500 Miles on a 5-Minute Recharge?

ctroutwi writes "In the wake of rising gasoline costs there have been plenty of alternatives seen on the horizon. Including Hybrids, Biofuels, fuel cells and battery powered all electric cars. CNN has recently posted a story about a company (EEStor) that plans on offering UltraCapacitor storage products. The claim being that you charge the ultracapacitor in 5 minutes, with approximately $9 of electricity and then drive 500 miles."

Comments

How much electricity?

[Phreakiture]

I'll say the same thing here that I said on tribe.net when this came up.... How much electricity is "$9 worth"? Is that at 4 cents per kWh, or 25 cents per kWh? Electricity is found at both thos prices, and every price in between, in different places in the US, and I want to know how much electricity this car uses, not how much it costs some undefined person at some undefined location.

1.2 Megawatts

[Stone Rhino]

$9 of electricity is about 100 KWh at national average rates. Passing that in 9 minutes gives you an average rate of 1.2 megawatts. What the hell knid of household has the circuit to handle that?

Re:1.2 Megawatts

[gurps_npc]

Gasoline is not inherently safe, it is safe because of how we build the system. Things like auto-deactivate gaspumps.

Similarly, if we build an electrical infrastructure, we would make it safe.

Not that hard to do. Drive into an enclosed area, with multiple ben franklin rods, close the door, plug the car in. and let it power up. Disconnect, open the doors, drive out.

Re:1.2 Megawatts

[ltbarcly]

(1.3 * (10 ** 8) joules * 16 * .25) / ((12 000 volts) * 60 amperes) = 12.037037 minutes

That is to say:

(energy in 1 gallon of gasoline * 16 gallons * efficiency of most cars) / ('reasonable' voltage * 'reasonable' amperage) = 12 minutes.

That is to say:

You could fill your tank without being rediculous at all, although at much higher energy levels than you would have at your house. At your house you could safely draw:

1.3 * 10**8 joules * 16 * .25 / (220volts * 60amps) = 10.9427609 hours

if you had a special outlet installed in your garage. (this is about the same as a big AC unit) and so you could recharge each night.

Moving things around we get:
(((220 volts) * 60 amperes) * (10.94 hours) * (.11 U.S. dollars)) / (1 000 * (watt * hour)) = 15.88488 U.S. dollars

So you could recharge this thing for about 15 dollars a night, assuming you completely discharge it. Since you can reasonably charge it yourself you can either buy electricity cheaply near a power plant or if you are the only one around with one of these cars you can just charge it yourself. Good deal, safe buy.

This assumes 100% efficiency, so scale it up by 1/efficiency to get a more accurate number. As long as efficiency is more than about 40% it is cheaper than gasoline. And of course it pollutes less (or at worse if you have coal it pollutes somewhere else, which is better for 99% of people, who don't live next to an old coal plant).

Finally, the complexity of an electric car is much much much less than a gasoline car. No exhaust, no belts, no cooling system (except for the electric ac), no transmission really, no power steering or brake fluids, no oil, etc etc.

A washing machine and an electrical generator are about equivilent in complexity to an electic car and a gas powered car respectively. With an electric car you can expect to repair it every few years for about 400 dollars a pop, just like a washing machine breaks every few years for about 60 dollars a pop ($5 if you repair it yourself, or about $30 for the electric car). Electrical generators are complicated and break down all the time, and are expensive to buy and maintain, just like gas cars.

Plus electric cars will be much lighter, as much as 40%. That directly leads to efficiency. Plus with no engine, instead of wasted space you get an extra trunk, or the car company can redesign the car drastically (assuming batteries/whatever are arranged along the floor of the car for optimal low center of gravity).

Finally, the only limit to the HP of an electric car is the size of the motor(s), and so you could have anywhere between 200 and 800 HP in a standard car.

Where do I sign up?

Re:1.2 Megawatts

[Phat_Tony]

Enough power to kill you is enough power to kill you. If you're dead anyway, who cares if you've just had a heart attack and otherwise appear untouched, or if you've been converted entirely to plasma and been atomized? There's enough power to kill you all over the place.

Even if you have some irrational fear of strong power, many commercial buildings have three-phase 440 volt power running through low-gauge wire on high-amp breakers- the kind of power they'll need for charging these cars. But people rarely get fried, and I've never heard someone complaining about how dangerous it is before.

It's quite simple, and we've known for a long time, how to make electrical connections that are very safe. Ones where there's no exposed conductor a person can touch. And our electrical insulators are very good. I doubt it would take much engineering to make an electrical charging process significantly safer than our current gasoline fueling process, which still results in a few fires at pumps every year, mostly caused by static electricity shocks when someone's finishing fueling.

Yes, gasoline fueling also could be much safer with better design, but the old system got grandfathered in and the accidents are infrequent enough that there was never a serious push for a new standard. Since we get to design electric-car charging standards from scratch now, we have to opportunity to make them extra fail-safe, with really good connectors, double insulation plus shielding, ground-fault interrupters, etc.

Re:1.2 Megawatts

[KDR_11k]

It gets worse than that.

Re:I*V=P

[Anonymous Coward]

At 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, $9.00 is 90 kilowatt-hours, or a little over a million watts in five minutes.

This is what happens when you have a faith-based scientific curriculum in public high schools. The populace becomes vulnerable to all kinds of interesting scams.

I'd like to see the charging cable...

[Doctor Memory]

If you're going to push enough electricity to "drive a four-seat sedan like a Ferrari" in five minutes, you're going to have to move several hundred volts at lots of amps. Hope you don't have to stop for a charge in the rain, there's no way I'd want to be around both water and that kind of current!

You need 4000 Amp line

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

500 miles? Let us say the hybrid has the efficiency similar to Prius, 50 MPG. To go 500 miles you need to store as much energy as there is in 10 gallons of gasoline. 10 gallons of gas, is 37.5 litres of gas, that is 30 Kg of gas.

Energy content of gasoline is 45 MJ/Kg. That means you are storing 1.35e09 Joules of energy. You are charging it in 5 minutes? So dividing by 300 seconds, the Power rating for the charger is 4500000 Watts or 4.5 MW. If you try to charge it from your friendly neighbourhood 110V line, the amp rating for the plug is drum roll please, 40909 Amps

Now think when you are pumping 25 gallons of gas into that Hummer in 3 minutes, you have a 8 MW device in your hands!

That's all well and fine, but

[pair-a-noyd]

I'm not expecting to be finding this available for us lowly mortals anytime soon.
So in the meantime I'm building a weedeater bike with parts I get at Curb*mart. Some people call them a "Mow-ped"..
Strap a 21cc weedeater motor on the back of an old bicycle and you can get 400+ miles per gallon. YMMV..
One guy traveled 1,000 mile on 3.5 gallons of gas. I'm going to put a big basket on it and that's how I'll be going to the grocery store. I'll use the car only when it's not feasible to ride the mow-ped, I think I can almost live without the car, maybe only having to resort to it once a month or less.

The mow-ped, built from stuff people throw away is helping to keep stuff out of the landfill, helping to reduce pollution and is a poke in the eye to the uberglobalists that insist we all buy brand new cars every year and constantly fill them up with hyperinflated, over priced gas..

I'm not a good little consumer. I want to keep my money. I'm tired of the fat cat profiteers on Wall Street getting fatter from the sweat of my brow, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
Time to fight back..

Re:That's all well and fine, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, man, chill out. READ what he wrote. You're one of those annoying people that automatically assume that anyone that disagrees with them is insulting their disability in some way. I have no idea how a small debate about the metrics of enviornmental impact turned into what you perceive as a personal insult. Sigh...you're a fool.

He was merely stating that simply comparing the consumption of gasoline is NOT an accurate way of measuring the environmental impact of a engine. Likewise, he was NOT insulting your lack of funds. The natural order of consumerism is that new technology will inevitably be passed down to end users. You may not adopt them immediately, but in time, you'll own what is now considered a "modern" emissions-control car.

And to take you up on your grand challenge: http://www.egr.msu.edu/erl/emiss/emiss.htm

Take a look at the chart, which was lifted from:
Sun, X., Brereton, G. J., Morrison, K.& Patterson, D. J., "Emissions analysis of small utility engines" SAE Paper 952080, SAE Off-Highway and Powerplant Congress, Milwaukee, Sept 1995. (Also printed in the SAE Publication SP-1112 `Design and Emissions of Small Two- and Four-Stroke Engines,' SAE, 1995 and as a featured article in the SAE publication: `Off-Highway Engineering', Jan 1996, and to appear in the SAE Journal of Engines)
Yes, I verified it.

Basically, what it's saying is that your weed-whacking engine, a close equivalent of the "Lawnboy D410 (2 Hp), 2-stroke (untuned)" is putting out 1500 (CO(gr)/kW-hr). Meanwhile, a "modern" engine is generating less than ONE. Even the 1994 California Emissions Regulations (a relatively lax requirement meant more to weed vehicles with malfunctioning emissions control systems) is 400 CO(gr)/kW-hr. So what does that mean? Your precious engine generates almost 4 times more emissions than a car that can just barely pass a 12 year old emissions requirement, and 1000+ times more than a fully modern and functional vehicle. And that's not even taking in consideration the greater kW-hr efficiency of a car's engine over that of a jury-rigged weed-whacker.

At 128 ounes = 1 gallon, I'd say that your "Green Machine" is easily outclassed by anything short of a vehicle that couldn't even legally drive on the road over 10 years ago.

Good game. And thanks for acting like a victim.

Re:Unlimited Miles on a 1-Minute Recharge

[Scrameustache]

It's called a MetroCard. Plenty faster, more energy-efficient, and more convenient than a car, and it only costs $76 a month. And you can actually do stuff on your way to work, like read.

1- Try going 500 miles in a municipal transit system.
2- Some of us get motion sickness, you insensitive clod!

Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid

[networkBoy]

Imagine the electrical feeder line that will be needed going into the station.
You mean that single 20 ga wire?

The size of conductor is relative (via inverse square law) only to the current passed through the wire, not the total power.

This simply means that the car will have a step down converter immediately prior to the cap (likely integrated in the motor controller).
Likewise the power pump station will have a mini substation getting transmission voltage and stepping it down to something around the distribution voltage range (maybe even lower).

-nB

Yes I know the 20Ga is a bit silly, immagine the size of the insulator you would need if it was carring useful ammounts of power :-)

Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid

[Rei]

There are other solutions. There are "third rail" type systems in which power is only transferred when the "train" is on the rail, thus preventing the usual safety risks of having an exposed, electrified rail. There are "contact-free" options as well, although I don't know how well the economics would work out (for example, short-distance microwave transmission)

Heck, while we're in fantasyland, lets throw in interstates with coils of wire buried in them, and vehicles with retractable halbach arrays mounted to their undercarriages. Side coils could keep you going straight, and autoconvoying could be computer-managed. No more traffic, incredible speeds on open roads, no more need to drive, great system efficiency, no more parking problems (your vehicle can drive off and park, then come back when you page it), automatic pickup and delivery, integrated public and private transportation, and all sorts of other benefits.

Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid

[Rei]

You refer to the Ford Nucleon. It was designed, but not built. Unlike this monstrosity, which was partially completed.

AA, AAA, C, D

[DigitalRaptor]

You'll know the energy density of ultracapacitors has ripened when there is a real market for AA, AAA, C, and D ultracapacitors that are drop-in replacements for normal batteries and offer the same duration.

The benefit of ultracapacitors is that you can recharge them VERY fast. For instance, charging several AAA batteries could take as little as a few seconds, and can be done 500,000+ times with no affect on the battery (no memory, no decrease in power, etc).

Personally I can't wait, but we aren't there yet. MIT is making good progress using carbon nano-tubes, however.

Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid

[Anonymous Coward]

If the capacitor loads in 5 mins, it means the charger pumps said 2000 kWh in 1/12 of an hour, for a power of 2000 x 12 = 24MW;

That's just a baby as far as power plants go.

A major grid-connected plant can produce 3-13 gigawatts of power.

Yes, you'll need some honkin' bus bars. A rough rule of thumb is 10 amps/square mm (you can get a lot more if you can do something like active water cooling). If you're running this thing at 1000 V, you'll need 24,000 amps, or 2,400 square mm of conductor cross section. Square root gives a cross section of ~50 mm on a side, or about 2 inches.

That's quite a 'trode, but it seems doable. This is a back of the envelope calculation, of course. You'd definitely want to have a competent EE do a careful design on something like this, but it doesn't seem too unreasonable.

Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid

[JAFSlashdotter]

Just because it CAN be done in 5 (or even 15) minutes doesn't mean it HAS to be. If they made it take different voltages depending on the desired speed of charge (rapid, high-voltage charge at the filling station; slow, lower voltage charge overnight at home in your garage), most people would probably never go to a filling station again, except when on a long trip. And for a long trip, I'd appreciate a 5-30 minute break every 500 miles. More people ought to take one now. When away from home, motels, hotels, and overnight parking lots could fill up your "tank" over a few hours for a fee (plug in, swipe your card, walk away). If done over 8 hours, the requirement are much lower. The benefit of the capacitor over a batttery is that you have the flexibility to recharge it in a short span of time (and also discharge it quickly too*), but you don't HAVE to. If I had one, 90% of the time it would be topped off at home every night. The average commute is something like 12 miles. I know there are some crazies that commute 100mi each way to work, with a 500 mile range, even they could round-trip and recharge overnight at home.

With most people recharging at home, recharge stations exist only as convenience stores. So the convenience store has a high-voltage hook up, and a few road-warrior types plug in while they stop and get coffee -- for the convenience of a rapid charge, they pay 4x what it costs at home ($36 is still less than I pay now for 500mi). The demand for that is lower than for gas, so you don't need to redesign the grid to handle dozen of cars simultaneously hooking up for rapid recharge.

Some things that stop me from having an electric car now are that 1) the range is limited (~60-100 miles), 2) when you get to the end of that range, you're looking at a relatively long recharge, 3) the batteries perform even worse when cold, 4) lack of availability. Capacitors won't help #4, but do help the rest.

* Speaking of rapid discharge... what happens to these capacitors in an accident?

Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid

[N Monkey]

To actually pull this off in a (relatively) safe manner, you would have to:

      1. use a small bank of ultra-capacitors at the house/station that fills itself up over a more reasonable time (preferably off-peak)
      2. use a bank of ultra-capacitors (not 1 big one) in the car
      3. use a bank of smaller, more managable cables, bundled in such a way as to reduce magnetics and single short catastrophe
      4. develop a standardized end-point connector assembly that:

Or alternatively, why not have a standard cartridge for the capacitors so that all you do at the 'filling' station is swap a (partially) discharged unit for a fully charged one? The station could (pardon the pun) charge you for the difference between the energy levels in the returned unit and the supplied one.