Inhabitat reports that Porsche will be manufacturing a production version of the 918 Spyder plugin hybrid sports car - Porsche Gets the Go-Ahead for the Sexiest Hybrid Ever.

Earlier this year we told you all about the Porsche 918 Spyder hybrid concept car and now we get to tell you — as we so rarely get to do — that this concept car is about to become a reality! The Spyder which is surely to become the sexiest green car ever (sorry Tesla!) just got the green light to make this dream a real road eating machine. Porsche’s first ever plug-in hybrid goes from 0-60 in 3.2 seconds, gets 94 miles per gallon, and undoubtedly will have most of us drooling as it zips past us on our daily commutes. But why will we be drooling instead of riding inside, you ask? The price tag for the 918 Spyder is set at a whopping US $630,000.

Inhabitat reports that Porsche is looking to produce a plugin hybrid sports car - 918 Spyder is Porsche’s First Ever Plug In Hybrid Electric Car.

Porsche recently blew everyone at the Geneva Auto Show out of the water with their freshly unveiled electric concept car – their first plug-in hybrid ever. Dubbed the 918 Spyder, this stealthy-looking ride is a parallel hybrid just like the Prius – well, except much, much sexier. It also supposedly gets 78 miles per gallon, has emissions of 70g CO2/km, can go 16 miles on electric charge alone, and does 0-60 in just 3.2 seconds. Oh and did we mention that it’s drop-dead gorgeous too?

Todd Woody has an article at Grist talking about the benefits of expanding the smart meter / smart grid idea from the electricity grid to the water supply network - Smart meters save energy, water, and dollars.

The other day I came home to find a colorful flyer on my front door proclaiming, “Your meter just got smarter.”

While I was out and about in Berkeley, a worker from my utility, PG&E, slipped in the side gate and gave my old gas and electric meter a digital upgrade. So-called smart meters allow the two-way transmission of electricity data and will eventually let me monitor and alter my energy consumption in near real-time. I’ll be able to fire up an app on my iPhone and see, for instance, a spike in watts because my son has left the lights on in his room and a laptop plugged in.

Now I only learn of my electricity use when I get my monthly utility bill, long after all that carbon has escaped into the atmosphere. The situation is even worse when it comes to water consumption; my bill and details of my water use arrive every other month.

“When you tell people what total bucket of water they used in the past 60 days, the barn door is open and the animals are long gone,” says Richard Harris, water conservation manager for the East Bay Municipal Utility District, my local water agency.

EBMUD is currently testing smart water meters in 30 households and plans to expand the pilot program to 4,000 homes and businesses later this year.

“It’ll give us better knowledge of where our water is going,” says Harris. “We also thought if we’re going to ask people to use water more efficiently, especially when we’re coming out of a drought and have imposed water restrictions, customers need to have an idea of what their current use is.”

EBMUD’s smart meters take readings every hour and participants in the pilot program will be able to go online to check their consumption and set up an email alert if their water use rises above a certain level. The agency also plans to offer a social networking feature to allow people to compare their water consumption with other households in the area. Nothing like a little peer pressure to get you to turn off the tap.

Given that many states expect to face water shortages in the coming years, one would think we’d be seeing a roll out of smart water meters akin to the national effort being made to smarten up the power grid.

The payoff could be enormous. Water agencies and consumers would be able to detect leaking pipes and toilets in real-time and fix the problem before the water literally goes down the drain.

Smart grids continue to be the one area of the cleantech world that is really booming this year, so I'll do a little roundup of recent articles.

EETimes points to a recent report predicting their will be over 200 million smart meters deployed by 2014 - Report: Smart meters rise to 212 million in 2014.

Deployments of smart electricity meters worldwide will rise from 76 million in 2009 to reach about 212 million in 2014, according to a new report from ABI Research. The report provides forecasts of the wired and wireless communications options used to connect meters as well as profiles of some of many smart meter makers.

The move to smart grids and two-way meters to enable new services to the home got a $3.4 billion boost from economic stimulus grants in the U.S. this year, noted Sam Lucero, a practice director at ABI and author of the report.

For its part, the European Union enacted a so-called Third Energy Package in September which aims to migrate every European electricity meter to a capability for two-way communications by 2022. China is said to be ramping up its own smart grid programs, Lucero added.

Smart Grid News has a look at some possible changes to the energy market configurations as a result of smart grid implementation - Why Today's Utilities May Soon Be Obsolete (and What May Replace Them).

The potential for implementation of a Smart Grid depends upon the paradigm or paradigms that are eventually implemented, as well as on the quantity and quality of information being exchanged. ... Two major questions are paramount across all models:

* Who makes the decisions?
* How is control exercised?

These crucial questions determine who applies the smarts to the grid and how efficiently those smarts realize the promise of Smart Grid technologies.

Attempting to create a taxonomy of market structures risks over-simplification, but the resulting clarity can be insightful. This said, I argue that there are four market models that capture the critical elements of what will emerge when the Smart Grid is fully implemented. While elements of the four can be mixed and matched, at the core they represent extremes that require dramatically different deployment strategies in information and data flow, as well as end user decision and control.

These are:

* Pure Market
* Intermediated
* Microgrid
* Centrally Controlled

Reuters has a look at the smart grid investment landscape - How to make a play in the smart electrical grid: executives.

The privately-held Silver Spring Networks is smart grid networking company and is often cited as a candidate for an initial public offering.

The smart grid will allow two-way communications between utilities and their customers. Analysts have said it will marry clean power, electric vehicles, advanced meters, and power storage into a seamless network, modernizing thousands of miles of outdated power lines and allowing for more efficient energy use.

Increased momentum for smart grid technology helped push power storage and energy efficiency stocks to perform the best on the WilderHill New Energy Global Innovation Index in 2009, which tracks the performance of 86 global clean energy stocks.

The sector also has seen a boost from the Obama administration, which announced a $3.4 billion package in 2009 to help build a smart electric grid meant to trim utility bills, reduce blackouts and carry power generated by solar and wind energy.

"The scale is even bigger than the Internet ... but the speed of adoption is still going to be slow," said Adrian Tuck, chief executive at Tendril, a Boulder, Colorado-based smart grid company that GE recently acquired a stake in. ...

"Demand response is the killer application in this market, at least the first killer app," said Robert W Baird analyst Michael Horowitz. "These guys already have built fairly good business momentum over the last couple of years, as consumers and utilities alike are looking for better ways to manage delivering electrons," he added.

While bigger players are moving into the sector, they may not be the fastest way to profit from the smart grid. Google has invested in smart grid player Silver Spring Networks while Cisco and Microsoft are seeking to leverage their existing networking and software expertise in the emerging sector.

"Our view is the pure play companies are going to give a lot more bang. This is going to be very small to incremental for a company like Cisco and Microsoft," said RBC Capital Markets analyst Stuart Bush.

Back at Smart grid News, a look at some of the issues that are cropping up as utilities try to phase out jobs like meter reading as smart meters are rolled out - Is the Smart Grid Inducing Labor Pains?.

It seems that there is a bit of wire crossing happening amid the hardworking folks who are actually many of the hands and feet creating and managing the Smart Grid. In spite of very positive initial reactions to the federal investment of billions into the creation of the Smart Grid, the law of unintended consequences is introducing some consternation among the ranks of organized labor as Smart Grid programs move from philosophy to reality.

While the introduction of the Smart Grid Investment Grant (SGIG) program was applauded by many in the labor community as the beginnings of a new market for skilled technicians, such as in this AFL-CIO blog post, or this IBEW promotional video, some actual deployments are not being greeted as positive changes.

Most recently, on Jan. 19 the Kennebec Journal reported that IBEW Local 1837 was "speaking out against" a new smart meter installation project by Central Maine Power (CMP) that had been funded to the tune of $96M through the SGIG, and which had a total cost of roughly $190M. Seems that the project would likely eliminate, over time, some 141 positions, and that did not sit well with the union.

The tension at CMP, however, is not unique. In October, a plan by the board of Memphis Light, Gas and Water Division (MLGW) received similar criticism from the IBEW, which noted that roughly 400 meter reading jobs would be lost in that plan.

The Smart Grid is comprised of much more than just smart metering. It involves redundancy, and resiliency, and quality of power, and ease of integrating renewables, and storage, and on and on and on. Today's unfortunate reality, however, is that investment has been increasingly targeted to smart metering. Smart meters, and the improvements in automating, and "remotifying" the reading, turn-on, and cut-off of power, are seen as early wins. They do not appear to jeopardize the delivery of power, and can very quickly demonstrate cost efficiency by decreasing truck rolls. This is both a reaction to the government's emphasis of "shovel-ready" projects to fund, and to the ease with which a utility can justify the project to regulators as a cost-saver, paying off the capital cost in short order through a reduction in labor costs. As a result, the union teams, originally anxious to generate skilled labor to drive the construction of the next generation of transmission and distribution, is left, instead with a short-term need for installers that will be wiring up the elimination of hundreds of jobs for their meter reading brethren.

Greentech media has a look at the top 10 smart grid news stories from 2009 - The Past and Future of Smart Grid.

8. Distribution and Transmission Up Next: Not all smart grid systems are visible to the untrained eye. Upgrading distribution and transmission grids with communications and controls could help utilities squeeze up to 10 percent more efficiency out of their existing generation capacity, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. Those savings can come from preventative maintenance and replacement, shortening outage times, and optimizing grid voltages, among other sources.

At the same time, managing the massive growth in renewable solar, wind and geothermal energy that will be needed to cut the nation's carbon emissions will put new pressures on the grid. Hundreds of billions of dollars will need to be spent on new transmission lines to carry Midwest wind power and Southwest solar power to load centers, according to studies - which opens up new business models for startups.

And at the neighborhood level, distribution grids will need a whole host of new technologies to manage the increase in rooftop solar panels, demand response-enabled homes, and future plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles that will soon place unprecedented new pressures on utilities built on the model of delivering power from central generation stations to millions of customers.

9. Smart Grid 2.0: All of these emerging smart grid technologies will be a lot more useful if they can be linked together. That's the idea for the next surge in the industry – a whole ecosystem of smart architectures, stretching from generations sources and transmission lines to the wireless and wired networks in utility customers' homes and businesses.

GridPoint, one of the more prominent – and well-funded – of the smart grid startups out there, is centered on delivering this kind of integrated offering to utility customers. Its approach has included buying up a host of startups offering vehicle charging, home energy monitoring and industrial and commercial energy management, indicating the breadth of functions it hopes to provide.

What will the smart grid of the future look like? Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers speaks of a utility-managed system that orchestrates smart meters, solar panels, batteries, demand response systems and plug-in vehicle chargers to serve as "virtual power plants" scattered throughout a utility service territory.

CNet has an article on a in-house energy usage display that is combined with a thermostat (I suspect we'll see a trend for convergence in home based control devices over time which mirrors that of hand held devices) - CES: To save energy, thermostat becomes mini computer.

There are dozens of companies making in-home displays designed to help consumers shave energy use at home. But SilverPac is packing many of those features into a high-tech thermostat. SilverPac, which makes digital picture frames and other media electronics, on Monday introduced the SilverStat 7, a sleek device that combines the heating and cooling controls of a programmable thermostat with a real-time energy display. ...

The thermostat is built around a 7-inch touch-screen display that runs Windows CE on Intel's Atom processor. It has a Wi-Fi interface that will allow it to get electricity usage information from smart meters and talk to network-aware appliances on a home wireless network. It has built-in speakers to play FM radio or music streamed from a home network. People can also use the device as a calendar.

According to the company, SilverPac's in-home energy display will rely on getting information from a smart meter, which means that it won't be accessible to everyone. Even with millions of smart meters expected to be installed over the next three years, many utilities will not be making meter information available over home wireless networks, in part because of security concerns.

Smart meter programs in Australia are still in their infancy - Western Australia recently announced the first step in a local smart meter rollout - IBM nabs WA smart meter deal .

RESIDENTS in parts of Western Australia will soon be able to tell exactly how much power each electrical appliance consumes.

Western Power hopes to roll out 10,500 smart meters as part of its smart grid project, aimed at helping customers identify consumption patterns. As a result, households and businesses could lower their power bills as smart meters make usage monitoring more transparent.

IBM bagged a key contract with energy supplier Western Power to provide systems integration and project management services for the smart grid trial, due for completion in June 2012. ...

IBM is involved in almost 50 smart grid projects worldwide, including local utilities Energy Australia and Country Energy.

The federal government has pledged up to $100m towards the nation's first national smart grid. A government-backed smart infrastructure conference, ThinkFuture, will be held at Parliament House in Canberra on March 12.

SmartMeters.com has an article on some turbulence being encountered by a smart meter rollout in New Zealand - Second thoughts about smart meters in New Zealand.

A question has been raised in New Zealand whether the primary motivation for smart meter installations is so power companies can recoup funds from customers where were undercharged previously.

Three major utilities – Contact, Genesis, & Meridian – are all installing smart meters throughout New Zealand claiming the devices will conserve energy and save money for customers. The devices allow for remote meter reads so human meter readers don’t have to be sent out. The smart meters also use information technology to record and display power usage.

The New York Times has a look at consumer unhappiness with smart meter rollouts in the US as well - ‘Smart’ Electric Utility Meters, Intended to Create Savings, Instead Prompt Revolt.

Millions of households across America are taking a first step into the world of the “smart grid,” as their power companies install meters that can tell them how much electricity they are using hour by hour — and sometimes, appliance by appliance. But not everyone is happy about it. Leo Margosian of Fresno, Calif., said his meter put July use at three times as much as last July's.

Customers in California are in open revolt, and officials in Connecticut and Texas are questioning whether the rush to install meters benefits the public.

Some consumers argue that the meters are logging far more kilowatt hours than they believe they are using. And many find it unfair that they will begin to pay immediately for the new meters through higher rates, when the promised savings could be years away.

Power companies say the meters will allow utilities to vary the price charged to their customers by the hour to correspond to what those utilities are paying for energy in the wholesale market. This can help consumers save money, they say.

They also say the meters will be crucial to remaking the electric system to handle intermittent power sources like wind turbines and solar cells while continuously meeting customers’ needs. ...

In response to a wave of complaints from the Bakersfield area in the Central Valley, Pacific Gas & Electric has been placing full-page advertisements in newspapers in the area promising benefits from the new meters. It says customers will save money not only by paying rates based on hourly fluctuations in the wholesale market, but also eventually by displaying real-time rates.

To reduce their bills, customers could cut back at pricey peak times and shift some activities, like running a clothes dryer or a vacuum cleaner, to off-peak periods. Utilities will then have lower costs, the argument goes, because the grid will need fewer power plants as demand levels out.

Customers will become “structural winners,” said Andy Tang, senior director of the company’s Smart Energy Web program.

Someday utilities hope to use the meter to control consumption by major appliances like air conditioners. But experts are still debating what technical standards the meters and appliances should use to communicate.

The Energy Collective has an article on the need to educate consumers about the long term benefit of smart meter rollouts (though I think the fact that some smart meters just aren't that smart, or they help utilities adopt a utility centric model rather than a customer centric one - like the horrible example above of utilities controlling customer air conditioners rather than customers configuring their own response to high power prices, needs to be addressed - many of these programs are far from perfect) - Connecting the Smart Grid Dots One Meter at a Time.

There are more signs that the brouhaha over PG&E’s smart meter rollout may do damage to other utilities’ plans for similar deployments. News reports indicate that utilities and regulatory agencies in other states are closely watching the legal tangle devolve in California. Consumer advocacy groups in California are concerned that smart meters are expensive, inaccurate and increase their bills, and only benefit utilities by eliminating meter reading jobs. This clearly demonstrates that they and the consumers they represent see the immediate impacts of the rollout of smart meters – a highly visible and disruptive new technology – as negatives. To them, the smart meter is an unwelcome revolutionary technology with no benefits to average ratepayers. They don’t know about its evolutionary role in the Smart Grid and how it will help ratepayers save money AND the environment.

And why should they? It’s the responsibility of utilities, and maybe the Department of Energy (DOE) as well to educate consumers better about what Smart Grid technologies can do today and in the future. The DOE has developed a series of booklets that explain the benefits of the Smart Grid to various groups, including consumers, but clearly there need to be much more aggressive and coordinated campaigns to enlighten consumers.

Does Joe Ratepayer understand that smart meters enrolled in utility programs will reduce or eliminate the need to build more power plants to address peak electricity load requirements? Does Jane Ratepayer understand that new power plant construction translates into higher electricity bills to recover costs? Could Joe or Jane intuitively understand how a smart meter saves them money and saves the environment too?

Those of us in the business understand that smart meters will save consumers money on their utility bills as the grid evolves to residential Time of Use (TOU) electricity rates and Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) are deployed. (Note: The Smart Grid Dictionary defines TOU as “A rate structure with different unit prices for electricity use in a 24-hour timeframe, generally to encourage use during periods of lower demand. This price applies to a time-of-use price, rate, or tariff and is a dynamic price scheme typically used with non-dispatchable demand response programs. It is also known as time-of-day pricing.”)

Analogies can help explain the Smart Grid rollout process and the role that smart meters play. For instance, let’s say that I am building a new house with the kitchen of my dreams. I won’t get the benefits of that kitchen’s output until foundations to fixtures are installed.

The smart meter is like my house’s foundation. There’s no home without a foundation. There’s no Smart Grid without smart meters. In building my new home, I understand that there is a start and a finish to the project. I have a blueprint to visualize the goal. I have a project plan to understand the process of achieving that goal.

It is vital for utilities to connect the dots between current smart meter rollout activities and long term Smart Grid objectives. Ratepayers and consumer advocacy groups need equivalent blueprints and project plans to understand the long-term objectives in terms of what it means to their bills and the environment.

The New York Times also has a look at experiments investigating the psychology of electricity consumption - Will 'Smart' Electric Meters Lead to Smarter Consumers ?.

In conjunction with utilities, tech companies and state and federal agencies, Stanford University is doing a number of experiments to see how psychology affects people's energy consumption.

Researchers say that when it comes to demand-side management, the field of psychology has been lying fallow for far too long, particularly in the residential sector.

"California has huge amounts of money to put toward marketing campaigns, and they spend it all on media marketing campaigns that we know don't work," said Carrie Armel, a research associate at Stanford University's Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency. "Tens, hundreds of billions of dollars are going to be spent on installing smart meter technology. How much is being spent on behavioral research? Nothing. That's mind-blowing."

Economists and policymakers have long advocated real-time pricing as a way to reduce consumption and smooth demand at peak times. California's 2001 energy crisis might have been avoided had customers had a direct incentive to conserve power; the state Public Utilities Commission has experimented with at least three different pricing mechanisms since 2003, and is currently aiming to install smart meters in the majority of consumers' homes by 2011.

Stanford researchers are working on a dozen different studies on how behavioral patterns can create barriers to adopting new technologies and practices. The projects target four categories -- policy, technology, community and media -- with the aim of creating tools to tap into people's natural proclivities.

Mother Nature News has a post on a some recent comments by Google's Dan Reicher on the company's interest in developing software for managing the recharging of electric vehicles - Google creating software to make plug-in hybrids more efficient.

In its continual climb to take over what seems to be just about every industry, Google announced today that the company is writing software that will help fully integrate hybrid electric cars into the power grid. The new software will help utility companies better manage the load of this burgeoning auto technology, particularly during peak hours.

"We are doing some preliminary work," Dan Reicher, Google's director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives, told a Reuters reporter in an interview. "We have begun some work on smart charging of electric vehicles and how you would integrate large number of electric vehicles into the grid successfully … We have done a little bit of work on the software side looking at how you would write a computer code to manage this sort of charging infrastructure," he said in an interview on the sidelines of an industry conference.

Apart from plug-in technology, Google has been working on several green initiatives like developing custom solar panels that would reduce costs by up to 60 percent. The company is also looking at gas turbines that would run on solar power rather than natural gas, not to mention all the environmental work they're doing with Google Earth -- like helping conservation in Baja and adding a climate layer this week.

The SMH has a report on the new Google Earth climate layer mentioned above - .

Google is using its Google Earth mapping tool to simulate on a 3D map of the world the predicted effects of climate change until the year 2100.

Using data provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the search giant created new layers for Google Earth showing the range of expected temperature and precipitation changes under different global emissions scenarios that could occur throughout the century.

Plugin America is a site with a great list of plugin hybrid and electric vehicles - covering cars, bikes, buses and trucks.

Virtually every major auto manufacturer in the world, along with several smaller outfits, is developing a plug-in electric vehicle and Plug In America is tracking their progress. Our list below will be updated monthly. It represents highway-capable cars and trucks, 2- and 3-wheeled and commercial vehicles. Low-speed electric vehicles and conversions are not included.

FastCompany has a report on new plug in hybrid trucks being used by the US Post Office - Bright Automotive's 100 MPG Plug-In Hybrid Truck: It's Good Enough for the Post Office.

Plug-in hybrid (PHEV) sedans, sports cars, and SUVs are fine for everyday consumer use, but what about businesses that require larger vans (i.e. the U.S. Post Office)? Bright Automotive's new "light-use truck" eschews the sexy aesthetic of cars like the Chevy Volt and Fisker Karma for a more utilitarian 180-cubic-foot space with a 2,000 pound payload.

The IDEA uses only battery power for the first 30 miles of driving before switching over to a gas-supplemented electric system. Bright Automotive's truck gets 100 mpg for the first 50 miles--that's enough to get most urban delivery vehicles through the day. The car's high mpg-rating can be attributed as much to its design as its battery power. The IDEA uses high-tech lightweight aluminum, low-resistance rolling tires, and advanced composites to keep its weight down.

These are specs that could save a high-volume fleet millions of dollars. The U.S. Post Office, for example, operates 162,000 delivery trucks that get 10 mpg. Switch these trucks for 100 mpgIDEA models, and the P.O. could save 80 million gallons of gas annually.

If the government gives Bright the federal loan money it expects, high volume production of the IDEA will begin in 2012, with an annual run rate of 50,000 cars expected by 2013.

Technology Review reports that Fisker Automotive will start selling a plugin hybrid in the US in November - First Plug-in Hybrid to Be Sold in the United States

The first plug-in hybrid to be sold in the United States will likely be the Fisker Karma, which is due out in November. Fisker Automotive, which unveiled the concept version of the Karma in January, recently raised $87 million to help put it into production. A number of other plug-in hybrids, including models from GM, Chrysler, and Toyota, are scheduled to come out in the next few years.

The Karma, a luxury four-passenger sedan, can be recharged by plugging it in; it can then be driven on power from a battery alone for 50 miles. After that, an onboard gasoline generator kicks on to recharge the battery, extending the range by 250 miles between fill-ups. Power from optional solar cells on the roof will be used primarily to cool the car when it's parked, but they could also partially recharge the battery. The car will run on a lithium manganese oxide battery made by Advanced Lithium Power, based in Vancouver, BC. The battery is similar to the one selected for the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid due out in November of 2010.

Henrik Fisker, a car designer and cofounder of the company, said at the New York Auto Show last week that the car is part of his effort to show that environmentally friendly cars need not be small and underpowered. To go with its performance, the car carries a hefty price tag of $87,000.

The car will indeed be fast, but it won't be quite as green as some of the other plug-ins that will come out soon, in large part because of its size. Two 150-kilowatt electric motors together deliver 403 horsepower--enough to accelerate to 60 miles per hour in 5.8 seconds. (It takes the Volt about 9 seconds.) But that kind of acceleration is available only in something called "sport" mode, which uses power from both the battery pack and the gas-powered generator. Drivers will need to select the "stealth" mode to rely exclusively on electricity stored in the battery.

The stealth mode is a holdover from the origins of the vehicle's propulsion system. The Q-drive system was developed by Quantum Technologies for military vehicles designed to have a quiet electric mode for "clandestine operations." When the gas generator and battery are used together, the vehicle gets between 35 and 40 miles per gallon. That's still better than conventional performance vehicles, but not as good as the Chevrolet Volt; when its gas generator kicks in after a 40-mile all-electric range, the Volt will get 50 miles per gallon.

Fisker Automotive is one of several small companies attempting to challenge established automakers by producing plug-in hybrids or electric vehicles. The most promising of these, according to Mike Omotoso, senior manager of power-train forecasting at JD Power and Associates, are Fisker Automotive and Tesla Motors, a company that is already producing its first car, the electric Roadster, a small, very high-performance car that can accelerate to 60 miles per hour in less than four seconds. The Roadster runs exclusively on power stored in its battery: it does not have an onboard generator to extend its range. In spite of Tesla's lead in getting a car to market, it is expected to sell fewer cars than Fisker, Omotoso says. That's because the plug-in hybrid design will make the Karma more appealing to consumers who want to travel long distances. (The Tesla Roadster can go 244 miles on a charge, but recharging it takes hours. The Karma can be refueled quickly.) JD Power estimates that Tesla will sell 500 to 800 cars next year, while Fisker Automotive is expected to sell more than 10,000.

Technology Review reports that the new Prius is designed so that its battery pack can be swapped out for a plug-in lithium-ion battery - Toyota to Deliver Plug-In Hybrids.

Today at the North American International Automotive Show, in Detroit, Toyota announced that later this year, it will release a version of the Prius hybrid car whose battery can be recharged from an ordinary power outlet. By moving up the delivery data of the plug-in vehicle--originally scheduled for 2010--Toyota has slipped ahead of GM, whose Chevy Volt plug-in is promised for late 2010.

Toyota's fidelity to hybrid technology marks a sharp contrast with rivals such as Renault and Mitsubishi, which are planning to leapfrog the hybrid in favor of fully battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs). At the auto show, several U.S. automakers appear to be leaning in the same direction, with Ford Motor, in particular, vowing to release an EV commercial van next year and an EV commuter car in 2011.

Even Toyota is hedging its bets, presenting a battery-powered EV based on its four-seat iQ and promising to begin selling a similar EV commuter car in the United States by 2012. But Toyota explicitly ruled out abandoning hybrid technology anytime soon, issuing a definitive statement on the eve of the Detroit show calling hybrids its "long-term core powertrain technology."

The 2010 Prius available to consumers will still come equipped with a nickel-metal-hydride (NiMH) battery pack and no plug, but Toyota says that it is "plug-in ready"--designed and engineered to accept a lighter and more energy-dense lithium-ion battery pack that can be charged from the grid. Toyota will also produce 500 lithium-powered plug-in Priuses for its commercial and government leasing customers starting later this year. Toyota-Panasonic joint venture Panasonic EV Energy will supply the lithium batteries.

The fact that the plug-in battery pack can be swapped in for an ordinary hybrid battery suggests that it will be relatively small, and that the plug-in Priuses will have a smaller electric-only range than the Volt and the Chinese-built BYD F3DM. The plug-in vehicles that Toyota has been testing in Japan, France, California, and the United Kingdom are Priuses equipped with a second NiMH battery pack that gives them less than 10 miles of electric-only range.

Limiting the battery size is a conscious decision. Recent studies suggest that a limited amount of electric-only range may be optimal for plug-ins, especially in the United States, where half of electricity generation is coal fired. A working paper by Duke University researchers, released in November, predicts that plug-in hybrids storing enough electricity to travel 40 miles on a charge--like the Chevy Volt--will offer few if any greenhouse-gas reductions relative to conventional hybrids. Such long-range plug-ins will likely also cost more per mile, thanks to the high price of the lithium-ion batteries required to store the electricity.

In contrast, research to be delivered today by Carnegie Mellon University mechanical engineer and design expert Jeremy Michalek at the National Academy of Sciences' Transportation Research Board meeting finds that plug-ins with just 20 miles of electric range are likely to best conventional hybrids in both cost and carbon footprint--assuming they are charged frequently.

Technology Review also reports that GM plans to manufacture battery packs for electric cars - GM to Build Its Own Batteries.

General Motors (GM) is getting into the battery-making business. On Monday, the company confirmed early speculation that LG Chem, based in Korea, will supply lithium-ion batteries for its Volt electric vehicle, which is due out next year. But GM also announced that it intends to start manufacturing battery packs itself, noting that battery manufacturing will be central to its business going forward.

The Chevrolet Volt is an electric vehicle that runs on batteries charged from an ordinary power outlet for trips shorter than 40 miles. For longer journeys, an onboard gasoline or ethanol-powered generator will recharge the battery. Two battery companies, LG Chem and A123 Systems, based in Watertown, MA, have been in the running to supply the key component of a battery pack--the individual battery cells--for the Volt. Hundreds of such cells must be wired together and paired with control electronics to create the car's 16-kilowatt-hour battery pack.

Initially, cells from LG Chem will be assembled into battery packs by a subsidiary of LG Chem: Compact Power, based in Troy, MI. But once a new manufacturing plant is built, GM itself will assemble cells into battery packs, according to Monday's announcement. Bob Kruse, GM's executive director of North American Engineering Operations, says that the decision to make batteries is much like GM's decision to make its own engines because the technology is vital to the company's future success.

GM's decision is part of a strategic shift by the company toward the electrification of its automobiles, which will range from cars that rely on electric motors and batteries for brief bursts of power to those that run on electricity alone.

Changing tack, GreenBiz has a report on a novel form of bioplastic intended for use in cars - Researchers Develop Car Parts From Coconut Fibers.

Baylor University researchers have found a way to make car parts with coconut fibers, a process that utilizes waste coconut husks and would increase income for farmers. The researchers have been working on low-cost products that can be made with coconuts, abundant in equatorial regions where about 11 million coconut farmers earn about $500 a year.

Though a process that utilizes coconut fibers in place of synthetic or polyester fibers in compression molded composites, the researchers have focused on coconut-based trunk liners, floorboards and interior door covers. Part of their goal is to design products that can be manufactured simply and inexpensively, as well as triple the market price for coconuts to 30 cents each.

The researchers say that their process would be cheaper than using synthetic fibers and utilize husks, which would ordinarily be thrown away. ...

At least a couple carmakers, Toyota and Mazda, have also been experimenting with using bioplastic to make a range of car parts.

Technology Review reports that GM's plugin hybrid car - the Volt - has had its production finalised, though questions about the battery pack remain - Is GM's Volt Ready to Roll?.

General Motors (GM) unveiled the production design of its Chevrolet Volt electric vehicle on Tuesday, as part of its 100th-anniversary celebration. But significant hurdles remain before the car can start rolling off assembly lines, chief among them the need for continued development of the car's main battery pack.

The Volt is an electric car that can be recharged by plugging it into a wall socket or by running a small, onboard gasoline, ethanol, or diesel generator. The 16-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack stores enough energy for 40 miles of driving--enough to cover almost 80 percent of the daily driving in the United States, the company says. On longer trips, the generator kicks in to recharge the battery, giving the Volt as much range between fill-ups as a typical gas-powered car. For more than a year, GM has been showing off the concept-car version of the Volt in ads. The new production version looks considerably different--it has a more aerodynamic shape--but it will have the same performance specifications that the automaker has been advertising.

Plug-in hybrid vehicles like the Volt began to seem feasible because of new technology that made lithium-ion batteries safer, more durable, and less costly. But while individual battery cells using the technology seem to work well, yoking nearly 300 of them into a battery pack has proved challenging. That, in turn, is forcing GM to design systems that make the vehicle more expensive. "At the cell level, things look good," says Mark Verbrugge, the director of the materials and processes laboratory at GM's research-and-development center. "There are still issues at the pack level that we're trying to iron out, which gets pretty nerve-racking as we get close to production."

Next100 has a post on an upcoming plug-in hybrid cars conference in San Jose - Plug-In Hybrid Cars Head For San Jose.

Expect a jolt of news about new plug-in hybrid cars this week from the Plug-In 2008 conference in San Jose. Some news broke early on Friday when Reuters, citing unnamed sources, reported that General Motors and the utilities group Electric Power Research Institute will announce at the conference a partnership to promote the sale of electric vehicles. Ford Motor announced a partnership with Palo Alto-based EPRI in March.

GM's batter-powered concept car, the Volt.GM is developing the rechargeable Chevrolet Volt expected to enter production in 2010 with a range of 40 miles from a lithium-ion battery pack that could be charged from a standard power outlet. The Volt also will have a gasoline engine to recharge the batteries for longer distances, according to the report. Toyota and other automakers are expected to introduce plug-in hybrids in the next few years.

The automakers, electric utilities (including PG&E), battery-makers, business and environmental groups, engineers, scientists,market analysts, and more will be at Plug-In this week for a series of market and technical panels, including vehicle-to-grid technology.

The WWF has released a report noting that we need to dramatically increase the use of plug-in electric and hybrid cars to deal with both global warming and declining oil supplies.

Dramatically expanded use of plug-in electric and hybrid vehicles would be a way to a transport future that doesn't risk climate catastrophe, a major new WWF analysis has found. Such a move would also reduce the risk of conflict over less oil more and more concentrated in relatively unstable areas of the world.

"Plugged In: The End of the Oil Age" considers the future of a transport sector now 95 per cent dependent on liquid hydrocarbon fuels and examines the impacts and practicalities of electric, coal-to-liquid, gas-to-liquid, natural gas and hydrogen powered transport for the future .It finds that vehicles running solely or partly on grid-connected electricity are more efficient and less greenhouse gas intensive than all alternatives, even with most power now being generated using fossil fuels.

The report also finds that cleaner power generation and more use of renewable fuels in power generation will make it certain that the comparative efficiency and pollution advantages of plug-in transport will improve into the future, while the future of liquid fuels is one of increasing resort to dirtier sources that will take more energy to turn into fuels.

“We should all be relying more on walking and biking, on buses and trains, to get to where we need to go. But cars will inevitably remain a major part of the transport equation," said James Leape, Director General of WWF International. "The cars of the future must be much more efficient -- smaller, lighter, more aerodynamic -- and they should, increasingly, be powered by electricity,”

As oil becomes more difficult to access, techniques to create liquid fuels from coal are now being vigorously pursued in the US, China, India, Australia and South Africa. “Coal-to-liquid fuels are costly, energy intensive and extremely polluting, and have previously only been used on any significant scale in countries facing a state of emergency,” said report author Dr Gary Kendall.

Technology Review has an interesting article on "Heating Plug-in Hybrids", noting "Heating and air-conditioning systems that use thermoelectrics could make plug-in hybrids more practical".

The potential of plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles to curb petroleum use has grabbed a lot of attention lately. But there is still a big obstacle to clear before such cars can become the dominant vehicles on the road: automakers will need to find an efficient way to supply them with heat and air conditioning. That's because conventional heating and cooling systems either don't work or are inefficient in such vehicles, significantly lowering their range in hot and cold weather.

One of the leading candidates for an alternative system is based on thermoelectrics, semiconductor devices that can provide either heat or cooling, depending on the direction the electric current is flowing. Major automakers, such as GM and Ford, are now developing systems based on existing thermoelectric semiconductors, and experimental materials that use nanotechnology promise to make such systems even more appealing.

The first plug-in hybrids--cars that can be recharged by plugging them into an electrical socket, but have small gasoline engines to extend their range--will make use of electric heaters. When they start appearing from major automakers near the end of 2010, they'll cost thousands more than conventional cars, so automakers are looking for ways to make them less expensive to broaden their appeal. One way to do so is to find more-efficient systems of heating and cooling, which make it possible to use smaller, less expensive batteries. As a result, thermoelectric systems could start appearing in cars in 2012.

Technology Review also has a post on improving lithium ion battery technology, with energy storage capacity increasing 30% and battery lifetime doubling - Longer-Lasting Batteries for Laptops. Presumably this will also impact hybrid / electric manufacturers pursuing lithium ion based energy storage options.

Neal Dikeman has an interesting article on plug in hybrids, talking to Ian Wright of Wrightspeed about engine efficiency and where the biggest "payback" can be obtained.

As with most things, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about electric vehicles. Last Friday, Ian Wright and I spent a couple of hours around my conference table discussing our philosophies on electric cars. Wright knows something about this topic, as he was formerly an executive at EV start-up Tesla Motors, and is now the founder and CEO of Wrightspeed, a Silicon Valley-based start-up whose first car is going to be a high-performance electric supercar, price tag just shy of $200,000. And as it's electric, Wright expects it should out-start, outrun, out-turn, and generally outperform anything in its class.

Cleantech Blog has written extensively about EVs. I am known among my friends as being a real skeptic when it comes to EVs, but behind Wright's business plan he got my attention with two ideas that are worth repeating: payback and plug-ins.

First, Wright doesn't care about gas mileage per se; he cares about performance, power, and most importantly, payback. Focus on the vehicles actually burning the most gas, irrespective of fuel efficiency. That is, instead of making tiny, compact, fuel-efficient target cars more efficient with EV and hybrid technology--focus on the gas guzzlers. Wright's point is well taken. A small, fuel-efficient car that gets 35 mpg and drives a typical 12,500 miles per year only uses about 350 gallons per year. A large pickup truck that gets 12 miles to the gallon uses over 1,000 gallons for the same mileage--nearly 3 times as much. And if that truck is a work truck driven 25,000 miles per year, it would use over 2,000 gallons of fuel per year, nearly 6 times the little car. That truck owner may spend upwards of $50,000 in fuel over its life, where the commuter car owner may spend a small fraction of that.

When I asked him for comments on my example, Wright added: "The special case of congested city driving might be worth mentioning, since everyone thinks a lot of fuel is wasted there. But if you drive a Prius 10 hours per week in congested city traffic, it's only about 150 gallons per year! Not much point in trying to improve on the Prius for that use. (The arithmetic: Congested traffic is defined as 12 mph average; 10 hours per week would be 120 miles per week, or 6,240 miles per year. The Prius shines in this application, getting maybe 40 mpg, so 156 gallons per year.)"

Putting expensive hybrid and EV technology in the small car not only has a worse financial payback--compounding the perennial problem of EVs being too costly, but the same 20 percent efficiency improvement does very little to reduce overall fuel consumption for society compared to the same efficiency gains in a big truck that drives a heck of lot of miles.

So Wright asks, if we want to both find a way to save car owners money, and save the world--wouldn't we focus on applying technology to where the problem is the worst and the returns are the best?

When Wright looked at the automotive landscape and asked the question, where is the most fuel being burned, and how do we reduce that with technology? The answer? Performance cars and big work trucks. Not surprisingly, these are his target markets.

And why are high-performance vehicles like sports cars and Ford F350s so fuel-inefficient anyway? Take this as an example answer. If you need a big truck to have lots of power for short periods of time (for instance, in towing), then the truck engine and systems have to be sized to deliver the maximum power. But anytime you're not using all that power (i.e., most of the time), the truck is usually running well below its optimum--and burning lots of fuel for no extra gain. It's the same rationale for a sports car designed to run optimally at 90 mph, which performs worse at the average driver's speed of 50 mph to 60 mph.

Wright's more detailed explanation to me put it very elegantly: "Roughly speaking gasoline engines are most efficient at wide open throttle and the rpm that gives max torque. If you try to operate a supercar at wide open throttle, it will be doing 200 mph, and of course you'll be losing most of the energy to aero drag. The engine will be operating efficiently...but if you operate the car down where aero drag is reasonable--50 mph--then the engine will be operating at a few percent of rated power, and very inefficient. Why is it inefficient? The simple answer is that since the throttle is almost closed, there is almost a vacuum in the intake manifold, and the effective compression ratio is very low. You are trying to compress a vacuum. Engine efficiency is very dependent on compression ratio.

"Eighty years ago, there were cars that could transport a family of four at 50 mpg. The Austin 7 comes to mind. Engine technology has improved dramatically since the '30s, yet the best modern cars don't do any better than the Austin 7. Why is that? One big reason is that the Austin 7 had, well, 7 horsepower (actually about 10 hp--the "7" was "RAC hp"). So it was working hard most of the time. The family car that my wife drives makes 250 hp, and that's just an average family car these days.

"So if you displace the Prius with an EV, you can get maybe a 2x efficiency gain. But if you displace a high-performance vehicle that operates most of the time at low power settings, you can get a 10x efficiency gain. That's the main reason that 18 wheelers aren't a good target. They have powerful engines, but their power/weight ratio is very low (when fully loaded) and the engines work pretty hard. So in fuel per pound mile, they are pretty good already."

To deal with this issue, Wright isn't all about the all electric. He's pushing plug-in electric hybrids, PHEVs, aka gridable hybrids. Electric motors powered off of batteries charged from the wall or with an onboard diesel generator. The generator also acts as a booster for those times when extra power is required. Hybrids are really good at solving these power versus efficiency problems, since you can essentially design a system that can optimize for either performance or efficiency much easier than a straight gas or electric engine could.

Wright's vision also addresses one of the long-running Achilles' heels of electric cars--the lack of fueling infrastructure. Regardless of your feelings on the matter, it's generally bad business to try to bet on an expensive infrastructure rollout. And if it means slower and lower uptake of fuel-efficient vehicles, then calling for infrastructure change that's not going to happen is bad for the environment, too.

That's why I've been such a big fan of plug-in hybrids. We can have our cake and eat it too. It's all about payback and plug-ins. And it's good to see electric car gurus finally getting this message.

Links:

* SMH - Hot, parched and sinking - apocalypse Sydney
* SMH - Climate control: the heat is on
* The Age - Drought continues to hit farm crops: NAB
* Jeremy Leggett - Oil on the slide
* Tyler Hamilton - Canada's Ausra connection
* NPR - In Japan, Going Solar Costly Despite Market Surge
* Go Sun Solutions - Volkswagen Going Hybrid
* Neal Dikeman - Electric cars and hybrids: Silicon Valley vs. Detroit
* Christian Science Monitor - Power harnessed one step at a time
* Bruce Schneier - The Economist on Privacy and Surveillance
* Bruce Schneier - Staged Attack Causes Generator to Self-Destruct