Will we need 1.2 million public chargers? Gary Simon highlights how innovation will enable us to charge electric vehicles with fewer. This is an innovation in the ‘quality’ of charging as opposed to the ‘quantity’. The innovation may also be cheaper low end chargers, quantity over quality. I think quantity will be inevitable, everyone will drive EVs and demand access to reliable charging. Businesses will compete to meet the basic charging needs at the lowest cost. 

“Think of it like buying an employee a cup of coffee.” Will Barrett VP of Sales at ClipperCreek puts it succinctly. There are several things employers and businesses do to support employees and customers. The average employer spends over $100 on coffee a year per employee. If your employees and customs drive EVs, charging will be a perk people will expect. For a business, it represents a relatively small increase in cost and a potential revenue generator.

Reliable charging will influence people’s habits. 90% of daily drivers drive less than 65 miles; cars are parked for over 20 hours a day. Finding reliable spaces to charge for 4-8 hours is more valuable than a Fast Charger. Consumers driving EVs will change where they shop if it means getting a little extra charge. After buying my EV, I have changed where I shop based on charging availability.

The demand push for charging will be accelerated by public funding. The CEC is spending $384 million on ZEV infrastructure over 3 years, Southern California Edison is spending $436 million over 4, and San Diego Gas & Electric announced $44 Million recently. 

Innovation will make level 1 and 2 charging pervasive. EV drivers will value convenient access to reliable charging over fast charging. Businesses (Employers and Retailers) will do what they do best, compete.  Will that get us to the CEC 1.2 Million public charging stations? Perhaps, but it should make charging more ubiquitous.

Pau Lau, the new General Manager and CEO of SMUD appointed early this year, said that further innovations were a key to meeting 10% of the requirements to reach a zero-carbon power system by the end of the decade. Known technologies and applications would be enough to get 90% of the way there, but the rest depends on people creating new options no one has yet imagined. SMUD intends to spend the money to unlock this creativity, hopefully much of it close to home. This was welcome news to the sizable crowd that joined this special Perspectives Zoominar on Monday July 12. 

SMUD’s plan is very ambitious. It includes supporting “climate-friendly business growth” and “leaving no community behind”, all while capping rate increases at the inflation rate. Lau could not have been clearer about wanting to hear more ideas from the cleantech community. He pledged to sponsor meetings where the community could brief SMUD staff on the solutions they could offer to meet the 2030 goal. SMUD has always been a supporter of sustainability and clean energy, but this was a big step beyond anything SMUD has ever done before. Being open to more innovative ideas and offering support to early stage companies was a welcome message. The biggest innovations are needed in buildings and transportation. 

Lau said he wanted to lead the charge to bring as much of the money for clean infrastructure, EV charging, and renewables promised in the President’s budget to our region as possible. He wants to make the region a clear clean tech leader and test bed for as many good ideas as possible. He talked about shutting down all SMUD’s gas-fired power plants except the Cosumnes plant which will be repurposed for meeting peak needs, hopefully using green fuels. He wants to see at least 100 MW of grid-scale storage (and we would urge him to target more). He is a fan of vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-home applications to use the growing EV fleet to become part of the storage solution, a sector where engineering innovation will be key to working out the problems with rearranging the grid to accommodate such changes. 

There was so much that he discussed, it can’t possibly be described in this summary. It is all recorded and available on our YouTube channel. If you didn’t attend, you really need to watch this. And if you were there, tell your cleantech friends that they need to tune in as well.

Concrete is all around us, being the second most widely-used substance in the world. It’s a simple material to make, yet buildings made of it can last for thousands of years. It is also responsible for about 8% of all CO2 emissions, so it is the target of research to try to make it “greener”.  

Concrete’s CO2 emissions come from its critical ingredient, cement.  At our recent perspective we heard from Jose Garcia PhD, assistant professor at Sac State researching concrete and explaining how to shrink its CO2 footprint.  Check out the video. 

Prof Garcia broke down why concrete has high emissions. Most importantly, what Garcia most frequently corrects people on, concrete and cement is not the same thing. If Concrete were cake, cement would be the flour. Cement is to concrete as flour is to cake,  both binding agents holding things together. Cement holds aggregates (like sand, iron ore and rock) together to form concrete. To make cement limestone is heated to 1000 C resulting in the calcium carbonate becoming calcium oxide (Quick lime) and CO2. They then combine the quick lime with aggregates to create cement.

​For every 1 kilogram of cement that is produced, there is 1 kilogram of carbon dioxide that is produced. 60% comes from the chemical reaction, and 40% comes from the burning of fossil fuel. While cement is carbon intensive, concrete has the opportunity to be more environmentally friendly. Waste materials that would normally end up in landfills like fly ash, slag cement, and silica fume, can be added to concrete, reducing its emissions impact.

Professor Garcia researches alternatives to cement called Supplementary Cementitious Material and Portland limestone cements. He looks at how they could be used in more specialty applications. There are even opportunities for concrete to be injected with CO2 collected from the atmosphere making it stronger. But there are also issues with that.

Make sure you watch the video and look for us to invite Professor Garica back. 

It is no surprise that with continuing drought the “new normal” in the western US, finding ways to improve the management of this resource is becoming more urgent.  At our June 24 MeetUp, three of our region’s small companies that focus on water gave an update on their progress.  We had heard from each of them before, refocused their businesses in the search for a profitably way forward.

Tony Jones of Waterhound gained some important recognition recently by winning a 2020 CalSEED proof of concept award and the 2019 AI Tech Water Challenge of the Water Council, a global non-profit, the mission of which is to drive more innovation and better stewardship in water use.  Tony is focused on selling SaaS based on extensive data collection feeding an AI tool to improve operations of water treatment plants, markedly dropping costs and improving yields of fully treated water.  He is on a mission to improve water reuse to add to the water supply.

Chris Peacock, at AQUAOSO, is similarly focused on data analysis and software to improve users water resilience.  He is trying to improve the adaptation strategies of water users as climate changes and creates shortages.  One outcome that has been popular is a water risk scoring tool to help lenders and insurers get a better grasp of the situation of applicants.   This is a big pivot from AQUAOSO’s original intent to provide a platform for the buying and selling of water, and has been a very successful one.  They recently raised a $2 million Series C round to accelerate their progress.  Chris and his 13-person team are hoping to help customers “future-proof” their businesses as they identify water risks needing attention.  One method could be “regenerative” farming to take steps to preserve and enhance the water sources a property has.

Chuck Hansen of ElectroScan  believes he has the best tool on the market for detecting and characterizing leaks in water and wastewater pipelines.  While current systems lose 14% or more of the water they contain, current methods miss 90% of the leaks in the system and don’t do a good job of identifying the exact locations of leaks, leading to unnecessarily long excavations to visually pinpoint the leak.  Many of the leaks ElectroScan finds can be fixed in-situ without even digging up the pipe.  The company has won a long-string of awards going back to 2013 as a “best product” including one in 2021 as the Top Product of the Year from the Environment and Energy Leader conference (read the press release).  Chuck is a successful software entrepreneur who is learning now how different it is to sell a physical product.  He has assembled a 26-person team with offices not only in California but also in Florida, Canada, the UK, Europe and Australia.  His big shift was in concentrating on the UK where there was a better reception for the Electroscan product.  With that revenue base building nicely, he is hoping to get more attention in the US where the gains to users could be huge, but the decision-making is more fragmented.  His 17 awards and 15 patents certainly help.

My view is that it does not, because of some technology advances. The figure seems scary and likely will be used by EV skeptics to oppose using public money to fund charging installations.  The figure comes from a recent CEC report that looked into the requirements to support a fleet of 8 million EVs in the state by 2030.  There is no doubt that more charging stations will be needed, but what kind of stations?  The report looks only at the current crop of available chargers and focuses on Level 2 chargers (220 V, giving a 150-mile charge overnight) and 50-100 kWh/hour Direct Current Fast Chargers that provide a full charge in an hour or a bit more.  This approach overlooks the significant progress toward even faster chargers, with some claims of being able to deliver a full charge in 5-10 minutes.  Porsche has a new 800-volt fast charger it claims will operate at 350 kWh/hour.  Changes to batteries will also be needed to reach extremely fast charging rates, but these too are happening.   

These technology developments raise the question whether most of the charging in terms of kWh delivered will continue to happen at home, at parking lots at work, and at retail store lots, or if the equivalent of filling stations will arise.  If they do, then the number of charging locations would be drastically reduced.  The existing fleet of 275 million light ICE vehicles on the road today in the US are refueled by only 111,000 filling stations, with a refill taking only 5-7 minutes.  About 16,000 of these are in California.

While some have assumed people would rather recharge at home, if that only provides an added 100-150 miles in range, then people would likely prefer the convenience of a central filling station that could add 300-500 miles of range in a short time.    There are still concerns about how to prevent an 8-slot, extremely fast charging station from melting down the distribution grid to deliver the power, those too are being worked on.

Keep an eye on updates of this assessment and see if in fact the extremely fast chargers change the picture over time.