The day of the electric car has arrived!
THE of future of electric, environmentally friendly and economically viable motoring is already here.
This is according to Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University’s Dirk Odendaal, director of the institute’s uYilo Technology E-Mobility Innovation Programme (uYilo EMIP), established by the Technology Innovation Agency to fast-track development and commercialisation of key technologies to support a South African electric vehicle (EV) industry.
“Battery powered, or electric vehicles are now commercially available. And while we won’t see them in Port Elizabeth for some time, you will see a network of vehicle battery-charging stations in Gauteng within a year,” Odendaal said this week.
Last week uYilo received a Nissan Leaf from Nissan SA. The Leaf is the first electric passenger vehicle to be launched on the local market.
Nelson Mandela Bay isn’t expected to have a battery-charging network any time soon, so local EV owners would have to charge vehicles at home or make other arrangements. But ironically, NMMU is at the forefront of research and development of support infrastructure and business models for a national EV industry.
“We look at supporting infrastructure, like how an EV owner would locate a charging point, how charging points could be standardised or how they would interface with different makes of EVs,” Odendaal said.
UYilo is considering “up-stream” factors like energy storage and demand management with partners like auto manufacturers and Eskom.
“Initially, due to anticipated slow take-up of EVs, Eskom will certainly have capacity to meet recharge demand. They’ll encourage recharging in off-peak times through lower tariffs,” said Odendaal, adding he believed there would be a new electricity tariff system for the industry.
“One also has to look at downstream suppliers like municipalities, who buy energy from Eskom and then supply it with their own tariff structure,” he said, adding that feeding energy from the EV industry back into the national grid was also being considered. Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality is also one of the uYilo partners.