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1. Ford and Microsoft Team Up on Electric Vehicle Smart Charging
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2. Electric Scooters, Bikes: The Surprising Energy Storage Players
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3. Green Cars Are the Platform, Now Come the Applications
Ford and Microsoft Team Up on Electric Vehicle Smart Charging
Josie Garthwaite - Automotive
“Without Hohm, there would be a proverbial traffic jam on the grid,” Microsoft’s Troy Batterberry said this morning at NYIAS. With the Hohm tool, battery charging will be managed based on factors including energy pricing and a consumer’s schedule, enabling drivers to get a full charge in the time they need (between 10pm and 7am, for example) at the lowest cost. (Batterberry will also be speaking at our Green:Net conference on April 29 in San Francisco).
Batteryberry said the Hohm tool will provide drivers with “remote and automated control,” and Ford announced that it’s working on an iPhone app to allow remote monitoring of a battery’s charge status, and charging controls — similar to the apps that General Motors and Nissan (NSANY) have unveiled for their upcoming Chevy Volt and LEAF models. (For more on this, see Green Cars Are the Platform, Now Come the Applications).
How Hohm Works:
Here's how Hohm's basic service works: A consumer logs into the Hohm site, entering as little information as their Windows Live ID and their zip code. Taking this simple location information, Hohm uses algorithms licensed from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Department of Energy to start predicting the consumer's home energy consumption. For the most accurate predictions possible, the consumer can answer up to 180 questions, ranging in topic from home size to water heater brand. Hohm will incorporate smart meter data as such tools are installed and used
Linking up with third party device makers represents “phase 2″ for Hohm (phase 1 was launching the consumer-facing web portal and connecting the site with utility data), Batterberry told us. Microsoft has strategic partnerships with smart meter makers Itron and Landis +Gyr, and Hohm has announced partnerships with several utilities. But as Mulally said this morning, “Ford is the first automaker to use Hohm for electric vehicles.”
But getting involved with electric vehicle smart charging could be one of the most interesting applications for Hohm in the future. Batterberry has told us that he thinks "electric vehicles are the killer app for the smart grid," and because the cars will consume so much electricity and will need so much intelligence to manage, they will help usher in important intelligence services for the smart grid. And by linking up with an automaker like Ford, with its on-board communication system SYNC (developed by Microsoft), there’s potential to closely integrate the vehicle with home energy use (GigaOM Pro, subscription required).
Ford’s Derrick Kuzak described a platform this morning to enable drivers to get an alert in their car that electricity prices have spiked, and they could save money by turning off large appliances like a clothes drier. Then they’d have the option to shut down those appliances until energy prices drop. “We’re not there yet,” he said. But with today’s partnership with Microsoft Hohm, “We’re not far off.”
More from GigaOM Pro on the opportunities for the connected car (subscription required):
California Rules Show Opportunities in EV Charging
The App Developer's Guide to Working with Ford Sync
How to Build Better Apps for Electric Vehicles
How Ford Sync Could Teach Cars to Talk to the Grid
Electric Scooters, Bikes: The Surprising Energy Storage Players
Katie Fehrenbacher - Automotive
Yep, those two-wheelers that look so fun to ride and are starting to be embraced in China. While car many companies, startups and investors are focused on battery technology for the next-generation of electric cars, Lux Research analyst Jacob Grose, says “e-bikes and scooters will drive the biggest growth for these batteries in the next five years."
The total market for batteries, supercapacitors and fuel cells for both transportation and the smart grid will grow from $21.4 billion in 2010 to $44.4 billion in 2015, says Lux. During that time electric bikes, or e-bikes, and scooter batteries will grow from being a $6.4 billion market in 2010 to a $10.9 billion market in 2015 (11 percent growth).
In China in the short term lead-acid battery technology will make up 93 percent of scooter and e-bike battery sales, says Lux. But lithium-ion battery technology for e-bikes will actually grow three times faster than lead acid, growing 22 percent through 2015, just from a much smaller base.
Perhaps the growth projections mean life will soon get better for the e-bike and electric scooter startups. Companies like Vectrix have struggled with profitability, but are now getting a helping hand from China’s battery firms.
The co-founder and CEO of electric vehicle maker Mission Motors, Forrest North, told us he thinks the market is now ripe for a higher-performance (and higher price tag) electric scooter technology.
Image courtesy of Mission Motors.
Green Cars Are the Platform, Now Come the Applications
Josie Garthwaite - Automotive
The connected car platform and applications aren’t so far away. According to the group of U.S. and Canadian power grid operators who make up the ISO/RTO Council (IRC) and manage most of North America's bulk electric grid, as many as 1 million plug-in vehicles could be deployed on the continent within five years to a decade.
EV = IT
For electric cars, connectivity to the web and data (enabled by on-board communication systems like Ford's Sync or General Motors' OnStar, as well as off-board mobile devices) will be "required over and above what gas engines require," according to Doug VanDagens, director of connected services for Ford. Apps can use data — about topography, traffic, battery and vehicle health, infrastructure availability, driving behavior — to help orient drivers in the nascent world of electric mobility, both in and out of their vehicle. (Ford’s Ed Pleet, Product & Business Development Manager, Connected Services, and Paul Pebbles, General Motors’ OnStar Chevy Volt Service Line Manager, will be speaking at our Green:Net event on April 29).
Navigation represents such a critical piece of the puzzle for EVs that research firm Frost & Sullivan predicts, “Unlike conventional vehicles,” for which telematics alerting drivers to points of interest remain “an expensive option, most hardware elements required for enabling these services will be built into the cost of the EV.” As an early example of this, Nissan announced on Tuesday that its upcoming LEAF electric sedan will sell for just under $33,000 in the U.S., with standard features including Internet and smart phone connectivity, "advanced navigation," and remote controls for heating, cooling and charging (elements of an iPhone app Nissan showed off in prototype in July).
The trend of cars growing increasingly connected is not limited to plug-in vehicles, however. Automakers like Ford and General Motors have invested heavily in in-vehicle communication systems (Ford Sync, OnStar) for models across their lineup. And at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Ford announced that it had cracked open its Sync platform, allowing a handful of “trusted partners” (Pandora, OpenBeak and Stitcher) to hook up their smartphone apps to vehicle controls.
The Importance of Being Open
The finance chief for London's climate change program, Padmesh Shukla, explained in a panel last year that Sun Microsystems' Java platform — an ubiquitous system for software development for mobile devices, enterprise servers and the web — offers a model for the buildout of infrastructure for electric vehicles (in particular, he spoke about setting up guidelines for bidding on government projects).
The goal is to avoid picking one technology or company to have a monopoly on charging infrastructure, and instead foster development of common standards, tools and practices for developers and generally create an environment in which electric car companies can prosper.
Serving the Grid
The grid operators group IRC anticipates that as more vehicles come onto the grid, they will "transform from reliability assets,” (i.e. demand clusters likely to strain the grid), “to market assets," helping to balance grid load and store energy from variable, renewable sources. In other words, vehicles will become a platform of sorts for grid services, requiring increasingly complex charging schedules, more frequent communications, forecasting of resources and validation of transactions.
Various entities taking on the role of aggregator — grouping together hundreds of plug-in vehicles to provide services like scheduled battery charging based on pricing information and total grid load — will be making investments in the coming years to provide these services. According to IRC, a typical aggregator will invest $70,000 for servers, engineering, network infrastructure, software and project management to support connectivity with a grid operator.
Electric vehicle infrastructure startup Better Place (whose VP of Global Utility Alliances Hugh McDermott will be speaking on our New Networked Car panel at Green:Net) represents one example of a company seeking to build a business partly on the framework of an automotive platform. Sidney Goodman, the company's VP of Automotive Alliances, has explained to us (GigaOM Pro, subscription required) that Better Place wants to route subscribers to different charging stations based on factors including location, a battery’s state of charge and how crowded a given station is.
Long term, the company also aims to work with utilities to manage charging, with battery charging prioritized based on a user profile, your location (whether you're at your own workplace, for example), or plugging in for a charge at another office building and likely to hit the road again in an hour.
Examples of lighter weight applications for a vehicle platform abound, with the automotive market already fueling new app stores and apps for smartphones (see our chart on 8 iPhone Apps for Car 2.0). ZipCar, the country's largest car-sharing network, developed an iPhone app that enables customers to find and reserve cars in its network and even unlock vehicle doors. Nissan has created an iPhone app for its LEAF electric vehicle that includes a remote control function that's supposed to let drivers monitor their battery charge levels.
If you want to learn more about the connected car as a platform and how developers need to tackle transportation, come listen to Paul Pebbles (General Motors’ OnStar Chevy Volt Service Line Manager), Hugh McDermott (Vice President, Global Utility Alliances for Better Place), Mark Perry (Director of Product Planning, Nissan), Ed Pleet (Product & Business Development Manager, Connected Services, Ford Motor Co.) and Saul Zambrano (Director, Integrated Demand-side Management Core Products, PG&E) at our Green:Net conference on April 29 in San Francisco.
Related reports on GigaOM Pro (subscription required):
The App Developer’s Guide to Working With Ford Sync
How to Build Better Apps for Electric Vehicles
Report: IT and Networking Issues for the Electric Vehicle Market
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