Preparing for a car-2-grid world  

Tyler Hamilton's post this week is on V2G - "Preparing for a car-2-grid world".

Okay, maybe the idea of having plug-in hybrids and electric cars that interact with the grid is far off in the future. But we all have to admit that it's an attractive future. It means as the grid gets cleaner, so do vehicle emissions. It means millions of cars collectively act as a huge battery storage system, drawing power when it's cheap and selling it back to the grid at a premium. A plug-in future is potentially a grid stabilizer; it also offers a way of smoothing out demand peaks so we don't have to build extra just-in-case generation.

But getting to this utopia, assuming battery technology will ever be mature enough, requires some highly complex software that can manage the individual connections between car and grid. A Seattle-based software company called V2Green Inc. is getting into the game early, betting that such a world will one day exist. According to the company's Web site, utilities using V2Green's software "can remotely control the time and rate at which vehicles charge, minimizing demand spikes and matching load to the availability of intermittent renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power." The company says it plans to launch field trials with "leading U.S. energy companies" beginning in the fourth quarter of 2007 -- in other words, beginning now.

The Clean Break post references this article in The Seattle PI - "V2Green and the electric car".

David Kaplan spent 12 years at Microsoft helping to build SQL Server into a billion dollar business. Now, after a respite from the software industry, he's testing his luck with electric cars. The 54-year-old entrepreneur is at the wheel of a Seattle startup by the name of V2Green, which is developing software and hardware so utilities can better manage power flows to plug-in vehicles.

Problem is, there are only a few electric cars on the road today.

Kaplan recognizes that substantial hurdle, though he stresses the importance of developing technology now that will eventually be able to handle the estimated 500,000 to 1.5 million plug-in vehicles that are expected to be sold by 2015. The cars -- including the planned Chevrolet Volt and Tesla WhiteStar -- will consume enormous amounts of electricity as they charge in garages throughout the country.

And that's where Kaplan believes there's an opportunity. V2Green's "smart charging" technology allows utilities to control the time, pace and extent of thousands of vehicle charges -- potentially reducing or increasing the loads on the electrical grid. The system, which includes software and hardware installed in vehicles, also collects information from drivers so that a car is fully charged when a person needs it.

Balancing the needs of the electric car driver and the grid operator, is one of the challenges that V2Green is trying to solve. "The driver may simply come home, plug the car in at 6 p.m. and you just need it to have a full charge by 8 a.m. the next day," said Kaplan, who co-founded the company with engineers Seth Pollack and Seth Bridges. "That's a 14 hour window in which we can decide to get you an amount of electricity that may only take three, four or five hours to deliver. Our system can juggle that sort of calculation across thousands and thousands of cars to create a smooth load profile for the grid operator, so they are not experiencing power spikes or having to bring on back up sources of generation." ...

Kaplan, who after leaving Microsoft in 1999 worked at Impinj and served as a visiting scholar in the University of Washington's Department of Computer Science and Engineering, said he started V2Green because he wanted to align his business goals with his desire to make changes in what he describes as an increasingly "carbon-constrained world."

Does that mean V2Green was created for the environmental benefits?

Not necessarily. "I am doing this because it is a business. There is money to be made here," said Kaplan. "It is a longer-term build business than something like a typical technology business, no question about that. But when this market kicks in, it is going to be a very significant hockey stick."

The New York Times has an article on "The Rebirth of the Electric Car", spruiking the GM Volt.

This past Sunday, my report on the rebirth of the electric car aired on “CBS News Sunday Morning.” ... CBS gave me a juicy long time for the segment–but the truth is, there was enough good material to fill a miniseries. Like the interview with auto-industry superstar Bob Lutz, now a top executive at General Motors (vice chairman, global of product development), and the driving force between the upcoming Volt electric car. He’s a funny, smart, engaging guy, although he’s certainly got GM’s interests at heart.

But since I now have the luxury of an e-newsletter, and you have the luxury of a scroll bar, here it is: is a longer chunk of that interview.

DAVID POGUE: The Volt, as I understand it, has both a gas and engine and electric motor. But it’s not a Prius, right?

BOB LUTZ: No. What happens is in conventional hybrids is, there are very few batteries and they’re just designed to give an electric assist. It’s this constant interplay between gasoline and battery.

The Volt is is basically an electric vehicle. With a range of–we’re shooting for a minimum of 40 miles. And then, so that people don’t get caught out, when the battery reaches a certain minimum state of charge, there is a very small internal-combustion engine, four-cylinder engine, that kicks in.

It could be a small diesel. It could run on ethanol. Could run on compressed natural gas. It could be anything. But that engine never drives the car. It’s not hooked up to the wheels. Think of it as a portable generator that gets your battery back up.

Now, if you want to make a big, long trip, like from New York to Chicago, you can do it. But once you’re beyond the range of the batteries, then the small piston engine is probably going to be working most of the time, and your mileage will drop.

But we have impeccable data that show that 82 percent of the daily trips in the United States are 40 miles or less. So, I think there’s going to be a lot of people who find that throughout a month, they’ll never burn a drop of fuel. ...

Jim at The Energy Blog reports that New Zealand Has Banned New Fossil Fueled Power Plants. New Zealand leading the world for a change at something other than rugby (oops - strike that last bit - and good luck to Argentina and France this weekend).

Sometimes people agree with me. Earlier today I made this comment on a previous post: "If it was possible I would place a moratorium on building coal plants without CCS." I swear I had not read or heard about this story.

From Bloomberg:

New Zealand electricity producers, including Contact Energy Ltd., will face a 10-year ban on the construction of new gas- or coal-fired generators to help the nation meet its Kyoto Protocol emission reduction targets. . . .

State-owned generators will be barred from building new gas-fired plants, and a decision on whether to extend the ban to Contact and other private generators will be made this year, Energy Minister David Parker said today.

New Zealand already produces about 70 percent of its power from non-polluting wind, hydro-electric and geothermal generators. The government wants to raise that to 90 percent by 2025 and is blocking construction of cheaper gas-fired power stations to speed investment in wind turbines and steamfields. (Jim: another word for geothermal I believe)

"New Energy And Fuel" reports that fusion researcher Robert Bussard has passed away.

Through the grief of those closest to Dr Bussard some details are coming out. Dr. Bussard was a cancer victim of two kinds who was in the last weeks enduring radiation and chemotherapy for the disease.

Reports are he worked continuously while in treatment and assembled a good team to continue the research and development of the IEC fusion method he has been developing from funding provided by the US Department of Defense.

When funding for the research resumed Dr. Bussard attracted a friend who is a PhD plasma physicist recently working at Los Alamos and a PhD whose experience is in experimentation. Some staff from the previous lab in San Diego are on their way to join the team.

Dr. Bussard’s friends assert that he did everything he could to ensure that the work on IEC fusion will continue.

This morning M. Simon at Power and Control Blogspot posted an excellent eulogy that contains a brief list of some of Dr, Bussard’s most noteworthy work and a strong link list. See:

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2007/10/dr-robert-w-bussard-has-passed.html

Of note, Dr. Bussard was a trained engineer and added physics expertise as working requirements demanded until he became the preeminent magnetic confinement physicist/engineer in the field. Dr. Bussard gained famed in his youth for his design of the Bussard Collector that is often referred to in futuristic science stories. ...

Corrente has some notes on the surveillence state - "Even worse than we imagined: AT&T contract for NSA to surveill all internet traffic, foreign and domestic, started before 9/11". Who would have thought it. From their amusingly named "Department of When Foil is not Foily".

That’s all Internet traffic, foreign and domestic, data and voice. And the decision to do this was taken, not because of 9/11, but as soon as Bush took office. So much for the idea that the extremely benevolent and trustworthy Bush administration just wants “surgical” surveillance* to keep us safe from terrorists, eh? Could this program be Spencer Ackerman’s “Project X”?

Anyhow, it’s late, so I can’t do this story justice, but according to Wired ...

This does explain why the telcos are lobbying so hard for retroactive immunity, doesn’t it?

And now that we can be totally sure that Iraq was for oil—even in the absence of the suppressed records of the Cheney energy task force—and we know that massive warrantless surveillance was the order of the day immediately after Bush took office, it looks like what “changed” after 9/11 wasn’t “everything,” but just the catapult Bush used for the propaganda. Eh?

The Corrente post points to this interesting article by Jim Holt in the London Review Of Books on Iraq - "It’s the Oil". Who would have thought it.

Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.

How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks.

The Defense Department was initially coy about these bases. In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld said: ‘I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting.’ But this summer the Bush administration began to talk openly about stationing American troops in Iraq for years, even decades, to come. Several visitors to the White House have told the New York Times that the president himself has become fond of referring to the ‘Korea model’. When the House of Representatives voted to bar funding for ‘permanent bases’ in Iraq, the new term of choice became ‘enduring bases’, as if three or four decades wasn’t effectively an eternity.

But will the US be able to maintain an indefinite military presence in Iraq? It will plausibly claim a rationale to stay there for as long as civil conflict simmers, or until every groupuscule that conveniently brands itself as ‘al-Qaida’ is exterminated. The civil war may gradually lose intensity as Shias, Sunnis and Kurds withdraw into separate enclaves, reducing the surface area for sectarian friction, and as warlords consolidate local authority. De facto partition will be the result. But this partition can never become de jure. (An independent Kurdistan in the north might upset Turkey, an independent Shia region in the east might become a satellite of Iran, and an independent Sunni region in the west might harbour al-Qaida.) Presiding over this Balkanised Iraq will be a weak federal government in Baghdad, propped up and overseen by the Pentagon-scale US embassy that has just been constructed – a green zone within the Green Zone. As for the number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September that ‘in his head’ he saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat brigades, a quarter of the current number, which, with support personnel, would mean 35,000 troops at the very minimum, probably accompanied by an equal number of mercenary contractors. (He may have been erring on the side of modesty, since the five super-bases can accommodate between ten and twenty thousand troops each.) These forces will occasionally leave their bases to tamp down civil skirmishes, at a declining cost in casualties. As a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times in June, the long-term bases ‘are all places we could fly in and out of without putting Americans on every street corner’. But their main day-to-day function will be to protect the oil infrastructure.

This is the ‘mess’ that Bush-Cheney is going to hand on to the next administration. What if that administration is a Democratic one? Will it dismantle the bases and withdraw US forces entirely? That seems unlikely, considering the many beneficiaries of the continued occupation of Iraq and the exploitation of its oil resources. The three principal Democratic candidates – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – have already hedged their bets, refusing to promise that, if elected, they would remove American forces from Iraq before 2013, the end of their first term.

Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil companies themselves (the profits will be unimaginable, and even Democrats can be bought); US voters, who will be guaranteed price stability at the gas pump (which sometimes seems to be all they care about); Europe and Japan, which will both benefit from Western control of such a large part of the world’s oil reserves, and whose leaders will therefore wink at the permanent occupation; and, oddly enough, Osama bin Laden, who will never again have to worry about US troops profaning the holy places of Mecca and Medina, since the stability of the House of Saud will no longer be paramount among American concerns. Among the losers is Russia, which will no longer be able to lord its own energy resources over Europe. Another big loser is Opec, and especially Saudi Arabia, whose power to keep oil prices high by enforcing production quotas will be seriously compromised.

Then there is the case of Iran, which is more complicated. In the short term, Iran has done quite well out of the Iraq war. Iraq’s ruling Shia coalition is now dominated by a faction friendly to Tehran, and the US has willy-nilly armed and trained the most pro-Iranian elements in the Iraqi military. As for Iran’s nuclear programme, neither air strikes nor negotiations seem likely to derail it at the moment. ...

And think of the United States vis-à-vis China. As a consequence of our trade deficit, around a trillion dollars’ worth of US denominated debt (including $400 billion in US Treasury bonds) is held by China. This gives Beijing enormous leverage over Washington: by offloading big chunks of US debt, China could bring the American economy to its knees. China’s own economy is, according to official figures, expanding at something like 10 per cent a year. Even if the actual figure is closer to 4 or 5 per cent, as some believe, China’s increasing heft poses a threat to US interests. (One fact: China is acquiring new submarines five times faster than the US.) And the main constraint on China’s growth is its access to energy – which, with the US in control of the biggest share of world oil, would largely be at Washington’s sufferance. Thus is the Chinese threat neutralised.

Many people are still perplexed by exactly what moved Bush-Cheney to invade and occupy Iraq. In the 27 September issue of the New York Review of Books, Thomas Powers, one of the most astute watchers of the intelligence world, admitted to a degree of bafflement. ‘What’s particularly odd,’ he wrote, ‘is that there seems to be no sophisticated, professional, insiders’ version of the thinking that drove events.’ Alan Greenspan, in his just published memoir, is clearer on the matter. ‘I am saddened,’ he writes, ‘that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.’

Was the strategy of invading Iraq to take control of its oil resources actually hammered out by Cheney’s 2001 energy task force? One can’t know for sure, since the deliberations of that task force, made up largely of oil and energy company executives, have been kept secret by the administration on the grounds of ‘executive privilege’. One can’t say for certain that oil supplied the prime motive. But the hypothesis is quite powerful when it comes to explaining what has actually happened in Iraq. The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth. If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in the Middle East? On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is oil-centred, the tactics – dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final ‘surge’ that has hastened internal migration – could scarcely have been more effective. The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success. ...

Links:

* TreeHugger - LED Lighting Fixtures: LEDs Coming of Age. I'm hoping to replace all my downlights with LEDs soon , though at the moment they are still too expensive.
* The Energy Blog - New Benefuel Refinery Targets Key Flaws in Biodiesel Production. "By eliminating the need for water, having the ability to process a wide variety of feedstocks and having lower costs, this process could make biodiesel a much more competitive commodity and make it a more significant liquid fuel"
* AlwaysOn - The Future of Distributed Power
* Edward Tapamor - Peak Oil Passnotes: $100 Oil?
* The Age - Woodside's Pluto gas project gains approval
* STCWA - Oil War Feared Between Uganda and DR Congo
* New York Times - Former Top General in Iraq Faults Bush Administration
* Jeremy Scahill - Iraqis Sue Blackwater for Baghdad Killings
* Nick Turse - Slum Fights: The Pentagon Plans for a New Hundred Years’ War
* WorldChanging - Al Gore, the Nobel Prize and the End of the Beginning
* AlterNet - Fox News Immediately Begins Smear Campaign Against Al Gore, Nobel Prize
* Daily Kos - The United States Supreme Court in a surprise vote of 5 to 4 have declared George W. Bush the winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize
* Editor And Publisher - Ann Coulter on CNBC Show: Jews Need 'Perfecting'. Just when you think she can't get any crazier.
* Thom Hartmann - Ann Coulter and Justice Antonin Scalia to Synagogue - Jews Are Safer with Christians in Charge
* Cryptogon - Pope Clement Cleared Templars of All Heresies in Secret Vatican Document