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They actually already did it for public transit, though with zinc instead of Alumiumn, though it looks like it's "inactive", so maybe not as cost effective as they hoped.

http://www.electric-fuel.com/e...

Next, they need to make a flow battery version of this.

Drive down the road, turning fresh electrolyte (no peroxide) into spent electrolyte (with peroxide). You have one tank, with a non-permeable membrane between the two sides. Pull into a refueling station. Pump out the spent stuff, pump in the fresh stuff, over the course of a few minutes. Congrats. You just refueled. The station can deal with regenerating the spent stuff, so it can be reused. You don't have to worry about high-current or high-voltage electrical power being transferred to your vehicle.

They're already working with Zinc- and Vanadium-based flow redox batteries. They don't have a very high energy density, which is why you hear much about it. They were running a bus on such a system. Look here for more details.

At that point, all those whining about how long it takes to recharge will be out of excuses. Personal transportation can transition away from petroleum.

<sarcasm>
And there will be unicorns and butterflies for all.
</sarcasm>

Please try zinc instead. Zinc-air technology is amazing. It is the most efficient round trip fuel technology I've seen. If we moved all (or even some) hydrogen research dollars to zinc air, it would win. See for example, this bus: zinc air fuel cell bus.

Electric vehicle's analytical engines.

And people are using zinc-air fuel cells for some fairly substantial applications. I suppose that's it's cheaper to just deliver the appropriate small zinc plates to an outlying village and let them use locally-grown vegetables as the electrolyte. But it would seem that there are advantages to dropping off some large well-designed fully-charged fuel cells, and picking up the spent ones for recharging or recycling at a centralized facility. Otherwise, I have visions of every village eventually having a "zinc dump", containing hundreds of pounds of zinc and zinc oxide.

Zinc can be fairly toxic when ingested.

To fix that problem Electric Fuel has created a zinc/air battery for use in the field. To deal with the multiple battery form factors they have a little plugin empy plastic box, that leads out with a single pigtail. The actual battery actually is two 12 volt stacks that can be wired in parallel or series if you need 24V.

.. remember when Palm was holding out from introducing colour devices because of worries about battery life? (or so they claim).

Combine this with fuel-cell power packs, which is now approved by the DoT and is already in use on some airlines (BA), this means....

Pitching my PDA against the onboard computer in an Othello death match! YaY!

• The power comes from Electric Fuel's proprietary zinc anode, compacted from zinc particles in alkaline electrolyte, made under controlled conditions in an Electric Fuel regeneration plant. Each anode is flanked by two specially developed, high-power, long-life oxygen reduction cathodes that extract oxygen from the air for the zinc-oxidation reaction. Patented thermal management and airflow mechanisms ensure uninterrupted performance for the life of the battery.

Anyway, the darn things are recycleable and have a pretty good specific energy. (energy per unit mass). Sounds promising, anyway.

-tarkas