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That is a great question. There are other people who know more about EVs than I do in this kind of capacity, but one really good proof of concept example is what MAGICC has been doing. Imagine that you have not just your EV but hundreds or thousands of them and they have the smarts to talk back to a central computer. Now you can start getting really clever with the computer calling on those EVs in series to produce frequency regulation services. You'll get paid (the figures out of MAGICC would suggest something like six dollars a day is possible - not going to make you rich, but I wouldn't say no) and the grid operator now has a very fast ramping system that could potentially aggregate up to several MW and enhance grid reliability and efficiency.

By the way, a few posters have suggested this is going to kill your battery. I'm not going to scoff at that, but the technology is getting WAY better and attending conferences like the ESA conferences will quickly give you the idea that a lot of really clever people are putting a fair chunk of research into improving the technology.

Not to gloss over the problems, but this is what being a researcher is all about, and it's really exciting.

Sure, people and battery companies are looking at this already. Altair Nano and A123 come to mind. But, utility-scale batteries (a.k.a. a crapload of smaller batteries linked together) like this are very pricey on a per-megawatt basis.

So the question they have to answer is whether the difference in electricity prices between peak hours and off-peak hours is enough to justify the cost of buying and maintaining the batteries. The economics are getting better over time as battery technology improves, but at this point there are only a few large battery installations like this in the country.

There are other ways of storing electricity during off-peak hours and using during on-peak. The most common is Pumped Hydro, which can be quite economical, but only if you have a big lake up a nearby hill you can use. So batteries may have a future.

I understand your view a lot better now. Dealing with the government regulators and regulations must have been miserable. Your whole business would be subject to the arbitrary whims of petty bureacrats, fat overweight people behind desks who would decide if the 'job was done' for an environmental cleanup.

Course, before making that decision, they would subject you to delays and stacks of paperwork. Their decision woudld determine whether you were even profitable, and if you cleaned up the same site twice, they would probably make a different decision each time.

Anyways, here's how you'd store all the power from these solar panels : http://www.vyconenergy.com/pages/flywheeltech.htm

It's $1 per watt-hour stored, off the shelf, 20 year lifespan (at least). Essentially 0 wear on the system.

    I calculate that it would be more cost effective if these flywheel systems were about 10 times cheaper, which is within the realm of plausibility. Notice that there are no rare elements of any sort used, just steel discs that could be mass produced in china and some commodity electronics. Quality would not be nearly as important for a large scale flywheel storage system because you would not care if a few modules failed prematurely. This is exactly the kind of product that China could make on a massive, commodity scale.

And here's what you make all the panels with : http://earth2tech.com/2008/06/18/nanosolar-prints-thin-film-solar-at-100-feet-per-minute/

That's what I meant all along : if nanosolar had about 10 of those machines, and there were about 5 other competitors in the market, solar power would be economical TODAY. Read some of the comments by the nanoscale CEO, who compared it to the DRAM market. Just LOOK at the machine : that's exactly the sort of product that mass production will make cheap, just like DRAM.

So, I rest my case. I argue that if you put, say, $100 billion dollars into plants to make thin film solar panels using the KNOWN process by nanosolar, and another $100 billion into plants to make flywheel storage devices, you would solve the energy problem almost entirely. The final step is fast charging lithium ion batteries, which you would charge up from electric gas station that would use underground flywheel storage reservoirs, in about 5 minutes.

And, guess what : here they are, ready to be purchased. http://www.altairnano.com/ Again, expensive : but nothing that mass production and time won't solve. Lithium ion battery costs have plummeted over the past decade, so further improvement follows logically.

Of course further R&D will help tremendously. But all of the pieces are here already.

I reckon you could produce a truck with acceptable performance (but less range) very easily with this technology - especially if you only need short-haul capability.

...if they're able to charge your car in 10 to 15 minutes! Otherwise, except if you're at your destination and your car is waiting at the parkometer, will you really wait 4 to 8 hours for your car to be 85% to fully charged?

Those of you who will say that it's impossible to recharge a car in 10 to 15 minutes, I'll just tell you that Altair Nanotechnologies builds a battery pack that can do the job, it just needs the proper infrastructure to send enough amps and volts to the car.

Altairnano has been working on Li-Ion batteries, I had the opportunity to attend a presentation on the technology.

http://www.altairnano.com/markets_energy_systems.html

The batteries can be charged up to 10C (6 miniutes), can operate at 30 below, charge at feeezing, dont experience thermal run away and dont explode at 240C. They can also be charged 10,000 - 15,000 cycles. The problem now is production but they are working at bringing 4 manufacturing plants up.

No problem really, you can charge a123 cells at 10A. You could even do 15A, but that would shorten the lifetime of the cell. Look at http://www.a123racing.com/html/technology.html

And then there is Altairnano, promising 10 minute charge time, http://www.altairnano.com/documents/NanoSafe_Datasheet.pdf. Sadly their batteries are not available in general retail. For a123 cells you can buy Dewalt 36V batteries and harvest them. They contain 10 cells and those cells are exellent for RC use.

There are various different technologies:

a) Lithium-ion-battery
b) Lithium-ion polymer battery
c) Lithium nanophosphate batteries from A123 systems
d) Lithium titanite batteries from Altair Nano

All have their own pros and cons.

a) is cheap and available
b) has the highest energy density
c) can't explode and can discharge fast
d) can be charged very fast (1 min)

And now you can add technology e) to this list.

So all those lame comments about exploding batteries are well lame. I've even heard about most of those technologies here on Slashdot. Slashdot readers should know better ...

Bye egghat

I noticed the development from altairnano on what they call Nano Safe batteries. http://www.altairnano.com/documents/NanoSafeBackgrounder060920.pdf
Seems promising, they use nano-titanate materials (so says the spec sheet). This streetcar might be using this tech or a a similar type of tech. I want those batteries!

There is another manufacturer from the UK who's building a sportscar running an batteries and also claiming that they can be charged in 10 minutes. The cruising range wil be around 400 km. They are using batteries called NanoSafe from a company called Altairnano Inc. Does somebody know details about this company and their products?
The downside is, that the car will cost about 220.000 Euros.

This UK firm claims to make a sports car with special ceramical batteries (from US company Altairnano) that have 12 year warranty and they can be fully recharged in 10 minutes from a normal wall socket!(I really have hard time believing that, how many homes can handle such a current flow?) Autonomy about 300 miles, and 0-60mph in 4 seconds. 700 Bhp Car http://www.lightningcarcompany.com/ news article http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/News/articleI d=121268 batteries http://www.altairnano.com/

A123Systems' cells can be recharged in as little as 5 minutes. AltairNano claims a cell which can be charged to over 90% in 6 minutes.

The world is changing fast, try to keep up.

Has anyone noticed that Altairnano has already done this and their battery will last 20 years! http://www.altairnano.com/markets_amps.html

Using hydrogen to power a car is insanely stupid.

There is no scenario for the use of hydrogen in a terrestrial vehicle that would not be rendered safer, cheaper, and less polluting by taking whatever source of energy used to manufacture hydrogen and directly applying it to move the car -- skipping the extremely wasteful hydrogen conversion/transport/storage processes. Electrons are much easier to produce, ship, store, and use than hydrogen. There are already LiON battery technologies that promise very rapid charge/discharge cycles with no thermal runaway, and over 9000 complete charge/discharge cycles. NiMH and Ni-Zn, while not quite as good in some ways as LiON, are still more viable than using hydrogen, whether by burning in an ICE, or in a fool-cell. And last time I checked, we are much closer to being able to build 50,000,000 EVs than we are to being able to build 50,000 fool-cell vehicles, because lithium (and nickel, and zinc) is far cheaper and more plentiful than platinum, which so far, is the only reasonably (?) effective catalyst for a fool-cell.

Hydrogen will only be the fuel of choice for two groups: Those who have more money than sense, and those who can freely spend other people's money. Those of us that have to spend our own money, and don't have enough to burn, will go for more efficient technologies, such as EV and bio-diesel. Unless we are coerced by the government.

Political Correctness makes lousy science, lousy economics, and even worse public policy.

And it's on the market now. 10,000-15,000 cycles with little or no degradation, double the energy density of current li-ions. Ideal for automotive stuff, they're already shipping to customers.

http://www.altairnano.com/

http://www.altairnano.com/markets_amps.html#temper ature

Well, Biofuels are about 300x less effecient per acre than solar ;D (And thats assuming 10% effecient solar, newer solar tech can get 42% in lab conditions) Anyways though, Why in the world would you need Hydrogen when you have beefy car batteries that can charge in five minutes flat. (As opposed to 5-6 hours) http://www.altairnano.com/markets_amps.html And soon enough, ones that can offer 20x the storage of conventional batteries, with the same phenominal charge time. http://money.cnn.com/2006/09/15/technology/disrupt ors_eestor.biz2/index.htm Hydrogen is bunk given these new Battery Technologies.

First, The distinction of Li-Poly from the general chemistry of Li-Ion is in the electrolyte. Instead of a liquid or gel electrolyte, the Li-Poly cell uses a thin sheet of conductive polymer doped with ionic compounds. Now while this polymer electrolyte has less mobility than a liquid, resulting in a lower energy density (J/cm^3) and power density (W/cm^3), in practice the manufactured shapes can be more complex than the coin or cylindrical shapes imposed by liquid electrolytes. Therefore more "battery cell" can be stuffed into otherwise unused volumes, and in many applications this maximizes the effective energy density beyond what can be achieved using cylindrical cells.

Second, any Lithium chemistry cell using a Cobalt-alloy cathode (virtually all of them on the market today) is subject to a thermal runaway condition if the internal cell temperature exceeds 130C. This includes Li-Poly cells.

Valence corp has patented a Lithium-Iron-Phosphate cathode chemistry that has less energy density, similar to NiCd, however the change to a Iron cathode eliminates the thermal runaway possiblity, making the cells much safer. These will soon be available commercially from DeWalt as battery packs for their cordless power tools. Here is a press release... note that Valence later bought the company referenced therein, A123 Systems. (I wonder if there's been a delay somewhere - DeWalt was marketing this much more heavily just a few months ago, now you have to do a search on their site to find any reference of it.)

Another company, Altair Nanotechnologies, has patented a Litium Titanate Spinel anode technology that also claims to eliminate the risk of fire and improve on both the Energy Density and Power Density of vanilla Li-Ion. However they have yet to actually deliver cells (to me anyway, despite many requests). And this chemistry is not exclusive to the Iron Phosphate cathode, meaning someone with all of the proper patent licenses could combine the two and make a high energy-density, non-exploding laptop battery that does even better than the Li-Poly battery I'm using in my MacBook Pro right now.

Finally, here's a link to the "Safety Concerns" page of the "Battery University" site which is an excellent user's reference for Li-Ion secondary batteries, among others. And here is a link to a Valence Corp white paper that describes their LIP cells. Lastly, here is a PDF of Altair Nano's marketing material describing their claims of safety advantages their Titanium spinel material offers to commercial batteries.

A company called Altair is making a lithium battery which does not use graphite. The graphite component of Li-Ion batteries is the catalyst for thermal runaway, leading to fire and explosion of the battery.

Their energy density is currently equivalent to NiCd or NiMH, still a bit lower than standard lithium batteries. They are mostly targeted at the hybrid and electric vehicle industry. I think they could be interesting for laptops, too. These batteries can be safely charged or discharged at much higher rates. How would you like a laptop that can be fully charged in a couple of minutes?

From the abstract, his analysis finds Li4Ti5O12 to be a high-surface area material with a very large ability to hold a charge.

One word of caution, I notice the phrase "Dr. Kavan employed scientifically sound experimental procedures and test protocols to study these materials", which sounds a little self-promoting. I guess that's what peer review is for!

Critical Review in PDF

Enjoy the light reading!