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Sixty years ago, college kids raced across the country in EVs.
Volkswagen calls its new EV minivan “the electric reincarnation of the iconic Microbus.” But while the ID.Buzz may be a touchscreens-and-LEDs update on the bare-bones icon of the Sixties, it is far from the first electrified take on the VW bus.
On an August morning in 1968, a Volkswagen bus jammed full of Caltech students who had hacked it to run on battery power departed their home base in Pasadena, California. Their destination: Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of rival MIT. At the same moment, MIT students in an electrified Chevy Corvair left the East Coast bound for the West.
“I came up with the crazy idea of a cross-country electric car race between Caltech and MIT,” said Wally Rippel, the student who owned that electrified VW bus and challenged MIT to the 1968 race, while reminiscing about the competition in a lecture at Caltech last Thursday night. [Editor’s note: Caltech is where the author does his day job.] “There would be some interest there, and it would stimulate interest in research at Caltech and MIT.”
The great electric car race of 1968 carried the energy of a world’s fair, offering gawkers along its transcontinental route the chance to see the vehicles of the future. It would be another half-century before the EV finally went mainstream, of course. But the Caltech-MIT competition presaged what electric car builders and drivers would need to overcome, and their race is a reminder that the electric car wasn’t just an idea forsaken soon after the dawn of the automotive industry and then suddenly resurrected by Tesla. All along, engineers and scientists imagined another way.
Climate change is the reason for the whole electric vehicle revolution this century, but it wasn’t the animating force for the EV tinkerers of the ‘60s. Wally Rippel, who owned the Caltech VW bus, and his compatriots were focused on solving smog and air pollution, the car-related environmental calamities of that era. In his Caltech talk, Rippel compared the air quality of that smoggy era to the fire-and-brimstone atmosphere of hell itself. “I don’t think any of you could understand it if you didn’t live in Pasadena in the ‘60s,” he said.
Since 80% of L.A.’s smog came from automotive exhaust, Rippel came to the conclusion that the internal combustion engine should be replaced. The question was, replaced with what? Fuel cells were used during the space race of the 1960s, but they were maddeningly expensive and could provide only 1/20th of the energy he needed to move a car. After seeing electric-powered golf carts around campus, he thought of the electric car.
Just like the climate activists to come, they faced their doubters when the EV race got under way. Team member Dick Rubenstein reminisced in an article about the race: “I remember the service station attendant at Amboy. He thought it was all a joke and asked: 'What do you need an electric car for, anyway? What air pollution?'”
The challenges of long-distance EV driving were all present in 1968. Rippel wondered, like many people do today, how much more electricity the nation would need to power a country full of EVs. After whipping out his slide rule and performing a few calculations, he determined the U.S. would need 20 to 25 percent more electricity, a reasonable goal.
Rippel and company needed charging stations, of course. The Electric Fuel Propulsion Corporation of Michigan worked with utilities to set up 55 charging stations on the route across the country. Now, those stops didn’t look quite like the Tesla Superchargers of today, located in outlet mall parking lots. Rippel explained that some of their stops amounted to nothing more than a connection to a power line tower or a wire coming up from a manhole.
It typically took 45 to 60 minutes to recharge using the onboard 30kW charger that Rippel put in the bus. That’s not that far off from today’s times, even though the students ran lead-acid and nickel-cadmium batteries rather than the lithium-ion that is today’s state of the art. (Caltech’s VW carried a literal ton of batteries to store 16 kWh of energy.) Still: After blowing fuses and causing a power outage in Seligman, Arizona, the Caltech team had to start charging at a lower speed in order to avoid overloading the technology of the time.
Range anxiety was naturally worse, given the experimental technology and the need to make it to the next station on the list. Both teams had chase cars accompanying their EV and occasionally resorted to towing the electric car when mechanical gremlins struck. Caltech towed a generator along just in case.
The biggest enemy? Heat. Today’s EV batteries suffer under extreme temperatures, with heat degrading battery life and cold diminishing range. But modern EVs have sophisticated cooling mechanisms to help protect the cells. The student EVs did not have this. They resorted to a simpler fix: dumping ice on the batteries during charging stops.
Wrote Rubenstein: “We finally solved our battery overheating problem in McLean, Texas. While the car was charging, I went into town to buy some rubber tubing and a rubber syringe bulb. We got some small ice cubes and put them on the batteries, then used the tubing to siphon the water out of the battery enclosure. We used the syringe bulb to start the siphon. That was our handy-dandy cooling system, for which I blushingly accept credit.”
In other ways, their simple EV technology is startlingly familiar. The VW bus nearly didn’t make it to the charging stop in the desert of Needles, California, but used the downhill grade into town to put some charge back on the battery, just as regenerative braking in today’s EVs saves energy when the car is decelerating or rolling downhill. (Today, Needles is home to several EV fast-charging stations, befitting its nature as one of the rare pit stops on this lonely stretch of desert highway.)
The article in Caltech’s Engineering & Science magazine concludes by saying future lead-cobalt rechargeable batteries might reach 250 miles of range — just about what lithium-ion batteries were actually doing a half-century later, when cars like the Tesla Model 3 arrived.
The race ended nine days later, on September 4. MIT reached the end of the line first, by about a day and a half. But, per the agreed-upon rules, its team was dinged with many hours’ worth of time penalties because of how often the electric Chevy Corvair had to be towed — including across the finish line. The EV van from Pasadena, for all its own troubles, reached MIT under its own power and was, eventually, declared the winner.
In retrospect, the race looks like a one-off — a moment when young scientists with a dream tried to show the world a better way but decades before the world was ready to see it. In fact, though, this calamitous, makeshift Cannonball Run left threads that led to the electrification of vehicles that’s finally happening around the world.
The next generation of idealistic auto engineers created the Sunraycer, a 1980s solar-powered race car that crossed the Australian Outback. Its success led to the GM Impact, a 1990 concept EV meant to show the world what was possible. And the Impact led to the fabled, doomed GM EV1.
EV1 is remembered as the electric car that wasn’t, the victim in the case of Who Killed the Electric Car? But attempts like it and the AC Propulsion tZero in the 1990s showed that EVs were not only possible, but could be downright cool if you did them right. The rest is history.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”