⚡️🔋Current Events 4/13/23: Skyline Electrified, Model 3 Leak, London Charging, and The 5-Borough Battery Problem
Why is gravity so cheap? Because it's mass-produced.
Good evening everyone,
Welcome back to Current Events, where we bring you news and lore from the world of electrification.
Substack just released the Notes feature this week and so far I’ve been thoroughly enjoying it. It’s been a wonderful early experience meeting more readers and writers and exchanging ideas. Welcome to everyone who’s new to the All-Electric Newsletter!
Let’s jump right in.
Nissan Is Electrifying the R32 Skyline
“This initiative began with the desire of an engineer who joined the company because he admired the GT-R, saying, "I want to build a more exciting car by adding the latest electrification technology that I am involved with to my favorite car.”
— Nissan Japan
It's happening, folks. Godzilla goes electric! While the current generation of the GT-R is sunset, Nissan has decided to breathe new life into the legendary R32 Skyline GT-R with a factory-backed electric restomod. Say hello to the righthand drive, R32EV.
Yes, it’s a one-off conversion, but just think of the delicious iconoclasm! The iconic R32's twin-turbo inline-six will be swapped out for an electric drivetrain while maintaining its essential AWD system. To provide AWD we can expect a dual-motor setup at least. Given the pedigree of this conversion, who's to say that Nissan couldn't go all out and equip it with a tri-motor configuration like the Tesla Model S Plaid? It’s doubtful, unfortunately. Conversions tend to be constrained by space since the shape of the car wasn’t designed around the powertrain and battery pack so I’m in pure speculation territory here. What is clear is that they are not very far along with the project, as we can still see the exhaust on the teaser image.
While Nissan has only unveiled the R32EV in prototype form and hasn't disclosed any specific powertrain details, they have piqued my interest. Ultimately, I hope people's interest in the conversion project will be enough to convince Nissan to build a real-deal, clean-sheet Skyline EV successor for mass production and delivery everywhere. To dream the impossible dream, indeed.
Possible Model 3 Project Highland Leak
Godspeed to the individual that risked it all to show us this image. It seems a look into Tesla’s Project Highland (a rumored refresh for the Model 3 sedan) has leaked onto Reddit… and now onto Substack.
Right away, a few details stick out. The dashboard looks either covered by something or it’s shaped totally differently from the previous variant. The headlights are much sharper and less beveled than the previous Model 3’s. They seem to align more now with the updated design of Model S Plaid. Beyond this, I notice the accenting on the side-mirrors look to be a darker carbon. The finish is difficult to determine from the picture. The wheels are not shown in the best angle but the material and finish look intriguing. Not an ultrasonic sensor in sight, and we can make out no details about the exterior cameras on the vehicle either. A lot remains to be discovered it seems.
Of course, none of this information nor the photo have been confirmed by Tesla, and so it’s still a mystery what exactly this car is. They certainly wouldn’t want to Osborne their open orders for Model 3 by releasing information too far in advance. The Model 3 was without a doubt a critical inflection point of Tesla’s origin story. I’m eager to test out the next generation and compare with my own first-generation Model 3 Performance when such a test becomes possible.
London Gets £35.7m Fund for Public Charging
The city of London received investment this week from the UK Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (LEVI) Fund to the tune of £35.7m for charging infrastructure projects across the city. According to the BBC, the English capital already has one charge point for every four registered electric vehicles in the city, compared with the national average of one charge point for every 12 vehicles.
Here are the quick details:
Investment covers all 32 boroughs and the City of London
Public charge points developed in collaboration with London Mayor, London Councils, and Transport for London (TfL)
Greater focus on areas without off-street parking access
Additional £3 million in LEVI grants for councils to deliver charging projects
UK has a planned ban on sales of new fossil-fueled cars and vans from 2030
London Mayor Sadiq Khan predicts 40,000-60,000 chargers needed by 2030
London and TfL release land for 100 new ultra-rapid public charging points, operational by end of 2023
London currently has 13,000 charge points, mostly in ULEZ area
Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) to expand London-wide on 29 August, 2023
Khan says funding aims for at least one EV charge point on every street where needed
If we have any readers living the EV experience in London, I’d love to hear how your experience has been with public charging availability and micro-mobility! This recent funding announcement obviously does not represent the first investment the city has put into charging, but I am curious to know what locals think of the efficacy of the charging infrastructure rollout in the UK so far. Learning quickly from experience is critical for the ongoing push for global electrification.
The 5 Borough Battery Problem:
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the more creative methods we humans have come up with to effectively store energy. One particular form of energy storage that has been fascinating me for some time now are gravity batteries.
What is a Gravity Battery?
A gravity battery is a type of energy storage system that, as the name suggests, uses the power of gravity to store and release energy. It works by lifting heavy objects to a higher elevation when energy is abundant and allowing them to fall back down when energy is needed. An example, when a wind farm or solar farm is overproducing energy, that extra energy can be directed to the gravity battery and saved for later during peak demand. This process generates electricity, which we use to power devices, vehicles, homes, and businesses. Typical gravity batteries have a round trip efficiency of over 80% and require vastly less thermal management than chemical batteries as well as zero rare earth metals.
Pumped hydro (PH) is a similar concept but uses water instead of solid weights. In a pumped hydro system, water is pumped from a lower reservoir to a higher one when energy is abundant and released back down through turbines when more demand is high. The movement of the water generates electricity at over 80% efficiency. According to the US Department of Energy:
“PH currently accounts for 93% of all utility-scale energy storage in the United States. America currently has 43 PSH plants and has the potential to add enough new PSH plants to more than double its current PSH capacity.”
One great way to build energy storage infrastructure at lower cost is to use existing structures, like elevators, as gravity batteries. The potential benefits could be significant.
The Question
In thinking about all of this, a question came to my head. What if all of a city’s elevator shafts are just one gigantic distributed battery waiting to be deployed?
Along these lines, just how much potential energy could we store if every elevator shaft in a city, say like NYC, was converted into gravity-based energy storage?
Using some physics, I’m going to try and approximate a rough estimate. To estimate the energy capacity of a gravity battery, we’re going to need to calculate the gravitational potential energy of the object being lifted. For this, a formula!
Gravitational Potential Energy = mass x (g) x height
For clarity, g is the constant acceleration due to gravity, approximately 9.81 m/s².
NYC has a huge diversity of both building and elevator sizes. The One World Trade Center peaks the skyline at 541 meters while low rises can be as low as 35 meters tall. Naturally, there are far more low rises than super skyscrapers so to keep things conservative we’ll skew towards the smaller buildings. With this in mind, let’s make some basic assumptions for simplicity in our estimate:
Number of elevators in NYC: ~70,000 elevators
Average height of a building in NYC with elevators: 50 meters
Average mass of an elevator: 3000 kg
So let’s calculate the GPE for one elevator first:
GPE = (3,000 kg) x (9.81 m/s²) x (50 m) ≈ 1,471,500 J (joules)
Now, let’s multiply this by the total number of elevators in NYC:
Total GPE = (1,471,500 J/elevator) x (70,000 elevators) ≈ 103,005,000,000 J (joules)
Now, when we convert the total GPE in joules to kilowatt-hours to keep it simple for EV owners, we arrive at ≈ 28,612.5 kWh!
With our very basic estimate, we can say that if every elevator shaft in New York City into gravity-based energy storage, we could potentially store ~28.613 MWh of potential energy.
That’s a lot of juice folks, enough to fully charge 286 Tesla Models S or to provide a standard amount of stationary energy storage (10 kWh) to 2861 single-family residences. Not bad, Gravity.
While it’s definitely not practical to carry out a plan to actually convert every elevator in NYC to energy storage, this thought experiment is useful to teach something rather simple:
Abundant energy is all around us, just waiting to be harvested.
We must continue to think creatively about how to affordably capture and store it.
For anyone interested in firms building gravity batteries, there are plenty, but one of the most notable today is called EnergyVault. Energy Vault offers utility-scale, gravity-based energy storage solutions for renewable energy projects and is based in Lugano, Switzerland.
Thanks for reading and being a part of the Current Events community, where I write hoping to guide people through the world of electrification. Your support for this project means everything.
If you liked what I wrote today please leave a like, share your thoughts in the comments, and share freely with friends. Also, don’t forget to subscribe with your email so you can receive the All-Electric Newsletter right in your inbox every release. See you next time on Current Events.
With love and gratitude,
Renato
Renato A. Amboss is the author of Current Events, The All-Electric Newsletter. He is also the Founder and First Pilot of Ronin EV. The thoughts and opinions expressed here are his own. None of the views expressed are intended as investment advice of any kind and should not be taken as such. Have a lovely day!