Well, it's New Years Day 2010, time for a sum up of the RCH industry. 2009 was an incredible year for RCH. First, (and most importantly IMHO), I presented a paper on RCH at EVS-24 in Norway in May. Personal triumph, global non-starter. Looking around EVS-24, I saw lots of EVs, H2 vehicles, etc, but on the highway outside the convention, not a single one.

Second - ProTerra introduces their Rapid Charged Electric bus. Huge news. Nanobus now actually exists. I think they've shipped at least one, but I'll be visiting them in March to see for sure.

Third - Ebus introduces their RCH, with less fanfare than ProTerra (apparently the CEO of Proterra used to work for Ebus?). All in all, fantastic news all around. I especially like the Ebus battery pack. I'll be ...

While roaming around the Siemens site, this article I thought was very enlightening. I especially loved the photo of the first trolleybus! However this quote disturbed me:

"That's because power plants in the global electricity mix emit some 600 g of CO₂ per kilowatt-hour, which corresponds to 90 g for every kilometer driven by an electric car. That's a lot less than the 120 to 160 g of CO₂ emitted per kilometer by a typical mid-range automobile with a combustion engine"

This actually sucks. 90g is what the Polo Bluetec will emit. So why would anyone go electric at all? Well, hopefully the grid will get greener. Also, the displacement of emissions to outside the city is generally healthier.

A tiny bit ...

Siemens has an interesting article and some nice pictures about how they see fast charging evolving. I especially liked this bit about how a lot of fast chargers might destabilize the grid. This likely won't apply to a bus system, since there will be only 10-100 chargers in a city, not thousands.

"In addition to Siemens, the EDISON consortium includes the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and its Risø-DTU research center, as well as Denmark’s Dong Energy and Østkraft power utilities, the Eurisco research and development center, and IBM. In the EDISON project, various working groups are responsible for developing all the technologies needed for electromobility. Here, Siemens is mainly responsible for fast-charge and battery replacement systems. "Siemens’ portfolio already contains many componen ...