| Jens Moberg speaks on Accelerating the Transition to Electric Vehicles |  Print |
Life, love and relationships may be the main topics of interest to most women, but for some women, and most men it’s probably more exciting to talk about cars. Cars provide freedom, a thing that people are generally not prepared to do without. They also provide power, adrenaline, status, and have a long history of races won and lost, of breakdowns and misadventures. And they have a strange ability to make grown men feel like they are still 8 years old. Jens told how he bought his first moped before he was legally allowed to drive it and booked his test for his birthday. It wasn’t long before he followed this with obtaining his full driving license and he has been in love with cars ever since. Jens stated that it was built into the human DNA to always want more, or at the very least to maintain the standard.
 Yet this is Jens Moberg, CEO of Better Place, Denmark, and Head of Better Place’s Business Development Department for Europe, Middle East & Africa. Better Place’s key aim is to see the establishment of the infrastructure required for the widespread use of electric vehicles, with Denmark planned to be the first roll-out country. Jens fully expects to see the internal combustion engine become a museum piece, and he is helping to make it happen. How can these mindsets fit together?
The crux of the thinking is that most cars run on oil and oil is running out. Unless a replacement for the internal combustion engine is found then the beloved car will be history altogether. Jens believes that electric (battery driven) cars will be the best option to fill the gap, and that although the driving experience will obviously be different, there is no reason why it should be a compromise. He cited Tesla as an example of an electric sports car with exceptional performance, and showed an image of a Renault Fluent, due to be available to buy in Q3-4 2011, which looks very much as I would expect a new Renault to look. It is certainly not the usual box-on-wheels that electric cars have tended to be in recent decades. Jens’s point was that there is no need for an electric car to look different, to drive less well, or to cost more than an ordinary car. In fact, once they become mainstream, he argued that the technology is likely to be cheaper, both to purchase and to maintain. There are roughly half the moving parts involved. A battery does not require servicing, and brake wear is substantially reduced, because unless you need to stop quickly there is rarely any need to use the foot brake. Instead ‘engine braking’ recharges the battery whenever you take your foot off of the accelerator.
The envisaged design uses a 200kg battery that will allow you to drive 160km before recharging. This is more than enough for the average commute to work. And means that for day to day driving, with charging points at home, and in the office car park, there will no longer be any need to stop at petrol stations to refuel (or recharge!). For longer journeys, Better Place will build a network of battery change stations. These will use robots to lift out the old battery and replace it with a new one in less than 2 minutes. The technology will be the same as that currently used for cargo loading onto planes and boats. Alternatively, if you only rarely need to drive long distances then it may be preferred to hire a petrol car for the weekend, and use your electric car the rest of the time.
 So, electric cars are a feasible way to break the dependence on petrol for personal transport. But so far there is no guarantee that they will reduce CO2 emissions. This will only be the case if the electricity used to recharge the batteries is generated from a clean source such as wind power. To enable this to happen it is proposed that a computer is used to set when the car next needs to be used. The car will then communicate with the power grid and charge at times when there is green energy available. During the night there is often an excess of power, due to lower demand and high supply of wind power. In fact Jens said that Denmark often has to pay to get rid of its excess supply on windy nights. Having thousands of batteries plugged in to the supply can not only help cope with the peaks (thus helping to make wind power more economical), but could also be used to cover the troughs. If 5% of the electricity could be taken from a nations worth of cars, then it would be possible to close some of the coal power plants, which are kept for standby duty.
Jens finished by imagining a scenario 20 years into the future, where his grandchild was asking him about the petrol cars he’d heard about in school: “So did you really drive around with a tank of flammable liquid in the car?”, “Did the engine really work by making lots of explosions??”
In the question and answer session that followed the discussion covered parts of the technological, political and economic issues:
- Are Better place investigating using other battery types, as there are environmental issues with the use of Lithium?
Battery technology doesn’t follow Moore’s law, unlike semiconductor technology; progress is typically much slower. Therefore Better Place are planning to use the Lithium technology that is available now. There are large Lithium supplies in Bolivia and China, the batteries are expected to have a 12 year life, and 90% of the material can then be recycled.
- How much push is required from the government required to overcome people’s resistance to electric vehicles?
Until 2012 there are low taxes on green cars, and this needs to be extended, to avoid slowing down the transition. Eventually the change would happen anyway, but Better Place is talking to the government to convince them to accelerate the transition. Also, this technology shouldn’t be seen as competing with other green technologies (e.g. biofuel), but as complementing them. It is unlikely that lorries or planes will be able to run on batteries anytime soon, but biofuel would be more feasible. Similarly, there is not enough 2nd generation biofuel to meet the demand for cars, and it expensive to produce hydrogen, so batteries have a role here.
- What is the timescale expected for the roll out? And is it a bad idea to be the trial country when the infrastructure will cost so much to install and change? For example the railways were built in Britain early and ended up with a different gauge to the rest of Europe, which is creating problems now.
Electric cars should be readily available by 2011, there are 50-60 charge points around Copenhagen now, and the bulk of the infrastructure should be in place by 2020. China is already making electric cars and other companies need to get into the game now in order to be ready to compete. Some car manufacturers have embraced the new technologies, but others are reluctant. They all need time to build up the new expertise and to retool production lines to build the new cars. Better Place are pushing for standards to be defined covering the key technology and some of these are in place already.
- What is the expected timescale for this project, and what depreciation rate is there on the investment? Will another technology make this obsolete too quickly for it to have been worth doing (e.g. fuel cells, lighter batteries)?
The cost of building the charging infrastructure is billions of kroner, but it is expected to last for many decades. |