Where Do You Plug In a Hybrid?
This Toyota Prius was converted to a plug-in hybrid for California environmental activist Felix Kramer.
Photo: calcars.org
A hybrid car such as a Toyota Prius or a Honda Accord hybrid that gets its motive power from two energy sources, gasoline and battery electricity, needs to have its battery recharged overnight. True or false?
If you answered true, BRAAACK, you're wrong. Hybrids never get plugged in for a recharge. But don't feel bad, you're not alone. One of Toyota's marketing challenges has been making potential customers aware that hybrids are not electric cars and don't need an extension cord.
An electric car runs purely on battery power, which juices electric motors that turn the wheels. When the battery is empty (i.e. discharged), the car stops dead and must be recharged, just as a conventional car stops when its gas tank is empty. An electric car's battery is typically only good for 50 to 100 miles of driving, which is why there are no electric cars on the market. (Calm down, electric-car mavens. Granted there are a few modified golf carts for driving around gated old-folks communities, and I know there's the $98,000 all-electric Tesla Roadster sports car, but none has yet to be delivered to customers.)
When you drive a real hybrid, like a Prius or a Lexus GS 450h, the car is continually recharging its on-board battery. Sometimes the car's gasoline engine is turning a generator that feeds current back into the battery, sometimes the car is recapturing energy from the brakes when you slow down, and sometimes coasting with the throttle closed puts more energy back into the battery than is being used. Which is why you never plug in a Prius.
Now it gets confusing, though, because Toyota and a number of other manufacturers are working on what are called plug-in hybrids, and here's why . . .
A hybrid's gasoline-consuming, emissions-producing engine runs most of the time the car is in motion. It shuts off instantly and restarts when needed at red lights and in stop-and-go traffic, and if you're creeping along at five mph in bumper-to-bumper traffic, you may be doing it on electric power alone, but otherwise, you're still burning gas.
But what if you could shut off the gas engine and run at cruising speed entirely on battery power? It'd probably be good for 30 miles (a hybrid battery is smaller than what would be in an electric car), and most round-trip commutes and typical errand trips are less than that. So you just might never have to burn any gas. And if you did deplete the battery by going further, you wouldn't be stranded, as you would with an electric car; you'd just crank up the gas engine and continue driving.
Of course, you would have to plug the car into a battery charger at least once a day (or, preferably, night), and that's where the term "plug-in hybrid" comes in: It's a hybrid rather than an electric car, but it's a hybrid you have to recharge just like an electric car.
Plug-in hybrids might be the Next Big Thing in greenie-mobiles, but only if manufacturers can develop a new type of battery. The worst thing you can do to the kinds of batteries currently used in hybrids is put them through constant drain-and-charge cycles. They'll overheat, and they'll fail prematurely.
If they solve that problem, here's the next one: How do we quickly create an electricity infrastructure that can charge tens of thousands of plug-in hybrids, since millions of air conditioners running on a hot afternoon can already black us out?
There are no easy answers.
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Actually, power companies like PG&E in California are already developing pricing schemes that will encourage owners of plug-ins to recharge their cars when demand is lowest (midnight-5 am) and NOT when it's highest (noon-10 pm).
As for the new kind of batteries (blatant self-promotion here), see "Lithium Batteries Take to the Road," which covers the A123 Li-ion batteries chosen by GM and other automakers for plug-ins to launch in 2010 or 2011: http://spectrum.ieee.org/sep07/5490
Posted by: jvoelckercon | September 13, 2007 at 01:09 PM
You know, I am a firm believer in that old saying "If you put your mind to it you can accomplish anything." And I do believe that we as humans are capable of just about *anything*
What it boils down to, IMHO is that the powers-that-be don't *want* it to change. We can send a man to the moon with 1960s technology and we're bemoaning the fact that having vehicles that are clean is nigh impossible despite the fact that we have all kinds of high-tech gadgetry that is developing at an exponential rate. Seriously, I find it all hard to believe.
If you haven't watched that documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car" you should. It will leave you absolutely seething.
BTW. I want an electric car. I drive 12 miles one way to work, and that is apparently more than average. I really don't need it to go that far, 100 miles per charge would be more than enough. So why can't I *buy* one? They had them for sale going on ten years ago... Hmm, I wonder. Or you know what would be even better? A solar powered car. Here in south Texas, I'm willing to bet the sun could power my way to work most days.
As an aside, what happened to the idea that you could, instead of stopping at a filling station for gas....stop and change out the battery. Imagine if we could create a battery that was small enough to be easily popped in and then popped out and that would power the car. You'd pay a recharging fee to change it and on your way you'd go, no need to charge it up, you could go as far as you wanted to. Funny that that was the original idea for how to power cars at the beginning of the 20th century.
Posted by: tracker1312 | September 13, 2007 at 04:39 PM
"Who Killed the Electric Car?" was hardly a documentary, it was a polemic. (I write documentary films, and three that I've written have been nominated for Academy Awards, so I know the difference.) Though you're right, it did leave me seething--at its stupidity.
Battery technology is mature--meaning it it hasn't progressed a lot beyond what we had 100 years ago. There are no secrets, there are small, incremental advances, which is all very nice but has yet to show the slightest evidence of the kind of OoM technological leap that we need if electric cars are to become practical. Any good chemical engineer will tell you that energy storage and creation in a battery is relatively inefficient, and to say, "Why can't we develop lightweight batteries that contain enough energy to go 200 miles and just pop them in and out at 'battery stations?' is about like saying, "Why can't we just go to the moon by using a pack of matches? They're light and hot..."
I'm not against electric cars, it's just that I understand they have huge limitations and the creation of the power to recharge their batteries also has its own immense problems. It always amuses me that people say, "Oh, we'll just recharge the cars at night, during low-demand periods when the power is cheap." Excuse me? The meter reader comes to my house once a month and reads the bottom line on the meter. There's no discount for the TV I watch after 10, and if you think there will be a discount for charging an electric car at night, I have a big bridge in New York that I can sell you cheap...
Perhaps the ultimate answer is that we shouldn't try to develop cars that go 200 miles, we should stop going 200 miles at the drop of a hat.
Posted by: stepwilk | September 13, 2007 at 06:59 PM
Stephan: No idea where you live, but in much of the country power pricing IS variable depending on time of day. And last week I interviewed a couple of PG&E people at length on this topic--if they're willing to say on the record that they are planning pricing incentives, I think it's a pretty good bet it'll happen.
Your point about battery tech being mature applies to lead-acid chemistries, which are now 100+ years old. Several NEW chemistries have emerged in the last 20 years (NiCad, nickel-metal-hydride, lithium-ion) that simply have greater energy densities as a byproduct of their chemical bonds.
The batteries to permit cars 40 miles of all-electric range ARE now in early production. General Motors has staked a lot of public prestige on introduction of a plug-in hybrid version of its Vue Two-Mode Hybrid, probably for the 2011 model year.
Moreoever, it's building "E-Flex" architecture into its next global small-car platform to permit a variety of motive power & energy storage means depending on market, fuel and geographic preference.
This is now fairly off-topic, but feel free to contact me if you want more info. Peter Frank can put you in touch ....
Posted by: jvoelckercon | September 14, 2007 at 10:14 AM
"Perhaps the ultimate answer is that we shouldn't try to develop cars that go 200 miles, we should stop going 200 miles at the drop of a hat."
I drive to work because there's no efficient public transportation in the United States unless you live in NYC or DC. And even then it pales in comparison to London's public transporation system.
Perhaps if I lived in the UK or Europe I wouldn't have to drive 200 miles at the drop of a hat, but that's probably what I drive in a usual week just to work and back. I wish it wasn't so, but it is. I wish that there was light rail, I'd take it in a heartbeat, but there isn't. From what I've seen, the majority of Americans live in places where public transporatation is an impossibility and unless they come up with some way to work from home, they *have* to drive a car to get where they're going.
My point was, why can't we come up with something else? Why all the naysayers? Why is there this insistance that we be tied to gasoline, that anything else, any other alternative is just simply impossible to achieve. If humanity had had such a mindset throughout history, we'd still be living in thatched huts huddled around campfires.
There's all kinds of "free" energy we could exploit, solar, magnetic, etc. if only someone would bother funding research into using it for practical purposes.
Posted by: tracker1312 | September 14, 2007 at 12:21 PM