Customer deliveries will begin next month.
Source: Electric Vehicle News
Tesla launches a $10,000 monthly lottery to encourage workers to get COVID-19 vaccines
Tesla told employees that it is launching a new lottery to encourage workers to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
There are several prizes to win, including a new $10,000 prize every month until the end of the year.
The post Tesla launches a $10,000 monthly lottery to encourage workers to get COVID-19 vaccines appeared first on Electrek.
Source: Charge Forward
TeraWatt Infrastructure aims to address the massive energy capacity needs of EV fleet charging depots
As more fleets of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles go electric, there’s a growing awareness that building the necessary charging infrastructure will be a complex proposition, requiring specialized expertise and considerable capital. Fleet vehicle depots will need to incorporate not only charging stations, but energy management systems, and possibly energy storage and on-site generation. These sites will also require massive amounts of power capacity, and that means close coordination with local electrical utilities. Many fleet operators are turning to third-party companies to manage all these elements as part of a turnkey charging service.
TeraWatt Infrastructure offers a comprehensive platform that combines financing, energy management and project development to help organizations make the transition to EV fleets. The company has been acquiring real estate in strategic locations near major highway exits, metropolitan areas and logistics hubs—potential sites for future charging centers. It also provides fleet operators a suite of solutions and asset financing for infrastructure projects at their own sites.
TeraWatt has only recently come out of stealth mode, and has yet to announce any major customers. However, the company got the attention of the media in May when it appointed Neha Palmer, a seasoned expert in the energy management field, as CEO. Ms. Palmer was Google’s Head of Energy Strategy for 10 years, and she managed the tech giant’s buildout of its energy-hungry data centers. Her unique experience is expected to be an invaluable asset to TeraWatt as it works to develop large-scale EV charging infrastructure projects.
“Neha Palmer tackled Google’s data center energy consumption through a decade of massive growth, while also bending the will of the world to achieve net zero emissions,” said TeraWatt Infrastructure co-founder Ben Birnbaum. “It’s difficult to find someone with the kind of infrastructure development experience that the world is going to require to make it successfully through the transition to electrified transport, given the complexities of the energy requirements and the sheer volume of watts and capital required.”
Ms. Palmer explained to Charged how TeraWatt Infrastructure intends to tackle the problem of providing power for charging large EV fleets.
Neha Palmer: My background has been energy my entire career. I worked at utilities, and over the last 10 years, I was at Google helping lead the energy strategy for the global fleet of data centers. We built a team that was building out the energy strategy for these really large energy-intense pieces of infrastructure. Everything from transmission lines and substations, all the way to clean energy supply to make sure the data centers were clean. We went from eight sites on two continents to dozens of sites on four continents. We really changed the way corporations were buying energy, focusing on clean energy.
I was looking around at what the next big thing would be in terms of being able to reduce carbon emissions, and very quickly triangulated that it was electric vehicles. Electrification kind of has to go in sequence. The grid has to get clean so the source of power for those vehicles is clean, so it’s kind of a nice virtuous cycle. I started looking for opportunities there, met the founders of TeraWatt, and it just made a lot of sense. The experience I have in interconnecting very large-scale, energy-intensive infrastructure to the grid is definitely the way that we’re trending for electric vehicle charging, particularly for fleets. TeraWatt was conceived of by the founders as a way to help fleets electrify, focusing on the large amounts of electricity, infrastructure and other things that they’ll need to charge many vehicles at once.
I think when a lot of people think of charging, they think of, for example, a Whole Foods, where there’s a couple of charging slots. What we’re talking about at TeraWatt is having dozens of chargers in one location, dozens of vehicles charging simultaneously, which requires more than just a simple grid connection. It requires things like on-site storage, on-site electricity generation, and a really large interconnection to the grid. All of that starts to become a new asset class, and TeraWatt was built to help companies make that transition. We can own those assets for them if they don’t want to buy them themselves, and we can help them develop those assets as well.
We have property across 18 states that we’ve started developing into charging infrastructure. We’re focused on logistics hubs and highway corridors, where we believe that the early movers on fleet charging will be. We can help build out entire facilities that are pre-positioned for electric vehicles, but we can also help customers who are transitioning their current sites and help them think about how to do that as well.
Charged: What vehicle use cases are you focusing on?
Neha Palmer: There are two areas of focus. One is last-mile logistics, where you might have companies like FedEx, UPS or Amazon, that are making deliveries and have a warehouse with trucks coming in and out. The second area of focus is along highway corridors, where we believe there’s an interesting chicken-and-egg issue. Once those vehicles come to market en masse, there’s the need to have charging for those vehicles to truly be used in the way that traditional freight operates.
Charged: Will the fleet operators be the customers that you would integrate with directly? Or would it be vehicle OEMs?
Neha Palmer: I think there’s a lot of different paths. The ecosystem is still, I think, shaking itself out. OEMs are certainly interested. A lot of them realize that in order to be able to deliver a large number of vehicles, they need to provide a charging solution, but they’re focused on manufacturing vehicles. They don’t necessarily want to own a bunch of infrastructure, and they might not even have the in-house expertise to deal with the scale.
A lot of these OEMs have been delivering pilots of one or two vehicles. But when you start to scale to dozens of vehicles, that’s a step change in the amount of infrastructure required. We’re having conversations with OEMs where they’re saying that this could be a really interesting partnership opportunity. We are able to own those types of assets, and we are structured in a way that can bring a low cost of capital to finance those assets.
Charged: Say a municipality wants to electrify their school bus fleet or their transit fleet, would you do that as well?
Neha Palmer:We are here to help fleets in general. The infrastructure required is kind of agnostic to what you’re charging. It really is about: Do you have enough power to bring to bear for the number of vehicles that want to charge? And can you manage that entire piece of infrastructure, from connecting to the grid to delivering power to these vehicles?
Charged: So, your niche would be the really power-hungry, big hubs that have lots of throughput.
Neha Palmer: Absolutely. We really see an acceleration in the medium- and heavy-duty vehicle market. The total cost of operation for those vehicles is already positive in terms of switching to electrified vehicles. And yeah, we’re focused on those large-scale operations that will require many megawatts of charging, as opposed to just a couple of vehicles charging at one time.
The amount of energy intensity, I think, is something that people are starting to recognize, but have not anticipated. It takes a long time. My data center experience tells me that it can take two to four years for an energy-intensive piece of infrastructure to be interconnected to the grid with the reliability you want. And when I think about the number of charging stations that will be required for all the fleets that want to transition, it’s kind of mind-boggling. There probably is not enough capacity on the grid at this moment to meet the full demand that will be required once we have full electrification, so there need to be other solutions in the market. That’s where you start to see infrastructure with storage, on-site generation—all of these other aspects of charging at scale.
Charged: Walk us through the steps and the challenges if you wanted to electrify one delivery area of the city for, say Amazon, for example.
Neha Palmer: The first thing is just understanding the power availability in any location. Can you get the amount of power in the timeframe you want it? Oftentimes you’re going to have to build at least a simple line from wherever the substation is to the site, so that has a timeline associated with it. And then the capacity. Is there capacity in that substation to meet your load for the amount of charging you want to do simultaneously?
There is a significant amount of coordination with the utility, and sometimes it’s a different provider for the actual electricity. And then who owns the lines might be a different utility, so there’s a lot of coordination from that perspective. And then, if it’s a greenfield site, you’ll have to permit all the things that would be required to permit. That would obviously be a building, if there’s a warehouse, but it might also include other elements. If you wanted to have solar on a site, if you wanted to have energy storage, all of those things require lead time and special permitting requirements and other considerations.
Charged: How often does a utility have a large amount of excess capacity in an area where you need it?
Neha Palmer: That is a huge question that a lot of people are looking at right now. It depends on the utility. It depends on what industry might have been built up there, and maybe it’s gone. There may be areas where you had a lot of industrial activity, and it might have shifted over time. It really depends on what has happened previously. And you might have areas that are greenfield, being built out over time. I think that is a somewhat of a wild card for people as they think about developing these charging hubs.
Charged: Are utilities often willing or able to scale up their capacity in a local area for you if you give them some kind of guarantee that you’re going to use it?
Neha Palmer: It’s all about timeline and money. Maybe they can, and maybe it doesn’t cost a lot because the amount of infrastructure required isn’t great. There might be some capacity in the local substation. Sometimes however, they’re in a constrained location and reconductoring a line or whatever it might be, takes a really long time. They may have to build a new line, and that can take many years in some cases.
I think it’s a case-by-case basis, and I think that this is going to seed a lot of innovation. You see where people want to interconnect existing facilities, [but] if the power isn’t there, people are going to figure out alternatives. And I’m really excited for us to participate in that and see what types of innovation can help to move along faster, because in some cases it will take longer than people want to wait for the ability to charge in specific locations.
Charged: What kind of storage do you think will be required?
Neha Palmer: I do think storage will be a critical part of the equation. It can allow a facility to interconnect with a little bit less trouble, because they can make the load flatter. They might provide services back to the grid where you have instability—it might be another source of revenue for these types of installations. I think a lot of the freedom you have with storage, it’s kind of following what happened with solar over the last 10 years—you see the cost of storage coming down significantly. I think that you’ll see a lot more use cases for batteries, and I think it will be a key component of these types of facilities.
Charged: Is there a lot of storage being installed on the grid currently, at the utility scale?
Neha Palmer: It’s definitely growing. You certainly see a lot of use cases where it’s becoming very common. Ten years ago with solar, you wouldn’t even think about putting on storage. And I think it’s the opposite now—with a large solar installation, you’re probably going to have some sort of storage component to it. So certainly the uptake is there and, again, it’s really driven by those cost curves, making it a lot more cost-effective to use, and batteries have such interesting applications. It’s not just pushing power to the grid. You can absorb, you can push, you can provide other types of services to the grid.
Charged: What’s next for the company? Are you working on any pilot projects?
Neha Palmer: We are looking at our portfolio and starting our development of those assets. We were in stealth mode for a couple of years, and we just came out a little over a month ago, but over time we have been building that portfolio out, and now we’re moving to that next stage of looking at what we want to develop. We’re working with partners and we’re hearing what their needs are.
Where are these going to be located? I think the customer will drive a lot of that, so we’ll also look at expanding our portfolio to places where customers are asking us to be, and then start to develop there. We’re definitely looking at where customers want us to be, where our portfolio exists, and that overlap in terms of how we’re developing.
Charged: Do you think you’ll be a fleet management company? Will you help with the backend for the fleets or will you be more of an infrastructure provider?
Neha Palmer: That’s a great question. I think we see the gap in the market right now for the infrastructure. There’s not a lot of people out there that have experience with this scale, because it’s a new asset class and there are very few installations of this scale. So, we certainly will have to integrate forward into what the fleet is doing, and that will be a piece of it, and integration into the grid as well. But really where we can provide value is our ability to own these assets and develop them, so that’s the infrastructure piece.
Charged: Are you open to more partners?
Neha Palmer: We’re talking to lots of different customer types. Municipalities, OEMs, end users who are saying, “I have to install larger infrastructure—how do I do it?” The customer conversations are broad at this moment. Our focus really is on How do we help you scale? It really doesn’t matter what that end use is. How do we bring you the infrastructure you need to scale your fleet the way you need to?
This article appeared in Charged Issue 56 – July/Aug 2021 – Subscribe now.
Source: Electric Vehicles Magazine
Nth Cycle says its electroextraction tech significantly reduces transportation costs for Li-ion battery recycling
Refining the circular economy for battery materials.
As the e-mobility transition accelerates, demand for critical minerals is growing exponentially. Companies on the cutting edge, such as Tesla, are already experiencing shortages. However, to extract ever more minerals by mining and dispose of the waste in landfills, would be to continue the practices that got the world into its current environmental mess. Furthermore, expanding mining operations here in the US is often extremely difficult, due to permitting regulations and logistical challenges.
Fortunately, large amounts of the critical minerals needed for the energy transition are already in circulation today. Increasing the efficiency of recycling offers a way to “close the loop,” creating a circular supply chain that can provide the needed raw materials for batteries and other components and minimizing the need to expand the world’s mining operations.
Nth Cycle works with battery recyclers and miners to recover production-grade critical minerals from separated electronic waste and low-grade mine tailings. The company says its electroextraction technology—an alternative to the more traditional methods hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy—enables customizable, mobile, clean and consistent recovery of critical minerals.
Charged spoke with Megan O’Connor, the founder and CEO of Nth Cycle, about the company’s process and how it fits into the recycling industry.
Megan O’Connor: My background is in environmental chemistry, and I got my PhD in civil and environmental engineering. While I was at my PhD, that’s actually where we developed the core technology. My co-founder Chad Vecitis, who’s now our VP of R&D, was a full-time professor at Harvard and actually developed this technology over 10 years ago. I had him on my PhD committee and [we adapted] the technology for metals recycling specifically, so that’s how our core technology for Nth Cycle came about. We started the company in 2017.
Charged: Tell me about the capabilities of your technology, and how it differs from what came before it.
O’Connor: We like to call ourselves a metals processing company. We’re not specifically in the battery recycling space, or the mining space—we cover all feedstocks across the supply chain. Our true mission is to enable a very low-impact, streamlined supply of all critical minerals for the energy transition. We work with battery recyclers, mining companies, refineries, and everything in between, looking at all feedstocks to solve this critical issue of supply chain management. Compared to some of the folks you see in the battery recycling space or the mining space, who use traditional hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy, we are a replacement or enhancement to those, with a technology called electroextraction.
Our electroextraction technology is very modular. It has what I call the three Cs: it’s clean, consistent and customizable. It has a wide variety of locations that we can deploy in, and that really helps us take advantage of the different feedstocks that North America has to offer, and tap a lot of these valuable resources that we haven’t been able to go after in the past. We can also reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over 75% compared to traditional hydro and pyro, and create a very consistent output. It’s really critical, especially in the battery recycling space, where you get a wide range of feedstocks coming from different cathode chemistries, to be able to produce a very consistent output.
Charged: How exactly does your electroextraction technology complement traditional hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy processes?
O’Connor: Pyrometallurgy you can think of as a large furnace—really high-temperature, high-pressure furnaces that take the waste, burn it into ash, and pull out the metals as slag. Hydrometallurgy is where they take the waste and dissolve it in acid, and then follow that up with solvent extraction. They use a number of different solvents to pull out these metals, one by one, to produce the final battery-grade material.
How our technology differs is, we don’t use any high temperatures or high pressures or solvents to pull these metals out. We actually use a combination of electricity with water filtration. That’s really where our core IP is—combining these two technologies in a process called electroextraction or electrowinning, which is used very frequently in the mining and refining space. You can think about pushing electrical current across a very large filter, and that electrical current helps us capture the metals selectively. That’s really how our technology differs from the hydro and pyro, and helps us get to those very little operating costs, because our only input is a very low level of electricity that can come from a hundred percent renewable, versus the high chemical and energy use of the other two.
Charged: How does using electricity and filters capture the specific materials you want?
O’Connor: We can actually tune the voltages that we apply to our system, so we’re playing with the reduction potentials [the tendency of a chemical to acquire electrons from or lose electrons to an electrode] of the metals themselves. Each metal has a different attraction to different voltages that you apply, so depending on how we apply those, we can actually select for the different metals as we apply a different voltage to each filter that we have in our system.
By combining the two processes, we’re turning it from a batch process to a flow-through, continuous process. You can imagine a basic water filter, like you’d use for well water or a pool, and we’ve simply figured out a way to electrify it safely. So, we push the fluid through, like we’re filtering water, but then we apply that voltage across [the filter], the metals precipitate out selectively and fall to the bottom, and we can collect them from there.
Charged: What kind of materials are the filters made from?
O’Connor: That’s part of the innovation—using a carbon-based filter in our system, instead of using traditional filters you’d see in filter presses. That’s how we’re able to get the very low operating costs, as well as significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Using a carbon filter is our key enabler in this entire process of using electricity to produce these metals, so the reduction in the volume of chemicals that we use by using this filter instead is how we reduce the greenhouse gas emissions.
We did not design it specifically for this. These are filters that are used in a wide variety of other applications, and we adapted it for this application ourselves. We do not make them internally.
Charged: In the other applications they’re used in, are they used with this kind of electricity across the filters, or is that something new?
O’Connor: That is something new that we do. They are used in a couple other different applications in the fuel cell battery space, but we specifically use them for this water filtration application.
Charged: In a typical lithium-ion battery recycling process, would this be an added step that would help what’s currently used, or would it replace things?
O’Connor: We can do both, and it depends on the battery recycler. We sort of see them in two buckets. We have the legacy recyclers, who have been around for a while, recycling other types of batteries, and have moved on to lithium-ion. They’re really good at logistics. They collect these materials, and then they shred them down into what’s called black mass. This black mass is a mixture of the cathode and the anode. It’s a lot of graphite, and then the metals of interest like cobalt, nickel and manganese. Right now, these folks are losing money on this product, because it’s not worth very much. What we’re doing there is actually adding our process on, to upgrade that product to a much more valuable battery metal product for them to sell.
Then you have folks who are more vertically integrated in the space, who are going all the way from collection to producing the battery sulfate materials, which are going directly back into manufacturing, and there we can actually slot in right in the middle. So that would be, not necessarily a replacement, but an enhancement to increase the quality of the product in the middle of their process to make their other unit processes much more efficient. They have a hydrometallurgical step at the end to produce a sulfate, and we can significantly reduce the emissions and the energy use required for that final step by coming in in the middle and helping to upgrade that mid-grade black mass.
The big value that we bring, to both parties actually, is a significant reduction in transportation costs. Both parties have to ship this black mass to a different location, whether they’re selling the black mass or transporting it to another site internally to process. It is a significant cost to them to transport all of that mass when only 20% of it is valuable, so the real value we bring is a very effective, clean way to upgrade this material—not only to reduce the transportation costs, but also, for the legacy recyclers, to drastically increase the price of that final product. So, it’s going from a waste product to a suite of valuable products for them to sell. And for the vertically-integrated folks, a much higher-quality product that goes into their final refining stage.
Charged: So, at the locations where the batteries are broken down to black mass, you will install your system, separate out the valuable things, and then ship those.
O’Connor: That’s right. Our core value to them will be a much more efficient, cleaner way to process that black mass into these separated valuable products.
Charged: What materials can you extract with this technology?
O’Connor: We recover cobalt, nickel, manganese, graphite and copper.
Charged: Do those come out as a usable product, or do they have to be processed?
O’Connor: Those come out as usable products, and they’re metal hydroxide powders.
Charged: What phase is the company in? Are you in production? Do you have these systems in any active lines?
O’Connor: We’re actually ramping up to deploy our first two units in the field in early 2022. Our first couple of partners are in the recycling space. They’re folks that are in the logistics game, who have collected this material, and we’re going in to upgrade it to a more valuable suite of metal products.
Charged: Other than batteries, are there some other processes that you’ll use this technology on?
O’Connor: Yes. We are also looking at projects in the mining and refining space, working with mining companies who are looking at new ore bodies, especially in the United States and Canada. There’s a lot of cobalt and nickel assets here that have not been able to be tapped, because the technologies are either too expensive or can’t fit within the permitting regulations in each state. And so we’re looking at those to go onsite and actually upgrade the raw ore, to create more supply of these critical materials here in the States, so we don’t have to rely as heavily on overseas supplies.
Charged: Will you be producing the systems, building the equipment and everything?
O’Connor: No. We have our internal system that we scaled with, but at that scale, we will do all contract manufacturing. Our model is to own and operate these filters on-site with our customers, but not actually sell the units themselves.
Charged: What are the next steps for the company? Are you out there actively seeking partners, or is there still technology development to do?
O’Connor: We are actively seeking partnerships, especially in the mining space. We are also actively fundraising to deploy for our first couple of projects beyond the pilot. We’re hyper-focused on the North American market, because it’s such a critical piece, I think, in creating a circular economy, and not only that, but really reducing the risk that the manufacturers here face, relying so heavily on overseas supply chains, because there will be a significant gap in the supply of all these materials. If we truly want to reach our goals of electrification over the next decade, and even beyond, we really need to find an alternative source.
This article appeared in Charged Issue 56 – July/Aug 2021 – Subscribe now.
Source: Electric Vehicles Magazine
Meet The Xpeng P5: World's First Production EV With LIDAR
It’s a very advanced EV and its LIDAR system is the first on the market.
Source: Electric Vehicle News
Cupra Born Enters Production In Zwickau, Germany
A prettier Volkswagen ID.3?
Source: Electric Vehicle News
Citroen Ami Coming To UK In Spring 2022, Will Stay Left-Hand Drive
Buyers can book their Ami right now by paying a £250 refundable reservation fee.
Source: Electric Vehicle News
GMC Hummer EV WTF Mode Scares Occupants Who Beg It To Stop
It turns out the huge pickup truck’s ridiculous acceleration may be outright terrifying to some folks.
Source: Electric Vehicle News
Sun Joe’s $101 cordless blower/vacuum/mulcher makes leaf cleanup easy, more in New Green Deals
Now that we’re well into fall, it’s time to prepare to pick up leaves as they begin to clutter our yards. Well, Sun Joe has you covered with its cordless blower/vacuum/mulcher kit that easily tackles large lawns for $101. Plus, you’ll find discounts on electric lawn mowers and much more below, as well. We also have a wide selection of Tesla, Greenworks, and other e-bike discounts in today’s New Green Deals, so you won’t want to miss that either.
Head below for other New Green Deals that we’ve found today, more on why going electric for your yard tools like the mower on sale is important, and of course Electrek’s best EV buying and leasing deals. Also, check out the new Electrek Tesla Shop for the best deals on Tesla accessories.
The post Sun Joe’s $101 cordless blower/vacuum/mulcher makes leaf cleanup easy, more in New Green Deals appeared first on Electrek.
Source: Charge Forward
Tesla is being sued by police officers injured after drunk Model X driver crashed into them on Autopilot
Tesla is named as a defendant in a lawsuit by five police officers who suffered injuries after a Model X on Autopilot crashed into them during a traffic stop.
While Autopilot is being blamed, the officers are also suing a restaurant that reportedly overserved the driver.
The post Tesla is being sued by police officers injured after drunk Model X driver crashed into them on Autopilot appeared first on Electrek.
Source: Charge Forward