Dr. Dan Sperling - The Switch Interview

- Here, we have two pure electric vehicles. They run on big batteries, run solely on electricity from the grid with a plug. - Okay. - Here, we have just a regular conventional hybrid, a Prius. - Okay. - And here, we have what we call a plug-in hybrid. - [Man] Gotcha. - And what that means, it has a gasoline engine, but it also has a battery that's plugged in. - [Man] Can we drive one of these babies? - Let's go for a ride. - I'm gonna get behind the wheel. I hope you don't ruin your reputation. So we're in a plug-in hybrid, as opposed to a regular hybrid. Tell me again the difference in those. - Well, what we sometimes refer to a regular hybrid is really a gasoline-electric hybrid, meaning all of the energy comes from the gasoline. With a plugin hybrid, now, you get some of the electricity from a grid, from a plug. The way you do that is you put a bigger battery in that will hold more of the electricity, and so that way, you can use much less gasoline. And so therefore, you get much better fuel consumption per mile. - [Man] Okay. - So like this car, for instance, in a normal, as a normal Prius, it'll get maybe 45 miles per gallon. In this plug-in version, it'll get about 60 or 65 miles per gallon. - Of the liquid fuel. And that doesn't really account for the fuel used to do the charging. - That's right, plus some electricity. - Right. And we drove a Tesla Roadster, which was really amazingly responsive and everything, a blast to drive. It had a huge battery in it. - It's got a huge battery. So that's at one extreme. - [Man] Okay. - So that has over 200 miles of all-electric range, and at very high performance. I believe it has over 40 kilowatt-hours of storage. - [Man] Okay. - A regular Prius, a little, has a small battery. It's 1.3 kilowatt-hours. - [Man] Okay. - This plug-in Prius has about five kilowatt-hours, and the Chevy Volt has about 16 kilowatt-hours. Another way of thinking about it's cost. Well, each kilowatt-hour costs between 500 and $1,000. So if you have a 10-kilowatt battery, you're talking five to $10,000. - [Man] For the battery itself. - Yeah. - What's the range, the mileage range, on a vehicle like this, a plug-in hybrid? - Well, the range is basically whatever you get from the electricity plus the normal gasoline. So, instead of going 400 miles, you might go 500, 550 miles. - Really? - [Dan] Yeah. - That's fantastic. - [Dan] About another 25%. - That's a fantastic range. - Yeah. No one really knows what the optimal package is, and in fact, I think it's gonna turn out, there's gonna be a whole range of different types of electric and plug-in hybrids. And the question is, you know, what does the customer want? You know, do they want all electric range? 'Cause that costs money. - Sure. - [Dan] It's a lot more expensive. It's a bigger battery. Or, are they just happy getting better fuel economy and a little bit of all-electric range? - [Man] Sure. - And no one knows the answer to that. There's three large sets of fuels that are likely to play an important role in the future. And that's electricity, it's biofuels, and third is hydrogen. I think biofuels, it's the easiest thing to do, because it's most similar to petroleum. - We're used to it. - And we're used to it, and we can put 'em in pipelines and put it in combustion engines, so we don't need that many changes. - What is ethanol? - Well, ethanol is a pure chemical compound. It's what we drink. It's the alcohol in our beer and wine. It's made by fermenting sugar. - So summarize then your thoughts on some of the real challenges that we've seen based on the experiment with corn ethanol? - It's a fuel that, in the end, has the benefit of replacing gasoline, oil. That's good, but it has the disadvantage of having a much larger carbon footprint, using a lot of fossil energy, using a lot of land, and competing with food. - Water. - And using a lot of water. So corn ethanol was probably a good way of getting a foot in the door to, you know, with alternative fuels, trying different things, but we've gone so far with it. You know, this 10 billion gallons a year represents the total subsidy of about eight billion dollars a year. - Wow. - So if we use that subsidy for some of these other good options we're talking about that are much more sustainable, lower carbon footprint, environmentally better, we will come up with options that are very attractive. - [Man] Do you have a feel for the volume that's produced in ethanol every year from Brazil? - Yeah, in Brazil, they produce about seven billion gallons of ethanol a year. - [Man] Seven billion gallons. - Which is less than the United States. So the United States produces about 10 billion gallons of ethanol. The two of them together produce 90% of all the ethanol in the world. - Okay. - So in the United States, we consume about 140 billion gallons of gasoline every year. - Oh, okay. - So, 140, and so now, about 10 of that is coming from ethanol. Now, in Brazil, there, seven billion gallons is a much bigger proportion. - Sure. - The seven billion is roughly 40% of all their gasoline for light duty vehicles. So, they've gone much further than we have. - Sure. - They're producing ethanol at $35 a barrel equivalent. There's nowhere else in the world that does that. - What makes it so successful down there? - Well, I think there's two things that have made it successful. One is just government policy and support. I mean, this is a case where the government has spent over 30 years supporting, promoting, sugarcane ethanol. They've required the cars to burn it. They've had subsidies. They've done all kinds of things, required the fuel stations to provide it. So there's been continuing intervention and policy support for 30 years, and there were some dips there. They made some mistakes. Things didn't work out well all the way. But they were committed all the way through. And that, from a policy perspective, that's the most important lesson, is that perseverance, that persistence, that durability of policy. But on the other side of it, it might not be a replicable model. - Yeah. - Because Brazil has one of the most sophisticated agricultural industries in the world, and especially sugarcane. They have a huge R&D capability. They've been improving the growing of sugarcane for decades. They've got a huge and very successful distillery industry that they built up over time. They've got great weather. They've got lots of land. They've got relatively low labor costs. So, everything works. - It all came together. - It all came together. - Yeah. - And so everyone wants to replicate it, but it's not clear that anyone can replicate it. The problem is when you grow corn, you know, you've got this big, huge plant, and all you're using are those kernels, little tiny corn kernels, and you're only using even part of that, when you ferment it. - So you're actually just using the food. - You're just using the food. So a much smarter way of doing it, a much more efficient and sustainable, is to use more of all those other materials, all those plant walls, what we call the cellulose. The cellulosic material is not only the crop material, you know, the crop residues, you know, like the corn stalk and so on, but better yet, is actually growing dedicated crops for energy, grasses or growing trees specifically for it. It requires less energy, less fertilizer, less water, and you can get much more energy from a hectare or acre of land that way. So the challenge is with the cellulosic materials is, how do you take that material and convert it into a liquid that you want? The way that most of the work is going right now is they take an enzymes, and they use that to break down the plant walls, and then they ferment it. - Okay. Is anybody doing this at commercial scale, globally? - Well, you know, the research has really only spanned in the last decade or so, and the US government is subsidizing it. They've been funding different demonstration plants. But it's still, the total quantity is very small. It's, you know, we're talking now, I think this year, the US produces 25 million, 30 million gallons of ethanol from cellulose. - Okay. - You know, compared to 10 billi