Earth Techling opens a recent article with this statement: "One thing we've come to expect with the rise of electric vehicles is that pollution levels in areas where these are driven will drop, even if just slightly. Given the newness of mass adoption though, there's only so much data out there to collaborate our assumption. [...]
http://insideevs.com/turns-out-electric-vehicles-can-actually-reduce-u
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Continued coverage of the 24 Hours of Electricross race, continuing from Technosanity #25: 24 Hours of Electricross - Interview with Neal Saiki. Don Amador is with the Blue Ribbon Coalition, an organization specializing with taking off-highway vehicles (OHV) into the wilderness (mission: "The BlueRibbon Coalition champions responsible use of public lands and waters for the benefit of all recreationists by educating and empowering its members").
He attended the race to measure noise levels to understand the potential for electric off-highway vehicles to address noise issues related to OHV use. With a noise meter he recorded the race as producing 60-67 dB whereas normal motorcycle races produce noise in the 100+ dB range. At 65dB it is the same as regular conversation between people.
Electric vehicles offer more than mitigating environmental damage from burning fossil fuels, and they offer more than a way out of the peak oil mess. They offer a solution to noise pollution in our cities.
After 100+ years of gasoline vehicle use our society has become immunized to the noise coming from them. But they are noisy even if we're not aware of that noise. Think of the potential change to the quality of our cities if there were a preponderance of electric vehicles.
Technosanity #26: Interview w/ Don Amador at 24 Hours of Electricross
The California Air Resources Board will be voting on March 27th on a proposal by CARB staff that would reduce the number of Zero-Emission Vehicles (ZEVs) from 25,000 to 2,500 over three years. This means the six major automakers would only make 840 ZEVs a year. CARB staff is proposing this change because the automakers say they cannot produce Fuel Cell Vehicles (FCVs) except in tiny quantities in 2012-2014. However, they have already proven they can produce battery ZEVs, and we see no reason to wait for hydrogen.
Why is it that India has multiple companies building electric vehicles, and in the U.S. it's so difficult to find any for purchase?
Ultra motors display electric vehicles, launch later this year discusses a new company which has developed both a two-wheeler and three-wheeler electric vehicles. The three-wheeler is for demonstration, runs at 50 km per hour carrying a load of 500kg for 100km on single charge, and shows that the technology is not only affordable, clean and quiet but that it is scalable to heavy-duty applications.
In India the phrase "two-wheeler" means a motorcycle or scooter. The phrase "three-wheeler" is a sort of vehicle which doesn't exist in the U.S. I have a picture in an earlier article about plans by Mahindra (another Indian car company) to produce electric three-wheelers.
Ultra Motors is an English company. It's possible their plans are for offshored production in India and to distribute the vehicles worldwide. At the speeds quoted above, the three-wheeler is suitable only for congested urban areas (of which India has many).
Oooohh... this is more interesting than I thought as they've developed a nice hub motor.
Driving into work this morning I passed someone painting the lines on the street ... and had an interesting series of thoughts.
What was in front of me was two city utility trucks, and a little special-build gizmo that had four-wheels, a lawnmower engine, a guy sitting on a seat, and a paint sprayer. The two city utility trucks were guarding the guy on this little gizmo.
I thought -- why isn't that an EV? I'm sure that thing has a very short range requirement, and therefore doesn't need to be burning gasoline. I'm sure several people (myself included) on this board could design an EV gizmo that does the same job.
I want to zoom out to the big picture now.
The gasoholic duopoly of oil companies and auto makers are very entrenched. It makes little sense to tackle that head-on, it would be like flying the Millenium Falcon and heading directly towards one of the massive warships. As C3PO would say, the odds of surviving such a maneuver are slim. Instead nibble around the side building a larger and larger business in areas the automakers think are non-core.
e.g. The Steel Industry used to be the big thing in what are now known as the Rust Belt states (Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc). What happened? Well, the "mini mills" established themselves selling products that the big steel industry didn't see as core to their businesses. Eventually the mini mills businesses grew big enough that the big steel industry collapsed, because the mini mills would take one small market niche after another until the big steel industry had nothing left.
In the vehicle industry, the EV folk could work to make small vehicles like the paint sprayer gizmo I saw this morning. I'm sure that city governments are under some kind of mandate to decrease their pollution output. I remember reading some time ago that airports are being affected by such a mandate, and given the nature of airports the only avenue they had to decreasing their pollution was to electrify the ground service vehicles. In other words, there's a whole range of specialized service vehicles that could be built, that would be electrically driven, which would be a niche the big auto industry might be ignoring and could be taken by an EV supplier.
It's not as glamourous as building a car. But it could be a more sustainable business. Maybe.
Investigating possible automotive applications for ultracapacitors, MIT researcher Riccardo Signorelli here is setting up a test of the charge and discharge behavior of a 3,000-farad capacitor, whose stored energy is about one-eighth that of a D cell battery. (Courtesy of Joel Schindall / MIT) Known for storing a short-lived jolt of electricity essential to the successful operation of electrical circuits in devices and appliances ranging from PCs to microwave ovens, cell phones, and televisions, the capacitor is in the midst of a major, ongoing upgrade of its energy storage capabilities. After nearly two centuries in which batteries have been the obvious choice for storing usable amounts of energy, high-end capacitors, known as ultracapacitors, are poised to challenge them in a growing range of applications.
"In fuel cell vehicles, ultracapacitors have demonstrated a higher recovery of energy from braking than batteries, are considerably lighter, have a longer economic life, and are more environmentally friendly in their manufacture and disposal," says Pierre Rivard, president and CEO of Hydrogenics of Mississauga, Ontario, a clean power generation company with a focus on fuel cells.
http://www.worldandi.com/subscribers/feature_detail.asp?num=23938
Why, oh why, isn't Yamaha importing these to the U.S.?
EC-02, the little electric motorcycle by Yamaha
Well, okay, one reason would be the speed. At 30 km/h speed this thing isn't compatible with most of America's roads. And I would have a hard time calling it anything but a Moped. I have an electric moped, whose max speed is 30 mph, and want something faster because it's not quite compatible with the typical 35 mph speed (which people routinely ignore) on city streets.
