Other Source of Energy

GoAuto has a report on plans to build an electric version of the Holden Commodore (its just a pilot at this stage though) - Fleet boost for electro-Commodore.

A FULL-SIZE factory-built Holden Commodore that consumes no petrol, delivers at least 160km of all-electric motoring, comes with a switchable battery leased from Better Place and costs no more than the model on which it is based will be available to all Australian within a few years.

That is the ambitious plan that took one step closer to reality today with the announcement that Australia’s largest fleet car buyer has joined forces with a consortium that will produce a Commodore EV initially for fleet consumption prior to its full-scale public release.

Melbourne-based start-up company EV Engineering (EVE), a consortium of five leading Australian automotive suppliers with global connections, revealed its $26 million project to produce an Australian-built rear-drive large electric car based on Australia’s top-selling model in February.

It now says it is on target to produce the first two concept vehicles by the end of this year, and to have a fleet of seven all-electric ‘proof-of-concept’ Commodores ready for real-world testing by mid-2012.

None of the vehicles will be ready to unveil at this week’s Melbourne motor show, but EVE today announced a significant boost to the project by announcing it has been joined by GE – the parent company of Australia’s largest company vehicle provider, Custom Fleet.

GE will join automotive component suppliers Futuris and its partner Air International, Bosch and Continental, and EV charging network company Better Place Australia, in the EVE consortium, which is funded partly by a $3.5 million grant from the federal government’s now defunct Green Car Innovation Fund (GCIF).

EVE and GE would not reveal financial details of the deal, but each existing consortium partner will supply both financial and technical support to the project, with GM Holden and the CSIRO to provide technical expertise.

Holden’s only involvement at this stage is the initial supply of vehicles, data for those vehicles and the use of its proving ground at Lang Lang, but EVE today indicated it was likely Holden would manufacture the Commodore EV.

“Clearly we will be working with them on the project and updating them on our progress and yes we’ll be happy to review plans for mass production as we get further down the track with the car," said EVE CEO and former senior Holden executive Ian McCleave.

The New York Times has an article on ARPA-E investing in General Compressions CAES technology for an energy storage pilot project with Duke Energy - ARPA-E Is Poised to Put Products on the Grid.

ARPA-E, the government’s incubator for high-risk energy inventions, has its first graduate in the electricity area — a new energy storage technology — and on Thursday it announced a preliminary agreement to get it tested.

The agency, more formally the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, modeled after the Defense Department’s longstanding program, said it had signed a memorandum of understanding with Duke, the big utility company, and the Electric Power Research Institute, the nonprofit utility consortium, to try out the inventions in the real world.

The agreement will “provide the connective tissue for ARPA-E,’’ said Arun Majumdar, the agency’s director, and “provide the test bed to see how to create value in the actual business.’’

The first candidate will probably be General Compression, a company to which ARPA-E directed $750,000; that advanced the technology enough for the firm to raise $12 million privately, Mr. Majumdar said. The company developed a way to pump air into an underground cavern, using electricity generated at inconvenient hours. When the energy is needed, the air flows back out again through a generator.

An older technology accomplishes this by adding natural gas to the exiting air and burning it to spin a turbine; General Compression uses no fuel at all. Its “round-trip efficiency,” meaning the amount of energy delivered versus the amount it takes in, is 70 to 75 percent, the company says.

Energy storage is considered a crucial complement to wind power and possibly solar power as well, smoothing out production and ensuring that the energy is available when it is most valuable, but today’s systems are expensive and thus are not in wide use.

Mr. Mujamdar said that ARPA-E hoped the air compression technology can be scaled big enough to store a gigawatt-hour, equal to the entire output of a large nuclear plant for an hour. Price is a crucial consideration, and ARPA-E has determined that a utility could probably afford to pay $100 per kilowatt-hour of storage.