EuroWire November 2015

Transatlantic cable

Mr Hoium’s main explanation for the discrepancy is the same as anyone else’s: the relative availability of electric vis-à-vis hydrogen recharging infrastructure. According to the US Department of Energy there are 10,353 public electric charging stations across the country, with 26,025 charging outlets. In addition, tens of thousands of private stations are in home garages and at business locations. Mr Hoium wrote: “On the hydrogen side, California has two charging stations completed. TWO!” Toyota is hoping to have 15 stations open in California by the end of the year. But this scarcely reduces the challenge of getting around the state, still less cross-country, on hydrogen alone. Why not simply build more hydrogen charging stations? Here again it is a question of accessibility. Electricity is readily available in most of the USA, and even remote locations can use distributed energy like solar power to charge vehicles. Hydrogen must be generated from natural gas and then shipped to the charging stations. The cost of building the infrastructure needed to power hydrogen vehicles on a commercial scale would run into the billions. A $57,500 bet on the Mirai Mr Hoium makes the interesting point that a hydrogen-powered car is actually an electric vehicle with additional components. A hydrogen fuel cell does not have a direct connection to the crankshaft of the car: it produces electricity, which is stored in a battery for transfer to the electric motor that enables driving. In this respect he concedes to FCVs the advantages over EVs of a smaller battery pack and shorter refuelling time. But he holds that the components in an EV are in many ways simpler and more adjustable than in a hydrogen-powered car. He cites the Tesla Motors Model S with its batteries in the oor of the car, lowering the centre of gravity and improving performance. Hydrogen cars do not have the same exibility. Nothing daunted, Toyota is doubling down on hydrogen with its $57,500 Mirai, the rst mass-market car to run o hydrogen. Mr Hoium of the Motley Fool (its contributors call themselves Fools – one assumes in jest) terms it an uphill battle pitting a small installed base and weak infrastructure against an installed base of electric vehicles that could reach one million in 2016. He declared: “The alternative fuel debate is all but over.” † A similar view was expressed earlier in the year by Joe Romm, founding editor of the ecology blog Climate Progress . Noting that Toyota had backed away from its partnership with Tesla to build an EV, he wrote (8 th April), “For reasons that mostly defy logic the otherwise shrewd car company Toyota is placing a large bet on hydrogen fuel cell cars,” starting with the Mirai. “Toyota is going to lose this bet,” Mr Romm atly asserted. “There is little reason to believe FCVs will ever beat electric vehicles in the car market. There is even less reason to believe they will ever be a cost-e ective carbon-reducing strategy, as EVs already are close to being.” † Still another interested observer, the Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell, noted that Toyota has a track record for “disruption,” having built the rst mass-produced hybrid, the Prius, from “an experimental laughing stock” into a clean and unexciting mainstream sedan. He wrote, (12 th May), “While still a niche – hybrids make up only three per cent of American car sales – the Prius became emblematic of a way normal drivers could help save the world without trying too hard.”

Mr Harwell was told by David Whiston, an equity strategist with investment researcher Morningstar: “Toyota is so big that [the Mirai] can still be a science experiment for them. If it doesn’t work out they can go back to selling Priuses and all the other gas guzzlers no one ever talks about.” † If this view of its hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle initiative commends itself to Toyota, the company isn’t saying. Elsewhere in automotive . . . † Improper wiring in a roof-mounted air bag has led General Motors to issue a global recall of 73,424 Chevrolet Cobalts. GM said on 13 th August that improper routing of a sensor wire in the driver’s-side front door could prevent the air bag from deploying after a crash. The issue a ects Cobalts from the 2010 model year. There are 59,474 of the small cars on the road in the USA, 13,950 in Canada. The Detroit-based automaker said the recall is unrelated to last year’s recall of millions of Cobalts for defective ignition switches, which could stall the vehicle and turn o the air bags. † In robot-intensive manufacturing industries, such as automotive bodywork factories, robots consume about half the total energy needed for production. Now, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, in Sweden, report that smoothing robot movements can reduce energy consumption by up to 40 per cent, even as the plant’s schedule is maintained. The results were achieved with an algorithm that, by altering not the path but only the speed and sequence of operations of several robots moving in the same area, optimises their acceleration and deceleration as well as time spent at a standstill. Professor of automation Bengt Lennartson – who initiated the research together with, among others, General Motors – said on the Chalmers website: “We simply let [a robot] move slower instead of waiting for other robots and machines to catch up before carrying out the next sequence.” With higher power generation and lower installed prices, solar power in the USA is looking better all the time To Governor Jerry Brown, whose goal for California is that it receives at least 50 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy resources by the year 2030, recent news reports have been more than encouraging. As noted by James Ayre on the website CleanTechnica (27 th August), the state’s grid operator reported a new electricity generation record for utility-scale solar energy of 6.391 gigawatts (GW) of alternating current on 20 th August. That gure covers both utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) and concentrating solar power (CSP) projects. It does not include the output of distributed solar energy system output (so-called “behind-the-meter” electricity generation), whose inclusion would have pushed the total even higher. By way of comparison, Boston-based GTM Research estimated the total distributed solar system capacity in California at 3.2GW for rst-quarter 2015. Energy

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November 2015