Electric Avenues

Is Seattle ready for the electric car?

By Nick Horton | May 2010 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Credit: Image courtesy of Nissan

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.

Gassing Up? Natural gas may become the next automobile fuel
in the business market.

What Price Gas? Natural gas may flood the market at the same
time a new tax structure for carbon comes along.

Back to Where There’s a Drill, There’s a Way

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