A 101 on Electric Vehicles

E3's Managing Director, Ginger Elbaum, and Energy Storage Owner's Engineer, Jason Han, discuss Electric Vehicles in this first episode in the EV series.  During this podcast, Jason and Ginger talk about the different types of electric vehicles: light- and heavy-duty, and the opportunities and challenges of adopting electric vehicles and the associated infrastructure.  

Since this is a podcast about the top three takeaways, Jason provided his top three: 

1) EVs are coming and so is the charging infrastructure and there's gonna be a lot of opportunities for us to improve on that. 
2) As part of that infrastructure, there will be a lot of new ideas and innovations coming in that we'll have to adopt to keep up with the industry. 
3)  EVs provide a huge benefit to the United States and local hometowns in terms of air quality and sound in our local neighborhoods. 

Transcript

Ginger Elbaum (9s):
Welcome to The Top 3 by E3, a monthly podcast about the intersection between engineering, energy, and project finance. I'm Ginger Elbaum, managing director of E3 and I'll be your host today. Today I'd like to introduce Jason Han. Welcome Jason.

Jason Han (23s):
Hi Ginger. It's nice to be here. And today I'll be talking a little bit about electric vehicles, sort of a 101 topic to ease the listeners in.

Ginger Elbaum (35s):
Jason is part of E3's Energy Storage team. Jason, you're well-versed in EV from your time at APS (Arizona Public Service). This will be a good topic. What we're trying to do today is provide an introduction to electric vehicles. So why don't we just start with everybody's favorite - what kind of electric vehicle types are there?

Jason Han (58s):
With electric vehicles, you kind of split it into light duty and heavy duty. Light duty would consist of your typical cars, your Teslas and commercial vans, you know, sort of that last mile. Amazon, you'll see a company called Rivian really working closely with Amazon to get that package delivered to your house. Heavy duty would consist of things like semis trailers, which is also something Tesla is working on. So those are the kind of two vehicle types that are split up.

Ginger Elbaum (1m 34s):
Right. And so I think, probably most people think of your Teslas right, your, I don't know what you wanna call it, you're light duty, like you said, the sort of your residential personal vehicles, but there's a lot of work being done on the long haulers and the big rigs as well. Something else that's interesting that I thought I'd just stick in here is that we also see the commercial and long haul EV vehicles on the hydrogen side as well. So I think there's some parallel paths that are running here too. So we've bought our Tesla, now we've gotta charge it. Can you talk a little bit about, charging and charging levels and how, how to go about that?

Ginger Elbaum (2m 17s):
Maybe even the difference between AC and versus DC

Jason Han (2m 21s):
I'll, yeah, I'll definitely start out with AC versus DC. So AC is alternating current and I just describe it as it's the regular electric electricity you have in buildings in your house. DC is the electricity that's used in your electronics and also the batteries that are within those electronics and your cars as electric cars as well. And also it drives the motors within the electric cars. And so you have to kind of, when you're charging your vehicle, typically you're, you're converting your AC to DC but there's an exception that I'll talk about in a bit. But what people refer to as Level One Charging is your typical 20 volt you plug into an outlet and it's charging your vehicle.

Jason Han (3m 10s):
The big downside is it takes a lot of time to charge your electric vehicle this way you'll probably gain about 48 miles on 12 hours of charge, which takes a while to charge up. You basically put it overnight and you're getting only 48 at 48 miles.

Ginger Elbaum (3m 29s):
Yeah. That kinda defeats the purpose. Yeah.

Jason Han (3m 34s):
What typical people will do?

Ginger Elbaum (3m 38s):
No, I was just saying what else, what are the other charging options? Because that doesn't sound that appealing.

Jason Han (3m 44s):
So what typically homeowners do is get what is Level Two Charging and this is the outlet that is typically used for things like dryer washer, it's two 40 volts around double or 2 0 8 depending on where you're at and whatw, building level two will give you about 25 miles an hour. So within 12 hours of you charging, that can be accomplished by two hours. And what typically homeowners will do is if it's an older house, they'll put a new breaker in and they'll have that same plug as a washing machine and dryer typically in the garage and they'll get something set up that way.

Jason Han (4m 30s):
And that is what typically what most EV owners will do by a charger and, and charge it overnight or whenever just sitting in the garage.

Ginger Elbaum (4m 42s):
Does that come with, does that come with your car or is that something you have to, like when you buy your car is that you have to do this separately, right? Like at your, at your home, you have to have somebody come out and install this for on your behalf. It's not, the chargers aren't specific to the vehicles.

Jason Han (4m 59s):
Yeah, it's typically something that you'll have to hire someone or if your home is a newer build, it'll be more of a plug and play and type, there are branded chargers for each car, but it is generally separate. So for Tesla it's kind of like an Apple ecosystem. You'll have a, your specific Tesla chargers, although you can go third party, but people you know, prefer to stay in the same environment.

Ginger Elbaum (5m 25s):
Are, are those are our only two options or is there something else?

Jason Han (5m 28s):
So the third option is DC fast charging, and this kind of is a large range everywhere and some DC fast charging is also known as, level three charging and this can go from four 80 volts to higher. Typically you won't, you won't see DC fast charging in a home. It'll most likely be when you're middle of point A to B. The best known DC fast charging network is Tesla supercharger network and why they use DC direct current, as I stated before, the type of electricity that is used in your batteries and motors is that you don't need to convert between AC to DC or DC to ac and you don't have that converter as a, as a limit there.

Jason Han (6m 20s):
And so with that there's a higher efficiency, you can get about 180 miles an hour with a Tesla, it takes about 32 minutes to charge up to 80% and then, but that last 20% from 80 to a hundred takes about the same amount of time. So typically what people will do is when they're low, they'll charge up at a stationw, 15, 30 minutes and then they'll be good to go up to 80% charge.

Ginger Elbaum (6m 53s):
Interesting. And those are the, those are the stations we see at like the mall or like you said, they're also the, the stations that you see when you're, you know, potentially at like a, a fueling station. So a few members of the E3 team attended the S&P Project Financing Forum in New York. l was there and they were talking about their new work on charging pavilions, which I thought looked like a really neat idea and a really cool concept. They have, they have the charging stations but then they have picnic tables and playgrounds and things to do, obviously places to get food. And so I thought that was a pretty neat, neat concept and looked interesting and and appealing as somebody that would be interested in the, in EV there's lots of, I think there's a lot of innovation going on around EV and the, the charging stations and how they're gonna go about doing that.

Ginger Elbaum (7m 50s):
And, and that's certainly, I think that's gonna be a topic for a future podcast for us is talking about EV infrastructure and, and how that, how that'll work. But for the, for this podcast, what are, are there other charging levels or it's, it's one through three typically

Jason Han (8m 6s):
The one through three is sort of a guideline, especially with the DC fast charging and you do have different networks besides Teslas. The super trigger network is, is DC fast charging? One of the efforts within the United States, especially with Biden, is to create a supercharging network. Typically if you go to malls and things like that, it'll just be level two and that kind of goes into the infrastructure that it requires a lot of up network upgrades to get that DC fast charging at a location,, a lot of costly upgrades like new cables, new transformer. This is something, this is something we'll get into in a later podcast, but it's a, it's a big conundrum within the industry.

Ginger Elbaum (8m 52s):
Well, good. Well so what about just the EV market? Do you have any like, just kind of high level insights on just the market itself?

Jason Han (9m 1s):
Man, the, the market is just really exploding. They've adjusted a lot of the market has adjusted from, I think they mentioned 20 million vehicles by 2030 to almost 36 million. I think that was like in the last year or so, which is, comprises about 10% of all light duty vehicles in the United States. So by 2030 it'll be about 10%. And so especially in, even in other countries, especially China, they've really made the transition to electric vehicles very quickly. We are sort of on the cusp of where early adopters and mainstream adopters are really getting onto the electric vehicle train, especially since gas prices have been on the rise, you know, people are working from home for the foreseeable future we're gonna see a very large increase in electric vehicles on the road.

Ginger Elbaum (9m 55s):
Yeah. What about, so what about the heavy duty? is the, is the market as hot for heavy duty as it is for the light duty?

Jason Han (10m 6s):
So with, along with heavy duty there's a lot more constriction obviously there you have that issue where you need to get some, some goods from A to B very quickly and as we've kind of discussed, it takes about 30 minutes for a regular car to charge up to 80%. So you have kind of this conundrum where you need this vehicle or Hef semi to charge real fast but it's gonna take 15, 30 minutes or even longer. It's not like a gasoline Phillip. And so there's a lot of competing technologies such as hydrogen, which it works very similar to gas in many ways, but way cleaner. The only thing that comes outta the tailpipe is water.

Jason Han (10m 48s):
And so that's one of the competing technologies there. It's not as quite developed but there's a lot of experimentation going on in the west coast. They're trying to create a semi heavy duty corridor along the western coast.

Ginger Elbaum (11m 4s):
I met a woman at the same conference that I referenced earlier. I actually met a woman there who worked for, I wanna say it's forum and they are working on, you know, providing vehicles in that for that kind of what you call it, corridor there out in on on the west coast. I think it's really interesting and she was fascinating to, to talk to. So there's a lot of people looking at it. I think it's an exciting time for that. Okay, good. All right, well Jason, you know this is Top 3 by E3. Do you have three takeaways that you'd like to give our, our listeners?

Jason Han (11m 40s):
I think the top three takeaways is number one, EVs are coming and so is the charging infrastructure and there's gonna be a lot of opportunities for us to improve on that. Number two, I would say as a part of that infrastructure, there's going to be a lot of new ideas and innovations coming in that we'll have to adopt to keep up with the industry. And number three, I think really EVs and what it does for the United States and our local hometowns is gonna be very really a big benefit to air quality and sound of our local neighborhoods.

Ginger Elbaum (12m 21s):
Yeah. Very good. All right, well thanks Jason for your work here. And to our listeners, you know, thank you for joining e three's discussion on if you have any questions for Jason or any, you know, suggested future topics for our podcast, we'd love to hear from you. So please feel free to reach out to us by email e3 co e3 co com. Otherwise, we, this is the first in a series. We do plan to continue to discuss EV on future podcasts and so we look forward to, to doing more. Jason, thank you again. Appreciate your time.

Jason Han (12m 56s):
Thank you.