Metals Tech

A major public consultation has been launched to assess Bristol’s existing chargepoint network for electric vehicles.

The organisations running the process want to hear from any current user of the network – or people who would like to operate an electric vehicle in the future – on how Bristol’s electric chargepoint network should be run, managed and supported.

The consultation process includes a survey and focus groups, and is run by Bristol City Council partners Cenex with the Energy Saving Trust (EST).

Cenex and EST are working together to strategically assess the existing chargepoint network, identify any issues, and find where additional infrastructure needs to go.

Councillor Kye Dudd, cabinet member for energy at Bristol City Council, said: “Bristol has a proud history of leading by example in the action against climate change and has committed to be a city that runs entirely on clean energy by 2050.

“The move towards electric vehicles is one that the council is keen to support and will help us to make significant improvements to our air quality.

“As well as upgrading our own vehicle fleet, we’re determined to meet local demand for charging points to enable as many local residents and businesses as possible to own and run electric vehicles in the future.”

In January 2016, Bristol – bidding with the West of England authorities – was awarded £7.1million of funding over five years through the Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV) to promote the uptake of electric vehicles, including plug-in hybrids, across the region.

As part of its Go Ultra-Low West (GULW) programme, Bristol City Council aims to use its funding to install around 120 new public electric vehicle charging points across Bath and North-East Somerset, Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire.

Cenex will be identifying candidate sites for public infrastructure, and will be assessing their feasibility working with the Distribution Network Operator and local authorities.

EST are leading on stakeholder engagement of the project to gather views and opinions of the chargepoint network.

GULW’s headline target is to reach 5,000 new electric vehicle registrations per year by 2020, and therefore must meet anticipated demand for public charging points, potentially adding up to 200 additional chargepoints.

The online survey asks questions related to how the network is run, accessed, experiences, and people’s driving habits, such as vehicle type, mileage etc. The survey is live until Friday, March 9, and everyone taking part will be entered into a prize draw to win £100 worth of Amazon vouchers.

Auto components maker Bosch said that the government needs to chart out a clear policy and work with everybody in the ecosystem as it pushes car makers to work towards electric vehicles by 2030.

The government wants to see all vehicles in the country ply on electricity rather than gasoline and diesel in an effort to reduce pollution but the path towards that goal is riddled with challenges which include the high cost of battery, setting up of charging stations, and steady supply of electricity across towns and cities.

“China is the No. 1 in the electric vehicle landscape now due to a clear road map that is pushed by the government. You have to develop the ecosystem with the right technology and incentives for development. India can do a little better,” Bosch chief technology officer and director Jan-Oliver Rohrl told TOI on Tuesday.

The CTO said a sustainable policy would help. “Looking at the budget last week, I could not find a line about electric vehicles where we could say this is being supportive for a market that is still in a nascent stage,” he said.
Bosch, however, will go ahead with the development of electric mobility technologies in India as it believes there will be a market requirement no matter what the policy is.

“We will not wait for the policies and that is why we built the Agile Project House in January. We cannot be fence sitters,” Rohrl said.

The Project House is working on prototype development and system integration to get electric vehicles and electro mobility solutions on the streets. The company believes this will increase its competence to provide customized technology for flexible, affordable and efficient urban mobility.
Given the current adoption of electric vehicles across the globe, the company estimates about 10% to 18% of total vehicles will run on electricity by 2030, unless some breakthrough technology is obtained to reduce the cost of batteries and other parts.

“For India, the numbers will be a little less but will be significant considering the adoption is zero now,” Bosch India managing director Soumitra Bhattacharya said.

Bhattacharya said hybrid electric vehicles would bridge the gap between the current internal combustion engines and the electric ones of the future. “Hybrid is an important prospect for India, it has been proved in the world and this country will be no exception,” he said.

China is pushing automakers to sell as many electric cars as possible in order to keep their place in what is now the largest car market in the world.

To get its share of the market, GM’s Chinese joint-venture decided to go down market with an electric car that costs just ~$7,200.

With a length of 2,488 mm (98″), a width of 1,506 mm (59″) and a height of 1,670 mm (66″), this is a very small two-seater.

It is equipped with a 29 kW electric motor and its battery pack enables 155 km (96 miles) of range.

Those specs are far from being impressive, but that’s not where the Baojun E100 shines.

Baojun is introducing the E100 only in regions with aggressive incentives for zero-emission vehicles.

Last year, they first introduced it in the city of Liuzhou in the Guangxi autonomous region, where the vehicle starts at only RMB 35,800 (~$5,600 USD) after national and local incentives.

At that price, they managed to deliver 11,446 units in just 5 months – making it one of the best-selling vehicles in the city.

Today, they announced that they are expanding to several more cities in the Guangxi regions, where the vehicle will be available for RMB 45,800 (~$7,200 USD) to RMB 58,800 (~$9,300 USD) after national and local incentives.

That’s about half the price of the actual cost of the vehicle before any government incentive.

E-mobility is likely to be a key “demand driver of electricity” and “positive for coal-based generation” and electric vehicles (EV) could result in incremental power demand of nearly 160 billion units by 2030, according to a Coal Vision 2030 document.

“It is estimated that EVs could emerge as a key segment in the overall automobile sector.

Assuming a market share of 15 per cent by 2030, EVs can result in incremental power demand of nearly 160 billion units by 2030,” the study said.

Coal India Limited (CIL) has commissioned this study to assess the future demand scenarios for the coal sector up to 2030.

The study said in India, e-mobility or electric vehicles segment is at a nascent stage and currently, there were just over 4 lakh electric two-wheelers and a few thousand electric cars on the roads.

“However, EVs have the potential to grow to more than 5 per cent (of annual vehicle sales) in a few years,” it added.

The Ministry of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises, under the ‘National Electric Mobility Mission Plan 2020’, has formulated the Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric Vehicles (FAME) scheme to push e-mobility adoption in the country.

“The scheme envisages a population of 15-16 million electric vehicles in India by the year 2020,” the ministry said.

The South Australian government has announced another big battery for the mid North, with Tilt Renewables set to build a 44MW solar farm coupled with 21MW/26MWh battery system.

The energy generated will be fed into the national electricity grid via the company’s existing 100MW Snowtown Stage 1 Wind Farm substation.

The $90 million project will be financially supported with a grant of $7,125,000 from the SA Renewable Technology Fund and expected to create about 200 jobs during construction.

Established with a mission to accelerate SA’s energy transition, the fund has thus once again backed further deployment of energy storage, after it allocated a total of $8 million for four selected projects late last year.

Tilt Renewable’s Snowtown North Solar Farm and Battery Energy Storage System Project will feature up to 180,000 solar PV panels and be located on 100 hectares of cleared farming land next to the existing wind farm.

“When complete, the new infrastructure will be part of the biggest co-located wind, solar and battery facility in Australasia,”  said Tilt Renewables Chief Executive Deion Campbell.

According to Campbell, the Snowtown development demonstrates that the integration of the right mix of existing technologies in a modern renewable electricity system, can provide flexibility and security of supply and that co-location can greatly increase asset utilization and overall system efficiency.

In the same release, Tilt Renewables also announced that a 300MW, 1350MWh pumped hydro storage project at the Highbury quarry near Adelaide was moving to the approvals phase. 

Elon Musk is fiddling while Tesla burns. The entrepreneur has recently pulled off successful PR stunts for his other firms. And he has just broadened the electric-car maker’s funding options. But Tesla looks set to incinerate truckloads of greenbacks this year.

Fourth-quarter results unveiled on Wednesday show the maker of the Model S and Model X ended 2017 with $3.3 billion in cash on its books. That’s only slightly less than at the end of September.

But Musk has already had to push back Model 3 production targets three times in recent months after warning last summer of “at least six months of manufacturing hell.” And he has also committed the company to a number of other projects, including its Semi truck and an all-new Roadster. As a result, Tesla may set fire to almost $4 billion of cash by the end of December, reckon Barclays analysts.

Moreover, carmakers are starting to spend a good chunk of money to secure increasingly expensive or hard-to-get raw materials for electric batteries. Last month a Toyota unit agreed to spend $240 million to take a 15 percent stake in Australian lithium miner Orocobre. Tesla has discussed building a lithium-processing plant in Chile with Santiago-based miner SQM, Reuters reported last week. And last year Volkswagen tried to secure 10-year supplies of cobalt, Reuters exclusively reported.

The cash shortfall Tesla faces isn’t the kind that can be rectified with gimmicks that have worked elsewhere. Musk, for example, just raised $10 million for his tunneling firm, The Boring Company, by selling 20,000 flamethrowers – in reality, pimped-up, overpriced roof torches. SpaceX is likely to benefit from another of his stunts: on Tuesday its Falcon Heavy rocket ship put a Roadster into space – an effective pitch to companies needing to take payloads out of the Earth’s atmosphere.

He and finance chief Deepak Ahuja have also taken Tesla on a successful trip to the asset-backed securities market, raising almost $550 million last week with a deal that reduced the company’s funding costs a tad.

Keeping the carmaker’s focus solidly on the road ahead, though, requires more than just tinkering. Another multibillion-dollar stock sale is fast approaching.