ODO 9826 miles

So, after a brief hiatus, I'm back with another post. My inspiration came from new lingo I picked up at the recent Plug-in Electric Vehicle (PEV) Collaborative Annual Meeting held at UCLA. "Dwell Time" came up in the conversation about picking the most effective location for public charging stations by focusing on places that people naturally stay long enough to get a useful charge. This term, while new, made complete sense to me because I am frequently disappoint/happy to find that the Clipper Creek charger at the local public library is being used right when I'm going to hang out there for a while. Translation, there is an optimal dwell time for public charging at the library. {Hint to Mayor Garcetti - get more public charging at the libraries. It is super popular and would be a great element to your Sustainable City pLAn.}

You can see from these photos what an alignment between public charging and dwell time looks like. The public chargers at the top of the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook were completely empty (top photo), as was the parking lot as a whole. People routinely park at the bottom and hike to the top and not vice versa. Sadly, this sets a bad example for public charging. On the other hand, the chargers at the Bacara Resort in Santa Barbara (bottom photo) were full with Teslas during my recent Wall Street Journal ECO:nomics conference. Talk about an alignment with dwell time. With the beautiful weather, delicious wine and food and fantastic spa and beach, nobody was going to leave Bacara in a hurry.

For my next post, I'll explain the other piece of lingo I picked up at the PEV Collaborative = "Butts in Seats." That one gave me the giggles.

ODO 9134 miles

I am a prosumer! I'm going to get business cards made that say: 

Allison Faris

Prosumer

My Net Zero EV

Now, what is a prosumer? It is a new term to me as well that I recently encountered while reading an excerpt of the VerdeXchange 2015 opening plenary “The Future is Now—The Green Economy Going to Scale” on The Planning Report. In the plenary, President and CEO of California ISO Steve Berberich referred to the 2,353 megawatts of solar in California, some of which is being produced by "prosumers," a combination of producer/consumer. Berberich talked about the need to balance a massive increase in cost with the coming massive overgeneration of electricity resulting from having solar energy produced during a limited time during the day (no sun at night folks). What will the likes of SCE, PG&E, LADWP and others do with this massive overgeneration during the day? Just shed it off the grid some how?

Well, San Diego has a pilot project to see if the answer is dispatchable distributed energy through electric vehicle fleets: "electric vehicles directly participate as a grid resource in the wholesale market, vehicles respond to signals from the grid operator to reduce when electricity is scarce, and continue or resume charging when renewable generation is plentiful" This is exciting! I look forward to the day when my solar and my EV are both part of the solution to enhanced reliability, by adding and subtracting from the grid in a careful balancing act.

ODO 8705 miles

Google told me that today would have been Alessandro Volta's 270th birthday. I wish Count Volta a Happy Birthday and hope that he would have enjoyed this blog about powering an automobile with the sun's rays. He invented an early form of the electric battery called the "electrophorus." Count Volta, a man after my own heart, was quoted as saying: "The language of experiment is more authoritative than any reasoning: facts can destroy our ratiocination—not vice versa." Ah, yes, I agree that the truth is best when conveyed with data.

But, how does one go about envisioning the future? I've blogged in the past about bringing the future to the present. Well, I recently visited Kaiser's Garfield Innovation Center, where Kaiser works to bring the gap between an innovative idea and reality. One of the innovations on display was a Nissan Leaf, which represented a future where a car would autonomous drive to an individual with chronic heart failure in the middle of a possible medical emergency. The vehicle could be equipped with sensors so that the medical intervention would begin in the vehicle as it drove the patient to the hospital. Well,  many parts of this scenario are already under development. For example, the autonomous driving Leaf is on its way...in 2020. In addition, Patent US 8874301 B1 Autonomous vehicle with driver presence and physiological monitoring from Ford Global Technologies details an autonomous vehicle that would shut down and execute an emergency response mode if built-in or driver supplied biometric sensors detected "any serious condition/deviation in biologic signals." 

The pieces are all out there. We just need visionaries to bring it to the present and so I ask: WWCVD? What would Count Volta do?

ODO 8433 miles

This post is on a topic that is not EV or Solar or Solar EV related, but an important issue nonetheless. It is about water. Do you think about where the water that is coming out of your faucet originally came from? The mountains somewhere. That reservoir that I can see from the freeway maybe. Well, in this time of serious drought, where our drinking water comes from will likely become more diversified as we get more, umm, creative with finding new sources of water to replace the snow that is not falling.

In behavior change theory, one way to affect change is to bring the future to the present. That is what the state of California is trying to do by offering subsidies/rebates to electric vehicle drivers. As I drive along, a single driver in the carpool lane waving to everyone stuck in traffic on the 405, I am demonstrating a new model for transportation. So how can we bring the future to the present in demonstrating the latest water source that is gaining attention - recycled water, aka #poopwater? Well, Jimmy Fallon did just that when Bill Gates came on his show on January 21st. Watch it here. Bill Gates posted this photo on his twitter feed:
I love the way Fallon and Gates are showing everyone that recycled water is delicious! Other products are leading the way, my favorite is the recent offer from Clean Water Services to provide recycled water to homebrewers. Sign me up!

But time for a little truth. You might be drinking #poopwater already if you live near me. West Basin Municipal Water District uses recycled water for groundwater replenishment, i.e. they clean it and then put it in the ground. But, groundwater is 21% of their water sources. So what goes in, might also come out and to your faucet. That's what I call bringing the future to the present.

ODO 8283 miles

BMW i3 (Credit: BMW)

{Imagine a deep-voiced announcement}
In preparation for the Super Bowl, please enjoy this sneak peak of the BMW i3 commercial called "Newfangled Idea"

What did you think? So I have this shirt with the word "darwinisme" with a sperm squiggle that transforms into an @. The other day, I had to explain that shirt to my daughter. Will she ever get it? I doubt it but she will surely have her own parallel experience.

Here's one to think about: Running on fumes. As we transition to a transformed perhaps majority electrified transportation system, will she think back on the days when running on fumes was the modus operandi for Mom, always on the lookout for the next diesel station?

ODO 8216 miles

A gem to think about from Jerry Brown's recent California State of the State address - a quote from Edward O. Wilson, father of biodiversity: "we are needlessly turning the gold we inherited from our forebears into straw, and for that we will be despised by our descendants." I feel like those of us that drive and support the growing EV community are at least trying to slow the process, maybe not spinning our gold into straw as fast as we have been.

One way to slow that process is to continue to build up the EV infrastructure. And where do we spend most of our waking hours? I spend them at work. So workplace charging seems like a natural place to concentrate our effort. As a strong start, the US DOE Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy has issued the Workplace Charging Challenge. Is your employer on the list? Yeah! UCLA is! Boo...UC Berkeley is not (again I'm surprised by the lack of EV support in the City of Berkeley). As you can see from all the orange dots, I think the geographic diversity is a good sign. There's almost one company in every state. How can we get that wide area just east of the Rockies involved? MT, WY, ND, SD, NE. Now there is a recently installed Tesla supercharger station in Lusk, Wyoming. You gotta start somewhere. Maybe what we really need an an electric pickup truck.

ODO 7999 miles

Sony

I've never been much of a gadget person so it shouldn't surprise anyone that I haven't followed the Consumer Electronics Show in years past. But this year, news of the happenings at CES trickled in and I was surprised that Monday's keynote speaker was from a car company. I guess it wasn't just any car company, but Dr. Z from Mercedes Benz. I was stuck scratching my head - since when did a car become a consumer electronic? Consumer electronics to me are my yellow Sony walkman cassette player that I got as a gift when I was 12 or the laptop I'm writing this blog on. It never crossed my mind that my car would be in the same category as my walkman, but the times, they are a changin'. So much so that CNET called it "the year of the car at CES 2015" and Business Insider declared "CES 2015 is all about the car of the future."

So here are my highlights {even though I wasn't there in person}. Or rather highlight: autonomous vehicles. Audi sent a self-driving car from 550 miles from San Francisco to Las Vegas. BMW has a watch with an app that will instruct your EV to come pick you up (video). Volkswagen will park your car for you, and used the e-Golf as the base vehicle to demonstrate the technology. 

In EV news, there may be 3 minute charging in the future, if this Israeli start-up is successful. And a electric scooter called the Gogoro Smartscooter with battery swapping infrastructure (well, I know how that worked out for Project Better Place). ChargePoint launched a sleek EV charger, ChargePoint Home, that links to Nest and has an app for additional controls. Ah, the marriage of EV and IoT has come at last.

Now, I'm looking forward to next year's CES, if only to understand what my walkman and EV have in common. For now, I think they are both just really cool.