Weekly-ish News - Episode 40 (February 18, 2022)

What's the Alternative?

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Vehicles:

GM is planning to restart production of the Chevy Bolt vehicles in the beginning of April.

Ford is planning on making constant, iterative improvements to the Mach-E instead of doing yearly updates.

• One reason cited for this decision is that it helps inform the production of other electric vehicles more quickly than yearly updates.

Green Car Reports has a first ride article for the F-150 Lightning - not much groundbreaking info, but the impressions are positive.

BMW will offer two years of free charging on Electrify America chargers for their customers.

• This is available for buyers of:
• They specify 30min charging sessions, but it's unclear if there is a limit on the number of sessions.

Jaguar is going to have a dedicated, ground-up EV platform called "Panthera".

• They still plan to sell 100% electric vehicles by 2030.

Lightning eMotors is now producing Class 3 through Class 6 vehicles through GM.

Airstream is toying with a concept trailer that would have large battery packs both for being off-grid while camping as well as for assisting the vehicle towing it.

• The off-grid part is simple enough, the battery can power all electronics and such while parked.
• The vehicle assist part is more complicated.

Toyota is investing $73m more into its plant in Buffalo, West Virginia for the purpose of producing more electric motors.

• Part of this investment goes to producing 120k rear motor stators per year.

Volvo and Northvolt are building a battery plant in Sweden that will produce up to 50GWh of batteries per year, opening in 2025.

The company, Ascend Elements, will open a battery recycling plant in Georgia by August 2022.

• They are investing $43m in the facility and will be able to recycle 30k metric tons of batteries.
• They also intend to build a facility to produce cathode materials in 2023.

Yet another company (Continental) is trying to offer automated charging, but this time through a physical connection instead of inductive.

• It's super unclear if the charger bit moves to meet the car, but it can apparently handle 30cm (12in) of deviance in parking.
• The article is funny, because it talks about an alleged benefit being energy efficiency, but mentions Oak Ridge National Labs' demonstration of high efficiency wireless charging.
• The article also mentions that this seems like a better solution than the Tesla snake robot, but I wholly disagree: the snake robot doesn't require a retrofit for the car, this solution does.
• They're aiming for full production in 2024.

Deployment:

Oslo's transit agency has ordered 183 Solaris electric transit buses!

• These are Urbino 18 buses.
• The deal is worth approximately €100m.
• They're expected to go into service in April, and these will replace older, non-electric, Solaris models.
• These buses have a 500kWh battery pack.

MetroLINK in Illinois has been awarded a $5m grant by Rebuild Illinois to build overhead chargers to support their growing electric transit bus fleet.

• They plan to grow their transit fleet to 30% electric.
• 70% of their fleet is currently compressed natural gas.

Energy:

The U.S. saw an increase of about 28GW of electricity generation in 2021, with over 75% being renewable.

• 40.8% wind
• 35.6% solar
• 18.8% natural gas

Cryptocurrency companies are arguing that they will strengthen Texas' grid because they can act as demand-side response.

• The linked Washington Post article talks about some of the problems with this statement, though I don't necessarily wholly support the article.
• One issue with the idea of cryptocurrency being good as demand response is the same argument against curtailed renewables for hydrogen: you need to over-build capacity in order to be demand response, and this decreases your uptime.

Duke Energy will shut down all coal generation by 2035 and will invest over $100b in "cleaner sources".

Clearway Energy Group has begun operations at a 115MW wind farm in West Virginia, which will provide power to Toyota and American Electric Power (AEP).

Saluda County, South Carolina is getting nearly 75MW of new solar power.

Policy:

There's funding available for Level 2 charging in the Jacksonville, Florida area through the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program.

• Deadline is March 30.
• Funding is up to $7,500 for equipment and installation.