The powerplant in your driveway | Tom Gage | TEDxBermuda

I'm going to talk about a little bit of history a little bit of engineering and a little bit of future Allen kakuni and I were driving to Yosemite National Park in an electric vehicle we were about a hundred miles south of Salt Lake City when Allen leaned over from the passenger's seat and said Tom we've only got 20 miles of range left actually it was more like Tom pull over the car right now something's wrong either way it was a bad news because Yosemite was still 450 miles away this was in 1994 and I figured Allen knew what he was talking about even though I just met him because he had built the car in order to promote his new business AC propulsion he'd bought a new Honda Civic driven at home taking it apart and converted it to electric power in his driveway he hadn't just built the car he'd designed the drive system the battery and the charger at his house you're driving the car back to California after meetings with politicians in Washington DC including Al Gore and with auto executives in Detroit it wasn't a great trip the politicians and executives really hadn't been able to understand the significance of what they were looking at and now we were in the wilds of Utah with a battery that was running low I was still new to elect to driving electric vehicles I already loved the smooth quiet responsive power of the electric motor I was starting to look at energy differently was looking at it as a vital and valuable commodity it wasn't really scarce there was something we needed to understand better so that we could use it more wisely I can ask what is energy I probably won't get an answer at least not a good one this was what Richard Fineman said it is important to realize that in physics today we have no knowledge of what energy is and he won the Nobel Prize in physics so we don't know what energy is but where does it come from most energy comes from the Sun all the fossil fuel comes from sunlight absorbed by organic material over hundreds of millions of years all of the hydroelectric power and wind power comes from weather patterns driven by the Sun well biomass the food we eat food every animal eats comes for the Sun via photosynthesis solar energy of course comes directly from the Sun nuclear energy does not come from the Sun it comes from nuclear reactions in elements found here on earth so energy comes from a few different sources it has a variety of different forms but what does it do humans use energy for light heat motion communications compute computing and most important life itself all living forms need energy but only humans have been curious industrious and uniquely successful in finding ways to find and use energy in its various forms when we found oil we didn't exactly know what to do with it then the car was invented and oil became one of the candidates for providing the energy to make the car go along with electricity and steam in the early days of the auto industry the fanciest and best cars were electric they were preferred by people who disliked the oil heat grease noise and especially the hand crank associated with the internal combustion engine when Charles Kettering invented the electric starter for the automobile and introduced it in the 1912 Cadillac he was the first GM executive to try and kill the electric car with the electric starter cars became easier to use and more popular and millions in autumn ability became a way of life for millions of people use of electricity did too it wasn't used in cars but it was used and about everything else between the vehicle fleet and the power grid humans were able to use absolutely huge amounts of energy in fact human energy consumption by its size extent and effect became literally a force of nature when I read Bill McKibben's book the end of nature in 1990 I was astonished to learn that humans could alter the atmosphere on a global scale I gave the book to my boss at Chrysler and suggested that maybe the auto industry should do something about this that had little effect but now 25 years later more of us understand that our increasing mastery over energy is not the same as mastery over nature our monotonic approach to energy always increasing get more use more is causing problems that we may not be able to solve in order to avoid these problems we need to start looking at energy differently need to make careful choices about the sources of the energy we use and the ways we use it Hakone understood all this back in 1994 that's why he had engineered a small generator that could charge an electric vehicle battery while was driving and why that generator was mounted on a trailer we were towing behind our car that day in Utah it was a simple matter of energy storage density the battery in our car held 16 kilowatt hours electricity and yet it was the size of a 240 liter gas tank one liter of gasoline holds eight kilowatt hours of electricity so gasoline it has 120 times the energy storage density of the lead-acid battery in our car it was obvious to cocconi use electricity where it makes sense use it for most driving which is short local trips but the battery can handle it save the gasoline for when you really need it like long distance runs the trailer allowed us to do that you could leave it at home and you didn't need it you're going on a long trip you hook it up our only problem that day was that I had forgotten to turn on the trailer when I got behind the wheel once I turned it on it started delivering the juice to the battery and we had a nice trip the rest of the way to Yosemite by 1996 automakers were starting to develop Eevee's General Motors had a head start because a small group of creative engineers including cocconi had developed a prototype electric car for GM called the impact it was fast and efficient it set new benchmarks for electric vehicle performance GM took over the program and developed the impact and launched production version of it called the ev1 in 1996 while GM had been developing the impact or the ev1 Hakone had started AC repulsion built our cross country honda conversion and moved his business from his living room to a small warehouse in San Dimas California I drove both the ev1 and the Honda and even though admittedly the Honda was not certified it wasn't developed for mass production but it was faster more efficient and had two more seats than the ev1 it also outlasted the ev1 in 2003 General Motors recalled every single evreyone and crushed them this was the second time GM executives tried to kill the electric car the Honda kept running for another 11 years even though Hakone stopped driving it in 1999 that's when he got his new electric car the T zero in engineering in science D 0 denotes the start of a time series a sequence of events we wanted the T 0 to be the start of a new Automotive era it was built with one objective to be the fast to be faster and more efficient than any other car on the road this is possible only with an electric vehicle we wanted to prove that an electric field could be desirable and not just virtuous the T zero started off with lead acid batteries the chassis was so light that the battery weighed as much as all the rest of the car but in 2003 we'd have converted it to the new lithium ion batteries and these batteries were great they had eight times the energy storage density of the lead acid battery so the t zero ended up with half the battery weight four times more energy than the lead acid battery it was a rocketship we had a few impromptu speed contests the T zero never lost Ferrari Porsche Corvette hyper Lamborghini it was always a winner it can go from zero to 60 in 3.6 seconds it had a range of 300 miles on a single charge we took the T 0 to the Michelin challenge of addendum that's a contest sponsored by that tire company to see which alternative fuel vehicles have the best performance efficiency and emissions car makers from all over the world got cars they brought electric cars hybrids fuel cells diesels natural gas and them through a series of tests and when the results were tallied the T zero had the best score this is a T zero built in a small shop by a few guys and tested in the back alley T zero won the challenge bibendum we had a new guy with us on that trip named Martin Eberhard that's him in the upper picture there riding shotgun with the bendin Everhart was an engineer entrepreneur and investor he wanted to buy a t zero but we had bit built three of them already and pretty much decided they were too hard to build too expensive to build and we didn't want to build another one ever Hart was undaunted he decided to build his own electric sports car he's started writing a business plan and an investor pitch he decided to call his company Tesla Motors his pitch was a good one and he had a secret advantage we landed in the t0 to use when he was pitching investors his business model was smart and convincing but probably the ride in the t0 had the bigger effect with the prospective investors he set up a meet a meeting at bucks restaurant which is a deal making spot for high tech with high tech investor crowd in Woodside California this was in December of 2003 the Google founders were there Sergey Brin and Larry Page this was before the Google IPO so they did not have any liquid assets to invest one of us said though I remember distinctly call Elon he's got money that was a moment whose significance still resounds I went to see Elon Musk he had used the cash from he got from founding PayPal to start a company called SpaceX which was launching building rockets to launch satellites into space I went to see him at his rocket Factory in El Segundo he told him out about the t 0 he drove it and it had the expected effect in a short amount of time he was working with Martin putting time and money into Tesla and they bought a license for the t0 technology worked hard for four years and in 2008 they launched the Tesla Roadster it was fast and fun to drive just like the t0 and it was an actual production car with musk at the helm product development continued at Tesla and in 2012 they launched the all-electric super luxury Tesla Model S this car was received with rave reviews by the automotive press which is usually skeptical of electric vehicles it wasn't just being called a great electric car it was being called a great car it had created the aura of desirability that's critical for success in the auto market and around where I live in Silicon Valley I Mercedes and a BMW is nothing anymore you have to have a Model S just last week Tesla launched a new vehicle the model asks all-electric SUV so as excellent and significant as the Tesla vehicles are perhaps the greater impact so far is their effect on the auto industry they have a do-or-die commitment to electric vehicles they don't make anything else if they can't sell electric vehicles they don't have anything else to sell they'll go out of business it's hard for conventional automaker to compete against a company like that and there may be more companies down the pike Tesla success has caused other investors start spending hundreds of millions of dollars to copy and improve upon Tesla's Holly V business model the other car makers that aren't standing stillness on an BMW have made the greatest commitments they've concluded the electric propulsion is in the future but all car companies have to participate make TVs and they're now about 12 EVs on the market in some areas like Silicon Valley the e V sales rate is approaching 5% of the retail market last year in Cupertino over 500 V's gathered to take part in the world's largest IDI parade this many V's in one spot may not look that much different from conventional cars but it shows the promise and the risk of the future if all these cars plugged in at once that put a three point six megawatt load on the grid that's the risk if all these cars plugged in and could charge or discharge in ways that would optimize the use of the car and the battery they could support the grid and make it more reliable more responsive that's the promise dumb batteries on the grid is a burden smart batteries on the grid can help the grid grid doesn't need help for example in California a lot of solar generation is coming online and it deployed it displaces conventional generation when the sun is shining this this will continue and you can see the trend here as more solar comes on the demand for conventional generation which are the lines on this chart drops by 2020 you see a deep trough in the demand for conventional generation but then as the Sun starts to go down and the late day peak starts to rise the conventional generation cannot wrap up ramped up fast enough it can't keep up with demand batteries can help with this they can respond instantly and fill in the gaps now batteries don't have to be in cars to support the grid but as Evy sales grow that's where the batteries will be all the cars all the electric cars built in the US since 2011 have six times the energy storage capacity of all the stationary storage using batteries installed in the US the batteries and cars can't support the grid unless they have a bi-directional charger a normal charger takes AC from the grid that's alternating current from the grid converts it to DC for the battery a bi-directional charger goes both ways it takes AC to DC and DC from the battery to AC back to the grid this requires a few extra safety features that allows the EB charger and the battery evey battery to support the grid the technology is well proven and the benefits far outweigh the costs predictably Allen Kony included a bi-directional charger the second generation drive system he developed for the T 0 so far on a few automakers have looked at it one was BMW in 2008 they built 600 all-electric many ease these cars used the AC propulsion drive system which had a bi-directional charger while the cars were in serve BMW did not take advantage of the bi-directional charger but in 212 2012 they donated a small seat of many E's to the University of Delaware for use in a v2g project vehicle-to-grid stands for VT G stands for vehicle-to-grid it led by professor will at Kempton these cars proved in the de grid on wheels project they proved that a fleet of cars in daily service with bi-directional power could be controlled remotely when they're plugged in and respond to the demands of the grid or more or less power the cars are in money for doing this five dollars a day in the case of the grid on Wheels cars and most important the drivers could limit or control the use of the car so they were never inconvenienced by its nature electricity is difficult to store and so stored electricity is a valuable commodity it has value when it's used of course it also has value just for being available even if it's never used think of a flashlight battery you buy it it sits on the shelf until the battery goes dead then you buy a new battery put it in the flashlight just so you'll have the flashlight working and available when you need it in the same way the grid needs backup for that for when things don't go as planned today backing up the grid required huge investments in redundancy an overcapacity the use of batteries could reduce that investment and make the grid more responsive and more reliable an Eevee cloud is envisioned here would use edie batteries too great to create a vast distributed energy storage resource that could respond immediately and precisely to the needs of the grid the Eevee cloud would use predictive and adaptive systems with intelligence to aggregate and optimize the use of all batteries and BB cloud as they were available the Eevee cloud would approve the operation of the grid it would reduce the cost of electric vehicles and it would make charging electric vehicles more convenient so we've got electric vehicles energy storage batteries and vehicle grid integration all of this is going to take some time after all it disrupts three pretty big industries automotive utility and oil but it's now bigger than it ever has been and it started from a very small place remember that guy building his car his electric car in the driveway thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 125,918

Rating: 4.775054 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Bermuda, Technology, Alternative energy, Transportation

Id: 7kvB6bR_fu0

Length: 20min 39sec (1239 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 31 2015