it stays on at 77 degrees. Altho the title of the article is sticker shock, not much mention was made about the price. My 2009 Prius cost $21,000 so when its compared to the $40,000 Volt, it looks pretty reasonable.
From Economist.com
Ignore the 230 miles-per-gallon claims being touted for GM's plug-in hybrid
Bloomberg
SO, THE Chevrolet Volt—the plug-in hybrid car on which General Motors is pinning its resurrection—will get a staggering 230 miles per American gallon (or 97 kilometres per litre) in stop-go city driving? Well, er, no. That is just marketing hype, albeit prose that is permissible under the draft guidelines for “extended range” electric vehicles that America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently working on. When it is launched, late in 2010, motorists who have bought the dream will awaken to find their shiny new Chevy Volts get around 50mpg in traffic.
True, 50mpg is still pretty good for a roomy five-seater. Though slightly smaller and a good deal cheaper than the $40,000 Volt, Toyota’s latest Prius already boasts 50mpg for combined motorway and city driving in the United States—and considerably more in Japan, where the method of calculating fuel consumption is different. And that is the problem. There is no easy way to compare the efficiency of an electric vehicle—plug-in hybrid or pure electric—with a fossil-fuelled equivalent.
Comparing the performance of self-charging hybrids like the Toyota Prius and the Ford Fusion is easy. As far as their fuel bills are concerned, the motorist pays only for the bit that comes from the pump. The regenerative energy captured during braking—which is used to charge a hybrid’s battery—is, in effect, free. Like any other fossil-fuelled car, a self-charging hybrid’s official fuel consumption is simply the number of miles it can eke from a gallon of petrol while being tested on the EPA’s cycles that mimic driving on city routes and faster roads.
Not so the hybrid’s plug-in siblings. The Volt, for instance, has enough electrical storage to travel 40 miles (64 kilometres) on battery power alone. GM reckons that is enough to enable three out of four Americans to travel to work and back on a single charge. But if owners were to restrict their motoring to trips of less than 40 miles between charges from the grid, the Volt would give them, not the claimed 230mpg, but an almost infinite number of miles per gallon. Such quirks make a mockery of the EPA’s tests.
The EPA has yet to reveal its draft methodology for testing the Volt and other plug-ins. It clearly takes into account some contribution from the vehicle’s petrol-powered generator. It also seems to factor in the cost of the electricity (a national average of 11 cents per kilowatt-hour is quoted) used to recharge the battery. But how 230mpg can be claimed for the Volt is difficult to fathom.
Start with what is known about the vehicle’s traction system. GM reckons the platform needs only 25 kilowatt-hours of energy to cover 100 miles of city driving. At 11 cents a kilowatt-hour, that would cost $2.75 for 100 miles. If petrol costs $3 a gallon (as regular does today), then the Volt would be able to travel 109 miles for the same price as that of a gallon of petrol.
What if the owner does 50 miles between charges instead of 40 miles? Then the Volt’s 1.4 litre petrol-engine has to kick in to cover the extra ten miles—not to drive the wheels directly, like the Prius’s engine does, but to recharge the battery, which then feeds juice to the electric motor, which, in turn, drives the wheels.
If that were an efficient way of delivering torque to the wheels, all cars would have electric transmission systems instead of mechanical ones. They don’t, for good reason. So expect no more than 20mpg for a car the size and weight of the Volt when running under petrol power. In that case, the fuel used for a 50-mile journey would be half a gallon and the efficiency would be 100mpg. (Alternatively, you could take the figures for the price of motoring given above, and calculate an efficiency of 58mpg.) Go 60 miles and it would drop to 60mpg using the first measure, or 44mpg using the second.
And this assumes that no power-sapping components are switched on and the owner drives with a featherlight foot. In the real world the Volt’s 40-mile range on battery power alone is likely to be 30 miles at best—and perhaps half that if driver is in a hurry, the terrain is hilly and the lights, wipers and air-conditioning are turned on. Any reduction in battery-only motoring hits the Volt’s overall fuel economy hard.
The efficiency ratings that makers are claiming for their plug-in hybrids are nonsense. They are little more than figures plucked from the air because they depend on specific sets of circumstances. That makes comparisons with fossil-fuelled cars almost impossible.
Petrol cars and diesels can also get more or fewer miles to the gallon depending on how they are driven, but irrespective of the distance the owner drives. And they are, of course, oblivious to electricity rates. So if any meaningful comparison is to be made (and one needs to be, so customers can make intelligent choices), the best way would be to determine how many miles could be driven for the energy used—that is, the miles per kilowatt-hour. In those terms, a plug-in hybrid that uses 25 kilowatt-hours of energy to go 100 miles would have a “fuel” consumption of four miles per kilowatt-hour.
To find out what that is equivalent to in miles per gallon, you need to compare the energy content of the natural gas or coal used to generate, say, 25 kilowatt-hours of electricity with the energy content of the gallons of petrol needed to go 100 miles. To be meaningful, however, the calculation must account, on one side of the equation, for all the energy wasted in turning natural gas or coal into electricity, transporting it over the grid and then pumping it into a battery. To ensure apples are compared with apples, the other side of the equation has to take into account all the energy wasted in refining and transporting the petrol and pumping it into a car.
Such an analysis has actually been done by engineers at AC Propulsion, a firm in the Los Angeles area that makes parts for electric cars. Their conclusion was that around eight miles per kilowatt-hour is the equivalent of 100mpg. So forget GM’s outlandish claims: the Chevy Volt will get at best 50mpg in the city. As your correspondent noted at the beginning, that is not at all bad—but it is nowhere near the preposterous 230mpg being touted.
Comment
I get 45.5 mpg on my 2009 Prius, and that is with the AC on all the time. I havent figured out how to set the AC yet, so it stays on at 77 degrees. Altho the title of the article is sticker shock, not much mention was made about the price. My 2009 Prius cost $21,000 so when its compared to the $40,000 Volt, it looks pretty reasonable.
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