Weekly-ish News - Episode 33 (November 10, 2021)

What's the Alternative?

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Electric Vehicles:

The U.S. Department of Energy released a report with some CO2/mi figures for different vehicle types, and they're mostly unsurprising.

402 g/mi - Gasoline
206 g/mi - Electric (battery)
250 g/mi - Plug-in Hybrid Electric
237 g/mi - Hydrogen (natural gas)
Link to the report itself.

Tesla will soon begin selling level 2 chargers that use the J1772 plug type.

This is small news, but paired with their network slowly opening up to non-Teslas, it's slightly interesting news.

Tesla has opened up 10 Superchargers in the Netherlands to non-Tesla vehicles as a pilot project.

Ford is investing £230 million in electric powertrain production in the UK!

Toyota announced a new EV, but there's no price right now?

Apparently they're going to have a yoke steering "wheel", at least in China?
I implore you to go to this article and look at what is probably the worst graph ever created.
It will apparently be available in 2022 some time.

BMW is currently doing research with Oak Ridge National Labs to work on high-powered wireless charging for the Porcshe Taycan.

Long Beach Transit in California has purchased 20 new all-electric transit buses from New Flyer.

The transit agency expects to be all alternative fuels by the end of 2021 and all electric by the end of the decade.

Two native tribes in Minnesota have won a $6.5m Department of Energy grant for EV deployment which will fund at least 19 new vehicles and associated charging equipment.

The Australian petrol company, Ampol, will deploy DC Fast Chargers at 100 of their gas stations across Australia.

This is in partnership with the Australian Renewable Energy Agency's announcement of EV charger funding that we discussed in Episode 26.
These chargers will be dual-port, 50kW chargers.
This is part of a $100m commitment by Ampol towards future energy projects.

FREYR Battery and Koch Strategic Platforms are working together to develop 50GWh of battery production in the U.S.

SKC is investing $423m in semiconductor production at a plant in Georgia to support EVs.

There was a recent meeting about the battery supply chain gap held by Argonne National Labs, and a recording is available here.

The Michigan utility Consumers Energy says it's ready to support more than 1 million EVs in its territory by 2030, which is around a third of the total vehicles in their region.

This is interesting because many EV naysayers point at our grid's "inability to handle EVs" as being A Thing That Is Real, despite the fact that literally every electric utility I can think of very much wants EVs to become a thing (think about it, EVs represent *more electricity for them to sell*.

California will soon get public DC Fast Chargers at Taco Bell locations in the state!

These will be 75kW Tritium chargers.
The first installations will be in San Francisco, but will likely expand elsewhere.
The chargers will have battery backups and potentially solar. Lots of focus on using renewable electricity.

Energy:

One of the last three coal power plants in Louisiana is shutting down at the end of 2021.

It is a 650MW power plant.
It was supposed to shut down in 2026, but the timeline has moved forward.
It will apparently save customers $9-15/mo on electricity.
Most of the electricity will be replaced with renewables.

Policy:

The Infrastructure Bill has finally passed, and among many other things it includes $7.5b for EV chargers.

The Biden administration has a stated goal of installing 500k chargers across the U.S.
$7.5b at 50% cost share (federal requirement for grant programs) may fun up to 100k chargers*
I'm making the assumption that 500k chargers means 500k fast chargers, but this is slightly ambiguous, though I think it's been heavily implied in the past. Recent language implies Level 2 chargers may be included.
Here is the press release from the White House about the bill's passing.

The governor of Louisiana attended last week's climate conference in Glasgow and said quite a bit about Louisiana's role in the ongoing energy transition.

This isn't as widely interesting, but it's very relevant for my home state.
He focused on our industrial sector having a lot of transferrable skills as we move from oil and gas towards renewables.
He also stated that the next governor won't be able to walk back his changes because the commercial sector is demanding climate action.

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