State planning a plug-in car hub

Research center to work on battery

North Carolina is joining the national effort to develop an electric car battery that can travel more than 100 miles before being recharged.

The state, N.C. State University and North Carolina's two largest electric utilities will join to create a plug-in car research hub on Centennial Campus in Raleigh, Gov. Mike Easley said Tuesday.

"The future is going to be to replace the gasoline engine," Easley said in announcing the plan on the closing day of the university's Emerging Issues Forum, this year devoted to energy.

"If you can develop a technology where you can go 150 miles on a 50-cent recharge, instead of paying $30 in gas, I don't think it's going to be a hard sell."

The Advanced Transportation Energy Center is expected to cost $5 million to start and $1 million a year to operate, Easley said.

To finance it, NCSU is applying for grants from the U.S. Department of Energy. Progress Energy and Duke Energy, utilities that could gain handsomely by powering electric automobiles, have together committed about $3 million over five years.

The goal of the research is to create a battery that is up to five times lighter and stores five times as much power as batteries now used, and can recharge quickly while the driver is eating lunch or shopping. It now takes up to six hours to recharge an electric car.

Unlike the commercially available hybrid Toyota Prius, which recharges its batteries by capturing the energy from braking, the plug-in car would recharge with electricity from a wall outlet, just like a cell phone.

Progress and Duke will develop recharging pods that will allow drivers to recharge their car batteries in parking lots and at convenience stores, gas stations and curbsides.

"They will be all over the place," said Ellen Ruff, president of Duke Energy's operations in the Carolinas. "They need to be accessible. They need to be easy to use."

Worrisome snags

Designing an affordable electric automobile has eluded scientists for decades. The main obstacle is creating a lightweight battery that can match a gas tank in driving range between fill-ups. It now takes about 1,000 pounds of batteries to store enough energy for the driving range that researchers hope to achieve. They are focusing on the lithium-ion batteries used in cell phones and portable computers as the future automobile's power pack.

Another hurdle: The handmade battery can cost $10,000.

"The battery's the thing -- electric motors are simple," said Tom Turrentine, director of the Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle Research Center at the University of California in Davis.

Easley and utility officials said they hope to develop a prototype within five years that can go 40 miles between recharges. That distance would be sufficient for most daily commutes, allowing drivers to recharge their cars at work. Researchers would seek to improve the design until they broke the 100-mile mark.

"They aren't going to solve the problem by themselves," Turrentine said, noting that the advances are likely to be incremental and piecemeal.

A dispiriting string of dead-ends, the struggle to produce a zero-emissions, electron-powered automobile became legendary with the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

But with oil hitting $100 a barrel and the public increasingly spooked by global warming, the race is on again for a scientific breakthrough -- and for federal research dollars. General Motors, Toyota and other automakers, as well as universities and utilities, are researching or funding electric car technology. Chevrolet has already developed a concept car called Volt that can run on electricity, ethanol, biodiesel or gasoline.

Easley said that the state is in discussions with General Motors about collaborating on research.

Shifting cars from petroleum energy to electricity means electric cars would ultimately become powered by the state's primary sources of electricity: coal and nuclear energy. Coal-burning power plants are a leading source of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.

Stephen Kalland, director of the N.C. Solar Center, said that a car powered by coal and nuclear fuel is preferable to gasoline. Pollution, now coming from power plants as well as millions of cars, would be limited to power plants.

"It's a definite improvement," Kalland said.