Going the Extra Mile: Intelligent Energy Management of Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles

Kanok Boriboonsomsin, Guoyuan Wu, and Matthew Barth

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) have generated significant interest for their potential to decrease dependence on imported oil and to cut pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. While hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) rely on their internal combustion engines to recharge their batteries, PHEVs generally have larger batteries and can be recharged by plugging into an outside electricity source, such as a standard home outlet (Figure 1). As a result, PHEVs are potentially more efficient and cleaner than HEVs, in part because more of their energy can come from clean, renewable sources.

Download the PDF.

Quantified Traveler: Travel Feedback Meets the Cloud to Change Behavior

Raja Sengupta and Joan L. Walker

Halting climate change will require a concerted effort to reduce emissions from on-road vehicles. While significant progress has been made to improve vehicle efficiency and reduce CO2 emissions, surface transportation accounted for half the increase in US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over the past two decades. Today, surface transportation accounts for 24 percent of all US emissions. Automobile improvements alone will not be sufficient to meet federal and state emissions targets; policy makers also need to identify solutions that reduce the demand for car travel. Information technology offers a promising breakthrough on this front.

Download the PDF.

Can We Have Sustainable Transportation without Making People Drive Less or Giving up Suburban Living?

Mark Delucchi

City planners, transportation analysts, and policymakers have struggled to reconcile the promises and problems created by suburban land use and automobiles. On the one hand, automobile use and suburban living are widely and highly valued; as people become wealthier, they tend to buy cars and live in bigger homes farther away from central cities. Many urban planners, however, blame automobiles and automobile-driven sprawl for a wide range of problems, including climate change, road fatalities and injuries, rising traffic congestion, ugly urban form, oil dependency, and increasing social fragmentation. Most approaches to these problems focus on curtailing automobile use and its impacts. Outside of densely populated cities, however, it is hard to reduce personal automobile use.

An Innovative Path to Sustainable Transportation

Daniel Sperling

Contrary to popular belief, the world is awash in fossil energy, much of which can be readily converted into fuels for our cars, trucks, and planes. We are not running out of fossil fuels. The abundance of fossil fuels means we are unlikely to see high fuel prices due to scarcity. Indeed, most analysts predict that future oil prices will not be much higher than today’s, apart from occasional peaks due, for example, to conflicts in the Middle East. Prices might even end up lower as new exploration and extraction technologies for shale oil, heavy oils, deep-sea oil, and oil sands make it cheaper and easier to extract fossil energy. Thus, we cannot depend on high oil prices to reduce transport energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Download the PDF.

2017-05-26T21:41:39+00:00Categories: ACCESS 45, Fall 2014|Tags: , |

THE ACCESS ALMANAC: Vehicular ad hoc Networks: Storms on the Horizon

Amelia Regan

Researchers and policy makers have long anticipated fully connected vehicular networks that will help prevent accidents, facilitate eco-friendly driving, and provide more accurate real-time traffic information. Today, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) offer a promising way to achieve this goal. Using advances in wireless communications, computing, and vehicular technologies, VANETs rely on real-time communication not only with roadside sensors but also among vehicles and pedestrians. While there are still communication problems to solve within these complex systems, concerns about privacy, liability, and security are the chief obstacles that prevent progress towards large-scale implementation. Download the PDF.

Dynamic Ridesharing

Elizabeth Deakin, Karen Trapenberg Frick, and Kevin Shively

Most cars can carry at least four passengers, but the average auto occupancy rate for all trips in the US is only 1.6 persons. Because all the empty seats in cars represent our greatest source of untapped transportation capacity, promoting ridesharing is of considerable interest. Government agencies across the country employ ridesharing programs both to provide transportation at low cost and to reduce traffic congestion and the other costs of solo driving.

Download the PDF.

2022-10-11T19:34:15+00:00Categories: ACCESS 40, Spring 2012|Tags: , |

THE ACCESS ALMANAC: Solar Parking Requirements

Donald Shoup

Solar panels have begun to find a new place in the sun—on parking lots surrounding commercial and industrial buildings, mounted on canopies providing shade for the parked cars. Parking lots in asphalt-rich cities have great solar potential because the panels can be oriented to maximize power production during summer afternoons when electricity is most valuable. Solar-powered parking lots can mitigate the substantial increase in peak-hour energy demand that major developments create, but few developers now install solar canopies over their parking lots. Although the demand for electricity peaks on days when the sun shines brightest, solar power accounts for less than 1 percent of our total electricity supply.

Download the PDF.

2018-02-13T23:37:18+00:00Categories: ACCESS 40, Spring 2012|Tags: , |