Conference Report
First All Plug-In Hybrid Conference PHEV2007
November 1-2, 2007
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
- Azure Dynamics
- Burnaby, BC
This conference (www.pluginhighway.ca) had a crisp timeline and grew. It was put on by the Plug-in Highway, an emerging group wanting to develop electric mobility options and renewable energy for Canada. The call for abstracts closed June 20. Papers had to be in for review by September 5 and I know mine was reviewed both in the U.S. and Canada. As abstracts were accepted you could watch as the program changed. When the conference kicked off there were 250 people populating 16 sessions, a parallel simulation course and a dynamic academic networking process for 40 invitees. We were in continuous motion and so busy that it was hard to visit the nearby convention centre to see the 20 booths or 17 vehicles displayed in the displays. All of us who attended could write a different history.
Following the opening plenary was easy. Andy Frank, of UC Davis, put us all on a common footing and described the principal of "charge depleting" plug-in hybrids and their ability to significantly reduce fuel consumption in the personal vehicle market, subject of course to the availability of batteries that can meet the mission.
Inspired, after coffee, I picked a session chaired by David Checkel of the University of Alberta entitled "PHEV Impacts on Utilities and Vehicle to Grid." Ed Innes of Manitoba Hydro showed that renewable electricity is used three times more efficiently by a battery vehicle than a fuel cell vehicle. Innes was followed by Alec Tsang of BC Hydro which has been looking at an analogue to the infrastructure for plug-in hybrids. Tsang had been monitoring a fleet of electric golf vehicles as a way of emulating a fleet of plug-in hybrids, and had interesting data to report on the interaction of these places on the local substation. He also reported that the City of Vancouver is setting up codes to allow electric vehicle charger needs to be supplied in new buildings. This session was concluded by Alistair Miller of Atomic Energy Canada whom I first heard at a Climate Change technology conference eight years ago at a time when it was projected that oil prices would level off at $27 per barrel because of the vast scale of the Alberta Tar Sands. Alistair's nuclear energy is now sought after and he has recently been analyzing the economic optimum for those locations where it is possible to hybridize it with wind energy. The night time charging needs of electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids are analyzed in his paper and he shows that they are not a problem for the grid.
After another break I was encouraged by Ali Abouimrane of the National Research Council of Canada giving a presentation on new electrolytes not only with improved thermal stability for lithium batteries but with reasonable ion transport properties. This was followed by Gitanjali DasGupta of Electrovaya describing plug-in conversion kits based on their lithium polymer battery, made reasonably safe with an iron phosphate cathode.
Unfortunately, at this point the energetic conference co-chair Eric Bibeau had arranged for me to help with a film being made for schools and I had to stop listening, talk and re-emerge at the lunch. Late arrival at a conference lunch results in useful mixing and I found myself mixed with Jan Tribulowski, a powertrain engineer, who is with BMW's technology office in Palo Alto, California. We reminisced about our common knowledge of the BMW E1 of 1992, which had a hot sodium-sulphur battery, before listening together to the first lunch speaker. This was Phillip Sharer of Argonne who was talking about the "forward looking" Powertrain Systems Analysis Toolkit (PSAT). This was useful as all delegates had a PSAT CD in their package and it was good to know why!
Still at lunch, Sharer was followed by Jasna Tomic of Westart-Calstart "Beyond Hybrids: The HTUF Process and Pathway for PHEV." (HTUF means the Hybrid Truck Users Forum). I ducked out to take a quick look around the displays at the conference centre, which included a PHEV school bus, and captured a shot of Al Cormier the executive director of Electric Mobility Canada who was on the stand of hardware in the loop modeler Opal - RT Technologies (www.opal-rt.com) with their Mathieu Giroux and Jean-Nicolas Paquin.
Executive director of Electric Mobility Canada, Al Cormier, talks to Opal-RT Technologies' Mathieu Giroux and Jean-Nicolas Paquin about hardware in their loop modeler.
Tomic concluded and partitions divided the lunch room into three. One third of the audience was trapped in each section and had to readjust their positions to listen to the talks of their choice. I headed into a session chaired by Isobel Davidson of NRC, "PHEV Experiences and Futures," to be the first speaker and broadly describe 100 years of plug-in hybrid vehicles which were contrasted with a conventional hybrid shuttle bus and van and the only fuel cell plug-in hybrid mentioned at the conference, the Ford Edge. With the latter the 15.6kWh Li-ion weighs in at 130kg and takes up 5% of the vehicle weight compared with, say, the 2.8% "battery fraction" in the current Toyota Prius.
Tony Markel of NREL followed on plug-in options and expectations but Eric Bibeau had asked for my attendance in a workshop where professors, government and "stakeholders" were putting together a Canadian PHEV network.
At the workshop my own company's needs for people skilled in hybrid vehicle modeling and controls were being safely suggested so I returned to catch the concluding speaker in Davidson's session. This turned out to be David Checkel who reported detailed results on 1992 plug-in hybrids. Most interesting was the measurement of the variation of the round-trip efficiency with depth of discharge of the battery. This efficiency can be poor at great depth of discharge. Checkel was telling us details from a past PHEV that the bulk of the community has yet to learn and is one of the core reasons that "conventional hybrid" vehicle producers choose to oscillate their hybrid battery around an optimum state of charge.
Sadly, I had to skip the dinner and the second day of this interesting conference to leave for the airport with a set of slides from Alistair Miller which he had used the day before at a symposium on Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies and Climate Change in Edmonton. I looked at them as I flew back to Vancouver on a flight for which I had paid $3.20 for a carbon credit. They told the story of hybridizing wind and nuclear power in the same way that Alistair had done for the PHEV conference. The difference was that that his audience in Edmonton had been attuned to hydrogen and not PHEV and so were these slides! I settled down to watch "Radiant City" (www.radiantcitymovie.com) and could see why it is in North America that we pursue electric mobility by whatever technology route works.
