Conversion Packs for Plug-In Prius available in '08

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Earthling @ May 2 2007, 08:26 AM) [snapback]433964[/snapback]</div>

This does look encouraging, but I'll probably wait a few years. Hopefully the price will reduce more than the tax credit does in that time.

Dave M.

 

40 miles all EV range for $10,000?? gotta do it... no doubt. i wanted 20 miles and was willing to go $6k on that. this just makes it acceptable for over 92% of my trips logged over the past 18 months instead of the 85% that the 20 miles would have satisfied.

at $3.27 and climbing, i wish it was here right now!!

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(DaveinOlyWA @ May 3 2007, 09:17 AM) [snapback]434789[/snapback]</div>

Well, I'll admit, with all the short distance traveling my wife does, it might be worth it. I doubt she ever does more than 40 miles in one day. When she does, she drives into Spokane. That at least lets the car warm up.

In terms of mpg (Gas only. I don't worry about electricity. Most of it around here is hydroelectric), we'd have to be getting at least 75 mpg on normal days. My wife isn't at all careful about slow braking, etc.

Dave M.

 

It sounds interesting but I need to know more about it.

If it will run in the full green mode of a prius then acceleration will be very anemic and what happens once the ICE start? I assume it will go through it's normal start up routine.

Also, we will be limited to <41 mph or the engine will be started.

So 40 miles under these conditions are somewhat unreasonable.

My hope is that the 09 Prius (if it's not a plug-in from scratch) will remove these problems by allowing the electric only mode to go up to highway speed. I don't think that will happen as they seem more interested in reducing space then increasing electric engine power.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(DaveinOlyWA @ May 3 2007, 12:17 PM) [snapback]434789[/snapback]</div>

What happens at 41 mph? Will this be limited to 40 mph or will the gas engine have to spin to protect the motor generator that can't go over 41 mph?

40 miles is good, but not if speed restricted to 40 mph max. At least for my needs.

- Tom

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Tom_06 @ May 4 2007, 12:33 PM) [snapback]435470[/snapback]</div>

They say, the extra "Omph" from the electric motor will still be adding to the ICE when the Prius is traveling at speeds in excess of 41mpg, so MPG will still be up there. Thought I'd read somewhere that the extra battery kit was only going to be made available to fleet vehicle purchasers. Hope not.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Earthling @ May 2 2007, 11:26 AM) [snapback]433964[/snapback]</div>

Discussed it with my wife, if they'll say it'll last 10 years, yep, I'm going to go for it anyway. Not even close to cost effective for me, I'm doing it anyway. Hymotion, you have a customer waiting in the Washington DC area.
Unless the Volt beats you to it.

 

I'm kind of new here, but wouldn't it be a bad thing, environmentally, to charge a car using mains electricity? Most electricity in the US is generated by coal-fired steam turbines. Burning coal is worse than burning gasoline. Now if you have solar panels on your roof and are already selling electricity back to the utility company, well.....

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(1x1 @ May 4 2007, 12:01 PM) [snapback]435599[/snapback]</div>

Check this out for the answer to your question: Environmental Benefits of Flexible Fuel Plug-Ins

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(1x1 @ May 5 2007, 03:01 AM) [snapback]435599[/snapback]</div>

From what I've read, the overall effect of converting hybrids to PHEVs is a net lowering of greenhouse gases even though much of the electricity in this country is generated by burning fossil fuel. One reason for this is that the PHEVs would generally be drawing electrical power at night when the grid is up and running but under capacity. An article in my Solar Today magazine indicated that if all the cars in the US were converted to PHEVs, the present grid could supply recharging power to 84% of them at present levels of energy output, assuming that the cars are charged during off hours. Another way of looking at this is to see a PHEV as a rolling battery/storage unit; power put into the car at night when demand is lower, is used during the day when peak demand for all forms of energy is high. With inverters, a fleet of PHEVs could provide electricity to homes when the city grid power goes off line.

I used to work for the transit system here in Seattle, and the question often came up about our electric buses and how efficient were they.... Even if Seattle derived all or most of its electrical power from fossil fuel, which it does not, it would still be more energy efficient and less polluting to run a fleet of buses from a common electrical power source than to have myriad diesel powered buses roaming about, each spewing out pollution an spreading it around (a power plant tends to stay put).

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Angel Flight Pilot @ May 4 2007, 06:41 PM) [snapback]435701[/snapback]</div>

I'll second everything you said. And say that even if you charged them during the day, I'm pretty sure you'd come ahead in C02 emissions. Though not as much as if you did it at night, for the reasons you said.

Only about half of US electricity is coal (the US dept of energy has lots of readily accessible data on that). In my case, I'm already buying wind electricity, so in theory if I can get one of these things, the wall-socket electric portion of transport is carbon-free. Even if not, I calculated that, given the way the Prius would run (you'd still use the engine some), what our typical trip mix is (remember if you run over 40 miles a day, you lose the benefit), and so on, that a 30 mile PHEV would produce as much C02 as a straight Prius getting 75 mpg, and would cost as much for fuel (electric and gas) as a Prius getting 85 mpg.

So, I'd say that I expect modest carbon savings at Virginia Power's grid mix. And bigger carbon savings with wind power.

But the fact of the matter is, this is in essence a brutally expensive way to avoid carbon emissions. Like, $10k would pay the excess rates that I am charged for wind power for about ... 20 years. So, my $10K investment could either pay for 20 years of carbon-free electricity, or 10 years of reduced use of gasoline. Looking at my spreadsheets, that means that every dollar invested in wind power avoids about 5x as much carbon as a dollar invested in the PHEV Prius.

I'm going to do it anyway, but if it's really a question of avoiding carbon, this doesn't get you a lot of bang for the buck. Mainly because the Prius is not that inefficient to start with. You'd almost certainly be better off finding people who are too stubborn to change to CFLs and giving them cases of CFLs. Bet your net carbon reduction per dollar of your expenditure would be better than a PHEV Prius.

That said, I'm still going for it if Hymotion will say it'll last 10 years.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(chogan @ May 4 2007, 06:17 PM) [snapback]435777[/snapback]</div>

You have an interesting point, but one thing that I'd like to point out is that if you want to increase the amount of electricity generated by intermittent renewables like wind and solar than you need a place to put that energy. Alberta is already saying that they can't add any more wind power to the grid because it would make the grid too unstable - since wind is somewhat intermittent - i.e. you can't count on it being there when you need it.

A plug-in in every home would create the necessary stability and allow renewables to play a far bigger role because their batteries would be a place to draw power from in times of high demand. Cars tend to sit for most of the day.

And mass produced plug-in's, when they are the norm, won't be expensive for large automakers to build. The early adopters like yourself would really help get things moving in that direction. So for long term progress, I'm glad Hymotion is offering this upgrade and I'm there are people like you who are willing to take the plunge to show the public what can be done.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Fibb222 @ May 6 2007, 01:24 AM) [snapback]436259[/snapback]</div>

That's a very good point. I know that the intermittent nature of renewables means that you have to have alternative capacity ready for a worst-case scenario (here, that would be a windless August day with heavy cloud cover). But I wasn't aware that anybody was even close yet, probably because Virgina Power had a whopping 600 wind customers when I signed up, and appeared to be gaining them at the rate of about a customer a day. At that rate I figured it'd be a couple of millenia before there was a problem here.

So the information on Alberta was very interesting. Googled the Alberta sitution and did a bit of arithmetic and found that the current limit amounted to less than 3% of total peak capacity in the Albert network. (Calculated from:
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/columni...b6-ef19c4fc32f5

with an absolute technical upper limit stated as 20%, once they have all modifications to the grid in place.

Obviously that's unique to the particular facts of the Alberta situation -- from what I read, they get a lot of Chinook wind just when the place is warming up, and that's when demand drops there. Neverheless, while I knew there was some eventual limit, I had no clue that it would be 3% anywhere at any time.

But that makes your point about the value of a distributed network of small PHEV/EV batteries all that much more important. Wouldn't be economic for the utility to use the battery solely to store electricity, but might be economic if the batteries could do double-duty (without compromising their useful life -- and here's where the altairnano 20-year life estimate would see to be important -- you wouldn't have to worry about killing your battery with excess charge cycles if you were part of the PHEV-to-grid network.)

Now I'm sitting here trying to figure out whether there's enough juice in the battery to make this worthwhile. The Hymotion kit is 5 KWH. That's on the order of 10% of my daily usage on a hot summer day. Yeah, that seems like a sizeable fraction of peak demand, for a single customer. If everyone in Alberta had one and plugged it in, without thinking it through, that would seem to allow a place like Alberta to put in much more wind power.

On the other hand, the Alberta situation may be a particularly bad case. This article:
http://www.iec.ch/online_news/etech/arch_2..._0104/focus.htm

seems to say that 20% of Denmark's entire electrical consumption comes from wind, and one German state has reached 25%. So, the theoretical max for Alberta (20%) is already being met countrywide in Denmark and exceeded in some areas of Germany. Same source says Denmark is planning on 50% eventually. If PHEV/EV to grid is not part of that forecast, that would suggest only a relatively lower value for it there (if they can reach 50% without it.) But if you have to put the chargers in place anyway, setting them up to run both ways, based on (say) a signal broadcast or carried over the power lines, would seem like a not unreasonable thing to do in Alberta, as long as the marginal cost of that added functionality was small. Problem is, I'll bet you'll get PHEVs and charges in place long before anybody has set up any sort of standard for how to do EV-to-grid. That's a pity.