Tesla Motors and Elon Musk have been in the news a lot lately, receiving coverage of their recent successes — Climate Progress certainly included.

Musk took a serious gamble to start an American electric car company, kept it going with help from almost half a billion in Energy Department loans, and has seen Tesla rise from shaky uncertainty into a profitable luxury electric automaker whose products earn the highest ratings from Motor Trend and Consumer Reports.

But should clean tech outlets and those watching for advacements in zero-emission transportation hold Tesla aloft as the Next Big Thing? Some conservative outlets have abandoned their attacks on Tesla or ignored its successes.

Yet there are understandable criticisms of the company’s business model. “Range anxiety” is a concern for many. And no matter how highly rated it may be, the vast majority of people will never be able to afford the Model S, currently priced between $60,000-90,000. The profit that Tesla reported in the first quarter of this year was not achieved entirely through selling cars, but through selling $68 million in Zero-Emissions credits through California state law.

Is Tesla here to stay? And should it be the poster car that so many have recently lauded as a sign of a new gasoline-free transportation system?

One hurdle for Tesla is range. It excels as a city car. But unlike new car companies that can rely on existing gas stations to give drivers peace of mind when it comes time for refueling, a Model S is tethered to the network of charging stations on a long road trip. Tesla essentially has to build the recharging infrastructure more quickly than their cars can drive. Which is what Musk said Tesla is trying to do.

A company press release announced last week that this year it will vastly expand the supercharger network its cars use to refuel — for free. This year, the network will “connect most of the major metro areas in the US and Canada,” and a year from now, the company says the network will stretch across the continent. The chargers themselves have been upgraded to allow for a full three hours of driving in less than a half hour.

What this means is that in 2014, a Tesla owner will be able to drive from coast to coast and all places in between, for free, stopping every three hours for a 20-30 minute pit stop. As the nation decarbonizes and states increase the portion of their electric grid sourced from clean energy (through renewable energy standards), the net carbon pollution from Tesla vehicles will drop steadily over time.

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Electric cars are one of the key pieces of the renewable energy economy of the future, but they do come with a few challenges: charging them currently takes a while (30 minutes to a few hours), charging can add considerably to a home’s overall electricity use, and — when scaled up to thousands or millions of homes — that charging places a lot of extra demand on an electrical grid. At the same time, smart grid technology offers two-way information and communication between consumers and providers, allowing the first to better manage their electricity use and costs, and the second to better manage electricity supply. But so far, there hasn’t been much investigation into how smart grid technology could help with electric car charging specifically.

Enter a new demonstration project from the Australian state of Victoria. As part of the Victorian Department of Transport’s Electric Vehicle Trial, the firm DiUS outfitted ten electric-car-owning homes with their ChargeIQ system. The participants could pick “on demand” charging, which works the same way recharging something like an electric razor or drill works — you plug it in, and it immediately starts drawing power. Or they could pick the “smart” charging option, using the ChargeIQ’s smart grid technology to manage the charging of their cars. This would allow them to monitor their charging from a website or a smartphone app, respond to suggestions for the best time to charge, make choices, and react to unanticipated events.

The designers used flexible pricing so participants could respond to peak and off-peak costs, and they were even occasionally hit with simulated events such as an outage due to weather, a demand peak, or a heat wave to see how they’d respond. The result? Participants using the smart grid option cut their charging costs in half, and the electrical utility itself enjoyed less strain and smoother power utilization.

Based on residential electricity tariffs and the project outcomes, Victorian electric vehicle drivers could save around $250 per year, or around 50 per cent on their charging costs, by adopting ‘Smart’ charging practices. Grid-integrated ‘Smart’ charging technology would deliver this saving without sacrifice or effort on their part.

Managing electric vehicle charging at the network level will not only defer costly infrastructure upgrades through peak demand management, but may deliver better returns on existing investments through improved asset utilization. Grid-integrated ‘Smart’ charging technology would deliver these benefits and avoid creation of a ‘second peak’ in electricity demand as drivers individually defer charging to the off-peak period. Importantly, the outcome from these improvements will be lower costs for all electricity consumers – not just those who drive EVs.

“Using ChargeIQ to manage EV charging through the Smart Grid, the project has demonstrated how EVs can be integrated into our electricity networks — easily, conveniently and cheaply,” said Clency Coutet, Director at/of DiUS Computing, arguing for the global relevance of some of the demonstration’s findings.

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Climate Progress recently reported on a study that found both economic and environmental benefits if homes in the northeastern United States upgraded older heating systems by moving from heating oil to switchgrass. However, one point to emphasize was the findings were specific to those circumstances — the region, the homes, and that particular use.

Switchgrass was not nearly as good an idea for electricity generation or transportation fuel. Further confirming the need for a diversity of renewable solutions to our energy needs, a recent study determined that electricity generated by solar beats out biofuels for powering cars under myriad scenarios.

The report, put together by a team from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and published in Enviornmental Science and Technology, compared five different approaches to see what was the most efficient way to power a compact passenger vehicle for every 100 kilometers driven:

1. Battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) run on electricity from solar power.
2. Battery-electric vehicles run on electricity from switchgrass.
3. Internal combustion vehicles (ICVs) run on switchgrass biofuel.
4. Battery-electric vehicles run on electricity from corn.
5. Internal combustion vehicles run on corn-based biofuel.

The analysis considered land-use, greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel use, and took into account the production and use life cycles of both the fuels themselves and the vehicles they power.

In terms of land-use, solar significantly out-performed all other options. It performed modestly better than switchgrass in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and significantly better than corn-based biofuel. Solar was actually equal or slightly worse than switchgrass when it came to fossil fuel requirements over the totality of the life cycle, but it still out-performed corn-based internal combustion. (And, of course, gasoline.)

So all things considered, a pretty clear win for solar-powered electric battery vehicles:

A write up over at Green Car Congress has more details on the assumptions and variables in the study’s modeling.

“PV is orders of magnitude more efficient than biofuels pathways in terms of land use — 30, 50, even 200 times more efficient — depending on the specific crop and local conditions,” Roland Geyer, a UCSB Bren School of Environmental Science & Management Professor, told Science Daily. “You get the same amount of energy using much less land, and PV doesn’t require farm land.” The central bottleneck, as the report notes, is the low efficiency of photosynthesis:

Biofuels for ICVs and bioelectricity for BEVs use photosynthesis to convert solar radiation into transportation services, that is, they are sun-to-wheels transportation pathways. While photosynthesis has a theoretical maximum energy conversion efficiency of 33 percent, the overall conversion efficiency of sunlight into terrestrial biomass is typically below 1 percent, regardless of crop type and growing conditions.

“Today’s thin-film PV is at least 10-percent efficient at converting sunlight to electricity,” Geyer explained — hence solar’s superior performance. In fact, the WWF’s Solar PV Atlas found that as far as land-use goes, solar is so efficient that less than 1 percent of global land areas would be needed to supply all the world’s electricity needs in 2050.

Traditional corn-based biofuels are problematic on all sorts of levels: Carbon emissions from agricultural production over their full life cycle largely wipe out any carbon benefits at the point of actual vehicle use. They compete with human food supplies and food cropland, driving up global prices and contributing to global poverty and instability. And new cropland sequesters less carbon from the atmosphere than the grassland or forest it typically displaces.

Switchgrass and other cellulosic biofuels, while they avoid disrupting food supplies, are not immune to these other flaws either. On top of that, their commercial viability at any time in the near future is far from certain.

For the clean car fleet of the future, electrical and hybrid vehicles relying on a grid powered by solar — and presumably wind, hydroelectric, and such — still appears to be the way to go.

By Felix Kramer and Max Baumhefner, via Switchboard

When it comes to consumer products, environmentalists generally don’t encourage people to buy new and buy now. But that’s what we’re about to do because electric cars are significantly cleaner than gasoline vehicles, and driving one can save you serious cash at the pump.

Perhaps you’ve already thought about buying an electric car, but dismissed the idea for one reason or another. Let’s look at some common misconceptions, and offer some good reasons why you might want to reconsider:

“I should drive my current car into the ground.”

“Hold on,” you say to yourself, “I already own a car that gets 25 miles a gallon. I want to get my money’s worth from the investment.” The sooner you start saving gas, the better it is for the planet and your pocketbook. There’s no use in throwing good money after bad at the pump, and the sooner you sell your current car, the less money you’ll lose to depreciation.

“I’d just be switching my pollution from the tailpipe to the power plant.”

If you want to go green, driving on electricity is a clear winner. Using today’s average American electricity mix of natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, wind, geothermal, and solar, an electric car emits half the amount of climate-changing carbon pollution per mile as the average new vehicle. In states with cleaner mixes, such as California, it’s only a quarter as much. To find out how clean your electric car would be today, plug your zip code into the EPA’s “Beyond Tailpipe Emissions Calculator.” You should also know that, because old coal plants are increasingly being retired and replaced by cleaner and renewable resources, plug-in cars are the only cars that become cleaner as they age.

“What I save on gas, I’ll pay in electricity.”

On average US residential electricity rates, driving one of today’s electric cars is the equivalent of driving a 27 mile-per-gallon car on buck-a-gallon gasoline. It’s been that way for the last four decades, and is forecasted to stay that way for the next three decades. Experts basically throw up their hands when asked to predict the price of gas next year, let alone 30 years from now. One thing we do know: the price at the pump will jump up and down due to geopolitical events beyond our control. If you’re tired of that rollercoaster, call your local utility to ask about electricity rates designed for plug-in cars.

“I’ll hold off until prices go down and there are more places to charge.”

If you’re thinking you’d be better off waiting for a cheaper, better electric car, and a charging station on every block, consider the following:

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After a difficult first year in 2011, during which Chevrolet sold a mere 7,671 Volts, sales of the vehicle shot up to a respectable 23,461 car sales for 2012 — driven largely by consumer demand reacting to high gas prices. According to the Washington Post (hat tip to Treehugger) that surge looks likely to continue: General Motors will be upping 2013′s production to 36,000 units.

Able to run on electrical or gasoline power, the Volt — along with other hybrids, electric vehicles, and fuel-efficient cars — has helped boost job growth in the automotive sector in the face of a sluggish economy. This happened despite a storm of right-wing contempt for fuel-efficient automobile technology over the last few years, which focused largely on the Volt as a symbol of President Obama’s (largely successful) attempts to give the American automotive industry a chance to retool itself and get back on its feet.

Since then, overall hybrid sales increased 50 percent in 2012 from the previous model year, sales of plug-in electric vehicles tripled, and GM itself captured 7 percent of the hybrid market — up 2 percent from the year before. And now the company is looking to bulk up its Volt production by 20 percent:

General Motors Co. is planning to build as many as 36,000 Chevrolet Volts and other plug-in hybrids for worldwide delivery this year, 20 percent more than in 2012, two people familiar with the effort said.

GM is planning to build 1,500 to 3,000 of the fuel- efficient vehicles a month, said the people, who didn’t want to be identified because the target isn’t public. GM sold about 30,000 Volt and similar Opel Ampera cars globally in 2012, said Jim Cain, a company spokesman, who declined to give a target for this year.

Chief Executive Officer Dan Akerson has struggled to compete against more successful alternative-power vehicles such as Toyota Motor Corp.’s Prius. The CEO originally touted the Volt’s gasoline-and-electric system as the technology of the future and forecast global Volt sales of 60,000 in 2012, before settling for half that amount.

The 36,000 target is “probably a doable number,” Jim Hall, principal of consultancy 2953 Analytics, said. “It will have a full calendar year in Europe” and GM will probably sell more this year now that the Volt is eligible for the car-pool lane in California, he said.

Admittedly, these numbers remain behind GM’s previous hoped-for targets. It still lags Toyota, which boosted its hybrid sales 70 percent in 2012 over the previous model year, dominating the market with 892,519 sales of its various Prius hybrid models worldwide. The Prius starts at $24,200 — and a subcompact Prius model sells for $19,080 — which undercuts GM’s $39,145 four-seat Volt.

So good news for electric and hybrid cars as a whole, and thus for fuel efficiency and the environment. But less so for the Volt itself.

Still, the Chevy Volt has several factors going in its favor. It was selected as 2011′s North American Car of the Year — with 92 percent of those surveyed telling Consumer Reports they would buy open again. Meanwhile, fuel standards are set to require 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, technological moves on the horizon promise to make the car’s lithium ion battery technology lighter and more efficient, and there’s every reason to think high gas prices are here to stay.

Lithium-ion batteries are an extremely common form of rechargeable battery often found in consumer electronics such as laptops and cell-phones. At those smaller scales the batteries’ technology is reliable and well-understood, but at larger sizes there have been challenges.

The electrolyte component in the batteries is typically liquid and quite flammable, and the batteries as a whole are prone to shorts, overheating and catching fire. Boeing’s new Dreamliner 787 fleet was recently grounded worldwide after two separate incidents in which the on-board lithium-ion battery, which supplies the planes with auxiliary and back-up power, caught fire.

Improvements in larger lithium-ion batteries would be a big step forward for technologies such as electric cars or electrical grids, and thus for sustainable transportation and energy. To that end, a group of researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have just published preliminary work on a new form of battery that relies on a solid electrolyte. According to a piece in today’s Climate Wire, as well as a recent report in Technology Review, the new batteries promise to be lighter, safer, and able to store five to ten times more energy than the batteries on Boeing’s 787:

The ORNL researchers, in work published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Chemistry Society, have an easy method for making a nanostructured form of one solid electrolyte. The nanostructure improves the material’s conductivity 1,000 times, enough to make it useful in lithium-ion batteries. The researchers also showed that the new material is compatible with high-energy electrodes.

The solid electrolyte isn’t as conductive as liquid electrolytes, but the researchers say they can compensate for this by making the electrolyte very thin, among other measures. Even then, the batteries might not charge as quickly or provide the same boost of power possible with liquid electrolytes, but this would be okay in many applications, such as in electric cars, where the sheer number of battery cells makes it easy to deliver adequate bursts of power.

The solid electrolyte not only makes batteries safer, it could also enable the use of higher energy electrode materials. As a result, while the rate at which these batteries deliver power may be less than today’s lithium-ion batteries, the total amount of energy they can store would be far higher. A much smaller battery could then be used—saving space and weight on airplanes and greatly reducing the cost of electric vehicles.

The team restructured the solid electrolyte to be porous at the nanoscale, which yielded the far higher level of conductivity. The solid electrolyte also helps prevent shorts, and unlike the liquid counterparts won’t degrade electrodes. That’s particularly important for building better lithium-sulfur batteries, which can store tremendous amounts of energy but have safety problems and o far haven’t been able to recharge enough times to make them useful for something like an electric car.

The ORNL team’s work is still in the embryonic stage: The tests have only been carried out with cells about the size of a coin, and the research into compatibility with lithium-sulfur batteries specifically remains unpublished.

China is trying to get a leg up on the market for clean transportation by bulking up the rate it’s been filing patents. According to a recent report in Europe’s China Daily, China filed over 2,000 patents for alternative-energy cars in 2012, placing it just behind Japan and the United States, and dead even with Germany and South Korea:

With a worldwide push for sustainable, clean transportation, patents are vital to survival in the global new-energy vehicle industry, China Intellectual Property News reported.

China had filed more than 2,000 patent applications – 8 percent of the world total – for new-energy cars by the end of last year to share the third place with Germany and South Korea, according to the statistics from Thomson Reuters.

Japan ranks the first with nearly 9,000 patents, followed by the United States with 4,000, accounting for a respective 60 percent and 22 percent of the world total.

China has actually been in the patent game for sometime. In 2011, the country’s patent office received more applications — for all forms of invention, not just green technology — than any other nation. At the same time, very few Chinese investors seek to patent their ideas abroad — less than 5 percent between 2005 and 2009. As The Economist put it, if an inventor has a genuinely good idea, they’ll seek to patent it as many places as possible. Concentrating merely on China’s office could be an indication that other incentives are driving the patent, such as the chance to snatch up a government subsidy.

The race between various countries to accrue patents in alternative-energy also raises the possibility of “patent wars,” such as those that have riled the world of software. Companies and interests attempt to round up and hoard patents in order to corner sources of revenue. That is, of course, very profitable for them, but it also tends to dampen innovation in the relevant industry. The spread of patents forces companies and inventors to spend ever more time and money making sure every conceptual aspect of the technology they’re working on is in the legal clear, or is properly licensed. That drives up costs for the companies, for consumers, and slows down the creation of new products and technologies that can raise everyone’s well-being — like cars and other forms of transport powered by sustainable energy. It arguably even drives up inequality.

The problem is especially acute in the software world, where it’s especially difficult to organize who has the rights to what into a public and easily-searchable database. But in principle the inefficiencies and transaction costs that come with over-zealous competition for patents can afflict any industry, including green tech and green transportation.

In February of 2011, for example, Butamax Advanced Biofuels, a joint venture between BP and DuPont, sued another advanced biofuels company, Gevo, for infringing their patent on a process to produce microbial-based biofuel.

by Justin Horner, via NRDC’s Switchboard

Predictions and prognostications are the stuff of the New Year–and why should driving trends be any different?  Will 2013 see a continuation of what has now been a nearly 90 month drop in population-adjusted Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT)?