Nissan: The Fuel Station Of The Future
Originally published on EV Obsession.
People often ask me about the energy flowing into my LEAF from the charging station. Well, here is Nissan’s larger plan: in a brief and stunning video below promoting a kinder future for our children and grandchildren, Nissan states, “Charged by the sun, the wind, & the oceans, cars could (will) empower people to store and the distribute renewable energy.”
It is Nissan’s plan to enable your vehicle to park autonomously, charge, and move back to your house. Thus, the battery with stored renewable energy will power your house in the morning — stored while you slept. Wow, that would be something. “The fuel station of the future is your home, your street, your city, your car.”
Recently, at the Geneva Motor Show, Nissan in Europe shared this fully renewable connectivity idea and a glimpse into the future – “the first look at its fully connected vision of the future of mobility.”
I encourage you to take 2 minutes and watch the electric video — the forces of renewable light energy in travel and home come alive in it.
Full Story at NissanNews.com
“Integrating zero emission technologies into the built environment is vital in creating smarter, more sustainable cities,” said David Nelson, co-head of Design, Foster + Partners. “That commitment must extend far beyond the car; it must sit at the heart of everything we do.”
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Well made. I like the illustration with an upmarket London street. American readers may not realize how much such houses cost these days – several million.
The handwaving part is the reduction in parking space. Electric cars do nothing to reduce congestion or demand for parking. The solutions are road pricing for the former, car sharing and public transport for the latter.
Thank-you James, for further explaining the practicality and environmental issue. I wondered how much the houses the video showed did cost. I drive a LEAF — I would use improved mass transit and trains in particular connecting Florida cities if they were available.
Getting energy from the wind, sun, and ocean. (But not the moon and stars?) Charging your car from their wireless parking spots and then charging your house/apartment? I guess the wiring in the UK doesn’t extend from the street to the house? I suppose in the future every office worker will drive their cars to their cube/office taking the freight elevator. Such a beautiful future. No more security scans or elevator congestion.
Very efficient solar panels can get a little energy out of moonlight. Not much.
Given direct sunlight has 32,000-100,000 lux and a full moon on a clear night has .27-1.0 lux I’d say a 300 watt panel might get you .003 watts. Which is indeed not much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux
I like the sentiments of the video though. And Ven had a great comment above.
The only reason the full moon seems so bright is because… evolution.
In my other life I have a YouTube channel, where I would amuse people by making fires in novel ways. One of the methods is to use a parabolic mirror (like the polished bottom of an aluminium soda can) to concentrate sunlight onto a piece of smouldering tinder.
I calculated that it should be possible to do the same thing with moonlight.
All you would need is a perfectly parabolic mirror of perhaps five hundred square metres! So yeah… Sent an email to the folks at Ivanpah, but haven’t heard back yet…
Lunar “insolation” (inlunation?) for bright moonlight on earth’s surface is approximately 1 milliwatt per square meter. Not much to work with.
(The debate that was sparked ended up being quite instructive. For instance: with sunlight, the incoming rays can be treated as essentially parallel, due to the fact that the sun is extremely far away. Would moonlight be more diffuse as a result of the moon’s proximity? And what is the spectral composition of moonlight? Is it “cooler” than sunlight, based on the apparent blueness of the light? That sort of thing. The answers are sometime counter-intuitive.) There’s also a “pure physics” viewpoint that maintains it would be impossible to concentrate the radiated energy to yield a temperature any higher than the source of the radition – in this case the surface of the moon, which we know is not hot enough to burn astronauts. Or plastic flags.
I am not into V2G, but quick charging stations with battery banks can help smooth out the grid.
I suppose that is true. In general the more battery banks the smoother.
A game changer. Autonomous Ev self charging means all those apartment renters who have no access to a charger in their building can let the car go find a charger. Now the part about bringing electricity back home in a battery for your house might not at first make sense to some. But consider off grid houses. If your solar array is not able to charge your house battery because of sunless days then your car can go to the local charger and bring back a full battery for the house. That might happen 5 or 10 times a year.
Some off grid people have been doing similar things for years. They have a battery that they charge off the line when they drive to town then bring it home instead of running a generator. Those have been heavy lead acid batteries, with lithium already a part of the car the option is much easier
I’ll believe it when I see it. But I’ve up voted nevertheless – because today’s reality is yesterday’s pie in the sky thinking.
I think the car/home synergy theme is correct, not because the car brings home useful energy, but because the car doesn’t care which two hours of the day it charges* – it’s the perfect grid levelling device. It’s like a cat that lives only on scraps – costs nothing to feed and actually cuts down on waste.
*as the batteries gain more kWh – it’s ‘which 4 hours of 48’, then ‘which 6 hours of 72’ etc. Our cat becomes a very hardy creature.
The removal of a human from the driving seat, makes the possibility of electric, driverless, taxi-cabs becoming an ubiquitous and very cheap form of transport, so that it would be much cheaper, for people, than having their own car. A few key presses on your smart-phone could result in a car arriving at your door, in a few minutes, and driving to your chosen destination, having charged your account with the fair. Road congestion and the need for car parks would be a thing of the past, and domestic streets could become leafy parks with a small taxi access road.
Never happen in the USA, greed takes precedence over practicality and environment.
I hope you’re wrong, I want one.