Let's get started.
Alright. So good morning and good afternoon,
depending on where you are.
My name is Kelvin Cheu
I'm a professor from The University of Texas at El Paso.
I'm also part of the Center for Transportation, Environment and Community Health,
a Tier One University Transportation Center funded by USDOT.
I will be hosting this webinar.
Today, we have a very distinguished speaker,
Dr. Regan Zane from Utah State University.
He's going to speak to us about An Electric Future for Transportation.
Let me introduce Dr. Zane.
Dr. Zane is the center director of
the NSF funded Research Center for
Advancing Sustainability
through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification.
You can see the name of the center on the screen now.
He holds
the David G. and Diann L. Sant Endowed Professor position at
Utah State University in
the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
where he founded the USU Power Electronics Lab,
the Electric Vehicle and
Roadway Research Facility and Test Track,
and the Battery Limits and Survivability Test Lab.
He has published approximately 200
peer reviewed articles,
28 issued patents and has received
international and institutional recognition in
his research, teaching and innovation.
He has raised more than $60 million in
research funding to date.
His recent research programs
span electrified transportation
charging systems and infrastructure
from battery, vehicle, and charging systems, to grid integration,
smart charge management, demand
response and distributed energy resources, and so on.
He maintains a very strong emphasis
on collaboration with academic,
government, and industry partners to develop and
transition research innovation into the marketplace.
So today, he's going to,
Dr. Zane is going to share with us
his research at NSF funded research center.
So without further ado, I'll invite
Dr. Zane to deliver his webinar.
Before that, let me
make a few housekeeping announcements.
First, this webinar is being recorded on video.
Second thing is when
Dr. Zane is delivering his webinar,
please mute your microphone.
And if you have questions
you may type it in the Q&A
section of the Zoom, below on your screen.
We will have a question and answer
session after Dr. Zane
has finished his presentation.
So Dr. Zane, please. Kelvin, thank you.
Thank you. Thank you for the kind introduction
and thanks to the team for the invitation.
I'm quite excited to be here,
excited to speak to this broad and diverse audience.
So I'll be quite interested to
hear the questions as they come.
And, and of course,
I'll be available after
the webinar for those that may watch this online,
please feel free to reach out to me.
We are very interested in collaborations and
opportunities to work together and even just
brainstorming ideas on how to make a better future.
So I'm excited for this.
I know that in a webinar format
we don't have a lot of interaction during the talk,
so I'll be sure that I get through
the core content and I hope that will
excite and insight some ideas and interests.
And I'll be sure I do leave some of
the time at the end for the Q&A
that Kevin will help manage.
As was mentioned, my name is Regan Zane.
I am at Utah State University.
I am the center director for
the recently funded
NSF Engineering Research Center called ASPIRE.
And as usual, it's an acronym for the words that,
that actually does have meaning here.
Our center is a consortium of
universities and national laboratories and
industry partners, all committed to the challenge of
how do we break down barriers to
the adoption and specifically around
the challenges of the charging systems and
infrastructure needed to support electrification.
All right, so we'll talk about some of our ideas.
I'll highlight some perspective,
that I think it's important to,
to our breaking down these barriers,
and doing it in what I'll
say is the right way, or positive way.
And I'd be quite interested in
your thoughts as we get to the end.
I'll also give a brief highlight
of what we're really doing here in the center.
Some expertise we have and where we'd
love to have additional collaboration.
All right, so let's dive in.
We'll go ahead and get started.
The vision for ASPIRE is to achieve a better future for
our children and achieve
a sustainable and equitable future.
And we believe that this can be accomplished in
large part by addressing
the challenges here in transportation.
So no surprise,
we're targeting both environmental implications
as well as economic, and so health and prosperity.
And we also have a very strong emphasis, which I think
is really a necessity to accomplish
the level of impact that we all would like to
achieve on equity and
access to both transportation
as well as the health and economic benefits.
We believe that this is going to require
widespread electrification of all vehicle classes,
and all, call it adoption groups or user groups.
But what I mean here is we need to be looking beyond
the personally owned passenger vehicles
that are parked in the garage.
We need to be looking well beyond
that perspective towards those that don't have
access to private parking and all the way up
into fleet vehicles and medium and heavy duty
and we'll talk a whole lot more about that as we go.
Kind of looking at our nation's goals,
The target now is
2050 for net-zero in the United States.
I think that's an outstanding target for us as a nation.
And I've heard the recent predictions are to get there,
we need clearly modifications in transportation.
And one of the targets I've heard recently is by 2030,
achieving 50 percent or
more of new vehicles, and new vehicle sales
being electric in all vehicle classes
so that all is right in line
with where we'd like to head with this.
So let's talk about what we're up against
to accomplish those goals.
Transportation Electrification
across vehicle classes.
What are, what are we really talking about?
So I thought might be helpful first just to,
kind of take a look and say, okay, here are the,
here are the networks where we're
looking to essentially transform
to entirely electrify the transportation system.
So we're talking about the electric utility,
power distribution,
generation distribution,
transmission distribution networks.
And we're talking about our entire transportation system.
I'm showing here pictures of generation and freight.
But you get the, you get the idea.
These are two of the largest networks in the nation.
And we're looking to have significant,
what we'll call transformative change
in both of these networks.
And so thinking about that,
let's put it in perspective,
just how big are these systems.
So the electric utility industry,
of course, this varies year-by-year,
but it's in the ballpark of $400 billion - large industry,
here in the nation, grows essentially at
the rate of population growth or even below,
with the energy efficiencies that have been achieved.
Its emissions have been decreasing.
Now it's accounting for
roughly 27 percent of
the greenhouse gas emissions in the nation.
And that number continues to go down
with decarbonization of the grid.
And so let's compare that to the transportation network.
This may be something that many of you are well aware of,
but let's just compare those numbers.
The transportation network,
if we look at just fuel, and I should
clarify this in the text.
If we look at the diesel and gasoline market
for transportation,
now of course that also varies
with fuel price and
that's headed up with the
expected demand here the summer.
But it too is in that rough number of
around $400 to $500 hundred billion dollars
for our fueling industry.
And it also accounts for
a very significant portion of
the greenhouse gas emissions.
And in fact,
with the recent adjustments in decarbonizing the grid,
transportation is now the highest emitting sector
for greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.
Clearly something we need to be looking at
and looking to address.
I'll also emphasize if we
look at these two networks together,
a couple of things that are interesting.
One is, because they're of similar size,
both in dollars and emissions, that all really ties
to the generation of
electricity and the use of the gasoline,
if we envision transforming one into the other.
So if the gasoline and diesel were
a 100 percent converted to electric,
of course this isn't an apples to apples,
but at least a rough order of magnitude,
we're looking at roughly doubling
the demand on the electric utility network
and if we're doing so in a couple of decades,
that would be the highest growth rate of
electricity that has ever been seen.
So this is, we're talking about
a major, potentially transformative need for
growth in the electric utility network.
Alright so, just addressing that there are
going to be some real challenges in getting
this done, and getting it done well.
And finally, I'll highlight we also of course,
would like to ensure that as we convert
the transportation network over to electric,
that we're doing so in a way that also reduces emissions.
And now of course, when we do this,
we have zero tailpipe emissions.
And that can really help air quality,
which is a significant challenge,
especially in the urban areas and even in areas of
low income and under-represented regions
that are often areas with
high traffic and high localized
emissions so, that can't be ignored.
That's an important piece of this.
The other one that I'll emphasize here is when it comes
to burning of fuels
and how we generate our electricity,
the greenhouse gas emissions are also important.
And as we convert the transportation to electric,
it's very important that we
consider what are going to be the implications on the grid.
Is this going to be a business as usual on
the grid and maintain the same ratio of emissions,
which would mean that our power network
would now go up to 50 percent or more?
Or, are there opportunities here
where electric vehicles can actually act
as a resource to the grid and
help accelerate the decarbonization of the grid?
And that's something we'd like to emphasize,
that we see as a real opportunity.
Not only going to zero tailpipe emissions,
but also making electric vehicles
a resource to the grid
to help us have a greener grid.
Alright, last point I'd like to make on this slide
is vehicle classes.
I said we need to look at all vehicle classes.
Here's a pie chart showing the energy use by
vehicle class in transportation, roughly.
And light duty market is over 50 percent of
the market of energy use
because of the large number of
vehicle miles traveled by light duty.
But we've broken that down here
into kind of smaller light duty, the
small passenger vehicles and
the larger light duty, or SUVs and pickup trucks.
And then what I've labeled here as trucks is
the medium heavy duty vehicles,
predominantly heavy duty, long-haul trucking.
So the small light duty, we have vehicles
you can buy today,
you can buy a vehicle now that's $30,000 to $50,000
that has 300 mile range,
maybe 200 mile of really usable range on
a long haul trip if you're charging them to
80 percent and using super high power charges.
So we're in that realm of
possibility on a light duty, but we're really not
in the opportunity for the masses,
so more needs to be done there.
Then as we advance into the larger vehicles,
particularly into our heavy duty trucks,
this is a significant portion.
It's close to a quarter of the
energy overall by transportation and
more than a quarter of our roadway transportation
or surface transportation.
So these are areas that have
got to be addressed. Now on trucks.
We can imagine this isn't quite there yet.
We see a Tesla truck, a semi-truck is expected to be coming.
And we have research projects even in our group,
we have projects with partners looking
at electric truck demonstrations.
But it's going to be difficult.
There are challenges here. A heavy duty truck with
400 to 500 mile range,
all Electric with a battery electric.
Now we're looking at a battery for that truck alone
that is well over
$100,000, and over $200,000 today.
And even with projections we'll stay over
a $100,000, and weight is an even bigger issue.
The weight of that battery pack, now we're looking
at well over 10,000 pounds, again,
likely on the order of
15,000 to 20,000 pounds just for that battery pack.
So there are significant challenges to address
in achieving heavy duty electrification
and even our larger light duty,
and then even small light duty
in catering to the masses.
All right, so I just wanted to outline some of
the challenges that are in front of us.
And then really flip this to
show what are the perspectives that we
believe are important to do this right.
So how do we ensure that
vehicles and electric vehicles end up being
a resource to the grid
for decarbonization and air quality,
while also achieving high quality
of service for high levels of adoption and low cost?
So few points
I'll just run through here very, relatively briefly,
working from the left to
the right, starting with environment.
We need to be looking at the localized impacts.
So localized air quality and emissions,
so tailpipe reduction,
as well as where's the electricity generated?
How is that impacting the air
regions of that area?
We're also looking at life cycle emissions,
everything from the mining and manufacturing of
the components leading to
the vehicle and its battery pack
all the way to decommissioning and recycling.
Grid decarbonization we'll talk
more about as we look at the grid impacts,
but that needs to be a consideration for the environment.
And in general, most of these points
I'm going to make all point in the same direction.
That is, we love to find
opportunities to reduce the size of the battery pack
and overall environmental impact,
that battery pack is one of them.
From the users' perspective,
we've got to look at opportunities that impact cost.
And I'll show here in a moment some of
the charging challenges that directly impact cost.
So at the moment that cost is really driven by
the cost of the battery pack, a large pack on
the vehicle and the cost of charging the battery pack
depending on your opportunities and
where you're charging and how you're charging.
Users are also looking for a more seamless experience.
And in fact, we see opportunities
here where electric could actually be
more convenient than the existing gasoline,
gas tank, gas station model
where perhaps vehicles can even operate,
where we even forget how,
where and when recharge and
and the vehicle's just always ready.
This leads into the desire to work with
all classes as well as user groups.
I mentioned personal, kind of shared fleet.
We'd also like to ensure that electric,
which we'd certainly expect it to be.
But we'd like to see electric as being synonymous
with, compatible with autonomous vehicles.
And then finally, we've got to find solutions
that are more equitable where
electric opportunities for transportation
and access to transportation are accessible and,
and are accessible to all audiences.
And in addition, we'd like to ensure that
the economic impacts of going to electric transportation,
as well as the environmental impacts are all equitable.
On the vehicle side,
what are the implications to accomplish what
we just went through on environment and user?
I'll pitch, we need smaller batteries,
both for the environmental impact of
the batteries as we go to scale,
as well as for the cost. We need longer life,
particularly of the battery pack.
Vehicles are low maintenance for electric systems,
fewer moving parts, high reliability,
but the battery pack needs to retain its capacity longer.
And I think there are opportunities
in how we treat the batteries,
as well as the chemistries and future developments
that can accomplish this.
We're having a heavy emphasis on what
we call shared infrastructure.
The approach of having
private infrastructure,
or single use infrastructure, is a real challenge
and it's also part of that equitable challenge
where only fleets
and entities sufficiently
large to have their own infrastructure can participate.
Shared public infrastructure, we believe is really
a future to make this accessible to small businesses,
as well as to all people.
And we need to be looking at solutions.
Both for parked vehicles
as well as those running in urban areas,
as well as those operating
on the highways and for longer-term.
And we need to look to a future of
what are the vehicle use scenarios.
Today, our passenger vehicles
sit parked 80 to 90 percent of the time.
But what's the future? We want to ensure that
electric systems and
charging systems have that future in mind.
Alright, last point on this slide,
and I promise you the next slides
will go quicker.
But I think these were all important perspectives
that we at ASPIRE
believe need to
get ingrained in our approach to electrification.
So the last point here is on the grid.
As we look at the electric grid,
how is it we accomplish our goal of low cost and
improved environmental impact
from the perspectives we just went through?
And these are the points that we've come up with.
We need electric vehicles
if they're going to act as a resource to
the electric grid, they need to be connected to the grid.
So, it seems obvious.
But if it's not, there's no electrical connection
if we can't pass electricity,
energy between the vehicle and the grid,
or vice versa, then it's not much of a resource.
So the challenge here is that if you only
plug-in during certain hours and you're never plugged in otherwise,
or you're not connected in any other way,
there's limited opportunity to be that resource.
We're also looking for flexibility,
this on-demand model, the existing gas
station model that we operate on.
We assume that we carry
the energy that we need on the vehicle,
in gasoline or diesel.
And when we need to refuel, we don't give any warning.
We show up where we want to show up
and we fuel very quickly.
We want it done in a few minutes
and then we're back out.
So we need more flexible,
more predictable, and more managed capabilities
if we're really going to create this resource.
If we continue with this kind of on-demand model,
that's a disturbance to the grid.
And that means that it's difficult to have
renewable sources supplying such peak loading
and it really drives cost up.
Alright, so those are,
it's essence of what we feel is important.
And so, essentially the remainder of
my presentation will highlight a few more details on,
on kind of why the status quo is a challenge and
then little bit of detail on
ASPIRE and what we're doing about this.
And then we'll give some time for questions.
Alright, so let's start with with
the status quo approach of the gas tank,
gas station model as I put it.
This is an on-demand model.
And particularly for
fleet vehicles, for those who don't
have charging at home or charging
at work and those going on long haul trips.
The default,
the status quo right now is that we'll need
electric vehicles to act like
gasoline vehicles or diesel vehicles.
And that is, we show up when we want and
we're going to get
a very fast charge and then we keep driving.
And this is today often
called extreme fast charging, meaning
we'd like to charge, you know,
not even in 30 or 45 minutes,
but we would prefer to charge in 15,
10 or maybe even as little as five minutes. To do so,
depending on the vehicle type and the
miles per kilowatt hour of that vehicle,
we're talking hundreds of kilowatts to megawatts
to achieve these fast charging rates.
And we're getting close to that capability
with some of the chargers that are out
there now for the light duty vehicles.
The main target here is the ability to have reduced
battery size so you can fast charge
a smaller battery, costs less,
and now your smaller battery works for
most of you are driving and when you do your long haul
trip, you do a real fast charge and that all works out.
Here I'm showing an image from
Idaho National Laboratory where they really
did an analysis of such sites and what they might cost.
And let's consider what the potential implications are.
In general, this might be fine if you're doing
this for occasional trips
like I do with my electric cars.
But what if this were
your primary mode of operation,
you're a fleet that runs continuously through
the day, or you don't have
access to your own private parking.
So now let's look at what would be
the implications if you had frequent,
what I'll call unmanaged fast charging.
And you can probably tell from the terminology I'm using,
this isn't what we're proposing.
And that's not, I think, what people
are thinking. We are imagining,
even with fast charging,
can we get this to be less frequent and/or
can we make it more predictable and managed?
But if you keep with the status quo,
these are examples of numbers that have been
published and even that
are are in commercial operation
today. What will this cost?
Well, the charging costs we usually think about. This is
what you'll be charged at, or billed at the,
the charging station.
This cost has built into it,
the peak demand charge
that you're pulling from the utility has
built into it the infrastructure,
upgrade cost of the utility,
as well as the actual charger,
the construction to build the charger,
running the conduit,
making the grid connection, the meter.
All of these various costs get lumped into
your charging costs. And today,
that's in the ballpark of $0.30
or more per kilowatt hour,
depending on your vehicle time.
And it comes out to these numbers, you know,
$0.08 or even $0.16 a mile for a sedan,
and even close to a dollar a mile for a semi-truck.
Again, those costs, they're on
par with the gasoline and diesel.
Maybe not a show stopper if you're doing it infrequently.
But a real challenge in shifting to electric
if these are going to be your normal operating costs.
And so that's one of
the challenges we're looking to address.
I'd also like to highlight that those aren't the only costs.
Another major challenge here is the battery cost.
There's a large battery pack on your vehicle.
Even with reduced battery size with this fast charging,
you're still needing
hundreds of miles of range.
Now as we fast charge that battery pack,
depending on the cost and
cooling management that went into it,
it's very likely that that battery pack is
going to have degradation
with high-powered charging.
And now with frequent fast charging,
that cost of the battery pack,
maybe on the order of $0.05, $0.10,
even $0.15 a mile
for the degradation impact on that battery pack.
And then the last one that
we don't often think through,
but I mentioned earlier,
semi-truck tractor trailer combination.
They live on revenue from the freight that they take.
If your battery pack is 20,000 pounds,
that's a significant cut into your revenue.
And so you should also be accounting
for the implications of the weight of the battery pack.
Alright now not to say here that the electrification
is a show stopper or costs are too high.
But that all of these numbers can go
down if we're careful about the way that
the charging systems and infrastructure
are implemented and managed.
The charging costs could be ten
times lower than what's listed here
if we can get close to bulk rates and act as a
resource and then the near
constant demand and load for the utility.
And these battery costs and weight costs will
go down significantly if we
treat the batteries better and have less weight.
There are multiple technologies that were investigating.
The fast charging is certainly one of them.
And we're looking at ways to minimize how often that's
required and bring the cost down for that fast charging.
Another technology that we're pursuing here
within the ASPIRE center and with many other partners,
is the opportunity to, what we call,
dynamic charge, provide dynamic charging the vehicle,
meaning we charge the vehicle
while it's actually in motion.
This can be done queuing up for
taxi stalls, could be done, you know,
when you're pulling up to load and
unload at low speeds in and out of the ports
or could even be done as shown here in this diagram
with heavy duty vehicles
all the way down to light duty sedans
on our highways.
The motivation for this is what
we just talked about in the last slide.
Can we shift away from
the large battery packs on vehicle
that charge occasionally every
couple hundred or few hundred miles
and carry that load around and have
the degradation and have the fast charging implications
on the battery and the fast
charging implications on the grid?
Instead, could we provide
more continuous power to the vehicle?
If that's a possibility,
that means that the batteries will be treated better,
it means that the grid has lower peak charging -
a number of potential advantages here
that could bring the overall cost down.
And a major challenge will be,
how do we implement this cost
effectively in the infrastructure?
One of those approaches,
we can do this with either conductive, meaning wires that
we connect to overhead or wires down in the ground.
Like you might have in a subway or
overhead like you'd have in a train or some of
the bus systems in
the cities, or it can also be done wirelessly.
And the picture I'm showing here is an example of
wirelessly charging or providing power to a vehicle.
These concepts can also be bi-directional.
Vehicles could provide power back
to the grid even through this.
So the basic, so we just want to
look through how this works.
The basic idea is one,
we have roadside equipment that connects to utility,
distributes power and now
the power to actually distribute
potentially even through
the roadway, we're above the roadway.
Here in this wireless version
that distributes in the roadway,
the upper pavement would look just like
any standard pavement in a road,
any vehicle could operate on it.
But when you have a compatible
electric wirelessly charging vehicle,
this roadside unit would communicate with the vehicle,
coordinate the billing and secure IDs
and then as the charging pads on
the vehicle come over
the charging pads on the road, it would receive power.
As I mentioned, one of the big costs for
these high power charging stations is the grid connection,
the meter, the construction going to that unit.
An advantage of a solution like this is
it can be done at scale.
We can have a single roadside
piece and grid connection.
It can operate at even the tens of megawatts level
and it would have a single interface for,
let's say, a mile of road.
And so it allows a great economy of scale.
Alright, so from the roadside unit,
it distributes power to roadside coils,
for example, I'm showing them here as a coil of wire.
This would be what we call inductive charging.
We also have solutions in
development that would use plates that would be
what we call capacitive or electric field charging.
So these operate with what we call pair
electronics and they power up the road
and transfer energy to
the receiving coils on the vehicle.
The vehicle side has the receiving units.
They receive that energy
and then transfer it to the battery.
This can be done safely,
there's an existing standard for low-power wireless charging,
that is becoming available soon,
even on light duty vehicles
and there are standards in place and in
discussion for heavy duty and
then potentially hyperdynamic charging.
Magnetic fields are
well contained and coupled between the road and vehicle.
And anytime that you're outside
of coupling between the two coils
from the vehicle and the road,
there's essentially no field, so it's safe.
There are no contacts outside,
so there's no electric shock hazard
for anyone walking on the road at present.
So this is an example system.
One of those technologies we're looking at
that could be a real game changer
in terms of overall costs. I mentioned earlier,
the cost of over $100 thousand
for the battery pack alone for a heavy-duty truck.
We talked about the light,
small light-duty car, $30,000 to $50,000
today for 300 mile sedan.
But can you imagine the implications
for both accessibility to transportation as well as cost
if we could have, you know,
$10,000 to $15,000 vehicles
that can drive around town with a let's say
40 to 50 mile range on
normal roads, but could
get on electric highways like
our interstate highway and drive
nonstop from LA to New York
with this relatively low cost vehicle
and relatively low-power charging.
So we see some real opportunities here.
Big implications, battery, it's battery friendly.
Main idea here is that we charge
the battery at lower power rates and more continuously,
instead of these short,
high-powered pulses. It's good for the grid.
A number of implications here.
First is that the vehicles are,
are more continuously, in this case,
connected, connected wirelessly to the grid.
So that means the vehicles can be more of a resource
because vehicles will still have some range on board.
And so the electric grid and management of
the system could make
decisions and coordinate with the vehicle and say,
Okay, I'll let you charge in two miles
or I'll let you charge in five miles.
And now what we did is we have a moving electric load.
And so the grid can actually use that
to balance out loading and
provide good services throughout
and especially urban regions.
It's also shared. This infrastructure
could be shared both light, medium, and heavy duty.
We envision this through a modular approach.
So that's a real opportunity
for increasing utilization and in decreasing cost.
It's also long life.
The battery packs on vehicle are
a challenge because those
battery packs are likely ten years or less lifetime.
And for fleet vehicles,
those battery packs might even be less than five years.
What we're essentially doing here is we're trading off
vehicle cost for infrastructure cost.
And by shifting that cost to the infrastructure,
we believe it can be done quite more cost-effectively,
now with long life infrastructure, you know,
20 to 40 year life
infrastructure instead of short life battery packs.
And then finally, I'll highlight
that this can be done at scale.
I mentioned that for kind of
a single grid connection per mile.
But now we can also envision what would it be if
we had private-public partnerships.
But we have, we have some partnership that allows
major highways and corridors coming
around cities, even crossing states,
now could become one of
the largest customers to
the utility in that region or in that state.
So if we have a highway going through a state
that takes up 50 miles, 80 miles
but it could be a single operator
running that, operating that highway
that's now a many hundreds of megawatt
customer to the electric utility.
Now there's some real opportunity for
scale, both for management, and loading on that grid,
but also for negotiating the rates.
This could really bring costs down compared to
every gas station doing
independent installations and negotiations.
Alright, so that's a pitch for one of
these technologies that could make a real difference.
And I'll give one
last highlight to some of the studies we've done.
This portion of the study looks at
aspects of, what if we had dynamic charging?
If we could charge vehicles partially while they're on
the go and partially when they're parked and stopped,
we'd love to see a combination of these technologies.
What would be the implications?
What are the power demands?
What are the demands through the day?
What would the implications be for cost?
This analysis would apply to both,
conductive dynamic opportunities
as well as wireless.
And we've done multiple studies.
Again, just a brief highlight here from
the study funded by the Department of Energy,
ARPA-E, where we evaluated
with additional partners through ASPIRE.
And one of our industry partners, AECOM,
we evaluated Los Angeles
and the ports there in
LA and we looked at multiple roads.
You can see the ones marked here,
the I-70 and 210 are examples.
And we evaluated the traffic and the loading and the power
demands if they were shifted to
electric, and we looked at light duty,
medium duty, heavy duty.
If we were to put only one class versus multiple classes.
But one interesting result we found
if you look in the lower right-hand section,
we give the power demand per time and per distance.
It's a 3D plot here.
This is the instantaneous demand of those vehicles.
So if we did full dynamic
where we just provided the exact amount of
power the vehicle needed to move
at the spot that it needed it.
This is the demand
you would have from trucks and the demand you would have from cars.
And then interesting that if you combine those
two and put it in the upper plot for I-710,
we found that the, the mix of light,
medium, and heavy duty as we combine all these options,
actually gave a more uniform demand
and loading throughout the day.
Also, interestingly, it's a more predictable,
relatively predictable load because
traffic loading is
relatively predictable and
operating throughout the day.
So even in and of itself,
it provided more uniform loading to the grid
if we were to combine
these vehicle classes and
operate them with the dynamic charging system.
And then on top of this,
than we would like to apply managed,
control capability through communications management,
which could further levelize some of
these loadings and distributions.
And then finally, essentially as
a last resort and we would look to
renewable and distributed generation sources,
not lastly in renewable, but lastly on
the distributed generation such as batteries
and others to help further smooth the load.
Alright, last remark I'll make on this is
that one of the aspects of the study we
performed is techno economic analysis and we evaluated
the return on investment of
a roadway operator and found that,
for example here on that 710,
if we were to incorporate and I forget the numbers
but I think it was about 30 to 40 percent of
the roadway would be electrified to cover all the traffic
demands with a reasonable adoption curve
over a 30-year time period,
we found that the entire cost of the infrastructure,
the charging system, the grid upgrade,
and the installation, etc.
as well as the cost of the energy and
electricity during operation,
all of those costs could be covered with a fee of
roughly 25 percent of the fuel savings
going from diesel or gasoline to electric,
which is much better than what I showed
previously on the slides where it showed that
fast charging today is costing close to
equal to the cost of gasoline or diesel.
In this case, you would have roughly 75 percent savings.
Alright, so that's
a highlight for why we're looking at a mix
of technologies and why we see this as some,
some real challenges ahead to,
to accomplish our goals.
And so within ASPIRE,
we are bringing together multiple expertise from across
disciplines in engineering as well as
business and policy and law,
to really understand, what would it take to
make this type of change? To be looking at
pavements and roadways and parking structures
and, what are the connections to autonomy?
And, who will adopt? And, how do we meet the needs of
diverse audiences and fleets, etc.?
These are
the challenges that we're up against and
we'd love to find
additional opportunities for collaboration.
So our approach is to look at this both from
the consumer and fleet perspective,
combine that with the charging systems
and technology with wired and
wireless charging systems as
both technologies that we're investigating,
but with a general theme towards,
let's bring the power to the vehicle,
let's charge vehicles when, where,
and how they operate,
rather than modifying traffic and
operations to get vehicles to a charging station.
So this includes in their parking lots, in
the main roads and also on our highways.
Doing so in a way that is synergistic with
the needs for electric utility in
the grid through smart charging,
and coordination. Then finally,
combining this and integrating it with planning and
future developments in
transportation systems and operations.
So ASPIRE, as we see it,
is at the integration and intersection.
We'd like to be a trusted resource
to look at the paths forward.
And also one
who's helping create teams and collaboration.
Anything that we can do to help advance
these themes with other partners.
Alright, that's the basic pitch.
We'd like to see this across
modes of transit, from trains to buses, to cars, trucks,
integrating renewable energy,
all of this with smart management and
integration of different charging systems.
And overall, creating a resource for the grid,
decreasing costs, improving air quality.
That's the basic pitch. Alright,
with that, I will conclude here in just a few minutes.
Let me just briefly highlight
who we are, who we are really within
ASPIRE and these broad,
big themes I've just highlighted, what are we doing?
So we've created what we call umbrella projects,
five core areas that we're organizing our projects.
And then we have research thrusts so
where we have our core expertise,
essentially our departments that support those projects.
And these will progress and grow over time.
Our five core projects
are Extreme Fast Charging.
I gave that a bit of
a dirty name here in the beginning,
but that is going to be part of the portfolio
and we've got to find ways to do so more cost
effectively and with less implications on the battery.
That's a theme of our center.
Pavement Integrated Systems,
particularly if we have integrated
wireless charging systems,
is an ongoing theme.
How do we do this cost-effectively?
How do we actually make them,
you know, 20 to 40 year life systems?
Smart and Secure Charge Management.
Cybersecurity is a major challenge here
and the charge management is absolutely
critical to the implications I just went through.
And then finally, how do we take these
and create systems? But not only
a System of Systems,
but even Systems of Systems that the
combination of the transportation networks,
the vehicles, the fleets,
the electric grid, and distribution networks.
All of this comes
together and is important for operation.
And then finally, we have a major project
oriented around Market and Workforce Development.
How is it we help influence the growth and
informed decisions and policy and the market?
And how do we develop the workforce needed for
such a transformation across this space?
So, those are the primary themes
and we have many sub-projects in these areas.
And always looking for opportunities to leverage
and expand what we're doing with others.
So please reach out.
Our research thrust to support these are in
transportation, adoption, power, and data.
I've kind of highlighted those before.
These are big buckets
for a number of core expertise
that are necessary to make all this happen.
And then workforce development and
a real emphasis on the culture that we're generating.
An inclusive approach to these systems
and diversity. Alright, who we are,
I'm not going to spend that much time on this thrust,
but I can make these slides
available and we have it here on the recording.
But within each of those research thrusts,
we're core individuals and each of them have expanded,
these slides are outdated, on the personnel
but you can find more information on our website [https://aspire.usu.edu/index].
We're looking at infrastructure as well as systems
and how they would impact the
technologies I've just talked about.
We're looking at the adoption, both from
user and societal implications to
policy, economy, environmental impact.
We have experts in these areas
and many opportunities here to expand that collaboration.
We have the Power Thrust,
everything from the batteries to
the electric grid and all in between.
And so a number of core expertise
and developments in that space.
Then on the data side, it's really kind of
the glue that holds us all together,
but it's both from the modelling and
simulation on the planning side, to the real-time operations.
Our data systems expertise brings together
all of these components.
Finally, we pull these together
into what we call Systems of Systems Testbeds,
that are ways for us vet and
evaluate these technologies and concepts.
And each of these test beds are pulling in
both expertise and talent
and developments from within the center,
as well as our national laboratories,
and our industry partners.
On the left-hand side, we're
developing what we call
a city, an intercity simulator,
this is essentially our digital sandbox,
to vet and evaluate all of these concepts together
and really understand that
we're barking at the right tree,
that the advancements we're pursuing will make a difference,
they'll have societal impact, they'll drive adoption.
That's through these simulation systems.
And then on the right-hand side,
we have a hardware system for, kind of
pre pilot vetting and
development in a controlled environment.
And this is the test track at Utah State University,
We have a quarter mile test track, that
is what we call the Electric Vehicle and Roadway Facility,
EVR, we have solar power,
we have energy storage,
we have a high power utility service.
We have everything available here to look at
both wireless technologies and wired.
We have vehicles
from light sedans, to an SUV, to a bus.
And now we're expanding to semi-trucks.
We have an expansion to that facility currently planned.
We hope to have a groundbreaking
this year and the ribbon-cutting next year.
This will be an expanded version of the EVR facility.
It will essentially allow us to the host larger groups and more,
more interactive activity and
more vehicles, larger vehicles.
So really looking forward to that expansion
as a headquarters here for ASPIRE.
The ASPIRE center, headquartered at
Utah State here in Utah.
We have core partners,
the University of Colorado, The University of Texas at El Paso,
Purdue University, and University of Auckland.
And then we have affiliated campuses with
additional core expertise, faculty we've known
for a long time and are core contributors to the center,
Colorado State, University of Colorado Colorado Springs,
Cornell, and Virginia Tech.
And that is expanding.
We're certainly open to expanding our affiliated campuses.
We have four national labs that we're actively
collaborating with within the center.
And then we have industry and innovation partners
throughout the nation and some worldwide.
Our industry partners, the industry board today
is just over 55 members total.
That continues to grow,
but we're looking for the right
individuals, the right groups at the table
to help drive our vision and plans forward.
Alright, now truly the last couple of things I'll
say and then we'll have time for
perhaps just a few questions.
We are advancing the technologies
through both the pre pilot work
here at the EVR as I mentioned,
the early pilot work as I might pitch it,
public scale testing and demonstration, evaluation
of our technologies with multiple projects.
I just highlighted three of them here.
They're looking at Smart Charge Management, for example,
across modes of transit here in
Salt Lake. A program looking
at wireless charging at the Port of LA.
Another one looking at megawatt
wireless charging in Seattle,
with the partners you see listed, but many
opportunities to really vet these early technologies.
And then we're in discussions with many agencies,
state agencies and other partners
considering where will those first pilots be?
Where will we actually get beyond the,
the public demonstration and into
a real pilot in a less controlled environment.
And so that's
an excitement that we have moving forward
and we really are looking for
new partnerships and opportunities to
achieve rolling these technologies out in
pilots across the disciplines.
So I think I'll conclude.
I just had a couple more slides
that highlight what some examples are,
pilots that we have in play,
we have some here in Utah, one at
Inland Port that may be an
opportunity to vet a number of
these technologies together in a realistic environment.
Just one of those examples from that previous list.
We have community partnership programs,
one funded by the Department of Energy,
where we're building those partnerships
throughout the Intermountain West, as we call it.
To set the stage
for really rolling these technologies
out as they become available.
But there's just so much happening in
this space. I think we all know it.
I hope we can find good opportunities to work together.
I emphasized workforce development.
We're looking at multiple pathways
into the implications of an electrified future.
And we're certainly interested in the implications
not only at the collegiate level and in engineering,
but also with our trades and community,
and junior colleges.
We're in discussions with some of the trades,
looking at the implications for electric utility,
for transit agencies, for road construction.
And we've really got to get our heads into that game
to understand and develop
technologies that are going to work and,
be there for everyone.
Last picture I'll show just to highlight
that there's a group of middle school students.
We had the year before COVID,
we were hoping to do this last year as well,
but that was canceled.
But we had, they run their little race cars.
They develop an electric car,
kit car, and they race to see who'll go the longest.
But we retrofit one of
these with a wireless charger and put a wireless
charging segment out on the track
and show that we can easily beat them
with longer range
when charging every time we go around the track.
But they were very excited and there's just a lot
of excitement and interest in this space.
With that, I'll conclude,
we are excited to see
a future opportunity in electrification
and make the world a better place.
Thank you, Kelvin. Thank you Regan.
We have time for
questions. I'm seeing two questions in the
question and answer box.
Let me read the questions to all of you
and we'll call on our presenter to provide the answer.
The first question is,
is there any type of
overhead power for semis, like how light rail is powered?
Absolutely.
Yeah, that's a great point.
And the comments that I made about dynamic charging,
providing charge as you go, and some of
the advantages on the battery and on the electric grid.
Those all apply equally to the wireless
charging or what I'll call wired or conductive charging.
And for semis, the overhead lines
are one in serious consideration.
And in fact, there are demonstrations.
There was a demonstration
running for a short time at the Port of LA
where Siemens was helping to lead that.
And there's also an existing pilot
that has been running in Sweden
where there are multiple miles of roadway segment with
the overhead line running semis
as a demonstration pilot
and I think there are further plans,
maybe in Germany and other parts of Europe.
So it's a 100 plus year old technology
that it is relatively small modifications
to get working with semis.
So that's a real contender.
The challenge with that one,
well, a challenge, is that it
would be, for a single vehicle class,
meaning it's difficult to get
that same infrastructure working
for medium or light duty and, and other scenarios.
There are also concerns that others have raised
with regard to being
kind of the environmental
just the visual impact of the overhead lines.
But to the extent that we have,
let's say dedicated, heavy duty lanes
that might be with heavy utilization, high utilization.
That's a real opportunity.
So that's in the running.
Thank you! The second question is,
how would the EMF of the conductive wires
affect the mobile devices
carried by the general walking public?
Yeah, a lot of questions and thoughts around
broadening electrification and what
the implications are.
It's a great question on mobile devices.
Also, of course, concerns for
public health.
And those that have pacemakers and other,
other devices that are critical.
And so these are certainly under
consideration and are being accounted for.
Of course, with general distribution,
getting to the roadway, etc.
existing standards are in place and can be managed for
the low-frequency 60 Hertz or the DC lines
that would feed these systems. For the wireless system,
which may be the emphasis after this comment,
for a wireless charging system in a roadway.
That's where the existing standards,
you know ICNIRP is the standards agency that
is often used in this space.
But there are actually two or three organizations
that have also run standards.
They've carefully evaluated and investigated what
are the allowable emissions.
And the same standards are used
for deciding what's allowable for
your cell phone or for
radio towers or
for your microwave oven, etc.
So those standards are well in place and have
been applied to wireless
charging systems for electric vehicles.
And there is a standard now published
for light duty wireless charging vehicles.
And it easily meets those safety standards.
So the implications are that it would
not affect your mobile device. That's good to know!
So do you have any questions from the audience?
There's one in chat.
This question is,
can you talk
a little bit more about
transportation infrastructure systems?
What aspects are you looking at and
what projects or pilots do you have in the pipeline?
You bet. Certainly, one of
the more challenging aspects
and something that catches the eye and interest of many
as we're looking at how to accomplish this.
On the transportation infrastructure side
and, maybe I'll give you the caveat on both of these points
that we can bring in the core experts within
our team, would love to make connections
for those that would like additional follow-up.
And we have great leading experts
in each of the spaces. On the infrastructure end,
we are looking mostly at how we can
accomplish integration of different aspects
of charging systems in the pavements.
And this is not just the wireless,
the wireless version that I just highlighted is
pretty clear. If you can imagine now having
taxi queue up areas or short-term parking areas
on the road, or having parking garage.
Today, having cables and connections
and all these user kiosks anywhere that you have,
the three or four chargers.
But if you can imagine
a parking unit with 300 - 400 parking stalls and
let's say 50 percent or 75 percent of them are
electric compatible, how that would be implemented.
So with the wireless solution,
what we're looking at is how,
how is it we can embed
the charging coils and quite
possibly some of the electronics
as well so that the whole system is embedded
and has a no touch,
no interface experience for the user.
So for that, we're looking at how is this done in asphalt,
how is it done in concrete,
what are the thermal cycling implications?
What are the stress implications on
each of those payments?
How does it impact cracking,
how does it work over seasons?
In each case,
how does it affect the construction
technique and the materials?
We're looking at examples, for example,
in the concrete scenario,
we're looking at precast, concrete modules
is a sample either for
parking stall or for
a roadway segment for implementation in the road.
You know, these are ideas and solutions
that could provide fast
construction and wouldn't
require additional training.
So you could use relatively well-known techniques
for putting the roadway in.
So these are all big questions and
what's the manufacturability?
What's the constructability?
What training requirements are there?
What are the lifetime implications?
So we have teams working together with the,
with the electronics and the power components,
with the thermal modelling and analysis,
both for the power side as
well as for the payment itself.
And then of course we have the pavement engineers
working on this.
On the transportation systems end, Kelvin could jump in
and provide answers on that one as well.
But in the systems aspect,
what we're interested in, what are
the implications to the transportation planning,
to the networks, and
communication, vehicle to vehicle,
vehicle to infrastructure communications,
what's the synergy with autonomy,
with traffic lights and signal traffic flow, etc.?
But how is all this going to be combined and integrated in
with a seamless charging experience?
How do we design
those systems together with our smart charge management,
such that those systems, for example,
would minimize our emissions,
would minimize cost, would minimize travel time?
These are all options.
The holy grail of this,
in my view in the end is that,
I've got an app where I can,
I can say, okay, I need to get from A to B.
That might be a 300 mile trip
and I need to be here at that time.
And it tells me, okay,
you leave this point, costs
you $100.
You leave it this time, it costs you $50.
And behind the scenes it's integrating in
the implications for
the electric grid, it's loading
and the dynamics on the grid.
It's looking at feeding me into the traffic and
guaranteeing my time on the road to get there, etc.
So a lot to be done here on
transportation systems that's beyond
the scope of ASPIRE.
But we really want to find
the right collaborators and colleagues
to bring those aspects into how we're envisioning
the smart charging and management systems
and our charging infrastructure.
In terms of projects and pilots,
we have we have existing projects looking at
subsets of some of the pieces I've just mentioned,
including smart charge management,
utility scale charge management.
We have pilots or projects
currently running that are here at the EVR,
the facility I just showed,
we have currently operating demonstration.
We'd love to host anyone that would like to come out.
But we have demonstrations in play right now
with pavement integrated charging system,
some that have been in our payments for,
for over two years, two to three years,
maybe even longer by now.
And we have new projects looking at
new approaches to the construction for both
asphalt and concrete and those are being tested
at our facility among
our partners including
our international partner in Auckland.
They each have sub-pieces of
this being tested at their various sites.
And then for pilots,
I gave you kinda that list
of pilots that are in consideration,
various discussions. I'm using the word pilot
now for assuming a real public demonstration.
It's not in a fully controlled environment.
And that Inland Port is one that we're likely to
be pursuing over the next few years.
This is where you have multiple container trucks,
about a million per year operating
at the Utah Inland Port, just south of
Salt Lake City, south of the airport.
So it's a nice combination of container handling,
drainage tracking, support vehicles.
And so we may be applying some of these concepts to that,
that environment as a pilot.
Do we have anymore questions?
Last call. Maybe if there are no further questions,
I'll just double down on my pitch.
A lot of change coming and I think this crosses
so many disciplines, well
beyond the scope of any one of us or even any,
any of our teams or groups or centers.
We're sure looking for opportunities
for collaboration,
sharing ideas, building a conference,
workshops around these topics.
So please reach out. I'll get you to the right person.
Thank you, Dr. Zane. We will conclude our webinar here.
Thank You
everyone for attending this.
And we will also notify you of future CTECH webinars.
Thank you again, and thank you Dr. Zane.
Thank you. Goodbye.