Techtrend

Energy efficiency to shine in 2010.

Energy efficiency to shine in 2010

Solar and wind power may get the headlines and attention, but green-tech experts say 2010 will be dominated by energy efficiency.

By Dana Hull

San Jose Mercury News

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Solar and wind power may get the headlines and attention, but green-tech experts say 2010 will be dominated by energy efficiency, the mundane but critical process of cutting the amount of gas and electricity that homes and offices use.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu regularly describes himself as an “energy-efficiency nut.” Sixteen states, including California and New York, have passed legislation enabling homeowners to finance energy-efficiency upgrades through their property taxes. President Obama even declared insulation “sexy” at a Home Depot last month.

Then there are the sheer numbers:

Venture-capital investment in energy efficiency hit a record in 2009: at least 115 deals worth nearly $1 billion, according to a preliminary tally by the Cleantech Group and Deloitte. That’s up 39 percent from 2008.

Meanwhile, solar, which had 84 deals worth about $1.2 billion, was down 64 percent from 2008, and there’s increasing talk about solar being “overfunded.”

“In 2009, there was a pullback and realization by investors that because of the capital intensity of solar, there may be safer places to put their money,” said Scott Smith, U.S. cleantech leader for Deloitte.

Energy efficiency generally refers to a wide range of technologies designed to cut energy use such as improved lighting, greener building materials and sophisticated software that monitors power consumption.

And it’s increasingly seen as an effective way to create desperately needed jobs, save struggling consumers money, wean America from its dependence on foreign oil and reduce carbon emissions — all at the same time.

Home energy use accounts for 21 percent of the nation’s carbon footprint — roughly twice the carbon emissions of passenger cars, according to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. There are 100 million homes in America, and energy-saving measures like insulation, caulking, and heating and cooling system upgrades can reduce household energy consumption by 10 percent to 40 percent, according to a memo by the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

And saving energy saves money: Californians pay an average of $84 a month for electricity, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Kevin Surace has seen the shift firsthand. For years, the CEO of Serious Materials, which makes energy-saving windows and drywall, was the only energy-efficiency executive at industry conferences.

“I remember standing with a piece of drywall at the Cleantech Forum in 2006,” he said. “Every other company was solar, wind and biofuel. People were like: What are you doing at our conference?”

Now Surace is the keynote speaker at many of the conferences he attends.

“All the cleantech conferences are efficiency, efficiency, efficiency,” said Surace. “When you really break it down, every dollar spent on energy efficiency pays back the investment four or five times. It saves people money and creates jobs. And it has bipartisan support.”

Another company riding the surge of interest in energy efficiency is San Francisco-based Recurve, which provides detailed home energy audits and green energy remodeling to Bay Area homeowners.

“Five or six years ago, energy efficiency was such a backwater,” said co-founder and President Matt Golden, who remembers the days of being met with blank stares when he would talk about insulation and duct-system leakage. “Everyone was like: There’s no money in energy efficiency.”

The company, which had 12 employees in 2007, has grown to 65. It is creating customized software that it plans to license to other contractors in the energy-retrofit industry and is actively hiring software engineers. Golden is so sought after as a public-policy leader that he spends much of his time in Washington these days.

Recurve, which raised a first round of venture funding in September 2008, is backed by RockPort Capital and Shasta Ventures.

“Energy efficiency is very capital-efficient,” said Rob Coneybeer, of Shasta Ventures. “We like the idea of people using IT to measure, monitor and improve their energy usage. We felt like Recurve had done a really good job, and we really liked the founders — that’s a big reason why we invested in them.”

Komatsu brings hybrid excavator to North America

Powered by the Komatsu Hybrid System and finally being offered in North America by Komatsu America Corp., the Hybrid PC200LC-8 uses a newly developed electric swing motor, power generator motor, capacitor, and diesel engine.

With the new Hybrid PC200LC-8, Komatsu America Corp. says it “has raised the industry bar for hybrid technology and fuel savings” by delivering an excavator with power and efficiency, while reducing environmental impact as compared to its standard model.

Komatsu says its goal, as one of the top construction equipment manufacturers in the world, is to meet increasing global environmental concerns through the development of innovative equipment designed to reduce environmental impact, including CO2 reduction. To prove its sincerity, it believed it would have most impact on saving fuel and reducing greenhouse emissions by applying its hybrid technology to an excavator in the 20- to 22-ton (18- to 20-t) segment.

“Komatsu’s decision to apply its engineering excellence to the largest construction machine segment clearly signals our commitment to developing environment-friendly equipment,” said Dave Grzelak, Chairman and CEO, Komatsu America Corp.

Powered by the Komatsu Hybrid System, the Hybrid PC200LC-8 uses a newly developed electric swing motor, power generator motor, capacitor, and diesel engine. Komatsu developed its hybrid system to work on the principle of swing energy regeneration and energy storage using the Komatsu Ultra Capacitor system. Komatsu says its ultra capacitors provide fast energy storage and instantaneous power transmission.

The kinetic energy generated during the swing braking phase is converted to electricity that is sent through an inverter and then captured by the ultra capacitor. This captured energy is then discharged very quickly for upper structure rotation and to assist the engine as commanded by the hybrid controller when accelerating under workload conditions.

In tests comparing the standard PC200LC-8 hydraulic excavator to the Hybrid PC200LC-8, the hybrid model reduced fuel consumption by approximately 25 to 40%, depending on the application.

The hybrid excavator is powered by the turbocharged, air-to-air after-cooled Komatsu SAA4D107E-1, which provides 138 hp (103 kW). With an operating weight of 43,643 to 47,260 lb (19,796 to 21,437 kg), the hybrid has a bucket capacity of 0.66 to 1.57 yd3 (0.50 to 1.20 m3). It has the same working forces and performance levels of the conventional PC200LC-8.

Viscous cab damper mounts reduce vibration to ensure operator comfort, says Komatsu. A 7-in LCD monitor provides easy-to-read gauges and onboard diagnostics as well as displaying the rearview monitoring system for viewing the work area to the rear of the machine.

The Hybrid PC200LC-8 is also equipped with the latest KOMTRAX technology, which sends machine operating information to a secure website via wireless technology. Data such as operating hours, fuel consumption, machine location, and machine utilization are relayed to the web application for analysis. The KOMTRAX fleet-monitoring system is claimed to increase machine availability, reduce the risk of machine theft, and provide a wealth of other information to drive business efficiency.

The Hybrid PC200LC-8 excavator, introduced to the Japanese market in June 2008, has been successful in reducing fuel consumption. In addition, Komatsu introduced the hybrid to the Chinese market last August.

DOE-funded ‘SuperTrucks’ to be 50% more fuel efficient

Argonne National Laboratory will work with Navistar to improve combustion efficiency and waste heat recovery. Pictured is the liquid breakup of a high-density stream from a fuel injector as imaged with ultrafast synchrotron x-ray full-field phase contrast imaging at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne.

The winners of recently awarded federal grants totaling $187 million to improve vehicle efficiency will help create more than 500 engineering, research, and management jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. More than 6000 jobs overall, including those in manufacturing, are expected to be created by 2015 as part of the nine grant projects announced Jan. 11 by the DOE.

Most of the grant money, $115 million, is targeted at advances that will increase the fuel efficiency of Class 8 long-haul freight trucks 50% by 2015. Among the technologies to be investigated are engine combustion, engine waste heat recovery, powertrain hybridization, idle reduction, and aerodynamics.

The remainder of the grant money is targeted at advances that will increase the fuel efficiency of passenger vehicle engine and powertrain systems. The improvement target is 25-40% by 2015.

In the truck category, winning roughly equal amounts of close to $40 million, are Cummins Inc., Daimler Trucks North America (DTNA), and Navistar Inc.

Cummins will partner with Peterbilt Motors Co. for its SuperTruck project, which aims to develop and demonstrate a highly efficient and clean diesel engine, an advanced waste heat recovery system, an aerodynamic Peterbilt tractor-trailer, and a fuel-cell auxiliary power unit to reduce engine idling.

Cummins is also a grant winner in the passenger-vehicle category. It will receive $15 million for work on diesel engine technology.

Engine downsizing, electrification of auxiliary systems such as oil and water pumps, waste heat recovery, improved aerodynamics, and hybridization will be focus areas of DTNA’s development and demonstration work.

Navistar, through the DOE project, will develop and demonstrate technologies to improve truck and trailer aerodynamics, combustion efficiency, waste heat recovery, hybridization, idle reduction, and reduced rolling resistance tires. The company notes that with more than 80% of the nation’s diesel fuel consumed by Class 8 trucks, the development of a SuperTruck has “enormous energy-saving potential as well as significant environmental benefits.”

Argonne National Laboratory will work with Navistar specifically on technologies that improve combustion efficiency and waste heat recovery. The lab will also conduct combustion spray research for Chrysler Group LLC on an advanced engine. Argonne expects to receive more than $5 million for both projects over four years.

Among automakers, Chrysler Group ($14.5 million) will develop a flexible combustion system for its minivan platform based on a downsized, turbocharged engine that uses direct gasoline injection, exhaust gas recirculation, and flexible air intake control to reduce emissions.

General Motors Co. ($7.7 million) will develop an engine that uses lean combustion and active heat management, as well as a novel emissions-control system, to improve the fuel economy of a 2010 Chevrolet Malibu demonstration vehicle by 25%.

Ford Motor Co. ($15 million) aims to achieve a 25% fuel-economy improvement with a gasoline engine in a 2010 mid- to large-size sedan using technologies including engine downsizing, turbocharging, direct injection, and a novel exhaust aftertreatment system.

Among winning suppliers in the passenger-vehicle category is Delphi ($7.5 million) for, among other things, “a novel, low-temperature combustion system” and engine downspeeding. Robert Bosch ($12 million) will study homogeneous-charge compression-ignition technology with turbocharging.

기사원문: http://www.sae.org/mags/tbe/7472/

Loser: Why the Chevy Volt Will Fizzle
BY Philip E. Ross // January 2010

This is part of IEEE Spectrum’s special report: Winners & Losers VII

Sometimes a project fails even though the technology it pioneers is destined to conquer the world. Take Babbage’s steam-era computer, Pioneer Electronics’ LaserDisc home video system, or Apple’s Newton—technically brilliant, yet business failures all.

Better yet, take General Motors’ Chevrolet Volt, a car known as a plug-in hybrid because it will get most of its power from the wall socket in a garage. The Volt is bold, cool, and technically feasible. It appeals to early adopters, and it’s catnip for the automotive fan mags. To cap it off, a little creative accounting gives it the sheen of sky-high mileage, the better to offset GM’s gas-guzzlers and thus meet future fuel efficiency targets.

GM, stung by the failure of its EV1 all-electric car of yesteryear, has put its considerable corporate muscle into the Volt, building the car into a game-changing breakthrough. But to succeed on those terms, it’ll have to become a mass-market car—anything less wouldn’t make enough of a difference to a company that, even in its postbankrupt state, still remains the second-biggest automaker in the world. And at a projected price of US $40 000, cosmic success just isn’t going to happen.

”The first year’s volume, by GM’s own calculations, is 10 000 units, and you can’t save a company with that. That’s chicken feed. You’d need a vehicle that sells 400 000 units,” says John Wolkonowicz, an auto industry analyst at IHS Global Insight, in Lexington, Mass.

”There are not enough idiots who will buy it,” Johan de Nysschen, the president of Audi of America, told auto blogger Lawrence Ulrich.

The idea behind the Volt is wonderful. The car doesn’t have to trade off power between motor and engine from second to second according to some exquisitely complicated mechanism or scheme. Instead, the Volt makes electricity the main course. Today’s hybrids put the motor and engine in parallel so that they juggle their power contributions to the wheels according to many different parameters, including speed, battery charge, and the load on the engine. But the Volt links the power plants in series. That way the motor powers the wheels, and the engine merely engages, when needed, to recharge the vehicle’s enormous lithium-ion battery. How enormous? If you drive no more than 65 kilometers (about 40 miles) and have an electric socket handy at both ends of your commute, you won’t burn a drop of gasoline.

Plenty of tech-minded people love the concept, hence the aftermarket for conversions of standard-issue hybrids to plug-ins (see ”Plugging Away in a Prius,” IEEE Spectrum, May 2008). But these are unusual folk: They don’t mind buying a standard hybrid for $25 000 and throwing in $30 000 to make it into something else. These are the people who tile their roofs with photovoltaic cells, harvest the energy they expend on their StairMasters, or live underground in hobbit holes to conserve heat. We love these people—they make up a significant portion of our readership—but they have little in common with the typical auto buyer, who is mainly concerned with overall costs.

In a study published recently in the journal Energy Policy, four engineers at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, found that the Volt won’t save enough on gas to cover the higher purchasing cost. They assumed that the plug-in would achieve 50 miles per gallon (4.7 liters per 100 kilometers) when operating on gasoline and asked how much more mileage you could eke out by adding enough batteries to enable the vehicle to get most of its power from the grid.

They assumed (from reports about the Volt) that the car would achieve 250 watt-hours per mile (402 watt-hours per kilometer) when operating on electricity, that gasoline would cost about $3 per gallon ($0.79 per liter), that electricity would cost $0.11 per kilowatt-hour, and that the car would cover 150 000 miles (roughly 241 000 kilometers) over a 12-year life. Result: a lifetime savings of $4875, ignoring charging costs. By discounting that sum at 10 percent over 12 years, to cover the cost of borrowing money, the authors arrived at a net savings of $3000 in fuel costs over the life of the vehicle. That’s what you’d save by running on wall current instead of gasoline.

”So if the extra batteries cost more than about $3000 up front, there is no way to make up the cost in future fuel-cost savings unless electricity prices drop or gasoline prices rise considerably,” says Jeremy Michalek, one of the authors of the study and a professor at CMU.

He and his colleagues assume a base price for lithium-ion batteries of about $1000/kWh, meaning that the Volt would require a battery pack costing $16 000—or $13 000 higher than economic considerations can justify. Sure, battery costs may fall, and the federal government may give as much as $7500 in tax credits, shifting some of the burden from the car owner to the taxpayer. But it’s still uneconomical.

Michalek doesn’t deprecate hybrids; it’s just that he prefers parallel designs, which can make do with smaller—and therefore cheaper—batteries. ”With a lower-cost pack, there is less investment to recover in fuel-cost saving, less weight to lug around, and less risk from uncertainty of future gasoline and electricity prices,” he says.

GM declined to respond to IEEE Spectrum’s requests for an interview. But in the company’s blog, FastLane, GM’s vice president for global program management, Jon Lauckner, attacked the CMU study as unrealistic, saying that its estimate of the cost of the batteries ”is many hundreds of dollars per kWh higher than the actual cost of the Volt pack today. Moreover, our battery team is already starting work on new concepts that will further decrease the cost of the Volt battery pack quite substantially in a second-generation Volt pack.”

So let’s assume for a minute that the pack ends up costing just $8000, about the same as the hoped-for tax break, and that the Volt and other plug-ins eventually sell by the millions. That’ll cost the government tens of billions of dollars a year in subsidies, so the bailout of Detroit will go on and on. And it won’t just be a bailout for Detroit: GM’s rivals will also be standing in line for those subsidies. Indeed, Daimler, Fiat, Mitsubishi, Nissan, and mighty Toyota, father of the Prius, are coming out with all sorts of electric-drive vehicles, just in time to take the shine off GM’s tail fins.

The Prius offers a sobering view of what the Volt is up against. It is easily the most extraordinary tech success story that the auto industry has had in decades, yet Toyota took a long time to reach the break-even point. ”I don’t think they’re making money on it even now,” says IHS Global’s Wolkonowicz.

GM can’t afford to lose money on the Volt, not even in the short run, because it doesn’t have a stable of great new products waiting in the wings to help defray the Volt’s start-up costs. Look at GM’s market share, which has been falling not just for years but for decades.

Archrival Toyota is experimenting with plug-in hybrids—although apparently not serial hybrids—and says the technology is promising but unripe. ”We are indeed committed to the technology, but we are being open about the tech progress—and the key issue is battery technology,” spokesman John Hanson told Spectrum. ”For the plug-in to become a mass-market success, we need a breakthrough in battery technology that will deliver three things: higher energy density, lower cost, and higher overall performance than lithium.”

The Volt is a fine idea, but it just can’t do what GM is asking it to do.

This article originally appeared in print as “Discharged.”

For all of 2010’s Winners & Losers, visit the special report.

기사원문: http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced-cars/loser-why-the-chevy-volt-will-fizzle/0

Diesel Deserves Better
By Drew Winter
WardsAuto.com, Dec 28, 2009 9:51 AM

Love is blind. Environmental policy should not be.

Falling in love and being monogamous usually is a good thing, but when it comes to public policy, it should not be allowed.

Nowhere is it clearer than with the Obama Admin.’s head-over-heels infatuation with electric and hybrid-electric vehicles. It continues to lavish money and attention on everything electric while it appears to forsake all others that also can play a role in reducing U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions.

Incentives aimed at encouraging EV development and sales are crucial to their success, and we support them, but the U.S. government should not be settling down with only one technology just yet.

“I understand why political leaders have fallen in love with hybrids and electrics. But this may be the one time you’ll hear someone in Washington say it shouldn’t be a monogamous relationship,” says Johan de Nysschen, president-Audi of America.

Audi and parent Volkswagen AG have EVs and HEVs in the pipeline, but that doesn’t stop de Nysschen from dissing cars such as the Chevy Volt and declaring himself “the world’s biggest diesel advocate.”

De Nysschen’s point is that EVs are too expensive and impractical for the average consumer, and their widespread use is decades away. He adds that with most U.S. electricity generated by coal-fired power plants, EVs’ benefit to the environment is overrated.

Meanwhile, de Nysschen says diesels can provide big carbon-dioxide reductions almost immediately without big sacrifices by consumers.

Like most executives of auto makers based in Europe, de Nysschen is chagrined by diesel’s lack of acceptance in the U.S. About half of all new vehicles sold in Europe are powered by compression-ignition engines.

Because they are 25%-30% more efficient than comparable gasoline engines, diesels have had a profound impact on Europe’s fleet fuel economy and CO2 emissions.

Yet even though the newest diesels debuting in the U.S. on Volkswagen, Audi, BMW and Mercedes vehicles are proving oil burners can meet California’s emissions regulations for oxides of nitrogen and particulates, the toughest in the world, the Obama Admin. can’t bring itself to introduce the “D word” into the public dialog on climate change.

Even worse, California air-quality regulators, who are aggressively pursuing local state initiatives to curb greenhouse gases, continue to devise new regulatory hurdles that hurt diesels rather than make them part of the solution.

As it stands now, the California Air Resources Board’s LEV III (low emissions vehicle) mandate will make it nearly impossible to sell diesel-powered vehicles in California beginning in 2014, just one new-product cycle away. Auto makers are hoping to convince CARB to bend.

After another round of Ward’s 10 Best Engines testing where we drove three incredibly good new diesels and named two to our 2010 list (as well as two HEVs), we have to insist the Obama Admin. back away from its singular devotion to electricity and at the very least tell CARB to moderate LEV III standards to accommodate diesels.

Long ago, Europe decided the fuel-economy and CO2-reduction benefits of diesel were more important than its drawback of higher NOx emissions. The Obama Admin. should do the same.

Love is blind. Environmental policy should not be.

기사원문:http://wardsauto.com/commentary/diesel_deserves_better_091228/index.html