Electric Avenues

Seattle this year will be one of the advance markets for the Nissan Leaf, an all-electric passenger car. The city is also building 2,550 charging stations with federal grant money.

As shale gas from British Columbia is steadily introduced to energy markets in the Pacific Northwest and beyond, businesses and consumers alike may benefit from stable  heating and power costs. The advantages of shale gas could even spread all the way to our highways—energy generated from shale gas may soon power Seattle’s burgeoning fleet of electric cars.

Seattle is already at the forefront of the electric car movement. Thanks to a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, Seattle will receive 2,550 new electric car-charging stations in 2010. The grant was awarded to Electric Transportation Engineering Corp. (eTec), a Phoenix-based firm that will install the charging infrastructure in partnership with Nissan. Nissan, in turn, will offer an advance launch of its new electric car, the Leaf, in Seattle this summer. (A total of 1,000 Leafs will be available for purchase this year in the Seattle area.)

The new charging stations—some of which will be 220-volt home chargers awarded to buyers of the Leaf, while others will be fast-charging, “level 3” chargers located in to-be-determined public or corporate settings—will provide infrastructure for a new generation of electric vehicles, including the Leaf and the much-anticipated Chevrolet Volt, which is expected to arrive in 2011.

The Leaf is a landmark in electric car production—it will be able to travel 100 miles on a single charge. On a 220-volt home charger, the Leaf would take four to eight hours to charge. The Volt, meanwhile, has a 40-mile, all-electric range with a gasoline motor that kicks in when the battery is depleted.

The primary benefit of electric cars is that they can be powered up during the night when the region’s power capacity is underutilized. But if the use of electric cars spreads, they will ultimately require utilities to add additional capacity to support an already stressed power grid. And sources of new power are rare: Hydropower production is limited by a fixed number of dams; expanded coal production will be effectively halted by climate legislation; and wind power is famously inconsistent. The logical source to meet this new demand is clear—in the coming years, utilities will continue to turn to natural gas-generated power.

Puget Sound Energy (PSE), the Bellevue utility, projects that its gas-fired generation capacity will increase 104 percent over today’s level by 2029, to a total capacity of 3,270 megawatts, comprising the bulk of all new power production. Coal power and hydropower will continue to dwindle in the same period, leaving natural gas and renewable energy sources (including wind and solar) to pick up the gap in supply.

Furthermore, PSE expects to radically increase its use of natural gas-fired “peaker” plants—power plants that operate only during peak demand. Today, that peak occurs between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. But in 20 years, peak consumption could occur during the wee hours of the morning, as tens of thousands of electric vehicles silently charge in the garages and driveways of Seattle homes. And quite likely, that electricity will have been produced by shale gas from British Columbia

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