The Economist was one of the first major
publications to notice PHEVs, in a long story in
December 2004 (see
<http://www.calcars.org/kudos.html> or
<http://www.fuelcellsworks.com/Supppage1716.html>.
This week, they were included in a general
roundup story, then in a second report focusing
on the Plug-In Partners press conference:

The Economist, January 21-27, 2006, p. 77-78
Alternatives to petrol
Gentlemen, start your engines
[Story describes the growth of interest in
hybrids, questions their fuel economy, includes diesel trends, concludes:]

And those who don't like diesels can take other
paths to clean and economical cars. The latest
buzz is around "plug-in" hybrids. These are
vehicles with even smaller than usual petrol
engines, bigger batteries and the ability to
recharge from the mains overnight. Given that the
average American motorist travels barely 30 miles
(50km) a day, the petrol engine in such a hybrid
is there mainly to stop the driver being stranded by a flat battery.

Supporters of plug-ins, such as James Woolsey, a
former head of America's Central Intelligence
Agency and a man obsessed with the country's
energy security, think such cars offer a clever
answer to dependence on petrol. By shifting the
donkeywork of supplying energy for transport to
power stations --which generally burn coal --
they make drivers less vulnerable to the vagaries of the petroleum trade.

Carmakers, though, are skeptical about plug-ins.
Publicly, they claim the batteries will not
tolerate the rugged regimes of recharging
envisaged by Mr. Woolsey and his fellow
enthusiasts. Somoe people, however, suspect that
the real reason for the skepticism is a worry
that the successful marketing message which has
launched the Prius and its rivals might be
tarnished by memories of plug-in electric
vehicles, such as General Motors' EV1, which flopped in the 1990s.

If plug-ins fail to catch on, another way of
escaping the Middle East would be to burn ethanol
made from crops. A blend of 85% ethanol with 15%
petrol, known as E85, is gaining acceptance since
it can be used in normal petrol engines, and
advances in biotechnology promise cheaper ethanol
by turning waste cellulose into the glucose from
which ethanol is fermented. (At the moment most
of it comes from maize seeds.) If that works, it
would put paid to the old objections that
"gasohol", as it is sometimes known, consumes
more energy in the making than it releases in the
engine. Further down the road, companies such as
Ford and BMW see great possibilities for burning
hydrogen in internal combustion engines 9long
before it is common in fuel-cell electric cars).
And then there are fuel cells themselves --
though they are still some way off. In the race
to find alternatives to petroleum, the contenders are already on the grid.

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VQPGRGD
Plug 'n Play
The Economist online
Jan 27, 2006

"FORGET hydrogen. Forget hydrogen. Forget
hydrogen!” That was the rallying cry of Jim
Woolsey, a former director of America's Central
Intelligence Agency, at an energy-technology
event this week in Washington, DC. He was
referring to the idea that America might make
itself less dependent on foreign oil by
encouraging the development of hydrogen-powered
cars. Instead, the former spy-chief has joined a
curious coalition of environmental activists,
national-security hawks, clean-energy experts and
politicians to unveil a national consumer
campaign in favour of “plug-in” hybrid-electric
vehicles. Another surprising supporter of
plug-ins, Orrin Hatch, a senator from Utah and a
conservative Republican not known for supporting
green causes, also dropped by to declare that
this obscure technology could be the “silver
bullet” America needs to end its addiction to oil.

The event, and the campaign it was designed to
support, are the brainchildren of Austin Energy,
a power-generating utility owned by the city of
Austin, Texas. Austin Energy's campaign has
already won the endorsement of dozens of cities
and towns, including Los Angeles, San Francisco
and Denver, as well as Austin itself, and also
more than 100 utility companies. It now plans to
collect millions of signatures from individuals
requesting that big car firms start making plug-in hybrids.

Plug-in technology itself is a modified version
of hybrid-electric cars such as the Toyota Prius.
Instead of relying solely on energy from a petrol
engine to charge them up, plug-in hybrids can, as
their name suggests, be plugged into conventional
power sockets. That allows a plug-in to travel
30-50 miles (50-80km) without petrol, rather than
just a couple of miles, as with the Prius. Since
most American motorists travel only 20-30 miles a
day, they could drive in all-electric mode most
of the time. This has the potential to lift fuel
economy from the pitiful 20 miles per gallon
common in American cars to 80mpg or more. But, as
in a conventional hybrid, once the battery was
drained, the petrol engine would kick in—thus
ensuring that the driver was never stranded.

Enthusiasts reckon that this technology would
dramatically reduce oil use (which is why the
national-security types are interested) and curb
greenhouse-gas emissions (which is why the
environmentalists are interested, although this
benefit would depend on what method was used to
generate the electricity in the first place). And
prototype plug-ins developed by the University of
California, Davis, by the Electric Power Research
Institute (the research arm of America's power
industry), and by enthusiasts who have “hacked”
Priuses to enable them to be connected to the
grid, suggest that the idea can work in practice.

The main obstacle is that the longer range
requires a bigger battery, and bigger batteries
are heavier and more expensive. Andrew Frank, one
of the researchers in the team at Davis, reckons
that “retrofitting” a Prius-type hybrid with a
big enough battery that uses conventional
nickel-metal hydride technology adds about 70kg
(150lb) to the vehicle's weight. Using
lithium-ion batteries (common in mobile phones)
adds less than 25kg, but costs much more. Still,
it is an interesting idea, and if it came to pass
it would radically restructure America's energy
economics by shifting demand from the filling
station to the power station. And, who knows, it
might even shift the global balance of another
sort of power—the political variety.


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Felix Kramer fkramer@...
Founder California Cars Initiative
http://www.calcars.org
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/calcars-news
http://www.hybridcars.com/blogs/power
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/priusplus
http://www.seattleeva.org/wiki/EAA-PHEV
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