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G. David Felt - Staff Writer Alternative Energy - www.cheersandgears.com DOE $15 Million Investment into US XFC Infrastructure The Department of Energy has announced funding opportunity number DE-FOA-0001808 for building XFC (Extreme Fast Charging) across the United States. The floor is $500,000 with a maximum single payout of $5,000,000 as the DOE works to achieve a reduction of 2.5 billion gallons per year of petroleum by 2020. The focus of this grant system is to encourage and fun development of the new XFC charging system and batteries that would allow mass adoption of EV auto's. The focus is to decrease charging times while maintaining currents of less than 400 kWh and assure battery state charge increases by 50%. Battery cells are to be capable of 500 cycles or more of charging with less than a 20% fade in energy capacity consisting of a 10 Min charge to full. Toshiba has accomplished this and this funding is to encourage others to enter the battery and charging race to supply infrastructure and batteries for a cleaner, quieter city and road. Currently most level 3 DC chargers in the US excluding Tesla only put out 50kWh of power, where in Europe they put out 100 kWh. Porsche installed their new 350 kWh chargers as they started to build their e-Mission car. Since then Europe has settled on a 360kWh XFC charging system that will fully charge a 400 mile range battery in about 15 min. Since investment costs are high, the DOE felt it needed to put out this $15 million dollar program to drive investments and research into better batteries and chargers. DOE by setting a Spec ceiling of 400 kWh is looking to help support the current standard of CCS which is used by all of Germany, most of Europe and the US. CHAdeMO is a spec using in Japan and the US only by Nissan. DOE Grant Site
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G. David Felt Alternative Fuels & Propulsion writer www.CheersandGears.com 2015 Vehicle Buyer's Guide Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy The U.S. Department of Energy has released their Clean Cities 2015 Vehicle Buyer's Guide. This covers the following types of auto's; Propane Natural Gas (CNG) Biodiesel Electric Hybrid Ethanol Flex-Fuel In this guide you will find the following information to help one make an informed buying choice. The guide starts off by covering Fuel Economy, Energy Impact, Smog Scores, Greenhouse gas Emissions just to start. Once you have gone over that information, you then have a section that covers Auto cost and Emissions before buying. the follow up section to this is about Converting auto's to run on alternative fuels. Once you have reviewed this information you start down the line of specific auto types to best understand their use and benefits. You will find after the Propane and CNG auto sections a section covering fueling infrastructure as an important factor.The report then goes into details about Biodiesel, electric auto's and how to read the EPA labels on all the auto's. An important section is how to compare fuel costs before you buy. A perfect example is how cheap electricity is in Seattle where they have plenty of Water generated electricity compared to the Midwest or east coast where you have coal generated electricity or nuclear and much higher costs. The section on finding charging stations, Hydrogen and ethanol fueling stations will come into benefit to those that have those type of auto's. The final section covers 2015 incentives. As an addendum starting on page 31 is a chart covering all the auto's and how efficient they are on each fuel type or what they call the Energy Impact Score. Pretty amazing to see E85. I have to really question why bother to make E85. Check it out and come to your own conclusions on what you think is a good Alternative Energy Auto. Clean Cities 2015 Vehicle Buyer's Guide
