Electric Co-op Today

What will it take to meet the Obama administration’s goal of having 1 million electric vehicles on America’s roads by 2015? Some experts believe it all comes down to a better battery.

EPRI’s Henry A. Courtright (left) joined Dan Galves of Deutsche Bank in a discussion on electric vehicles. (Photo By: Michael W. Kahn)

“The real swing thing will be battery power—providing extension of range, flexibility and price reductions,” said Henry A. Courtright, a senior vice president at the Electric Power Research Institute.

Courtright was part of a panel discussion at the June 16 Energy Efficiency Forum 2011 in Washington, D.C. Fellow panelist Dan Galves, vehicle electrification lead analyst at Deutsche Bank, sees electric car batteries improving in much the same way as laptop computer batteries.

“Laptop batteries originally were about 90 watt hours per kilogram when they first came out. Now they’re getting about 230 watt hours per kilogram,” Galves said. “Car batteries are still in the 120-130 watt hours per kilogram and they’re getting 100 miles of range. So if you can improve that similar to laptop batteries you can pretty much do it for the same cost and almost double the range.”

But even with today’s technology, Galves contends that electric cars make economic sense.

“A battery is going to cost about $12,000 for an electric vehicle. They’re going to last 120,000 miles, about 10 years. So if you spread the cost of the battery across the whole life of the car, it’s about $100 a month,” Galves said. “So you save $100 a month on fuel, and you’re paying $100 a month for the battery, the economics work right now. But the problem is people don’t think about spreading that up-front cost over 10 years. They’re thinking about three or four or five years.”

Another concern was raised by panelist Jim Trask, a vice president at technology developer Azure Dynamics. Trask noted that tax breaks and other incentives to buy EVs won’t last forever.

“The challenge to the industry, very clearly,” Trask said, “is to figure out how to bring costs down before the incentives go away.”

Tags: Electric Vehicles