Txchnologist: 1 Million Electric Cars On U.S. Roads By 2015?
2011 Nissan Leaf and 2011 Chevy Volt, with charging station visible; photo by George Parrott
Earlier this month, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu stood in the rain before a row of electric cars parked on the median at the Department of Energy’s massive complex in Washington, DC, speaking to a crowd of journalists, carmakers, and utility executives.
Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, touted President Obama‘s goal of putting 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. He then looked further into the future. Driving 100 miles in an electric car, he said, “is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Lithium-ion batteries being tested at the Argonne National Laboratory, which helped developed the battery technology used in the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, could enable cars to travel up to 500 miles on a single charge by the end of the decade. “Batteries,” Chu boasted, “that are one-third the cost of today’s batteries, but at least three times the range.”
The excitement about these breakthroughs, Chu said, as the crowd huddled under shared umbrellas, is “palpable.” After the speeches, industry officials got in their electric cars for an “innovation motorcade” through the capital to the Electric Drive Transportation Association conference.
But, for all of the enthusiasm about the advance of auto technology, it remains to be seen if the U.S. can put 1 million EVs on the road by 2015. The symbolism of the rainstorm was as fitting as it was obvious: Would reality rain on the electric car parade?
A tiny share of the fleet
The administration’s goal is not quite an “Apollo program” – an analogy drawn by President Obama in his 2011 State of the Union address – which, after all, required scientists to propel astronauts 250,000 miles to the moon then bring them back.
By comparison, EV optimists note, this goal should be easy and has the tangible benefits of reducing dependence on foreign oil and curbing greenhouse gases. “We have the technology,” said Brendan Bell, an expert with the clean vehicles program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
That technology includes any set of tires that can be driven by an electric motor – from the battery electric 2011 Nissan Leaf, which has no gasoline motor, to the Chevy Volt, which uses its battery power before tapping a gasoline engine to power a generator that extends the car’s range.
Toyota’s planned 2012 Prius Plug-In Hybrid will operate on battery power then become a gasoline-electric hybrid. (Hybrids use an internal combustion engine along with an electric propulsion system but can generally only run exclusively on the latter at low speeds.)
Bell pointed out that even 1 million electric cars would represent slightly more than one-third of 1 percent of the 246 million registered vehicles in the U.S.
The percentage is tiny, he said, but people should look at 1 million electric vehicles as a down payment on the future of America’s vehicle fleet. We need to gather enormous amounts of information about how consumers use electric cars in order to decide where to put charging stations and learn how they work with the electrical grid, Bell said.
Mass deployment will also drive down costs as automakers develop better batteries and learn from consumer experiences. “We need to start getting these vehicles on the road now so that, by 2030, these can be the standard vehicle,” he said.
Read the original here:
Txchnologist: 1 Million Electric Cars On U.S. Roads By 2015?
Source Form: All Cars Electric