Tag: Asheville EV

Daily Planet’s Opinion: At last, Asheville goes electric

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planets-opinion

Thursday, 12 January 2012

Kudos to all involved in the Dec. 12 unveiling of Asheville’s first public charging station for photovoltaic-powered electric vehicles.

BioWheels RTS (now Brightfield™ Transportation Solutions) and its partners deserve much praise for offering a viable future for driving on sunshine, rather than depending on oil from foreign suppliers who sometimes are enemies of America.

Plugged in at the event were a Tesla, a Volt, two Leafs and a hobbyist’s 1970 Jeep conversion.

Some critics have claimed electric vehicles are incapable of providing the driving range and horsepower needed in today’s society. Others have said that EVs merely replace oil with coal.

However, the driving range and horsepower of EVs is ever-increasing and, even if the grid were totally coal-fueled, carbon emmisions would be a wash with oil. And experts say criteria pollutants and primary energy consumption would be reduced by a shift to EVs.

The area’s coal grid fraction is 60 percent and falling — and installing PV to offset EV energy consumption will reduce that fraction.

While critics contend that EVs do not pay for themselves, it’s clear to us that technological advances — and dwindling oil supplies and soaring prices — likely will eventually make EVs economical.

What’s more, the compact size of the EVs that boosts their performance will reduce the costs in volume manufacture.

Best of all, EVs could help the U.S. attain its long-desired goal of energy independence.

Brightfield Helps with Regional EV Planning

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Brightfield is working on regional EV planning with Land of Sky Regional Council through the Clean Cities Clean Vehicles initiative and the regional EV Committee. Together, our organizations are helping to make western North Carolina a state-wide beacon for EV readiness. Land of Sky has the capacity and state-wide network to both develop a regional EV readiness model and proliferate that model throughout NC.Brightfield is assisting the effort by installing Brightfield Charging Stations and through the use of our Transportation Infrastructure Modeling (TIM) tool that analyzes demographic, industry forecast, and EV cost and benefit data to determine the strategic location and quantity of EV chargers necessary to meet impending demand. The TIM tool can be used on a micro level to help fleet managers determine the most cost effective way to transition fleets to electric vehicles overtime, and on the macro level to determine how much solar capacity is needed to provide renewable fuel for vehicle miles driven, how much ground-level pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are deferred regionally, and how to make best uses of resources to get EV chargers where they’re needed most.The TIM tool is a valuable part of the EV readiness quiver. Brightfield will continue to work with Land of Sky and the new Evolve Energy Partnerships initiative to ensure that the outcome of our collective EV efforts attains the environmental, social and economic benefits we seek including reduced pollution, affordable vehicles and fuel, and regional job and manufacturing growth.

1,000,000 Electric Vehicles on the Road by 2015

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“We can break our dependence on oil…and become the first country to have one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. The future is ours to win,” President Obama said in his January 2011 State of the Union address.

Some critics believe that this goal is overly ambitious, citing the fact that it took 10 years for Hybrid vehicles to reach the 3% market share, which is the same share the Obama Administration is hoping electric vehicles will reach in 4 years.

But what differentiates this ambitious electric vehicle goal from Hybrids or other alternative-fueled vehicles is that the government is investing significant resources in it. According to a US Department of Energy report titled The Recovery Act: Transforming America’s Transportation Sector, released July , 2010:

As part of the Department of Energy’s $12 billion investment in advanced vehicle technologies,
the Department is investing more than $5 billion to electrify America’s transportation sector.
These investments under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and DOE’s Advanced
Technology Vehicle Manufacturing (ATVM) Loan Program are supporting the development,
manufacturing, and deployment of the batteries, components, vehicles, and chargers necessary to
put millions of electric vehicles on America’s roads.
The goal of these investments is to support the infrastructure that will support electric vehicle ownership:
  • increase number of nation-wide electric vehicle charging stations from 500 today to 20,500 by 2012
  • decrease the cost of 100 mile range batteries 70% from $33,000 today to $10,000 in 2015;
  • decrease the weight of batteries 33% from 333kg to 222kg.

These infrastructural gains will help pave the way for the 1,000,000 electric vehicles on the road by 2015. Additionally, all of the major car manufactures are releasing various types of electric vehicles as quickly as they can roll them off the assembly lines: 20,000 Nissan Leaf all-electric vehicles are already on order nation-wide.

In 1999, the electric vehicle industry group The Electrification Coalition published an in-depth study titled The Electrification Roadmap. Their findings forecast there will be 14 million electric vehicles on the road by 2020 and that 75% of all light-duty vehicle miles traveled by 2040 will be in electric vehicles: even more aggressive assumptions than the Obama administration.

Regardless of whether or not you agree that the goals set by organizations like The Electrification Coalition or the Obama administration, its hard to argue with the facts that transitioning to electric vehicles is creating jobs, spurring investment and well underway.

Why Integrate Solar Power and Electric Vehicle Charging?

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By integrating solar power production with EV charging the Brightfield™ Charging Station concept solves three critical issues: it moves us away from fossil fuel, it generates revenue while EV charging demand grows, and it provides locally harvested fuel.Here in western North Carolina our electricity comes mostly from coal strip mined in Virginia and West Virginia through the process known as mountain top removal. In fact, North Carolina leads the nation in mountain top removal coal use. Switching from oil to coal for our transportation sector provides a net environmental gain because the electric motor is much more efficient that the internal combustion engine. But the mining and burning of coal perpetuates the environmentally destructive consequences of burning any fossil fuel namely air pollution, water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. There’s no way around the fact that coal fired electricity will play a major role in the EV transition, but Brightfield is proving that by incorporating solar power generation from the onset, we can phase in the solar capacity needed to fuel the growing regional fleet of EVs. Doing so will reduce pressure to build new coal-fired power plants as electricity demand increase to meet EV need while increasing the amount of renewable energy deployed.

As far as the revenue generation goes, The solar power generated by Brightfields is bundled and sold on the energy markets as Renewable Energy Credits (REC). The RECs are purchased by individuals and companies looking to stimulate renewable power generation and/or offset their own non-renewable electricity use. In North Carolina the RECs are purchased by NC Green Power. The revenue from the sale of RECs covers Brightfield operations and maintenance costs and provides cash flow to Brightfield. This is particularly valuable while we wait for the EVs the Brightfields will serve to arrive. With integrated solar power generation, the Brightfield Charging Station is productive from day one every moment the sun is shining.

The result is that abundant local sunshine is harvested by the Brightfield’s solar array and put on the grid to power your car. Local fuel is secure fuel. When we buy our imported oil refined as gasoline at the pump, only a few cents per gallon stays in the local economy. The rest leaves immediately to be deposited in far away corporate and foreign-nation bank accounts. But when we harvest sunshine and send it onto the grid and then draw off the grid to fuel our EVs, more of our fuel dollars stay local where they can serve the local economy.

Integrating solar power production and EV charging is environmentally, socially and economically beneficial. There are few products out there in the world today that enable you to improve the environment, put people to work, keep money on local communities, decrease consumer fuel costs, increase local manufacturing, and inspire us all. That’s what the solar power generating Brightfield Charging Station does.