Lithium News

Wearing a black Tesla jacket, Eastern Michigan University student Chris Torrella plugs a charging cord into the side of his blue Tesla Model 3 electric vehicle.

A glowing computer screen inside shows the car is already 84 percent charged and has about another 25 minutes to go.

“That’s all it takes,” Torrella said, standing along Fernwood Avenue in the Pittsfield Village neighborhood, where Ann Arbor’s first curbside EV charging station is now up and running.

Homeowners Lisa Lemble and Robert Gordon — along with Torrella, their tenant in a neighboring condo – led the charge to make it happen, spending 10 months jumping through hoops.

They installed the EV station in front of their home at their own expense, with city approval, and others are now free to use it.

“Mainly we want people to know that if they live in the city of Ann Arbor and don’t have a driveway and don’t have access to a garage, that it’s possible to put in a charging station curbside,” Lemble said during a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Tuesday, May 7.

Because it had never been done before, there wasn’t an established city permit process for a curbside EV station.

They also needed to convince their condo association to approve the project.

Torrella approached the city and the Pittsfield Village board of directors with the idea early last year.

His persistence led to a closed meeting between city and condo association representatives in May 2018.

Soon after, Torrella said he was dismayed to learn the city denied the proposal. Lemble and Gordon believe that initial denial was due to a misunderstanding over who would pay for the charging station. They clarified they weren’t asking the city to pay for it.

With help from their 3rd Ward City Council representative, Julie Grand, they set up a meeting with city staff in July to clear things up.

Several neighbors then showed up before the condo association board in support of the project in August, along with Craig Hupy, the city’s public services administrator. Hupy voiced the city’s support, and the board approved the project.

After that, Lemble and Gordon executed a license agreement with the city in October and the charging station was installed in November.

The final step came in December when DTE Energy added a dedicated meter for it, and charging began.

The station has two cords, so it can charge two EVs at once, including a Tesla that Lemble and Gordon own.

For safety reasons, nozzles are kept locked, but others who want to use them can get key access by making arrangements with the couple.

“We like to share! Ask us about charging,” a sign on the station reads, giving their name, address and phone number.

It can take six to seven hours to go from zero to fully charged, said Gordon, vice chair of the city’s Transportation Commission.

The couple has a flat-rate arrangement with DTE to pay about $46 per month for the electricity, Gordon said.

For those wondering, it was expensive to go through the permitting process and have the charger installed, Gordon said, indicating it cost about $15,000-$16,000, including thousands of dollars in city permit fees and thousands to reroute the sidewalk.

Now that there’s an established process and model to follow, Gordon hopes it will be less expensive for others.

Grand said she’s glad Lemble and Gordon were willing to put their financial and creative resources around living sustainably and she hopes others build upon their success.

Charles Lanning of Howell-based Homestead Enterprises was the electrician and general contractor.

“We feel like this would never have been completed if he hadn’t stuck with it through the entire process,” Lemble said.

The couple also gives credit to Alison Heatley, a city engineer, and Senior Assistant City Attorney Matthew Rechtien for their work on creating a process to follow.

“I would say that it was a little rough at times, but not because anybody was trying to make it difficult,” Lemble said. “They knew that they could do it. They just had to figure out how to do it.”

Explaining just how much work it took, Lemble said she has hundreds of files and emails related to the project on her computer.

But to start it all, she said, somebody had to initially think it was possible, and that wasn’t her.

“Chris Torrella bought himself a wonderful electric car and said, ‘It’d really be nice if I didn’t have to leave it somewhere for eight hours to charge it while I ride my electric skateboard somewhere,’ so he started asking, and he started garnering support,” Lemble said.

Torrella is studying computer science at EMU and is about to start a summer internship at Tesla in California. He hopes to work as a Tesla programmer after he graduates.

The reason he bought a Tesla and fought for a curbside EV charger for it, he said, is to make the world a more sustainable place.

“We need this to happen,” he said. “And so that is what drove me through the whole process of talking to people and researching and really seeing how we could get this done.”

He said he’s appreciative of Lemble and Gordon for funding the majority of the costs.

Their next step, they said, is hopefully convincing the condo association to allow solar panels in the neighborhood.

Shell New Energies formed a joint venture with Convergent Energy and Power to install new industrial energy storage systems, starting with 21 MWh at two Shell Canada Products facilities in Ontario.

The two companies say they intend to collaborate on future projects for customers within and beyond Shell’s affiliated portfolio. North American independent energy storage solutions developer Convergent already has 26 MW in service in Ontario.

Convergent describes the energy storage solutions that it develops and operates as helping commercial and industrial customers lower energy bills by decreasing the amount of electricity their facilities consume during grid peak periods.

The company says that their Peak IQ dispatch algorithm is 25% more accurate at peak prediction than public market forecasts. Convergent added that, when combined, the algorithm and energy storage system can save large commercial and industrial customers as much as 40% on their electricity bills.

“This energy storage offering complements the broader suite of solutions, including energy efficiency and energy management, that we already provide,” said Eric Bradley, global general manager of connected energy at Shell New Energies.

Earlier this year Shell agreed to acquire the German smart energy storage systems manufacturer Sonnen, which makes solar-powered lithium-ion battery packs for homeowners.

Shell is investing as much as $2 billion each year on its New Energies division to grow in a power sector it sees delivering 8 to 12% annual returns, Maarten Wetselaar, director of Shell’s Integrated Gas and New Energies unit told Bloomberg in March.

With the increasing electrification of Volkswagen’s fleet, the company has come up with a plan to deal with EV batteries at the end of their lifecycle. Volkswagen says its ID.3 factory can crank out 330,000 cars per year. Instead of merely recycling them, VW has two paths for old batteries to take.

MEB battery packs can be re-used in portable charging stations, which can hold up to 360 kWh of energy and which have a maximum quick-charge output of 100 kW. The stations can be taken to places where there isn’t yet a “proper” electric vehicle charging grid, and like VW says, they can be used at remote locations such as music festivals. Customers will not have to wait until the first MEB cars to donate their batteries a decade or so from now, as VW says it will begin full-scale portable charger production next year. This approach is largely similar to what Nissan is doing with Leaf batteries, for example powering lighting at disaster areas.

When the batteries are damaged, or too gone to be used for the greater good, they will be ground up at Volkswagen’s battery recycling center at Salzgitter, an old engine plant south of Wolfsburg. The Salzgitter facility has been producing internal combustion engines since 1970, and continues to do so in the future, but its side gig will be recycling some 1,200 tons of electric vehicle batteries per year, or the amount of batteries from roughly 3,000 vehicles.

The shredder at Salzgitter eats up individual battery parts and produces a “black powder” made of cobalt, lithium, manganese and nickel, which can eventually make their way to new batteries after proper separation.

VW states that 53% of battery pack parts can be recycled today, and when the Salzgitter grinder reaches full capacity, that figure is said to rise to around 72 percent. The target is to reach 97% recyclability, with other recycling plants in the pipeline after Salzgitter.

Almost a year to the day after opening its first charging station, Electrify America says it is rolling out the country’s fastest-growing network of fast chargers.

Funded by $2 billion from Volkswagen’s 2016 diesel emissions settlement, it has a goal of building hundreds of stations and putting nearly 2,000 chargers in place by the end of this year.

Many of those will let battery-electric vehicle, or BEV, owners charge up nearly as quickly as they could fill a gas tank. Charging speed — along with the lack of a national network of charging stations — has been cited as a key obstacle to the widespread public adoption of electric cars.

“Longer range and faster charging times are critical to the widespread adoption of electric vehicles,” said Brendan Jones, the chief operating officer at Electrify America, during a conversation at the company’s headquarters in Reston, Virginia. It’s the equivalent of the classic chicken-and-egg problem.

EVs go mainstream

Extended-range vehicles, offering anywhere from 200 to nearly 400 miles per charge, are starting to roll out in large numbers from mainstream brands such as Daimler, Ford, General Motors and Volkswagen, as well as start-ups such as Tesla and Rivian.

Setting up a nationwide infrastructure is the next big challenge, according to many analysts. An August study by McKinsey & Co. projected it will cost as much as $50 billion to ensure public charging stations are as easily accessible as gas stations in three key markets — the U.S., Europe and China. The U.S. alone is expected to require an investment of as much as $11 billion, McKinsey estimated.

Several key players have entered the field and are starting to ramp up efforts to fill the broad gaps that exist across the country. These include Tesla, which has already put into operation 1,441 Supercharger stations across North America, the vast majority of them along U.S. roadways. Those facilities are only available to Tesla owners, but companies such as EVgo and ChargePoint are targeting the rest of the market. So is Electrify America.

Emissions settlement

Electrify America must spend that $2 billion by the end of 2026. The company, based in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., was created as part of Volkswagen’s diesel emissions settlement with U.S. and California regulators.

The company is spending that money on a mix of consumer education and infrastructure, the latter drawing the vast majority of the funding. Though Electrify America is housed in the same faceless office complex as Volkswagen’s U.S. headquarters, the settlement calls for it to operate as an independent entity. That was underscored by a network television ad the organization ran last year that featured a number of different electric vehicles, including those from Nissan, BMW and General Motors, but none from VW.

Electrify America’s charging stations are being outfitted to allow any plug-based vehicle to connect, though Tesla owners will need an optional, proprietary adapter.

The first of its charging stations opened for business about a year ago. Since then, more than 160 have come online, with dozens more in various stages of completion. Each station features an average of four to five chargers, with a maximum of 10 at what are expected to become high-volume locations.

Building out

The goal is to have about 2,800 Level 2 and more than 2,000 Level 3 chargers in operation around the U.S. by the end of this year, said Electrify America CEO Giovanni Palazzo. To put that into perspective, the U.S. Department of Energy said a total of 54,638 public Level 2 and 3 chargers were in operation across the country at the end of 2018.

Electrify America’s initial focus is on regions with high levels of EV ownership such as California and parts of the East Coast, he said. But it eventually plans to have charging stations that are no more than 70 miles apart along all major roadways in most states. Urban areas where EV ownership is expected to peak will have more of them.

Ola Electric Mobility, a subsidiary of India’s Uber-competitor, Ola Cabs, recently announced a fresh round of funding from one of the most famous and influential industrialists in India.

Ratan Tata, the chairman emeritus of Tata Group, invested, in a personal capacity, in the Ola Cabs venture in the electric mobility segment. While a number of media agencies covered the news, none managed to extract the actual value of investment made by Tata.

Ola Electric plans to bring 1 million electric vehicles to the streets of India by 2021. In early 2018, the company had also announced a plan to launch 10,000 electric vehicles over a one-year period under this medium-term plan. These vehicles are expected to be mostly three-wheeler vehicles that represent a very popular mode of public transport in the India.

The company is believed to have an operational fleet of over 200 electric cars plying as cabs in the city of Nagpur, and claims that the fleet has already traveled 4 million kilometers. This fleet operates as a pilot project launched jointly by Ola Electric and Mahindra Electric, a manufacturer of passenger electric cars in India and subsidiary of auto group Mahindra and Mahindra.

Ola’s major competitor and global leader in cab aggregation services Uber has also entered into a partnership with Mahindra Electric. Last month, the two companies announced a plan to operate 50 electric vehicles as a pilot in the city of Hyderabad.

Passenger electric vehicles in India are not popular for private mobility and are currently only being used by government agencies, under mandate from the central and state governments. Three-wheelers and electric bikes and scooters are much more popular than cars. Electric rickshaws are currently the most preferred means of intra-city travel among all electric mobility offerings. These rickshaws are well-suited for very short-distance travel with small batteries that can be easily charged or replaced.

Cab-hailing services like Ola and Uber can very well prove path-breaking for electric cars to become popular private transportation options, as is envisaged by the Indian government. While several policy initiatives and broad-based incentives have been announced by the government, nothing announced directly for car buyers has so far attracted the attention of the masses.

People will stop complaining about EV range the minute fast charging is a reality, and new startup Piëch reckons it’s got the goods to deliver an 80 percent charge on a 311-mile (500 km) range battery in four minutes, 40 seconds, which is vastly quicker than anything else on the market. Why not just launch the battery, then?

While the Piëch Mark Zero, due for prototype testing next year, looks like a terrific electric sports car, the car itself pales into insignificance behind the claims these guys are making about their ultra-fast charging setup, which, as astute commenters on our original piece pointed out, would require some pretty fearsome megawatt-pushing technology at the charge station as well as some uniquely amazing battery properties.

Desten’s ultra-fast charging battery claims

Today, a little more information trickled out about the batteries, from Chinese/German concern Desten, and the chargers, from another Chinese/German company called TGOOD – as well as Piëch announcing two new variants of its sporty EV platform.

From Desten’s COO Andrew Whitworth came this slightly cryptic screed: “Due to the ongoing patent process, we cannot comment more detailed information about our lithium ion cells at the moment. This much I can reveal: we were able to construct the inner workings of the cell in such a way that significantly stronger currents can flow, hardly any heat develops during charging and discharging, and the entire recuperation can be made much more efficient.”

He goes on to flash some testing credentials: “The whole thing works: TÜV Süd, along with renowned system supplier Hofer Powertrain, which works for well-known car manufacturers, and the University of Esslingen have tested and certified our cells. We are concentrating on the series production of our cells and batteries.” And to add some credibility, he attaches some poorly done scans of the test results:

Piëch, for its part, says that the batteries deal with heat so well under both input and output power loads that they need no cooling system. The entire Mark Zero powertrain will be air-cooled despite its 300-kilowatt (402-hp) twin-motor AWD setup and 3.3-second 0-100 km/h (0-62 mph) acceleration time. That saves about 200 kg (441 lb) of weight, assisting both performance and range, and that’ll be another benefit other car companies will appreciate if and when they get access to the battery tech.

Piëch’s head of engineering Klaus Schmidt has apparently been to China to test drive a trial vehicle equipped with the Desten batteries, and is suitably pleased, saying: “I’m already looking forward to when we launch the Piëch Mark Zero onto the market with this innovative technology in three years’ time. Besides the short charging time, the innovative thermal management of the batteries also gives them the highest level of stability, and fast laps on the Nürburgring Nordschleife should not be a problem with the first roadworthy prototype of our Piëch Mark Zero in the spring of next year.”

TGOOD’s ultra-fast chargers – soon to be available at home

Jolly good then. As to TGOOD and its ultra-fast chargers, Piëch is now saying that these monstrous charging speeds will be available from a home garage wall box that TGOOD will make.

“The wall box charging station not only ensures that the new Piëch Mark Zero is charged to 80 percent of its battery capacity in 4:40 minutes,” reads the press release, “it can also be used as a modular storage unit.”

Storage unit? For energy? Is this thing going to be a Tesla Powerwall on steroids, some kind of megawatt-pumping supercapacitor capable of flash-charging somewhere around 100 kilowatt-hours’ worth of energy in a matter of minutes? It’d make sense for these things to sip energy slowly from the grid, save it up and blast it in only when required – that’d make them much easier to install without needing a gigantic pipe that could handle instantaneous megawatt draws from the grid.

Piëch seems to think so, saying they’re “suitable for both automotive and industrial solutions. In larger applications, they can thus serve to protect the power grid – eg. for rapid load balancing or emergency power supply. In general, applications that rely on the rapid delivery of great amounts of power will also benefit commercially as, in most cases, storage size and hence cost can be reduced.” Color us intrigued once more.

Piëch outlines range plans

While the battery and charging tech could be significant to the entire EV industry, Piëch’s cars will likely price themselves into exclusivity – hence why we address them last, and go light on detail. The Mark Zero concept is best explained as a preview of the Piëch GT-2 two-seater sports car.

The same platform will be extended into a four-seater GT-4 sports coupe, and Piëch will build upwards as well, for a GT-X SUV. The GT-2 is expected to be on sale in about three years, followed by the GT-X SUV and the GT-4 at a later stage.

The company is also looking at hybrid and fuel cell powertrain options, although with a battery setup like it says it’ll be premiering, you have to wonder why it’d bother. Indeed, you have to wonder about Desten’s choices as well – why the company is choosing to debut such a (potentially) radically transformative battery technology in a small, short-run startup’s first car. Will the expense be prohibitive? Is volume production going to be a problem? Or is Desten just most comfortable starting out at very low volumes?

The whole thing is a fascinating mystery for the time being, and one we’ll be keeping an eye on.