University Place  Theodore Bohn The Past, Present and Future of Vehicle Electrification  March 12, 2014 UP996   cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension. On behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday Nite, 50 times a year. Tonight it's my pleasure to be able to introduce to you Ted Bohn. He works at Argonne National Laboratory. He got his master's degree in electrical engineering here at UW-Madison. He grew up in Cleveland, Wisconsin. 

I just drove through Cleveland, Ohio, the other day. I'm assuming Cleveland is over by Lake Michigan? Different place, different lake. Tonight, he's going to talk about electric cars. I got a sneak peek at his Powerpoint, and it's pretty remarkable, the historical track of electrical cars. I'm pretty excited about getting to hear about what's going to happen in the next five or ten years. It's amazing what's happened in the last 110. Please join me in welcoming Ted to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. [applause]  >> Thank you very much, everybody. My name is Ted Bohn. I work for Argonne National Lab. 

I have a zero-time appointment here at the university, so I have a lot of affiliation with the university. No salary, but a lot of affiliation. [laughter] I actually use them as one of my prime contractors, so when you say what's the quid pro quo, I have the most talented people that I can access here, and I also live in Madison, so even though my office is in Chicago, I work in Detroit and Washington, DC, my home is here. And everybody knows why your home would be here. So, that being said, a lot of things are happening in the last century plus. Most people think that the electric car thing is new and it is the future. Pretty true that people a century-plus ago said the same thing. Edison, Steinmetz, and Ford, and Ford's wife, everybody's gonna tell you the same thing. If we can just get a better battery, we're all set. [laughter] So most people would say, for their phone, it's not really a problem, right? It used to be you'd have a half a day on your battery. 

You'd change batteries, plug it in. Most people's smart phones can go a day. A lot of it has to do with the amount of consumption. So efficient vehicles make batteries last longer. Better infrastructure, and where it is you would plug in your battery. You can imagine that if there were no plugs to plug in your phone, it would be kind of hard to maintain your flow. So, for electric vehicles it's about getting where you need to go with the resources you already have. Planning ahead is one part and having the right tool for the right job. We're going to spend a lot on historical content today, a little bit on technology and standards, and then of course look a little bit toward the future. That's basically what I work on, is not quite determining the future, but enabling the future. 

What we do at Argonne National Lab, and let me go back and just talk about where we've come in the last century. A century ago, there were garages with charging stations on the wall and cabs and other fleet vehicles that would come in, plug into the front and drive away, just like we do today. Everyone says, oh look and see this new thing I have. It's only a hundred years old. They're only, you know, 50,000 cars doing this a hundred years ago, but if you think it's new, it's new. It's new to you. And we'll just talk a lot about that. I do have to point out this is sponsored. My activity, my participation here, a lot of these slides, are your tax dollars at work. I'm very proud to say that's what we actually do. 

We spend money. We don't make money. We spend money that is used wisely, instead of money that is used just so they could get rid of it. At Argonne National Lab, this is the campus, the central office buildings. My lab is over here, in this cluster of buildings. This is where we have the smart -- operability center. Again, I do a lot with the grid. Over here, is the advanced photon source, where they do very, very, very, very short wavelength radiation, shorter than xrays, to look at different things on how proteins are built, how molecules are put together, and again, anything to do with nanos. This building over here is the nanotechnology center. Just to give you an orientation. 

So, is a headline from this week or a century ago? Which is, "Do you really need a 200-mile-on-one-charge battery car?" I heard that. You have to have a 200-mile range car. This is a century-old ad out of Harper's Weekly. Literally, this is a piece of newspaper, an ad, and these words on it. One of the things people do in their car, they go shopping, go to parties, theater, market, work, church, hospital, farm. I take my electric car out to the farm. But this calling? Huh, not a lot of cell phones a hundred years ago. That was when you'd go to call on someone else. You'd take your car and you'd call on them. [laughter] So, inflation. 

A lot of people will talk about how expensive cars are. Adjusted for inflation, they're about the same. So, in 1914, a Detroit electric is $2,500. Boy, I'd like to buy that car now. Well, if you would buy that car now, it'd be $56,000 about the cost of a BMW i3 or some of the other modern cars. Again, this is just to let you know some of the formatting is not as clear as it should be. I recycled a lot of slides, and I'm very much on recycling, so both in materials and labor. But the Model T, by comparison, was about one-fifth the price. So, about $12,000, about the same as a Hyundai-Kia. The Runabouts, which were much, much simpler, were just above that, about $20,000. 

It kinds of talks about entry level, Honda Fit, some of these entry level electric cars, the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, not a lot of features, not a lot of price. Then the Surrey which I thought was kind of outrageous, this one right here the equivalent of $38,000 and some of the options were, I can't see where it is down here. Anyway some of the add-ons were several hundred dollars which would be the equivalent of leather seats and a roof. Again everybody a century ago, Detroit Electric saying that we are the best company, we will be around forever we use worm or bevel gears for your axle. Anybody who knows about gears it's a very old technology so the point is that a century ago we had all these electric cars in these garages with wall chargers and we had street infrastructure, in the gutter plates, on the street, in the snow, in the winter, in Detroit a century ago there were 46,000 miles of electric taxis in operation a century ago. Fleets of cars not just a few but fleets in Detroit; not in Miami or some other sunny place. Just to warm up your brain cells what is the best way to get around in the future? This whole personal transportation paradigm might not be the future. Before we go too far into the past we'll go look into the future and say will everybody have their own car or we do this car sharing thing? Or will there be lots of bikes parked everywhere? Or will you be caring your deer home from hunting season on your bike? Or carrying your washing machine home on your back? The label didn't show up on here but this is Tolstoy on his bike so while you're thinking great thoughts and writing great stories you'd be riding your bike. I believe that is the future. As I was saying about the 60 occupying this space so here is 60 people standing next to each other, here's 60 people on a bus. 

Here are 60 bicycles and 60 people, about the same volume. Here are 60 cars, in fact there's not even 60 cars, there's less then 60 cars. Here you can just see that the volume of personal transportation is much greater then a bus or a cluster of bikes. Looking at the lifetime C02 per kilometer, grams per kilometer a bicycle you wouldn't think would be that high, 21 grams. Electric assist bicycle only a gram more so that's pretty good. That means that I don't have to peddle so much and I'm not really having a big carbon footprint. A passenger car again, based on short trips that a bicycle would make 270 grams. You can see over an order of magnitude and a bus is someplace in between about 100 grams. Some people say that a runner is about 50 grams per mile. I know per mile better the kilometer. 

Most hybrid cars are well under 100 grams per mile. The moral of that story is if you're going someplace especially to a foot race, drive your car then run. [laughter] A hundred years of electric transportation, GE has this charging station called the watt station. A century ago, they had something called the watt station and here is a very elegantly dressed person with a very bright light behind this charge station plugged. This is a mercury vapor arc rectifier. A century ago they had 8,000 chargers, 8,000 home DC chargers. Then it goes man, we're going to have DC charging in our home. This lady knew that a century ago. GE knew that a century ago. Here's Steinmetz from GE and Edison and this is basically Steinmetz conceding to Edison saying, you know what, we can't figure out how to make a good battery but Edison batteries rock. 

That's what basically Charles Proteus Steinmetz signed it here and he said average guy can't afford to maintain a horse. Horses are expensive to feed but an electric car that you can afford. Again, a century ago in an ad in this Electric Review 1914. Porsche's first car, some of you have seen this in the headlines recently 112 years in storage pull it out. Basically it was built in 1898, he was 23 years old, he's got his initials scrawled into here. He worked for Loaner, built this surrey that had eight convertible bodies so you could put different styles of components on top but this is the restored actual first electric vehicle that Porsche built. His lightweight 286 pound motor did all of three horse power continuous five horse peak. This here is a motor drive it's 150 horsepower and that's four years old. The next generation is about the size of a box of cigars, 150 horsepower traction drive. Again very, very high density, high voltage, again over a century of evolution. 

Battery swapping, a lot of people know that Project Better Place failed to meet its expectations after burning through 850 million dollars of investor money they decided to call it quits that they couldn't return on their investment. A century ago, a lot of people knew the same thing that it really wasn't a good idea. They had taxi cabs a century ago and in this taxi cab there is a pallet full of batteries so of course the cabby sat up high where he's got his tiller. The passengers sat in the front and in the center is a tray full of batteries. When the batteries were discharged instead of taking overnight to recharge the vehicle they'd pull into this fixture and there are two large levers over here that the operator would because as you can imagine if you're putting in 500 pounds of batteries into a leaf spring vehicle it's going to go down as you put it in, as you pull it out it's going to go up. You have to match the batteries to the vehicle. They would have large hydraulic rams that would allow them to articulate the vehicle to get the battery in and out; a lot of mechanical engineering a century ago. You can see these wooden frames where they have trays of batteries much like a fork lift operation where the swap it out. Charging garages and you can see these are some more of these mercury vapor arc rectifier tubes. Again, a pool of mercury that they turn sideways until it strikes an arc and then vaporizes and that was the rectifier a century ago; stations of them with lots of analog meters and lots of cables and lots of cars that were plugged in. 

These DC charging stations that people are proposing with new safer standards were around a century ago; again, economically feasible a century ago, economically feasible now with different constraints. "Does is pay?" I don't have enough time to go through all of these but you can see a lot of slides, switches and a lot of knobs and tubes and wires that the operator would have to know what he'd doing on charging battery vehicles but here are those four batteries that were in the swap. It's a dollar a ride for an electric taxi a century ago. A dollar was a lot of money a century ago. That's like me saying I want to take a Nissan LEAF cab from here downtown, $25. Wow, how many rides will it do? Fifteen hundred rides, you say wow some cab companies do 1500 rides a day not in a whole operation. The point is that all this switching station and charging and swapping never broke even. We'll go back 50 years. I can go back in more granularity but we'll just do it in decades. Fifty years ago and a lot of people remember them, most of you have good memories, you can remember the Electrovair. 

The front was filled with silver zinc batteries, most people know that silver zinc batteries are most often used on one way trips in military defense articles. In a torpedo or a missile you don't expect that battery to come back. This is a car stuffed full of batteries that don't expect to have a very long lifetime and again very good density but they did it all with SCR's. Anybody who knows power electronics this is a big feat to do this, no computers, gate turn off devices, it was a lot of technology for 50 years ago. The Electrovair was an investigation that lead towards the electro-vet and some other things but just looking in the back you can see a spaghetti mess of wire, a whole bunch of batteries, the horizontal fan that was in the Corvair. These were some papers that were published 50 years ago, half a century ago. Forty years ago seems like a long time ago and for some people it is but looking back at Slide Rule calculators, so the electronic Slide Rule first same out in 1974, the SR-52 with a Slide Rule. It took only three seconds to come up with a trigonometric answer, three, one, two, three before it came up with an answer. Most people were amazed and again they were on the order of $200. If you were using a Slide Rule that was a great time saver. 

Today we have Google glass, here's a dime and that shows you the monitor that fits inside the eye piece and you have basically a full on wearable computer in just 40 years. You can imagine what the next 40 years holds. A lot of people say we need DC off board charging. Here it is, 350 mail jeeps were deployed by the US government and AMC for the postal service. Three hundred and fifty units, 40 years ago, lots and lots of DC charge vehicles in fleet operation every day. Battery swapping, here's a company in Boston who did battery swapping on delivery vehicles. Mail vehicles were electric vehicles; today we have mail vehicles that are electric vehicles. Thirty years ago, EV-1. Hard to believe EV-1 came out 30 years go as a T-pack design. We have one here in case anybody doesn't know, here at UW Madison we have one of the remaining 40 left on the planet and it has a T-pack in the middle and it originally came with lead acid and then second generation was nickel metal hydride. 

The motor drive system on the front was about 100 kilowatts so you can see this thing that goes fender to fender, now fits in a cigar box; again, 30 years of evolution. I worked on this product a long time ago at GM. Eight years ago, and it doesn't seem like eight years ago. Eight years ago the Chevy Volt was released. It was in production in 2010 but eight years ago was when they announced the program and made it public. Again the T-pack, lithium ion batteries, water cooling plates, you can see the difference in the size of the packs between the EV-1 and the Volt. Anyway, we move on to today. The Tesla model S has 8,000 18650 cells. These are trays of the cells that are welded into an array with cooling and a insulating thermostat in between and then a lot of inner connects. These are made and such with the spot welds and I don't have a close up of the spot welds, the spot welds are on the end of each battery if there is a failure isolates the failure. 

You would never have a cascaded failure. This is a segment out of a fire, a first responders video on how to flip the car on its side to extricate some of the items underneath. You can see the whole bottom of the car is flat. What normally people would do to jack or pry you can't do in an aluminum car because there's nothing to pry again as some people know. Like jacking in mud, if you put a level against it all you do is push into the mud. In an aluminum vehicle as soon as you start to pry the wheel away from the vehicle all you do is punch a whole in the vehicle and you actually don't get the vehicle to come apart. A lot of first responder training is needed. You can see on the bottom is a very thin battery pack that spans the whole bottom of the car. This one is from the Tesla model X the gull wing car which has all wheel drive. Again, zero to 60 in, I don't know what they're saying, 3.3 seconds some $100,000 car. 

You get sports car performance at a price better then a BMW M3. Plug in vehicles all need the appropriate rate of charging. If you have, and I'm not sure exactly what everyone in the crowd is familiar with so I'm just going to go over this, mild short range electric cars, short electric range plug in hybrid vehicles have about a five kilowatt hour battery and the charger will take on from the wall about one and a half kilowatt and from a fixed prewired source, three kilowatt. Very small battery like a humming bird it drinks a little bit but it has to do it quite often. An extended range vehicle like I saw some people pull into the parking lot with their Volt you have about 10 to 20 kilowatt hours. The Volt generally takes on about 10 kilowatt of energy and you'd like to charge at a rate up to six kilowatts. It's three kilowatt is the typical charge that's on board because again, rate costs money. Anybody who's a fan of mad max to say speeds a matter of money, how fast do you want to go? Same with charging infrastructure, same with PAR electronics; it's easy to do it'll just cost you money. On a $100,000 vehicle and extra two to three thousand dollar premium for a charger is unnoticeable. On a $12,000 vehicle well that would be 1/3rd to ¼ of the incremental cost you would never think about doing that. 

Then the battery electric vehicles as we just mentioned they have 20 kilowatt hour, 85 kilowatt hour if you can afford that much battery and they'll charge above six kilowatt. Market share, a lot of people say, wow, look at Norway, they are awesome, 6% of the vehicles in Norway are electrified. I know of people in the audience know the answer, why is that? Well, they get to drive in the bus lane, they get about $80,000 off on their taxes, you're like what do you mean? Vehicles cost about $80,000 so F1-50 in Norway costs about $80,000. They heavily, heavily dissuade you from using petroleum which Norway sells. You say why would you eat your-- It's like a dairy farmer eating all his cheese instead of selling it. It's like got to have something to sell. They highly subsidize electric vehicles, again, the air is clean in Norway why would you do that? They don't want to be a petroleum dependant country. Those subsidizes have made it tough for buses to get through. There is more traffic in the bus lane then buses. The smallest user of the bus lane are buses and buses are running behind now because there's too many electric cars. 

They're a victim of their own success. Netherlands the same way except for their subsidizes are ending so even though it's 5% of their country they won't hold that position because once subsidizes end the popularity tends to end. You can see Iceland because they have a lot of renewable energy and they do like to be zero carbon country because they aren't a petroleum enabled country so they have a lot of incentive. It goes all the way down to Italy and actually cut it off down by Russia. What is the future? Is it going to be gull wing cars? Well, -- says yeah, you've got a $100,000 to burn in your pocket; I'll sell you a gull wing electric car. If you're a Mercedes here is $430,000 I'll sell you a gull wing electric car. If you're a shoe salesman I'll sell you this wing tip electric car. This goes about 1400 feet just back and forth in front of the store. You can just see how the rapid increase and most people who know trends say wow, look at this in 2010 there was less then 1000 cars because again when the Chevy Volt and other cars came out to what we had last year, 52,000 electrified vehicles were sold last year. You can see it's just gradually going up and it'll keep going up. 

Infrastructure so we have a lot of reasons why we should have plug-ins. The ratio of plugs, of dedicated charging infrastructure to vehicles was thought to be 2 to 1 for every car I have to have two chargers, one here and one there. Actual fact is it's 0.2 to 1, because I can use my existing infrastructure; my 15 amp 120 volt outlet does just fine if I have plenty of time. As much as people thought they were going to spend a lot of money on this infrastructure and we'll get to one of the pyramid slides later talk about how not important it is to have massively publicly funded infrastructure. There's a lot of different ways you can get energy into your vehicle that are just suitable. People have been finding that this thing that I already have in my garage is just fine if I want to bump it up another $500 or $1000 or $5000 that you can do at your own privilege. The subsidies for this are going away so a lot of people who were incentive-ized to say the free thing, I like a lot. If I have to pay any money for it I'm not so enamored with it anymore. That's a lot of my world of how do we encourage people to do the right thing without paying them to do the right thing? Here the colors are significant on here on one of the new stations are so the blue dots are stations that were deployed in the last year. You can see there are more blue dots then red dots. 

This is that whole infrastructure where people believe there will be a return on investment, they will put public infrastructure in to a limit. ECOtality failed, 350Green failed, Better Place failed, they had a business model that said people will pay to use these outlets. What you don't know is that the rate that you pay for access to electricity, not the electricity itself but access to electricity almost like the coffee cup model with Starbucks, what's in that cup is about three to five cents of material. You're paying for the cup, the parking lot, the guy handing you it, the insurance plan, taxes. The smallest bit of what you're getting is what's in that cup. You're paying for access to the coffee not the coffee itself. The access to electricity adds up to somewhere between 12 and 20 dollars a gallon equivalent on transportation miles you can go on that electricity that's dispensed from this. You say $2 per hour is a pretty good rate but when you can get into your car in that one hour would be the equivalent of about 12 to 20 dollars of gasoline at 3.15, right now we're back up to 3.50 a gallon. Lots of comparison so snap shot of where the charging points are. AFDC is alternative fuels data center by DUE hosted at -- and they make a catalog of where all the stations are but there's not a real-- Anybody who's looking for stations knows that you can't just look at one site, you have to look at a combination. 

Charge Point claims that they have 15,000 stations out there. The Blink Network which is now operated by Car Charging Group claims that they have 12,000 points and then this is the test, the Super Charger Network which you can see goes across America in an H pattern. There's one up by East Town, there's one in Rockford so if you have a Tesla which again is a proprietary charging plug for a reason. They don't have any sign up or reservation stuff. It's like if you bought a Tesla of this one that the plug will work you get to use that station. If you didn't buy that particular model from that particular vendor, that stations not for you. I look at is as the executive wash room, if you're privileged enough to use that it's for you, if you are not that person it is not for you and has zero benefit to you. That nice pattern you say wow, I can go cross country if I bought this $100,000 car or I would say the minimum to get that access is about $70,000. Anybody who's driving a Tesla I make apologies for using you as an example. Interoperability, a lot of people don't know what the word means so I thought I'd bring it up a little bit because I'm going to talk a lot unless my job ran out to make sure one thing works with another. 

Most people say will you bill it to the spec it works everywhere and people have had phones and if you remember printers and other things you plug it in; it didn't work at all. Or you get this new phone it says enabled for but not actually capable of right? All these little fine print asterisks or people didn't really check where two different standards are not compatible. Incompatibility is different then interoperability as different from compliance. Certification of interoperability is what my lab does. Here's some examples of pioneers, Luther Simjian was the father of ATM. Long before people thought about ATM's he worked on interoperability of ATM's. The original ATM's were a failed business model because the only people who used the automated tellers were people who didn't want to face a real human which were people who had disreputable careers.  People who hang out on street corners at night who do other kinds of transactions, they were the ones who didn't want to deal with a teller. Vint Cerf, this is a picture when he had dark hair, father of the Internet and then Martin Cooper out of Chicago the father of the cell phone. Without them we would still have ATM's that looked like this, computers that looked like this and brick phones that looked like this. 

Instead we have Google Glass and we have automatic driving cars and we have cell phones that are as smart as PC's and ATM's that can do any bank transaction you care to. Interoperability enables a lot of different features. The big picture, this is the core of when we were talking about where we were, where we are today and where we're going. The big picture is we have these markets, we have grid operators, we have generation, transmission, distribution and then you have the part that you're mostly familiar with. The transformer in your neighborhood or on the pole and then this thing that everybody loves to see the number go up fast. We don't, we just say we like to minimize the amount of electricity we use for our daily things and if it's for transportation we accept that that usage is for transportation. These gateway devices, these metrology devices they all can be interoperable between different utilities and different retailers. This is the model that's coming. See where we are today to where we're going so the NIS 10 book 130 talks about methods of sale. How is it I can sell electricity without being a utility because most utilities say not going to happen? Then you look at other cities that have competing electricity retailers that are selling electricity in the presence of the franchised utility that usually maintains that area. 

How does that work that we have interoperable communication systems and meters that I can own? How is it that I can own my own -- meter? This thing that's on the wall, how can I own my own? How can I go to the butcher and bring my own scale and say this is what I'm going to pay today? I don't really see that happening yet handbook 130 says yes it will. Handbook 44 is a century old document, has a new chapter written by me and of course a hundred other people arguing but the guy who actually writes it is the one who starts the ruckus. I have a new idea. I have this meter that can be built for $10 parts cost. Not retail, parts cost. Wow, so I can own my own thing. I can go to Best Buy, get my own meter, plug it into whatever this fits into and now I can pay electricity at the rate that I negotiate much like my cell plan, I can go from a company A to B to C and see who gives me the best rate. The same thing with time of use rates, real time pricing; there's a lot of different structures. This is the future, we're going to be able to negotiate or prepay or have what are called critical delivery systems, use case five which basically said if I have wind my car can just follow the wind. Whenever wind is up, I charge, whenever the wind goes flat I stop charging. 

That seems pretty fair. This way there's no spinning reserve needed for those highly variable sources. There's a lot of reasons that wind and solar can be backed up by cars. The communication metrology and all these different interconnect devices that are interoperable are going to enable that future at an affordable price. This is what I spend most of my time working with people, working internationally so you'll see a lot of international type things on here. These are retread slides from presentations I just gave in Washington yesterday. Harmonization of standards and test procedures are enabled by interoperability between the electric vehicle supply equipment and the communication to the grid. Most people think the grid is this thing or person who's got a phone or a knob or dial or whatever, it's a market. There are system operators; there are aggregators so a lot of different levels in between. The same with charging standards and so after the top because I mean you can go look at level two DC, a couple others which again can feed 100,000 watts into your car. 

That's the equivalent of about the full capability of everything in your house, five houses or a typical draw of 100 homes on average goes through this thing in your hand. Level one DC is even more impressive. People get very confused on how can this 43 mm coupler deliver 40 kilowatt. That's what I work on. Basically a $50 coupler, this just to let you know is $750. There's an alternative that's only $50. Most people don't want to do it because they want to up the value of your car. They would like to sell you $100,000 car with a $750 coupler. I would like to sell you a $20,000 with a $50 coupler and I would like to put this meter inside your car that lets you negotiate for electricity. I would like to have this gateway in your house so you can connect to things without your monthly meter connection fee. 

All these different things that could be open and interchangeable and interoperable have to be negotiated between all people and say I need to make money. I need a fee from everyone of you, every month and that's how some business plans work and when the plan doesn't work out they find a different business. We have protocols, connectors, communication controllers, metrology which is what you see here and then standards. Standards and interoperable standards so in my lab and we have this very large monitor that allows me to touch and see everything in the lab. We have big wind turbans, we have 130 kilowatt of solar rays, we have small solar rays that are directly tied to vehicles that have battery charging systems and battery controls labs. We have dynamotors. This guy came by from Washington one day and arrived in his helicopter and said this looks pretty cool. Then he went on but anyway. This is President Obama in my lab and saying we need more of this. The national lab system is also very dependant on people endorsing the reason that these independent third parties can make things happen, can broker a deal between China an Japan and Europe because even in Europe one country says that they want it, we want the opposite. 

I'm not even going to listen to what they're proposing, whatever it is make it different. Why would you do that? I don't want to be interoperable with them. I want to compete with them. I want to have separate proprietary systems. That doesn't benefit the customer so most of the Department of Commerce meetings that I go to everybody wants to increase global sales by harmonizing. That's what this lab is all about. You see a lot of different electric vehicle supply equipment, you see smart bus ways, RF chambers, wireless charging, DC charge and AC charging. Here are some examples of tech transfer. People we work with companies, for those of you were in the electrical industry there's something called an insulation piercing tap which allows you to do a live connections between one electrical system and another electrical system without shutting it down. I have a version of this meter that fits into an IPT so in order to instrument a transformer or a branch circuit which is connected to an electrical vehicle which might have other electric vehicles to it I don't need to disconnect that. 

I actually clamp it on, turn the screw alive and it's a metered circuit. There's a lot of these different things that companies are now licensing that we'll be building and of course incorporating into electrical vehicle supply equipment. This is a lot of what we do. We pioneer things, we come up with the first one and we hand it off because it's public domain to transfer it to people. Your tax dollars at work making all these things happen-- Laboratory has a limited budget to verify standards. Every piece of equipment that's screwed into your house has to be UL listed by the National Electrical code. UL comes to my lab to work, and this was a vehicle that was on four column lifts that had 1 mm resolution so I can actually pick up the car and move it around between the wireless coil on the bottom and the top. People say how will Fifi fair if he runs underneath the car when the car is charging? Will Fifi get a headache? Will Fifi get an aneurysm? Will my coke can that I dropped by accident that rolled under the car burst into flames? For some unsafe systems the answer is yes. People say my goodness, why would you let that happen? The standards don't let that happen, it's the noncompliance to the standards and the interoperability verification that would say that doesn't comply so any problems you have is not the problem of the systems that are interoperable or non-interoperable it's lack of compliance to code. Here you see some AC charging interoperability with some very precise measurements of what people would say I plugged it in, I turned it on, it's interoperable. 

It's like ah, under what conditions? That's a lot of what we do in my lab. Here's a little bit more of a close up of the RF chamber. The RF chamber is a shielding box that's like the opposite of a microwave oven where all the radiation, all the electromagnetic fields that are generated by the test article stay inside and the electromagnetic fields from the outside don't taint the results on the inside. I can take this fixture and roll it inside here, let me show so you can see right here and drive the car and I can do all my measurements in a very controlled environment for a very low cost. Most of the time it costs about $5000 a day to go access somebody else's chamber; I built the whole chamber for like $20,000. You can see really reasonable cost equipment so this is a lot of off the shelf servos and controls and meters. Not free but things that are built at a low cost I can transfer to underwriters laboratory who would normally have to start at a half million dollars and go to a million dollars to get a certification program going which means that each article might add $1000 to the cost of that article to certify it now brings that cost down so that the incremental costs can be singles of dollars added to get that UL stamp. Just to give you an idea of what things cost to build enough extra couplers to destroy and test the insertion force and things like that, I think it's about $70,000 plus another $30,000 of testing. To get a UL mark on this connector is $100,000. If I sell even 1000 connectors, that's $100 per connector extra cost just to get that mark on it. 

I can't sell it without that mark. It turns out in the history of things, I was the one who coughed up the 100 grand to get that UL stamp on there because it was a year behind. Nobody was going to pay. It's like everybody's staring at the check on the table. Who's going to pick it up? A lot of companies said not me; do you realize how much it's going to add to the cost of each car? It's not my coupler and of course a couple of people said I'm selling the couplers so do you want to pay $1000 for it or $700? Difference is what it costs. Anyway, your tax dollars at work. Standards, we can go over this. There's lots and lots of standards as they always say, standards, we've got hundreds of them. Two-way flow of information so every use case on how you plug your car in or how information flows or how energy flows is covered by wireless standard. You can see 2931/7 is security. 

Points of vulnerability, you don't want to plug into your car and find out some person had a fancy coupler that they put in between and became man in the middle. I basically steal electricity by going around with my funny coupler and I basically have the vulnerability point that I'm exploiting. 2931/7 says, I'm identifying all the vulnerability points and moving the security bar up because again if you could get into the utility network that would be a point of vulnerability. It's a lot of money, many, many zeros of money being spent on cyber security for the electric grid, electric vehicles are no different. Metering, we talked a little bit about it that everybody's used to this but this doesn't really fit in your pocket, doesn't fit in your car, it doesn't fit where it needs to go so there's no standard for electric vehicle fueling. That's where handbook 44 and handbook 130 the new sections are being added to that to create a standard. My lab has done a lot of pioneering work. There's a company called 2G Engineering in Sun Prairie. It's one of the contractors I work with very closely right here. You said where'd that thing get invented? Right here in Madison. 

A lot of these new ideas came right here so this handbook 130, handbook 44 there has to be a fuel verification device. You see the pelican case is here so this is the size of the verification device that I think we can build for less then $1000 because each state regulator has to put a stamp on your car. Every year you've got to get a fresh sticker on that said this is actually, if it were a meat scale it would say that is for legal trade. As you know the budgets are all in the red, we won't pay $20,000 or $50,000 or hire staffers. We want to get rid of staffers. They'd like to do self certification but that leads towards corruption. A small case that can plug right into your car and gives you a red light, green light and it prints out a sticker, that's actually where we're headed. You say what does the future look like? It looks like the secure IC's you can see this dotted line around here that said this metering IC right there has all the security features built into it for $2. That's kind of where things are going. Credit card sized things, matchbook sized things that fit inside other things that talk to off the shelf gateways that talk to connectors that talk to motor drives; everything talking to each other in a secure manner. 

Safety, I know a lot of people are looking at the future but you have to look at where we are today. The dream liner had a little issue on overheating batteries. Some hobbyist decided to just put a whole bunch of batteries in the truck of their car and charge them up or over charge them so these batteries used to be about three-quarter inch thick and you can see they're about three feet wide now. They just got really big and very angry. A lot of these vehicles burned to the ground and they erase all evidence of what happened. That's another problem that people, like I don't see any car, I don't see and garage. The thing that caused the problem was you goofing around with things that you didn't comply to standards. Overheating transformers so just briefly touch upon where these loads are and most people are afraid that electric vehicles are going to cause our grid to crash or everything to go up in smoke. Most neighborhoods have a meter survey system and I forget what the acronym is for the product. Basically they can add up all the loads of all the houses in that neighborhood and figure out how much load is on each transformer. 

Basically they have a transformer load monitoring system that doesn't actually put a monitor on the transformer. This is a picture of my transformer. One day I just walked out my door and did this. That's what it looks like. When you look at where the electrical vehicle load on the amount of energy you would deliver to charge your car per year, you see it's right there between the clothes dryer and the water heater. Not a lot but not a little. If you had an electric home heating system it would be a lot of energy, refrigeration and air conditioning; again, above lighting but not huge. You can just see how this transformer base load you'd have to size it properly for that. Most of the people who do electric distribution know exactly when you have a cluster of vehicles that, that summation of all the meter bills in that area are going to put a transformer at risk, they'll upgrade the transformer. Much like the old joke doctor, doctor it hurts when I do this, don't do that. 

The transformer is being overloaded, put a bigger transformer in. You can do shifting and that's really where we're headed when you say what does the future look like. We're going to multiplex cars. You won't have the Wild West of everybody plugs in whatever they feel like where ever, whenever, however. You will reserve a time spot. You would say the energy is delivered to my car in this window. Somebody might get a 3 am to 6 am spot, someone might get a midnight to one, someone might get a 9 pm till midnight spot that average draw will be averaged out but you have to know which cars are plugged in and when they would be full. That's where this communication again comes in. The communication and the dynamic interaction between vehicles and charging infrastructure is a smart grid. You can make the smart grid more resilient. 

You can have cars that can export power, V to B. V to B is huge, vehicle to building is very huge. We had snow storms, we had that six inch storm we didn't really loose power here in Madison but a lot of other people in the country, winds and ice and it's happened where some people are without power for three days, not three minutes or three hours. A vehicle that said, oh it's built into the car. I just plug the car in and there's a switch in the house that says things seem to be really bad let me put into a configuration where your fridge and your wifi and your lighting are all held up by your car. Isn't that a great future? Those are features that are coming built in by standards. There's a standard called 2847/3 which is reverse power flow through the connector. You say, wow that can be done? Yes, it can be done but now the utilities and all the other standard bodies have to agree how it is done. Here's some pictures of equipment that you've seen in your house just to point on how will these things have to fit  together with communication? There are smart thermostats, there are gateways which you see right here, there are small electric vehicle supply equipment, there are larger electric vehicle supply equipment. There are disconnects because again a lot of local electrical codes require to have a disconnect near the point of load so that if you were servicing it you can pull that disconnect. 

These in fact are that disconnect so this connecting closure can be purchased for $5 retail. Normally you would think $105, $55 even the couplers on here are $5. Five dollars for that 60 amp base, this thing that fits into it is $10 materials cost again, sell at $100 but the point is I can add metering to any infrastructure by pulling out that T-bar and putting this in there. That's the vision of the future is that you can do this smart charging, retro fit. Same with these connectors, I have a version of this meter that fits into the connector so all I do for these 10 and 20 year old legacy systems is I take the connector off and I put an instrumented connector on it. That's a bold future so the department of energy and other people are discussing how do I get the grid to be more modern? How do I get electric vehicle infrastructure without starting over? Turns out I can just change the handle. There's a lot of lies people say this is good and this is bad. This is big and this is small, it's really gradients. This is representative of a level one AC which has 120 volt plug that fits in the trunk of the Ford Focus. This is a product made by -- I can go about five miles per hour of charging at about 1700 watts, 16 amps continuous on a 20 amp brand circuit. 

The next level up, again level one is 120, level two is 240 but you have the minimum level which runs at 16 amps or the bigger level which runs at 80 amps. And 80 amp cord is pretty big, pretty heavy and you need 80 amp of extra service in your house, not 80 amps of service, 80 amps of extra service. Most people have to put a new panel in and again most vehicles don't charge at 20 kilowatt only the Tesla model S right now beside commercial vehicles will charge at the full 20 kilowatt or 19.2 kilowatt of that connector. You can go from 19 to 3 to 1700 or basically 60 miles an hour of charging or five miles an hour of charging with the same coupler, same inlet, same everything. It's just really blurred between and then we have this DC level one that we talked about which was just this coupler running at 80 amps and 500 volts is 40 kilowatt. I can do 120 miles per hour for $50 coupler, pretty good deal. This one is more expensive can do 100 kilowatt. There's one above that called level three DC can do 250 kilowatt. You can see a lot of power can be transferred all on existing standards. Adapters so you can see there are proprietary standards such as the --, because they didn't want to wait for this one to be ratified because it takes a lot of people globally to harmonize this. 

Every other country has now harmonized this but these people have been shipping this coupler for four years now, five years. We got it now or we got it international and so there's a lot of discussing. Right now what I'm building in my lab is an adapter between this and this. There's a protocol converter, there's galvanic isolation, there's a bunch of differences between the standards but one that can speak this language and one that can speak another language is effectively a translator. Tesla has lots of adaptors to say from other infrastructures to our infrastructure but not from the Tesla super charger infrastructure back to NSAE or to --. It's always good to borrow somebody else's infrastructure but please don't use ours because it's exclusive, it's proprietary. Adapters are an issue and I don't have any melty plug pictures in here but again, anybody who's driving a Tesla this is not an indictment it's just really a factual statement, even though -- does, I have no recalls. These are not problems we're just going to out of gratitude send out 29,000 new chargers because some of you had problems with the box melting out of the wall and lighting the garage on fire. It's not a recall, it's not a safety issue I just decided on my own good will to replace 29,000 units. I'm like oh at $1000 a piece it's 2.9 million dollars. 

One lawsuit so you just say wow, look at that. Pretty good sense to say I'm not wrong but we're going to change them anyway. That's where adapters fit in so by the national electric code adapters are not allowed but people are doing it anyway. This is the triangle I talked about is transformative nature of workplace charging and multifamily dwellings, multi dwelling units that have a lot of rows of people in a small place, don't have their own parking garage or stall with their own outlet, they have a shared space. That share space, multifamily home or work place charging most people underestimate the transformative nature to say if I had charging at work I might consider buying an electric car. My work place gets to take all the carbon credits because any vehicle I charge at work they get carbon reduction for. The biggest way to do carbon offsets for your building is to put a plug outside to say anybody that plugs in that plug they get the credit for it. I'll just leave credits all by just putting an outlet on there but there's tax implications and again I don't have time to get into it but there is this de minimus part of the tax code said if you can declare something de minimus much like the electricity for the coffee pot. Most people say I paid for the coffee but they don't have to tax you for the electricity it took to brew the coffee because you got benefit. Not everybody drinks coffee so everybody gets a 10-99 for the value of the electricity that went to heat the coffee. 

You say I don't want to do that right that's de minimus. There's a lot of big push right now to have somebody set the president that said electricity at the work place is de minimus or there can be an open understanding between the employer and the employee that you will on a voluntary basis contribute towards the value of the electricity that's dispersed to offset it against the people who don't take advantage of it. The big issue is, and as they say, the people who are most upset about work place charging are the ones who don't charge at the work place. They would like free gasoline. If you get free electricity I want a gallon of gas on my desk. That's only fair to assume but hey how about if we don't do that and we say everybody works for the greater good. That's where workplace charging can be transformative towards getting more people to do more carbon offsetting by doing the right thing without being paid to do the right thing. Finally we talk about wireless charging so here's a wireless charger being installed in a bottom of a Chevy Volt. You can see it's a very large electronic assembly with a coil in the middle. It's a lot of loops of wire and loops of wire on the floor. 

Here is Nikola Tesla's sketch from 100 some years ago that said electricity for everybody. Of course, George Westinghouse said that's pretty good but how about meters for everybody and he said I haven't quite figured that out. If I've got ubiquitous access to electricity, how do I meter everybody? Of course he never made his money back and most people knew the story of Tesla and the, I was trying to remember the name of the location. Anyway the place in New Jersey where they built the tower, very large tower, very large coil that went down into the ground a hundred years ago. Got hit with some inflation and so it turns out the price of the lumber and the copper and the other things to make this tripled between the time he started the project and when he finished it. They actually just ran out of money because the building materials went up so much. It wasn't that it was a bad idea, they just came up short on their budget. Most people said doomsday weapon. You can actually change the weather, you can change our polar axis all these different things, let's burn it. They did. 

They went out of business. They demolished it and all was gone but a century later this is what we're going to be doing on cars. You say what does the future look like? Every car, not some car, every car will have the option to have a wireless charging system into it. I'll just close with the thought of what does the future hold? The future will be like your garage door, 1950 it was okay to drive up, put your key in the door turn the knob, lift the door up, drive your car in, close the door and go into the house. Where today some cars say I'm near the garage open the door for me. You get out of your car and go in the house and push the button and the door closes. That's the way wireless charging is. It's okay to pull the connector off the wall and plug it into my car and take it out of the car and plug it in and say it's 20 seconds this way 20 seconds that way, 40 seconds out of my day. Or I just pull in my garage and then I leave or parking spot or where ever it happens to be. Ubiquitous wireless charging is coming, the standards are a little bit behind because there's a lot of arguing about the cost and frequency and safety issues and that's a lot of what I'm working on in my lab. 

I think we're going to end here and you can have questions afterward. Thank you very much. [applause]