Solar powered cars

Note: the following post includes the personal opinion of a single Green Team member

Usually solar powered cars are some goofy looking vehicles taped together by a few undergrad students for a solar mobility competition in the Australian outback. That's all very good and important, but in my view there is much more to the concept. Electricity can efficiently and cleanly be produced by photovoltaics and electric vehicles of all kinds can be efficiently powered by it. Let's look at both of these aspects.

PV arrays have increased in efficiency while dropping sharply in price. In 1980, a MWh of solar power would have cost almost $1,600 while in 2010 the same amount of power was available for $200 (as outlined in the much recommend GMO quarterly report by Jeremy Grantham). Prices are likely to continue to go down making solar a highly competitive power source. If only it were to shine all 24 hours of each day...

Similarly, electric vehicles are much more efficient in use of primary energy to move about their cargo (i.e. single humans mostly). Even if we were to burn the same gasoline in a stationary large scale facility to generate electricity, it would be more efficient than driving around a small scale engine with direct exhausts. More so, electric vehicles have much less moving parts and are simply more economical over time (on top of being more ecological right out of the gate). A quick look at key ingredients of the Tesla Model S makes that point clear.

In my personal quest to become electricity (not quite energy) independent, I have added a PV array to our house capable of producing 27 kWp (that's kilowatt peak).  Even in "sunny" Germany, this setup produces about 24,000 kWh / year, which I can consume or sell back into the grid as clean energy due to the German system of feed-in tariffs. This, of course, is way more electricity than we consume as a family (about 6,000 kWh per year for a 6 person household). But this is where electric mobility comes in. We can use the excess power we generate to charge our electric car! On a clear sunny day this looks as follows:

Our solar power control center "SMA home manager" shows the current electricity flow from the roof to the house drawing 7.4 kW (and taking 260 W from the grid to supplement). 

At the same time, the car is set from my iPhone's mobile app to being charging at this moment consuming the locally generated clean solar power to fill its battery. That's what I call a "solar powered car".

An electric vehicle has a certain amount of kWh it consumes per 100km driven. The new BMW i3 for example is rated at 12.9 kWh / 100km. So to drive 20.000 km it would require 2.580 kWh. This is an amount that can be achieved by a normal household sized roof top PV array. Even if sourced from the grid as 100% renewable energy at .25 Euro-Cents / kWh, it would be less than half of what you would have to pay at the pump to drive that far.

The crux is that our car is not always parked in our home garage plugged into our house grid when the sun shines. This is where two co-dependent factors come into play: a high number of electric vehicles and wide distribution of standardized charge points. As soon as EVs can be plugged in (or better using plugless charging systems) at work, at the supermarket, at the gym, almost anywhere, they can be connected to the grid as an electricity consumer while charging as well as contributor selling electricity back. The accounting for the demand and supply based battery management is likely easier than my daughters cell phone plan. On a large scale many of these 'driving storage systems' can be used to manage the inherent ebb and flow of renewable energy sources in today's electricity grids.

In my view, a future with de-centrally produced clean energy, a large number of electric vehicles and a widespread bi-directional charging infrastructure is possible. It is the true potential of solar powered cars and a much preferable outlook over today's fossil fuel based mobility.

The impact of airtravel

To date, only about 5% of the world's population has ever flown. However, the IPCC estimates that 3.5% of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions stem from aviation. Taking a long distance flight, say from Munich to San Francisco, is about the worst climate offense one can commit in a day. Air planes are per person not much more efficient than cars. If you consider the distance being about 5870 miles one way, a round trip can be equivalent to your annual car mileage!

But given that our lives at times require air travel, it is important to mitigate its impact. There are many sites selling carbon offsets, but they all vary in precision of climate maths, efficiency of administration and quality of investment projects. It is very important that the money gathered by selling offsets is invested in meaningful, timely and verifiable projects. The currently best option to offset flight emissions is atmosfair. Their focus on the airline industry makes them a good partner for environmentally acceptable air travel.

Some of the things that make atmosfair stand out are:

• Over 90% of all investments go into CDM Gold Standard project (the highest available standard for climate protection projects).
• High efficiency of administration with 92% of all funds going into projects.
• Detailed emission calculation specific to air travel, including non-CO2 impacts.
• Research on efficiency of airlines, published in a detailed airline index.
• Engaging with corporation to optimize and offset business travel.

atmosfair is "more costly" than what carbon calculators of other sites quote to fully offset a flight. However, this is due to more accurate calculations and higher quality projects. As they state on their site, 'because contributions to atmosfair are voluntary, [...] passengers should be fully informed about the ecological effects of flying as they are currently understood by the scientific community.' It becomes our choice then.

Next time we fly, we can consider our personal climate budget. Given the climate community's stated goal of limiting the average rise in Earth’s temperature by 2050 to 2°C above the pre-industrial level, we have a global budget of about 750 billion tonnes of CO₂ until the year 2050. Given a world population of 8.2 billion people, this means that each person on Earth has a yearly budget of roughly 2.3 tonnes of CO₂. We can do our own maths on how many flights that allows us to support this important goal. Let's do our part!

Tesla S wins Car of the Year award - for true innovation!

Elon Musk and Tesla have done it - they built an all-electric car that wins hands down in all evaluation categories - the Model S. And to prove it, they were awarded the Car of the Year award by Motor Trend. Their chief editor shares his thoughts on why Tesla could become the next Apple and why this is a turning point in history in recent interview.

This car is truly fascinating. Our very own Ken Morris is proud owner of by now 3 electric vehicles, including his brand new Model S:

Now, this is not only beautiful, fast and all-electric powered, it is also smart. A quick look at the insides of this vehicle as taken on a factory tour show this:

The chassis pretty much ends at your knee. Battery packs close to the ground, four wheels, an electric motor - done. No combustion engine, gearbox, cooler. No maintenance intensive pieces, clean, simple.

No wonder the existing cart manufacturers are either fighting this disruptive innovation tooth and nail or are at least blocking it where they can to slow it down. The larger part of their entire value creation is threatened! No more age-old intellectual property required.

Every so often a truly disruptive company comes along. Workday is leading us into the Cloud Computing age of Enterprise Applications, Apple has shown this by offering us a digital lifestyle that has changed our world completely. Tesla might just do that for our eMobility by showing us the future today.

Needless to say, I signed up on the pre-order list and am now counting the days until my Model S is being built. Several other Workday folks are already ahead of me though...

(all photos courtesy of Ken Morris)

Reinventing fire

Watch Amory Lovins give an information-packed talk on how we can go from the current gridlock mess to a bright future of energy independency. In in the meantime savings trillions of dollar and providing lots of entrepreneurial opportunities.



A must see! Then go visit Rocky Mountain Institute's "Reinventing Fire" site to learn more about this can be done in this graphic.

Carbon Footprint of WC 2010

I am obviously very excited about the Soccer World cup in South Africa, but as always, there are at least 2 sides to this coin. A recent study outlined the CO2 footprint of the entire tournament and totaled it up to 1 million cars on the road for a year. Yikes!

Comparatively, the footprint of WC 2006 was lower due to existing infrastructure, different energy mix, etc. Maybe environmental considerations should be included in the selection of the next location...

Direct shuttle from Walnut Creek / Pleasant Hill BART to Stoneridge Mall

Fantastic news! Our very own Wai-Ping has been requesting public transit from PH and WC Bart to Stoneridge Mall and it is finally happening. This is the response she got from Wheels (Dublin / Pleasanton public transit system) last week:

"I am very pleased to say that, based on your request, we are starting up the new variant of our 70 line (to be called 70XV) that will travel between the Pleasant Hill + Walnut Creek Bart stations and the Stoneridge Mall Road loop in Pleasanton, operating nonstop along I-680 in between. This service begins on June 29, and will be departing Pleasant Hill Bart at 7:54a and arrive Stoneridge Mall at 8:28a. In the afternoon, the bus will depart Stoneridge Mall at 5:15p, arriving Pleasant Hill at 5:58p. These timings were based on a combination of factors, including the general availability of buses during peak times and input from the other office complexes along Stoneridge Mall Road. Even if these times won't work everyday for everybody, we are hoping that people who have flextime (and most seem to do) will be able to avail of the new service at least some days of the week.

As you may be aware, we are facing significant funding shortfalls at this time, affecting our ability to maintain current service levels. Therefore, this new service will have to build ridership relatively quickly and substantially in order for us to be able to justify its permanent continuation. I hope you can help us promote it among your co-workers at Workday. We will also be doing outreach at the Corporate Commons, Safeway HQ, Stoneridge Mall, and the Kaiser facility that are all located in that area.

Thank you for making this request and for bringing this unmet transportation need to our attention. I will set the request status to Closed, but you can still leave follow-up messages to this ticket if and when you feel that you might have additional information that could be useful to us. We hope to see you soon on the new 70XV !"


Taking public transport for the long commute from WC to the Mall will have a significant impact on CO2 emissions and is truly a green statement. Let's make this the most profitable bus route ever and take a few of the commute cars off the 680.

Thanks to Wai-Ping for making it happen!!!

New fuel efficiency standards are coming!

As outlined in many blogs, president Obama announced new standards for fleet efficiency for automakers in the US.

What's the deal? In 2016, we will have a 35.5 mpg fleet-wide average for new cars and light trucks. This standard will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil and keep 900 million metric tons of greenhouse gases out of the air during the lives of those vehicles.

According to the White House, this "is equivalent to taking 177 million cars off the road, or shutting down 194 coal plants."

Very exciting and real steps towards solving the climate crisis!

Momentum for a better place

Shai Agassi's "a better place" is picking up momentum with Israel, Denmark, Australia, Ontario (CN) already signed up, but also the Bay Area cities jumping on the electric wagon. Check it out...


Watch CBS Videos Online

See Shai's recent TED talk as well:

Sales went Green!

Our fantastic sales team not only sells our Workday solutions, they also set an example for eco-choices! The Grafs and Sakos "went green” when they departed from Sales Club in Squaw Valley, electing to ride to the Reno airport in a vegetable oil burning converted diesel truck called the “Eco Taxi”. They reduced their carbon footprint, and the smell of French fries made for a nice ride.

Click on the image to see the details of this interesting vehicle.

Not much progress...

This weekend, I found an old magazine in a bookshelf in a friend's cabin. It was an issue of "LIFE" from 1959. Paging through this classic piece of journalism and advertizing, I stumbled across an ad by Mobil gas.


Now, my first surprise was to see that even in the hay day of gas guzzling cars the miles per gallon mattered. 3 out of 5 ads in this issue listed that as a selling point. Even more was I shocked when I found that Mobil says that in a recent test with a selection of average 1959 cars, its fuel achieved a whopping 19.44 mpg! We are talking 50 years ago, cars a big as a whale.

I can't quite believe that cars in 2008 are on average not really much better. By any stretch of imagination, cars half a decade later should consume a fraction of the fuel, shouldn't they? Car manufacturers today seem to have a hard time beating their own track record from the days of lucky strike and soda fountains.

Somewhere along the way, someone must have had an incentive to not improve too much over those good old days...

Long live the electric car?

First off, if you have not seen the documentary "Who killed the electric car?", you should put it on your netflix queue. It neatly disects powers at play in the automotive / oil industry that prevent further advancements in alternate car technology. A drama in many acts featuring rise and fall of the EV1...

Interesting enough, the bad guy of the movie, GM, now proclaims its future is tied to success of the green car. See this shift documented in a recent Business week cover story here.

Bike 2 Workday

Don't forget tomorrow is "Bike to Workday", so leave your car at home and try out a commute on 2 wheels.

Enjoy!

Shai Agassi's better place

Most of us remember Shai Agassi as the young, charismatic SAP development leader. Since his retirement From ERP software, he has been busy on greener initiatives (see also "the long tailpipe").

His latest initiative is called "Project Better Place", an effort to introduce electric cars to the state of Israel. This collaboration by an automaker and a government could lead to a more widespread adoption of emission free vehicles. It includes building a complete infrastructure for charging vehicles as well as building new electric vehicles and retro-fitting existing cars.

Hats off to Shai for dedicating his efforts to a greener cause!

The green road warrior

If you live near our office in Walnut Creek, it is easy to take BART or ride your bike to work to be green. But how about those of us traveling for Workday working with our customers or selling our solutions?

Airplane travel is one of the most carbon emitting activities and until the airline industry comes up with a better alternative fuel source, we can only leverage carbon offsets. TerraPass offers a simple calculator to see how much carbon is emitted by a flight (based on your portion of the plane's fuel consumption) and how much it costs to offset it.

An example: Last year, 10 Workdayers traveled to a prospect in Wichita, Kansas for a few days. Taking everyone's starting point into consideration, this amounted to 27,000 miles of round trip travel producing 10,000 lbs of CO2. Offsetting this amounted to about $60 for the team or $6 per travelers, which is roughly 1-2% of the average ticket price (or a beer at the airport lounge).

It felt good to travel carbon neutral. And of course we had the beer, too.

Solarzyme - bio fuel from algae

A very interesting contribution from Dave. Solarzyme is a company pioneering oil made from algae. Check it out:



I like the idea of being independent from fossil fuels, but I cannot quite follow their notion of being carbon neutral. Unless algae absorb the same amount of CO2 in the processing that the fuel emits during burning, it still is not the perfect fuel. But already ways better than today's oil...