11 WINTER 2015 | AutoDealer

T oyota and Honda are supplementing their day jobs by helping to reimagine the Japanese energy indus-try. The country is still feeling the effects of the Great East Japan Earthquake that happened on March 11,

2011. The failed nuclear reactor in Fukushima is still leaking contaminated water and reactors across the country remain shut down as the nation aggressively moves toward the devel-opment of non-nuclear energy solutions.

In order to ensure their ability to build cars in case of another disaster while also exploring energy production, the big names of Asian manufacturing are putting their engineering know-how to work on smart electrical grids and completely out-of-the-box approaches to powering private homes and the vehicles that park there.

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INNOVATING THE

HONDA AND TOYOTA ARE REIMAGINING THE

FUTURE OF ENERGY

ENERGYGRID

BY SCOTT SOWERS AIADA Contributing Editor

12 AutoDealer | WINTER 2015

Above: In 2012, Honda was invited by the city of Saitama, Japan, to participate in the “E-Kizuna Project.” The partners agreed to work with a local builder to construct a demonstration house.

Toyota has developed its own microgrid connecting some of its manufacturing plants and providing its own source of power. Honda is currently working on ways to make cars and houses work together while using engine technology to produce electricity and heat.

Honda: Building Energy-Sufficient Communities Honda has been building and marketing natural gas-fired “micro

combined heat and power” systems for private homes in Japan since 2003. In 2009, two years before the quake there were over 90,000 units in place in the country. There are now over 130,000 — most of them made by Honda, which has plans to expand the product line into Germany.

In 2012, Honda was invited by the city of Saitama, which is about 30 minutes north of Tokyo by car, to participate in the “E-Kizuna Project,” which aims to unite government and private industry in creating communities that are energy self-sufficient. The partners agreed to work with a local builder to construct a demonstration house. Since then, a second home was built next door and is populated by a family who tests the various systems and monitors the results.

Teaming up on the E-Kizuna Project enabled Honda to continue research and development on the combined heat and power systems to determine how new elements and improvements would actually work for a real family on a day-to-day basis. The new system, dubbed the “Honda Smart Home System,” generates power as needed while also charging up a f leet of electric vehicles including cars, scoot-ers, motorcycles, personal mobility devices, and the MC-B, a two-seater that looks like a tiny car but rides more like a motorcycle.

Making the connection between home and vehicles more user-friendly is leading Honda toward new ways to plug in and charge electric vehicles. “To try and keep the recharge plug off the floor and out of the dirt, we’ve designed a system that looks more like what you would see and use at the gas station,” says Ben Nakamura, a public relations specialist for Honda Motor Company.

Charging units mounted to ceilings and walls and portable direct current chargers are being added to the product line. But all these advances are already looking outdated as Honda is also developing a

charging station for electric vehicles that eliminates the plug. Taking a cue from wireless, inductive charging systems used for small elec-tronic devices like smart phones, Honda has a larger version that sits on the floor of your garage and automatically starts recharging your electric vehicle as soon as you put it in “park.”

Some of the new EV prototypes can be plugged into the house and send electricity stored in the car’s battery to the home in case the main power grid fails. According to Nakamura, “we are learn-ing about the cooperation between the home and the energy stored in electric vehicles.”

The demonstration home also features solar cells on the roof and a large battery for emergency power storage. Energy usage is in the home is monitored and controlled by a community energy management system that Honda calls the “Smart E Mix Manager.” To further their research, Honda plans to connect the two existing smart houses with a third that is currently under construction, cre-ating the beginning of a “smart community.”

The beating heart of the system is a miniature cogeneration unit powered by what looks like a 100cc motorcycle engine turned on its side. The engine runs on natural gas and is packaged in a simple white housing located under the home’s carport. “The idea came to us from our power products business,” says Nakamura. “We oper-ate not only automobiles but also motorcycles and power products. This is our strength.”

The strength of the newer engine design includes self starting and stopping so the engine turns itself on, generates enough power to run the house, and then turns itself back off. The engine achieves a 92 percent efficiency rating by updating the vintage design of the

“Atkinson Cycle,” a type of internal combustion engine that was invented in 1882. The Atkinson pairs longer expansion and exhaust strokes with shorter intake and compression strokes which results in a very efficient power source. The heat generated by the engine is used to heat water for the house.

The challenge of developing the technology to make all the parts and pieces work together properly was partially overshadowed by

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Above: The “Honda Smart Home System” generates power as needed while also charging up a fleet of electric vehicles.

Left: Charging units mounted to ceilings and walls and portable direct current chargers are

being added to Honda’s product line.

WINTER 2015 | AutoDealer 13

Toyota is using excess heat produced by their F-Grid to power three greenhouses that produce 1,000 tons of green peppers each year.

Toyota’s F-Grid, with “F” standing for “factory,” is powered by an engine that runs on natural gas and produces 7.8 megawatts of electricity.

the major obstacle of relaxing energy generation and transmission standards. “Many times, we had to demonstrate to the government why we had to change things to allow them to work properly,” says Nakamura. “Sometimes, we had to lead them.”

Toyota: From the Factory to the Greenhouse While Honda concentrates on the small stuff, Toyota is looking at

a bigger picture by developing their own combined heat and power plant at the Toyota Motor East Japan factory located near the village of Ohira in the prefecture of Miyagi, which is about five hours north of Tokyo by car. The main plant, which builds compacts, employs about 1500 workers and is surrounded by six other Toyota-owned plants, all of which are attached to the company’s private grid.

Similar to Honda’s system but built on a much larger scale, the grid is powered by an engine that runs on natural gas and pro-duces 7.8 megawatts of electricity. Toyota refers to the system as the

“F-grid,” with “F” standing for factory. In order to unite the work-place with the nearby community where some of the plant employ-ees live, Toyota plans to link the village town center which is located about 5 kilometers away, to the grid by next year.

In the event of a natural disaster, the local government will be able to stay open while the plant keeps building cars. The com-pany is also working on a scheme to use old batteries from scrapped Priuses as a source for emergency power to run laptops and phones.

Toyota’s system also includes roof-mounted solar panels, but the engine does all the heavy lifting relative to energy production. The car manufacturer has been able to greatly improve the com-plex’s energy efficiency rating to about 80 percent, but saving fuel costs wasn’t the original objective — it was more about keeping the lights on. “We expected the supply-demand balance would be very tight because of the long term shutdown of nuclear reactors caused by the East Japan Earthquake,” says Ichiro Suzuki, a project man-ager for Toyota Motor East Japan.

Interesting and entrepreneurial twists to Toyota’s smart grid system show up in what they’re doing with the excess heat pro-duced by their miniature power plant. Suzuki says, “Steam at 175 degrees centigrade is used in the painting plant, water at 67 degrees is used in the effluent treatment plant, and water at 98 degrees is used in the greenhouses.” A third link in the energy chain connec-tion already uniting industry and community leads to agriculture.

“Vegi Dream Kurihara” is the one Toyota subsidiary connected to the smart grid that doesn’t have anything to do with cars — they produce bell peppers and lots of them. “We have three greenhouses capable of producing 1,000 tons of peppers a year,” says Toshio Nagashima, an assistant manager with Toyota’s agriculture and aquaculture division.

According to Nagashima, “Vegi Dream has been cultivating bell peppers in the prefecture since 2009. By using the waste heat from the generator for greenhouses, we realized we could reduce the fuel costs to warm up the greenhouses and also cut CO2 emissions.”

Hot water is pumped into PVC pipes that run in rows at the base of the plants. The company decided to grow peppers due to their popularity in Japan and because they used to all be imported from South Korea and Holland. Advancing energy technology while becoming the number one domestic supplier of bell peppers in the country are notable achievements, but the point of pride for the entire system is rooted in something more basic. Suzuki says,

“We are most proud of the fact that we are contributing to the entire region’s recovery from the earthquake.”

Everybody in Japan has the date of the earthquake and result-ing tsunami forever planted in their memories. The direction of the country has been greatly influenced by the effects and is leading to government and the auto manufacturers creating public-private partnerships designed make the country more energy self-suffi-cient. As with Honda designing and building the smart house system, Toyota faced the same challenges with employing the smart grid system. “The biggest obstacle was deregulation,” says Suzuki, “to be able to supply electricity to the factories.”

Electric power companies here and in Japan are responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure that provide heat and power to our homes and businesses. Because of that, the power com-panies have been guaranteed to make a certain amount of money to generate and transmit power and send it down the power lines. Privately owned microgrids and personal power plants cut the elec-tric company out of the deal. Japan has learned the hard way that in the case of disaster, man made or natural, making a profit some-times takes a back seat to survival.

Japan faces plenty of challenges as it looks to build a more effi-cient and secure energy system. Automakers Honda and Toyota are leading the charge, with an innovation mindset that will influence the future of cars and the energy grid. AD