One model sports optional 2 wheel or 4 wheel in-hub mounted drive motors.  With a large battery pack and a curb weight of 3300 pounds, it’s a bit ponderous.  But it has a 50 mile drive radius and rarely requires any maintenance.  What year will this vehicle be ready?  1899. It’s the Lohner-Porsche.

Recognizing that the weight the battery pack was a major obstacle, Ferdinand Porsche, still working for the Lohner Coachworks, came up with a hybrid model.  The vehicle used a small gasoline engine to power a generator and a single motor mounted on the rear axle of the vehicle. Porsche raced the car himself in the Semmerling competition near Vienna, and with top speeds of 75 miles per hour, won against a very competitive field which included Benz gasoline powered cars.  The 75 mile per hour top speed was unprecedented, especially from an electric hybrid.  The year? 1900!

So all things old are made new again.  If the 2200 pound weight of the Lohner Porsche battery pack could be reduced by 4:1 by using Lithium batteries, then a curb weight around 1500 pounds should be feasible.  The reduced weight of the vehicle leads to significantly greater driving range.  The Smart Car electric model is expected to have a range of 120 miles per charge.  Which, actually, is enough for a lot of vehicle applications.

In wheel drive motors are not my favorite solution, but if the weight can be reduced, then problems relating to suspension dynamics can be managed.  And that’s exactly what the folks at Protean Electric are doing.  They have produced a number of conversion vehicles as demonstrations of their electric motor technology.  And if the motors perform as expected, they will carve out a niche in the plug-in and hybrid electric vehicle world.

There are a couple of important points that need to made here.

#1) based on the “Absolute Value of Technology”, the only thing that matters is the vehicle costs per transportation mile.  That is made up to two components, the purchase price and the expected cost per mile driven.  Admittedly, if you can run an electric vehicle at $.04/mile, it is cost effective to own, even if the car costs more up front, because over the life of the vehicle, the low operating cost will overtake the purchase price.

The IRS deduction for vehicle operation is $.50/mile.  Electric hybrids and especially plug-in electrics are not expected to have any major maintenance costs.  Even if you add insurance, the cost per operating mile will be significantly lower.

But the higher price of the vehicle will be an obstacle from a pure economics standpoint.  For this reason, some manufacturers have considered the option of the local power utility company supplying the battery pack and maintaining it.  Since this is the single largest expense, leasing it to the vehicle owner in the monthly power bill is a good deal.

The second major point to be considered is plug in electrics, even with limited drive range, are the biggest contributor to American energy independence.  These vehicles will directly reduce oil imports every day they are operated.  Because almost none of the electricity in the United States is generated using fuel.  It’s either coal, natural gas or nuclear.

So if we really want to get after the issue of energy independence and stop funding governments that support terrorist activity, the electric car is the path forward.  As are 40+ mpg gasoline cars, and drilling and refining of oil in the US.

Let’s get after it!

One report indicated that the $2 billion would be funded as part of the scheduled $863 billion stimulus fund already appropriate by congress.  Another report indicated that the funds would be provided as loans.  There is a huge difference between the two, and the fact that the various reports are not clear on this point is very curious.

As a sidebar, I guess this is the new style of legislation.  The government passes a law first and decides what it means later.

$400 million is provided as a loan (or loan guarantee) to assist Abound Solar to add 2 major manufacturing facilities and new product lines for the company.  One facility in Indiana will be built from an existing automotive plant that will be re-tooled for solar manufacturing.  The company is expected to add several hundred new production jobs.

Abengoa Solar of Spain, which has operations in the United States will be receiving $1.45 billion, although it is not clear if the money is a loan or a grant.  And while Abengoa has operations in the US and has an excellent reputation as a contractor of large energy projects, it seems very peculiar to be giving money to a foreign entity.

This leads to a couple of really important questions about American energy policy.

From the standpoint of cost effectiveness, if you take the $1.45 billion for Abengoa and divide it by the 1500 projected jobs, the cash cost of each job is over $966,000,  per position.   It would be the same as paying $96,000 to each employee for 10 years.  This has to be the most ineffective use of public funds imaginable.

The other public policy question which has come up before is, why are US taxpayer funds being given to foreign companies?  Major green energy projects in every sector are being built by foreign companies with US government funding.   There needs to be a “Buy American” clause in all this pork barrel spending.  If these are loans, or loan guarantees, how does the government get paid back?

The corollary question for US Energy policy is why should the Federal Government be making loans or guarantees to private companies?

Fiskar Automotive, for example, has secured $500 million in loan guarantees from the DOE for it’s electric car program.  But Tesla Motors raised $2.1 billion in the private financial markets.  Does this constitute a scenario where the Federal Government is creating unfair competitive conditions by providing financial support to companies of their choosing?  And not providing similar funding to other companies.

This is also true on the larger scale.  As the Federal government continues to direct where the majority of US research and development funds will be spent, the process itself disconnects the efforts of the research community from the potential economic benefit that the research should be targeting.

The goal of all research is to produce a benefit.  And the benefit must be weighed in the context of economic utility.  When the development of technology is subjected to bureaucratic decision making, it is dissociated from the decision making process of economic benefit.

This will result in massive waste as limited resources are put into projects with poor return in value.  We appear to have entered a period of time where the process of free market decisions are being circumvented, and everything is to be decided by government.

Because, after all, these folks are professionals at spending your money and they know better than you, or the market, what is most important.

One of the most complex parts of the automobile is the transmission, which is a multistage gear reducer that “tunes” the speed range of the engine to the desired speed range of the vehicle at power levels of several hundred horsepower.  What makes this so extraordinary is that the workings are almost entirely automatic.  And the gearbox life expectancy is huge.  I just sold a 15 year old car and it’s transmission system is still working perfectly.

Manufacturing processes associated with gear manufacturing have evolved to help deal with the various demands for performance at lower costs.  The traditional method of gear cutting using machine tools generates accurate parts, but metallurgists found that the grain of the metal cut by machining caused weakening of the gear tooth.  Powder metallurgy had been progressing to the point where it was more cost effective to mold gear profiles in sintered powdered metal and do only finish surfacing with machining processes.  Later improvements in the process include the ability to load higher strength materials where needed in the design to produce higher strength parts at lower cost.

But as load requirements increase, all of the performance issues are magnified.  And unique environmental conditions can play a part as well.  In the current design of horizontal wind turbines, the gear box design is a critical component.  The gear requirement at 2.5 megawatts is certainly a challenge, but adding the need for precision and and durability to survive 25 years of operation make the task incredibly difficult.

There are a couple of subtle aspects to gearbox operation that need to be considered.  One is reversal stress.  How does one calculate reversal stress?  It’s the absolute value of the power, two times the power for simplicity, divided by the time period of the reversal.  This is usually a really big number.  And as the time allowed for the reversal decreases, the number goes up.

It doesn’t matter if the application is a servo motor system on piece of machinery or a gear increaser on a wind turbine.  The situation is the same.  It’s just more expensive when it’s a 30,000 pound reducer that’s 180 feet above the ground on a pole.    But the principles are all the same.

Keeping the machinery running is a tough task regardless of the field.  But monitoring the mechanical systems is key place to start.  Next generation gear boxes will likely include electronics to monitor the loading and condition of the gearbox to prevent catastrophic failures.

The direct energy cost per mile or equivalent mpg is one measurement of performance for human mobility.  A fully loaded cost per transportation mile, including vehicle cost, insurance, maintenance, etc., is more consistent with what we really experience.  So there are competing values that each person must consider in the mix of personal mobility.

2 wheeled transportation used to mean bicycles and motorcycles.  But the boundaries are getting fuzzy.  The Seqway puts the two wheels side by side with independent drive motors with a drive train similar to an electric powered wheelchair.   The wheels are independent and capable of operating as an electronic differential permitting these systems to turn in place, a turning radius of zero!  Pretty neat from a maneuverability standpoint.

But the new EN-V from General Motors takes the Segway concept to a 2 passenger vehicle that’s smaller than the Smart Car and designed for short range city mobility.   It’s very compact at 1/6th the footprint of a small car, so parking is not a problem.  And since it’s enclosed, it works in the rain.  The battery powered drive train will reach 24mph maximum speed.  Driving range and equivalent MPG’s have not been announced.

All of the mobility issues are tied up in one formula, namely F=ma.  Force = mass x acceleration.  So as the mass of the vehicle and its design payload, passenger capacity, is reduced, like in a Segway, a motorcycle or the new EN-V, the force needed to move that mass is decreased proportionately.   A 1 or 2 passenger solutions is much easier to deal with than a mini-van that has to have a 400 mile drive range.

In a very extreme response to the mass part of the equation, Honda has demonstrated it’s U3-X electric unicycle, borrowing the balancing concepts of the Segway, but converting the drivetrain to a single wheel system with perpendicular rotating elements where the tread would be so that the unit can move a person from side to side.  (check the video demos on YouTube)  At 22 pounds it is an astounding feat that it can move a person comfortably at 4 mph for 1-2 hours.

The General Motors EV-1 had over 2200 pounds of lead acid batteries in it.  Which made it impractical.  With the improvements of lithium batteries, a 400 pound payload of batteries, which is much more acceptable, makes electric vehicles practical on a technical level.  But due to lithium batteries cost, the Tesla roadster battery pack being well in excess of $10,000, the hybrid solution becomes more cost effective.

By reducing the drive range and acceleration, energy storage requirements are greatly simplified.  The designer can focus on the exact type of mobility sought in a given new product.  This change in thinking is giving rise to a whole new group of design concepts including autonomous drive options as envisioned in         “Minority Report” and the recent DARPA autonomous vehicle challenges.

In crowded urban areas with a highly networked communications infrastructure, new options like the EN-V become much more interesting, more cost effective at many levels, and potentially more safe than today’s smog filled city centers.  And as the supporting technology in battery storage and electric motor technology continue to progress, new solutions and options will continue to be pioneered.

I like new options.

And the two motions are essentially simultaneous.  Yes, we only see the azimuth motion because it is the daily motion of the panel.  But the angle of elevation has to be mechanically available at the same time so that the annual change of the sun’s angle to the earth can be adjusted.  You could probably get by with this one by going out and mechanically adjusting it 4 times a year, and it would work fine.  It’s just an extra hassle, and if you’re going to bother doing tracking it might as well be good tracking.

Here’s the reason tracking is so important.  The National Renewable Energy Lab says that dual axis tracking can add up to 36% to the energy harvest of photovoltaic panels.  That’s a big number.  It’s a bigger number than anything that is in the lab dealing with the fundamental efficiency of the energy conversion process.

Because tracking the sun has such a big impact on energy harvest, it gets attention.  There are about 20 companies and tracking systems around the world.  There are all kinds of interesting solutions to the mechanical problem.  There ought to be a prize for the best design.  Some of them are really wild.  But all of them have one thing in common.  They all move arrays of panels instead of one panel at a time.

There are two main areas of solar tracking, concentrating solar and photovoltaic panels.  Concentrating solar systems are generally arrays of mirrors that focus the sun’s energy on a target area to produce high temperatures that generate steam and turn a generator.  Large arrays of mirrors all pointed at the same spot require constant adjustment and very high precision in order to get the sun’s energy concentrated on the right spot.

In photovoltaic systems, the panels convert light to electricity directly and need to be perpendicular to the sun.  But accuracy of  +/- 1 degree is acceptable.  So in one sense, it’s not as difficult.  But 2 axes of rotation is a difficult motion problem to solve.  So there are a lot of solutions out there.

I spent some time working on this and there are several really simple solutions that are possible.  And in the process of researching all the possible solutions, we found a wide range of mechanical systems that are available.

Solid Tech Inc. is in the process of developing a cost effective solution that does 2 axis solar track on a single solar panel.  This approach serves commercial flat roof installations and residential applications increasing the total energy harvest and reducing the payback period for the system including the cost of tracking.

Stay tuned for more details.

The United Kingdom is pursing a major shift in energy supply to make wind 30% source of electricity .  In pursuit of this goal, a number of wind farm projects in the UK that have been approved and are under construction.  Some recent inspections of turbine foundations have revealed that parts of the foundation have moved since their recent installation.  The movement has been significant and is requiring engineering evaluation to determine what steps may be necessary to correct the problem.  Translated, the suppliers don’t know for sure what happened or how to fix it.  And don’t even get started on how much it will cost to fix.

This should come as no surprise.  Even after you get rid of the gearbox and convert the system to direct drive, the generator portion of the system is 90 tons in the new 4 megwatt GE design.  Not a small number.

The larger blades designed for these systems are expected to be greater than 20 tons each in spite of the fact use of carbon fiber which is very light weight.  Add to this hydraulic actuators used for pivoting the blade to optimize the angle for the wind speed.

With housing, power conversion and everything else, the turbines must be in the range of 200 tons.  The mast for the turbine is a concrete cylinder that uses 1100 tons of cement.  Add to this a steel tapered cylinder that weighs around 3000 tons.  So there is a 4200 ton load sitting on a 20 foot diameter circular path.

That’s a lot of load.  And it’s all resting on 113 square feet of surface area.  (The base is a circle of cement 2 feet wide with an outside diameter of 20 feet, check my math just in case I made a mistake)

We should not be surprised that there are unanticipated problems with the foundation.  It works out to 74,000 pounds per square foot of direct load, not including dynamic stresses.   That is an incredible load situation.

So as we seek to “scale up” and apply new wind power designs, subtle problems begin to appear. Good engineering practices that would work under known conditions may exceed limits as a design is scaled up.  And systems that have predictable costs, suddenly will become much more expensive because of unanticipated issues.  In this case, increasing the cost per megawatt instead of decreasing it.

But the idea behind “scale effect” is that the bigger you make something the less it costs per unit of output.  Only no supplier is claiming to reduce the price per megawatt paid for wind power.  At least, not so far.  After all, these are new designs.  And there is bound to be some de-bugging needed.

There are reasons to be concerned about the fresh crop of wind harvesting systems.  And reasons to be concerned about the hype that surrounds the industry.  Scale Up is just one of them.

Or so the story goes.

We’ve been trying to reach grid parity for some time.  Without much success.  And not because we aren’t trying.  Billions of dollars of government subsidies, R&D funding and private investment are being poured into the pursuit.

Energy independence!  Both as a Nation and as individuals.  It would be great to be able to say, personally, we don’t have pay any utility bills.

The first great fallacy is that either solar power and wind power can cause energy independence for the US.  This is because the energy we depend on is not electricity, it is Middle East Oil for gasoline.  We are dependent because of our cars and the choice to not make our own gasoline, even though we can at lower cost than importing it.

But on top of that, almost none of the electricity generated in the US uses Oil.  It’s all coal, natural gas, or nuclear.  So the idea that the US will reduce it’s foreign oil imports by generating electricity with solar power or wind power, is completely ridiculous.  There is no connection between the two.

There is a theoretical energy equivalency that can be expressed.  But there is no real connection.  So people who make this claim are intentionally misleading anyone who listens.

How are we doing with respect to the cost of electricity generated by solar power?  It’s been an interesting couple of years.  The industry experienced a brief shortage of raw silicon which kept prices fairly high.  More recently there was a precipitous drop in panel prices.

Opinions vary as to the cause of this drop, but with the massive increase in manufacturing capacity worldwide, I would guess that the price drop is strictly a matter of oversupply.

Economies of Scale will fix the problem according to some.  After all, look how well we’ve done with computers, hard drives and flat screens. Flat screens that were $10,000 to $50,000 a decade ago are now affordable to the point where the CRT has become obsolete.

Since the biggest component cost of the solar panel is silicon wafer, we should expect similar results in the solar market.  The stampede to build more solar panel manufacturing plants resulted in oversupply.

Now the race continues to drive costs down.  Panels that were selling for $3.50/Watt a year ago are down to $2./Watt and prices are expected to continue to fall. And some manufacturers will not be able to keep up with falling prices using older technology.

But are we getting to grid parity?  Is Solar power cheap enough to compete with utility power?  Nope. Because even at today’s bargain pricing, a 225 Watt panel will only produce 900 kilowatt hours in a year at maximum efficiency.  At market cost for electricity, $.05/kW, it’s only $45 worth a year.  And it currently costs about $1125 pay for the panel, installation and balance of system components.  That means it will be around 25 years, the end of the useful life of the system, before it breaks even.  Yes, in California where consumers pay $.23/kW the payback is better, but it’s still very expensive to convert to solar.

We have got to do better than that.  And we will.  The technology is coming along.  But economies of scale by themselves can’t quite get us there.

GE and Siemens both have prototype wind turbines in demonstration programs that are designed at 2.3 to 4 megawatts of peak power.  The real key to the new machines is the elimination of gear increasers to make the low speed propeller shaft turn a high speed generator.  It’s much more efficient to go to direct drive.

A permanent magnet generator with high pole count can be designed to operate very efficiently at the direct speed of the propeller.  By using powerful Neodymium permanent magnets, high power levels of electricity can be generated.  And this type of generator is efficient, simple to deal with electrically, and the winding constant can be varied for specific ideal wind speed.  It’s a great improvement and some in the industry are claiming a 25% increase in overall system efficiency.

But the improved performance and the increased size are not really connected.  I think there are two ideas that are getting mixed up.  One idea is that scale effect can have an impact on performance.  By simply making something bigger, we should expect it’s cost, or cost per kilowatt to be reduced.  But it is important to keep in mind what parameter we are measuring.  Generator efficiency? System efficiency? or overall cost effectiveness?

The goal of any proposed technology replacement should be to lower cost.  Steam engines cost less than using horses, given all the costs of feeding, stables, etc.  Steam engines were more reliable and could do more work than horses at lower cost, so they took over the market.  And yes, they were much cleaner than having a bunch of horse poop in the workplace.

If a technology is “green” or “clean”, and it costs more than the technology it seeks to replace, then it cannot enter the market unless consumers are willing to pay more for the technology.  But if a State Legislature enacts a law that directs the local utility company to use “green” power as part of it’s mix of energy sources, then prices will go up.

What is being mixed up is the nature of “economy of scale”  and scale effect.  In electronics manufacturing, the more of something you make, the lower it’s unit cost.  The economies of scale in electronics have brought the cost down on flat screen monitors, computers, hard disk drives, cell phones, and everything else electronic.

This argument might apply to converting light to electricity, but it isn’t entirely true in this arena either.  But that’s another discussion (which I will pursue in a future post).  Many who desire to see a large conversion of US energy sources to solar argue that if the electronics industry can achieve its typical economy of scale, that the cost of solar power will fall below the cost of coal fired or nuclear powered electricity.  But there’s a big problem for the solar community, it only works when the sun is out and skies are clear.

Coal power and nuclear power work all the time.  So there is basic measure of “uptime” that solar has to overcome.  And that makes it very difficult.  Plus, you can’t store the power easily to use it when you need it.  And that’s another problem working against widespread use of solar power.

I gladly grant that there is an increase in efficiency and overall performance to be had from direct drive permanent magnet wind turbines.  But there is nothing in making a bigger turbine that results in more megawatts per million dollars of cost.  Making wind turbines bigger doesn’t improve the cost per Megawatt,  it just makes them lose money faster.

In addition to measuring total R&D expenditures, there is a category which measures the Federal portion of the R&D total.   The estimated total R&D expenditures was $247B in the year 2000 (these figures are only updated every ten years).  The Federal portion of R&D for that year was $65B or 25%.  That’s a pretty big number.

And here’s the problem with it.  Who decides what “We The People” are going to spend money on?  Not you or me, that’s for sure.  And of the $65B, the DOE makes up about $9B in it’s direct budget.  Not including the majority of their grant programs which are matching fund awards.  That means that you have to have an equal number of dollars from other sources to get the grant money.  So, for example, Clemson University’s Wind Turbine Gearbox Testing program at $97M was funded with $45M from the DOE and the balance from other sources.  Other sources, by the way, who will not be able to spend those dollars on other pursuits.

How much of the $65B in Federal R&D expenditures will go to assist industry with development of relevant technology?  How do we decide which technologies are relevant?  I think 3D memory technology, both rotating and static, are incredibly important and judging from the $30B+ industry that was created by the hard disk drive, funding work in this area might be very strategic for the US economy.  The US is still, amazingly, a major force in the disk drive industry world wide.  And the disk drive industry frequently trickles technology into other areas of the economy, such as electric motor drives.

How much will be spent in matching programs?  This might be important to understand in the context that matching programs mean that more of the total R&D money available will be directed by government decision making processes.   Some of which are questionable at best.

In uncertain economic times, the investment in R&D and new product development can be one of the first things to go.   These efforts are generally considered risk, and we all become risk averse when there is a lack of confidence in the current economic situation.

This is not the time for US industries to slow their efforts, and Federal R&D policy is certainly not a headline news topic or widely discussed, which maybe it should be.  But if we are to see our major industries grow, then this is a subject we must pay attention to.

Currently the DOE and the Federal government have skewed the outcome with Federally administered programs, in favor of Wind and Solar technologies which are clearly not cost effective, and based on recent stories in the news, not nearly as reliable as claimed.  If the Federal Stimulus has allocated Billions of dollars to “Green Technology” projects, what’s left?  Everyone is trying to “cash in” on the Federal Stimulus money that has been parceled to the individual States for these purposes.   I think the unintended consequence is that far less money will get spent in areas where it would be more productive.

The studies were all quite well done and very informative.  The top line result is this; in order to achieve 20% wind power by the year 2030 we will need to create 280,000 megawatts of new wind power.  If the projected average size machine is 2.6 megawatts, then that means 108,000 horizontal wind turbines will be needed over a ten year period.  That’s a lot of turbines.  And good news for GE and Siemens.  Maybe not so good for US workers if the majority of the turbine content is sourced outside the US.

At today’s cost for land based wind power, $2.47 million/megawatt, it will cost  $691.6 BILLION dollars over twenty years.  And if wind turbines actually produced their rated power, that might be OK.  But the fact is they do not.  The industry average is in the 22-28% range of productivity, with some hope of achieving 35% due to forecast improvements in the technology.  The utility factor takes into account the number of hours per year of wind blowing, down time losses, parasitic losses, etc.  The utility factor is also impacted by the poor system efficiency at anything other than the ideal wind speed.

If the electronics industry ran at this level they would have shut down years ago.   In response to this, the wind industry is moving offshore.  Why? Because offshore winds blow more frequently.  So the expectation is that by moving the wind turbines to the sea, the utilization factor will increase to 65%.  Great!

One small problem.  How do you make one of these things float?  Are they safe during a hurricane?   It’s like putting up a drilling platform, only harder because instead of drilling down, you have to go up with 20 tons of equipment suspended 250 feet above the platform.  The best estimates  for this feat of engineering put the cost at $5.94 million per megawatt.  Pushing the price tag for 20% wind power to $1.66 TRILLION.  And we haven’t begun to find out about the technical problems at sea compared to the problems we are discovering in land based wind power.

But here’s the scary part; you’ll never get to vote on it.  US energy policy is being implemented without Congress or legislative oversight.  The DOE has paid for a road map and by virtue of it’s $9 Billion per year budget, is spending that money and incentivizing businesses with matching grants.  R&D resources are being committed to achieve a goal that is, at best, very controversial.  We’ve had a lot of press, a lot of campaigning, but no real discussion and no real performance review.  But the DOE seems committed to the wind power roadmap, regardless of the cost or how long it takes.

Creating policy with your tax dollars.  With no input from you and me.  Now that’s scary!