The Green Leap Forward 绿跃进

The Green Leap Forward travels to Singapore to look at three start-up companies–Zeco, AmpleMotion and The Green Car Co.–trying to make Singapore’s electric transportation dreams come true, and ponders the road blocks that lie in the path towards a renewable electron economy.

Singapore and the Renewable Electron Economy Proposition

The electrification of Singapore’s transportation has received growing interest ever since it was reported that an international panel of experts pegged Singapore as an ideal place to launch an electric vehicle (EV) network.  For anyone who’s lived here, it really doesn’t take an expert to recognize that the island-state has a number of things going for it:  a contained urban area (the longest east-west stretch is just over 40 km and north-south stretch about 20 km), one of the most efficient and reliable electrical grids, sophisticated IT sector, ambitions to remain at the forefront of maintaining its already world-class transportation infrastructure, and a top-down policy environment which will ensure rapid deployment of a complicated and ambitious system once there is buy-in from the top.  Moreover, the potential of sunny and tropical Singapore to harness its hitherto mostly untapped solar resources to feed into its grid completes the puzzle of the vision for a “renewable electron economy,” whereby everything in the economy essentially works of electricity generated by clean renewable power.

EVs represent not only a cleaner and more efficient alternative than their internal combustion counterparts (remember my rants against Formula One?), but also offer an interesting power management proposition.  According to Singapore’s 2007 energy policy document Energy for Growth, there are plans to build a microgrid in Jurong Island to, among other things, “test-bed novel power generating, storage, and integrated power/thermal systems and study their performance in a grid environment.” One of the touted business cases of EVs is their role in a vehicle-to-grid (V2G) system, whereby the batteries of EVs serve as energy storage devices to manage the “peaks” and “valleys” of the daily power load.  EVs would fit in ideally with Singapore’s microgrid initiatives.

With that preface, let’s take a look at three young companies trying to blaze the trail towards a renewable electron economy.

Zeco

Last week, GLF attended the launch of Zeco, which stands for Zero Emissions Company, and its new line of plug-in electric scooters from Germany’s e-max, namely the e-max 90S and e-max 110S.  Zeco is the exclusive Southeast Asia distributor of the scooters, which run on silicon batteries and have ranges of up to 90 km on a single charge, and travel at a top speed of 50 kmh.   According to Jan Croeni, Zeco’s managing director (pictured below at the Zeco showroom), Singapore is the ideal place for the deployment of such scooters; the small size of Singapore (as noted above) and the slow traffic speeds (62 kmh on highways and 26 kmh in peak downtown traffic) make the range (up to 90 km) and speed (50 kmh) of the Zeco scooters appropriate. Zeco’s scooters boast of German engineering, Italian design and Chinese (Wuxi, Jiangsu province to be precise) manufacturing, and retail at between SGD 7,000 and 8,000 (around USD 5,000), which is cost-competitive to similarly designed non-electric scooters in the local market.

Zeco is like the Better Place of scooters, seeking to build a renewable electron economy that this blog has been advocating over the past year.  In Zeco’s self-dubbed the “Zecosystem” paradigm, the scooters are just one leg of the Zecosytem stool.  The other two are a “park-and-charge” infrastructure network and the clean energy (i.e. solar) that feeds into it.  This network consists of identified charging spots at shopping malls, parking lots, offices and supermarkets island-wide.  Zeco aims to put in place the park-and-charge system by the second quarter of this year but declined to comment at this time on how or what form the system would take, or how Zeco would earn revenues from it. It is perhaps useful to review Better Place’s business model, in which consumers buy the electric cars while Better Place owns the batteries and charges subscribers to its charging infrastructure network a fee per-mile (or kilometer) driven, just like a mobile phone operator charges its subscribers for minutes..  Better Place, unlike Zeco, does not sell the vehicles, but partners up with established auto makers (Nissan-Renault, in many of its announced markets) which sell the EVs.  GLF will keep you posted on the unfolding of the Zecosytem.

Zeco was formed by Asia Cleantech Capital, a Singapore-based cleantech investment firm that considered investing in eMax initially but decided instead to build a business to extend e-max’s reach to a different market, much like Kleiner Perkins’ and Rockport Capital’s investment in TH!NK North America, the U.S. arm of Norwegian electric mobility company TH!NK.

By GLF’s own assessment, the Zecosystem approach is smart for at least three reasons:

1.  It uses proven vehicles (emax) that are already in the European, U.S., Japan and Australian markets.

2.  It is psychologically more acceptable (be it to consumers or regulators) to “start small” and electrify the scooter fleet first rather than attempt to build/import four-seater cars, and avoids tricky analyses on whether the state grid can handle the additional load of a significantly electrified fleet.  Scooters are just an evolutionary step up from the thousands of forklifts and golf buggies which already run on electric power in Singapore.

3.  Zeco is not merely in the business of distributing scooters.  The value-add in its business model lies in tying its scooter distributorship with the two other prongs of the Zecosystem.  In effect,  rather than a sit-and-wait reactive attitude, Zeco is taking a proactive approach in creating the sustainability proposition (clean power supply) and developing the market (park-and-charge network) for its electric scooters. The devil is in the details of execution, obviously, but Zeco may also be doing other budding EV startups such as AmpleMotion and The Green Car Company a favor if it successfully rolls out the charging infrastructure.

AmpleMotion

According to a recent story in the Singapore daily, The Straits Times, AmpleMotion was started by 36 year-old Lim Kian Wee to build plug-in hybrid electric vehicles with a range of up to 960km, thrice the range of today’s hybrid cars.  AmpleMotion is teaming up Efficient Dynamics, Inc. and has offices in Singapore, California, and soon Malaysia.   Operating on an “asset light” sub-contract manufacturing model, AmpleMotion has ambitious goals and is reportedly aiming for “worldwide distribution” of their PHEV by next year and a fully electric vehicle by 2012.

Even though AmpleMotion’s first vehicle has yet to be built, the company already boasts 16 pre-orders totaling USD 1.34 million (that’s an average of $83,750 per unit) picked up from various trade shows.  The company’s website outlines some of the planned specifications for the three models–mid-sized sedan, large-sized sedan (sketch-up, right) and compact pickup truck) of PHEVs in its pipeline.  Generally, the PHEVs have top speeds of over 100 mph, have fuel efficiencies ranging from 35 to 45 miles per gallon on the highway, have ranges (before refueling or recharging is needed) of over 600 miles, employ the use of regenerative braking, “patented environmentally friendly and custom microprocessor-controlled lithium-ion battery pack, with useful life in excess of 100,000 miles,” and “patented EDI mechanical continuously variable transmission (CVT).”

Like the Zecosystem, AmpleMotion plugs itself (pardon the pun) as just one component of a larger solution.  The company’s website hints vaguely at a “1AmpleWorld” vision, consisting of AmpleMotion, together with other concepts such as AmpleRenewable and AmpleCharge, perhaps suggesting that it has its own initiatives to develop a charging infrastructure based on clean renewable energy, just as Zeco is doing.

The Green Car Company

Another Singapore company that made the local news recently is The Green Car Company, which is seeking to build the cheapest electric car in the world.  GCC is adopting an integrated approach to car design, and working in an open source manner with partners and enthusiasts to optimize the unique design of a two-seater, three-wheel electric vehicle.  The design of GCC’s proposed SEV-2 (artist’s impression, left) seems to be a retro-version of the sci-fi looking three-wheelers that Southern California-based Aptera Motors is building (Aptera’s cars have two wheels in front and one behind, whereas the arrangement is inverted in the SEV-2).  The range of the SEV-2 is 90 km and has a top speed of over 100 kmh.

While GCC itself is only one year old, the company’s idea has its origins in the Corbin Sparrow (pictured above), which was first rolled out in the U.S. in 2000, one unit of which was brought into Singapore by a private citizen in 2003 and still roams its streets.  The manufacturer of the Corbin Sparrow has since gone out of business, but the rights in the Corbin Sparrow were bought up by Myers Motors, which is still trying to make its improved version of the Sparrow called NMF (for “no more gas”) a commercial success. GCC will collaborate with Myers Motors to bring to develop the SEV-2, which will be cheaper, have range twice of the Sparrow and NMG, and have air-conditioning.

In an e-mail to GLF, Mr. Tan explained that the SEV-2 design is ideal because a three wheeler is 25% more efficient, is lighter, has fewer parts to maintain and costs less than a four wheeler. Moreover, the design is a proven one because there has already been a Sparrow running in Singapore for three years. According to Today, the SEV-2 would reportedly use a lithium iron phosphate battery (the same kind that BYD Auto is using), although Clarence Tan, founder of GCC, told GLF separately last week that they were still undecided and were considering up to four different battery options.

GCC hopes not to just build an EV, but an “All Round Green Car,” which it describes on its website as

a car that not only emits no/low pollution but also generates no/low pollutants during the manufacturing process itself. The use of recycled / recyclable materials, RoHs compliant and other environmental friendly components is the key direction.  Coupled with ingenious engineering philosophy and advanced manufacturing methods helps to complete the whole green car lifeline.

• Lack of Economies of Scale: The is a chicken-and-egg problem.  Imagine the following dialogue: “EVs are so expensive.”  “Well that’s because there’s not enough demand to scale up production.”  “Why isn’t there enough demand?”  “Because EVs are too expensive.”
• Lack of Infrastructure: This is another chicken-and-egg problem.  “Why is there no charging infrastructure?”  “Because there are no EVs.” But then why aren’ t there…oh!  Zeco recognizes the conundrum, which is why it has decided to enter the EV market modestly with the scooter, which faces less severe infrastructure challenges because any house power socket can do the trick.
• Lack of Acceptance by Stakeholders: Such stakeholder include the regulators, insurance companies, workshops, parts producers, contract manufacturers, etc.  Can transportation regulators, for instance, feel comfortable in managing the safety risks that battery acid poses in the event of an accident?  It’s not that battery acid is more risky than gasoline, its that it poses a different kind of risk for which regulators do not have the years and years of data as they do for the good ‘ole internal combustion engine.   On the issue of general acceptance, Mr. Lim of AmpleMotion pointed out that the first cars used to be electric before petroleum-based internal combustion engines became the norm earlier in the 20th century, so there is a precedent.  The difference, GLF notes, is that in the case of the first electric-to-petrol transition, you had the support of a powerful interest group, the same interest group that will fight tooth and nail against a transition back to EVs today–Big Oil.  When the top brass of oil majors are denying the existence of peak oil and putting their faith on “technology” to find new sources of black gold, as if technology were a panacea, then you know the transition won’t be easy.
• Lack of Viable Business Model:  Can the private sector single-handedly bring the EVs to market, as well as the many millions more needed for the charging infrastructure?  If not, would governments take on the financial burden, especially in this global economic climate?  Would some sort of private-public partnership work better?  What form would that take?  All eyes are on how Better Place–which already have announced agreements to roll out EV infrastructure in Israel, Denmark, Australia, Hawaii, San Francisco, Japan and Canada–raises the billions necessary to roll this infrastructure out, and if and how much local governments will be chipping in.
• “Peak Lithium:”  Perhaps the kicker of it all is that EVs may not be so green after all, especially if all the EV makers are converging towards battery technologies that involve lithium.  The reason?  Some 80% of the world’s lithium reserves are concentrated in South America, much of it in Bolivia, which is not exactly friendly to foreign mining.  Geopolitically speaking, we may well be replacing OPEC in the Middle East with “OLEC” in South America.   Physically, there may simply not be enough lithium to meet the demand of electrifying a significant portion of the world’s auto fleet.  Some sources say there are just 11 million tons of proven reserves, which is fine for lithium batteries in lap tops and cell phones,  but a different story if we are talking about 8 kw batteries for hundreds of millions of EVs.  Environmentally, extracting lithium carbonate from salt flats (such as the Uyuni Salt Flats of Bolivia, pictured right) is environmentally destructive and rather inefficient in terms of requiring massive areas of land to allow the required evaporative process to run its course in extracting the needed lithium.  Following the preceding lines of thought, alternative battery technologies need to be developed, but will they be? Of course, this is not a settled position, and there arguments on the other side.  For a good primer to the issue of “Peak Lithium” and links to the authoritative papers supporting the opposing positions (the William Tahil vs. Keith Evans debate), visit Next100 blog.

By now it should be apparent that EVs represent a complex and challenging (but it the face of the poor alternatives of liquid fuels, probably necessary) solution to our energy-climate crisis, with lots of institutional, technological and social considerations.  EVs will remain in the headlines in 2009, and perhaps beyond, given China’s emphasis on the auto sector as a pillar industry, but the concurrent need to maintain a green sheen, especially to serve as a counterpoint to the debacle that is Detroit.  Rest assured, GLF will keep close tabs on developments on the EV and Renewable Electron Economy front.

January 23rd, 2009 | Tags: AmpleMotion, automobiles, automotive, battery, electric cars, electric vehicles, energy, environment, microgrid, peak lithium, policy, scooters, Singapore, The Green Car Company, Zeco | Category: automotive, policy, smart grid, transportation, uncategorized | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL