BMW Launches Its Answer to Tesla’s Supercharger Network

Wired has an article on BMWs foray into recharging networks for electric vehicles - BMW Launches Its Answer to Tesla’s Supercharger Network.

The biggest problem automakers selling electric cars face is limited range. No one wants to get caught without any juice. To get around this concern, Tesla, whose Model S offers the best range (up to 265 miles), is building a vast network of “Supercharger” stations that make it possible to take epic road trips. Now BMW is following suit, launching a network of charging stations to make owning its first all-electric car, the range-handicapped i3, more convenient.

The automaker announced last week that it has developed an impressively small, lightweight, and inexpensive charger that it is working to install around the country. BMW will sell the charger to “authorized partners”—starting with dealers—for $6,548. NRG eVgo, a private EV-charging company, will install at least 100 around California and offer free charging to i3 owners through the end of 2015.

The 24 kilowatt BMW i DC Fast Charger, developed with Bosch Automotive, can charge the i3’s battery up to 80 percent in 30 minutes. Compared to other chargers on the market, the BMW version is quite small: 31 inches tall, 19 inches wide and 12 inches deep. It weighs just 100 pounds, light enough to be mounted without reinforcing the wall or pouring extra concrete.

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An oil crash is on its way and we should be ready

New Scientist has a rather pessimistic article by Jeremy Leggett on peak oil and related topics - An oil crash is on its way and we should be ready.

FIVE years ago the world was in the grip of a financial crisis that is still reverberating around the globe. Much of the blame for that can be attributed to weaknesses in human psychology: we have a collective tendency to be blind to the kind of risks that can crash economies and imperil civilisations.

Today, our risk blindness is threatening an even bigger crisis. In my book The Energy of Nations, I argue that the energy industrys leaders are guilty of a risk blindness that, unless action is taken, will lead to a global crash – and not just because of the climate change they fuel.

Let me begin by explaining where I come from. I used to be a creature of the oil and gas industry. As a geologist on the faculty at Imperial College London, I was funded by BP, Shell and others, and worked on oil and gas in shale deposits, among other things. But I became worried about societys overdependency on fossil fuels, and acted on my concerns.

In 1989, I quit Imperial College to become a climate campaigner. A decade later I set up a solar energy business. In 2000 I co-founded a private equity fund investing in renewables.

In these capacities, I have watched captains of the energy and financial industries at work – frequently close to, often behind closed doors – as the financial crisis has played out and the oil price continued its inexorable rise. I have concluded that too many people across the top levels of business and government have found ways to close their eyes and ears to systemic risk-taking. Denial, I believe, has become institutionalised.

As a result of their complacency we face four great risks. The first and biggest is no surprise: climate change. We have way more unburned conventional fossil fuel than is needed to wreck the climate. Yet much of the energy industry is discovering and developing unconventional deposits – shale gas and tar sands, for example – to pile onto the fire, while simultaneously abandoning solar power just as it begins to look promising. It has been vaguely terrifying to watch how CEOs of the big energy companies square that circle.

Second, we risk creating a carbon bubble in the capital markets. If policymakers are to achieve their goal of limiting global warming to 2 °C, 60 to 80 per cent of proved reserves of fossil fuels will have to remain in the ground unburned. If so, the value of oil and gas companies would crash and a lot of people would lose a lot of money. ...

Third, we risk being surprised by the boom in shale gas production. That, too, may prove to be a bubble, maybe even a Ponzi scheme. Production from individual shale wells declines rapidly, and large amounts of capital have to be borrowed to drill replacements. This will surprise many people who make judgement calls based on the received wisdom that limits to shale drilling are few. But I am not alone in these concerns.

Even if the US shale gas drilling isnt a bubble, it remains unprofitable overall and environmental downsides are emerging seemingly by the week. According to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, whole towns in Texas are now running out of water, having sold their aquifers for fracking. I doubt that this is a boom that is going to appeal to the rest of the world; many others agree.

Fourth, we court disaster with assumptions about oil depletion. Most of us believe the industry mantra that there will be adequate flows of just-about-affordable oil for decades to come. I am in a minority who dont. Crude oil production peaked in 2005, and oil fields are depleting at more than 6 per cent per year, according to the International Energy Agency. The much-hyped 2 million barrels a day of new US production capacity from shale needs to be put in context: we live in a world that consumes 90 million barrels a day.

It is because of the sheer prevalence of risk blindness, overlain with the pervasiveness of oil dependency in modern economies, that I conclude system collapse is probably inevitable within a few years.

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Breakthrough in solar efficiency by UNSW team ahead of its time

The SMH has a report on advances in solar cell efficiency at UNSW - Breakthrough in solar efficiency by UNSW team ahead of its time.

Australian scientists have found a way of hugely increasing the efficiency of solar panels while substantially reducing their cost. The University of NSW researchers have come up with improvements in photovoltaic panel design that had not been expected for another decade.

The breakthrough involves using hydrogen atoms to counter defects in silicon cells used in solar panels. As a consequence, poor quality silicon can be made to perform like high quality wafers. The process makes cheap silicon "actually better than the best-quality material people are using at the moment", the head of the universitys photovoltaics centre of excellence, Professor Stuart Wenham, said. Silicon wafers account for more than half the cost of making a solar cell. "By using lower-quality silicon, you can drastically reduce that cost," he said. "Weve been able to figure out what the secret is that enables hydrogen to sometimes work the way people want it to, and sometimes doesnt."

At present, the best commercial solar cells convert between 17 per cent and 19 per cent of the suns energy into electricity. UNSWs technique, patented this year, should produce efficiencies of between 21 per cent and 23 per cent. ...

The price of solar panels has fallen by about 65 per cent in two years, partly due to a huge rise in production in China. Australians have been taking advantage of lower prices, with the number of homes with solar panels exceeding 1 million. The phenomenal growth has caused some casualties in the industry as companies have taken on massive debt to expand supply, then struggled with falling prices in saturated markets. Notable among them is the recent debt default by Suntech Power, once the worlds largest solar-panel maker, founded by former University of NSW researcher Shi Zhengrong.

Panel prices are predicted to fall much further. European producers predict they will be 60 per cent cheaper by 2020. "Based on the technological advances were making, we think thats certainly achievable," Dr Wenham said.

Eight commercial firms have signed up to be a partner in developing the technology to an industrial scale, including Suntech, which continues to operate from its base in the eastern Chinese city of Wuxi and has a research unit in Sydney.

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