Toyota May Be Developing Plugins

Thin film solar could play a huge roll in this. Charge your car while driving or parked on sunny days. It's gonna be a few years though. There are a lot of exciting things going on in the nanotech sector right now. Hopefully a lot of things will come to fruition in the next couple of years.

 

Power generation capacity is only part of the problem with the grid. The other part is transmission line capacity. The transmission lines in many parts of the power grid are loaded near their capacity limit.

The NorthEast blackout a couple of years ago was not caused by a shortage of generating power, but by a shortage of transmission line capacity.

The blackout started in Ohio, when a major power plant went offline. The resulting power surge tripped a transmission line and it went offline too.

Ideally, this wouldn't be a problem, because there is enough extra generating capacity in the grid to make up for that one plant. Also, electricy is like water which flows downhill by whatever route available. So, when a generating plant or transmission line goes offline, power from the Power Grid flows into the area via neighboring transmission lines.

However the other transmission lines connecting this portion of Ohio to the Power Grid were already heavily loaded. When one transmission line went offline, the power that had been traveling over it shifted to the other transmission lines. But now these other transmission lines were exceeding their ratings. When transmission lines are heavily loaded and get hot, they get longer and sag. Shortly after the one transmission line went offline, a neighboring one became overloaded, sagged into some trees, shorted out, and it also went offline.

This sent even more power through the other 5 transmission lines connecting that part of Ohio to the grid and one by one, over a period of just a few seconds, they sagged, shorted out, and went offline.

At that point, a whole section of Ohio was abruptly removed from the power grid. This sudden removal of a large number of electricity consumers caused a surplus of power in the grid. The output from generating plants must be carefully balanced with the load that is on them. They can neither be significantly overloaded or underloaded. In this case, a couple of generating plants found themselves suddenly without sufficient load for the power they were generating.

In response to this condition, the computers controlling the plants took them offline and shut them down to protect the generators. This had a cascading effect because now there wasn't enough power being generated to serve the load that was still on the grid. The remaining generating plants were now overloaded and their computers took them off line and shut them down to protect the generators.

So wham! In 14 seconds or so, the failure of overloaded transmission lines in Ohio caused a blackout across the entire NorthEast. It was all due to the fact that these transmission lines were operating near their capacity with no spare capacity to handle faults in the grid.

So, the obvious answer is to just build more transmission lines, right? Well, there is a plan in progress to increase transmission line capacity of the grid by 5% over the next decade. It is believed that this will be just adequate to handle the expected increase in demand over the next decade. However, to increase the capacity by 5%, they are building 10,000 miles of new transmission lines.

 

Exactly. And us proud Ohioans who live next to the power plant *be very scared* were to blame.

 

Yes they have! It's really interesting to look back at the quotes given by Dave Hermance, their spokesperson on this sort of thing, over the last two years or so. His quotes have made the complete swoop from "plugging-in makes no sense at all for xxxx reasons" to "we understand that people are interested in this option, but Toyota aren't ready to look at it" to "Toyota are considering PHEVs with LiIon battery technolgy and are prepared to begin production before the rational price-point is reached". Erm, OK that's paraphrasing a bit but you get the gist!

Correct, charging at home would be slow. But there are still people out there who like the idea of being able to fill up quickly at "charging stations" (not least those who have no garage or have to park in the street). For these people, a 10 minute charge at about 30 kW would probably be the best compromise.

 

Agreed. It's just not the slam dunk that a lot of folks might assume.

 

Here's a fun statistic for you...

A medium sized coal power generating plant generates 500 MW of electricity. Some coal power generating plants are as small as 100 MW and there are a few monsters at 1000 MW to 2000 MW. However most of them are in the 250 MW to 700 MW range.

So let's assume that a practical EV car has a 50 kWh battery.

Now, how many cars could a medium sized 500 MW coal power plant simultaneously charge if the cars attempted to charge their batteries in 5 minutes?




Answer: 833


Now, for comparison, how many homes can a 500 MW power plant serve?



Answer: 10,000 to 20,000

 

Charging your EV car at 30 kW for 10 minutes would only give a tenth of a "tank".

Pratical EV cars (300 mile or so range) would have a 50 kWh battery. A 50 kWh battery could supply 50 kW continuously for one hour. Likewise, to charge it, you would need to provide 50 kW continuously for one hour.

So, if you wanted to charge it in 10 minutes instead of one hour, you would need to supply it with 6 times the power for the shorter duration, or 300 kW for 10 minutes.

You are suggesting 30 kW for 10 minutes, which would would charge only 10% of the battery's capacity.

 

you dont really need to be able to go 80 miles with it, what you need is to pass those first 3-4 miles on electric power, while your engine heats up (slowly) which is where i usually loose most mpg.

If I had an way to skip first 3 miles of my commute every day, I would get at least 15% better mpg overall....

 

30 kW for 10 minutes is 5 kWh, which is, as you say, about a tenth the capacity of a full EV battery (say 50 kWh).

But we are discussing plug-in hybrids here, which aren't as reliant on a recharging network as full EVs. The 30 kW for 10 minutes would provide enough charge for 25 miles electric only range per day which is sufficient to make a meaningful plug-in hybrid.

Full EVs will require longer charging times and / or higher wattage chargers.

Would twenty thousand households all plug-in to recharge their vehicles at maximum charge rate at exactly the same five minute interval? No.

Look at it this way... an efficient EV can go about 5 miles per kWh. Assuming the average motorist requires 15,000 EV miles per year, a full EV driver would require 3,000 kWh per year, which is about 8.2 kWh per night. That's the equivalent of a 1 kW charger, left on for 8 hours at night. Your sigle 500 MW powerstation could therefore conceivably supply 500,000 homes at this rate - and that's for FULL EVs and ALL driven miles.

But let's think about the scenario in question in this thread: plug-in hybrids.

With the first to market small battery PHEVs, most people will only manage to travel about, say 5,000 miles per year on electric only, with the rest coming from gasoline (or diesel etc). That's the equivalent of only 2.7 kWh per day.

Now if the home owner can look around his house and try to save just 112 watts on average throughout the day by simply replacing electrical appliances with more energy efficient appliances, they would receive 5,000 miles motoring per year for ZERO ADDITIONAL ELECTRICAL FUEL BILL COSTS (ie 5000 essentially free miles per year). The utilities would not have to provide any more electricity and the homeowner would save 5,000 miles worth of gasoline per year - say $300 each year - by using electricity instead.

Can the average housegold save 2.7 kWh per day? (112 watts throughout the day)? Yes, that amount could be saved JUST from installing energy efficient lightbulbs alone. Replace the lightbulbs, 5,000 free miles per year.

Make further improvements, eg better fridges and freezers and not leaving things on standby and you can have many, many more electric miles per year with ZERO additional load to the generating plants.

 

What's E85?

 

While I realize there is a generator in the Prius, how true is this statement?

 

That's a fuel blend that's 85% Ethanol and 15% Gasoline.

 

They're refering to the large battery pack that a plugin has. I suppose you could also run the car to charge the battery and or run juice into the home. Toyota displayed this concept at a recent autoshow, in Tokyo I think.

 

the benefits are HUGGGEE!@!!

i saw a conference on the impact of the world oil supply on the Pac Northwest and there has already been a AER (All Electric Range) Prius developed by UC-Davis

it has a range of 60 miles on a full charge. that is enough to satisfy 95% of the driving needs of the individual US consumer.

now why do this? why not go all electric. well all EV's to date have failed to gain mass market appeal because of the range of the vehicle.

the above mentioned Prius will go all electric for 60 miles then it will start running the ICE only to maintain the charge on the battery pack, iow, it does not recharge the battery. it only maintains the minimum charge level until the vehicle can be plugged in. so say you spend all week mostly driving back and forth to work in your average 36 mile RT commute. you go home plug in vehicle every night. so that is 180 miles driven so far... not a drop of gas burned.

now its the weekend and its to the summer home up in the mountains which is 100 miles away. in an electric car, you may not make it, but because you have gas to fall back on, you can still enjoy the same 500+ mile range.

also... you do not want to use the car to power the grid... counter productive and not cost efficient. solar panels when used to replace electricity can take 25-40 years to pay for themselves... if using solar to replace $2.50 per gallon gas, the initial costs can be recouped in 8 years.

the researchers at UC-Davis have a 20, 40 and 60 mile AER. they figured for each 10 miles in AER range the cost would be $1000. so a 60 AER Prius can be had for under $30,000 and could conceivably get THOUSANDS of miles per gallon... cant wait...i will be first in line to get one