With massive investment by car manufacturers in recent years, great leaps forward in battery storage capacity, and increasing support for the development of alternative forms of transport technology among the general public and in government, the mass production of EVs seems just around the corner. To quote Claude Ricaud, Senior Vice President, Power Innovation at Schneider Electric, “We are convinced the market is taking off and now is the right time”.

R&D: a complete value-added chain in Grenoble

Grenoble-Isere has the good fortune to have a complete filière, or value-added chain, reaching from basic and applied research to large industrial firms and inventive start-ups, through technology platforms for developing prototypes: “The area has substantial assets and, what’s more, it is capitalizing on them,” says Ricaud. The latest important step forward is the launch of the Steeve (1) platform, the only one of its kind in Europe, which brings together various players from research and industry (CEA, CNRS, EDF, Ineris). It sets out to provide industry with a full range of R&D resources for basic research, battery prototyping, assessing safety performance, and certification.

Lithium battery – instrumentation from an electric vehicle to measure energy performance

© P. Avavian/CEA

Steeve’s two 400-square-metre test laboratories will enable next-generation batteries to be manufactured in small volumes. With capacity close to 1,000 kwh a month, it should ultimately be able to produce sufficient batteries to equip 50 EVs a month. Several industrialists – Renault, Michelin, Siemens and Alstom – have already expressed an interest in the facility. Steeve will also draw on the resources available at Prollion, an offshoot of CEA-Liten, to validate lithium-ion battery technologies and facilitate their transfer to industry.

Grenoble-Isere is also working on the other end of the process, as Recupyl perfects methods for recycling tomorrow’s batteries. The firm has developed and patented a process that recovers virtually all the metals contained in lithium batteries.

The two big challenges: storage and distribution

It is generally held that electricity cannot be stored. The challenge now is to overturn that assumption. For EVs to develop on a large scale they need to store a sufficient amount of energy in their battery to travel a useful distance. A vehicle with an internal combustion engine is fitted with a 40-litre petrol tank, whereas at present an EV with a lithium-ion battery only carries the equivalent of 8 to 10 litres, enough to travel just 150 kilometres. The current aim is to double that distance.

The second big hurdle is the charging infrastructure. If drivers are to switch to EVs they will need access to dependable, standardized sockets wherever they go to top up their batteries. “The aim is to have clean energy from well to wheel,” says Ricaud, “which means charging vehicles with carbon-free electricity, which in turn requires a [power] grid that is suited to efficient, safe, dependable energy management.” To achieve this it will be necessary to deploy a charging infrastructure in public spaces, companies and private homes. Universal plugs will also be required, which can be adapted whatever the charge and its location (home, workplace, car park, etc.). This will represent a massive change, in particular with regard to the latest developments in vehicle-to-grid (V2Grid) technology. The basic idea is that the batteries of parked EVs offer considerable storage capacity and thus a means of optimizing electricity supply and demand by way of a smart grid. In other words energy can be shared, and for this purpose the convergence between applications in housing and transport is immediately apparent.

But whatever their performance tomorrow’s vehicles must not cost more than their conventional counterparts. “To meet market demands, tomorrow’s electrical vehicles will need to be accessible to the vast majority of consumers,” says Ricaud. So will we soon be seeing EVs all over the place and within the reach of all budgets? Probably not as the transition will certainly be gradual. Drivers will have to change the way they use their car too. In the meantime France aims to have 500,000 all-electric or hybrid vehicles on the road by 2015. And 2m by 2020.

(1) Electrochemical Energy Storage for Electric Vehicles