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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."
As long as you get the ultrafluxcapacitor car going at 88 mph, you can go anywhen... ahem anywhere.
Where were you when the voynix came?
$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?
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
How about a system in which cars connect to electric lines along the highways, like they use for electric busses and trollies, and use ultra-capacitors to get from the highway to your home?
Behold the future.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I am old enough to remember city streets in places with overhead power lines for this. Its ugly. Why? I get 500 miles on a tank of gas (13.5 gallons and 29 miles to the gallon) so why not just let me pull into a service station, which now takes almost 5 minutes for a full tank, and plug in... charge me $20 for the charge, make the 100% profit ($9 for the elec, $9 profit, 2$ to cover overhead)... I end up better off they end up better off (distribution now done by the existing power lines, no need for trucks) and eventually, when we figure out how to make electricity cleaner (or convert part of of grid to wind or water turbine or whatever) the environment would be better off. Sounds like a win/win/win situtation
I reject your reality
I'm thinking of a system more like this...
The advantage of electricity remains, even if you are still polluting with your power generation facilities.
It is easier to institute stricter pollution control measures at centralized power generation facilities than it is to implement equivalent levels of pollution control in vehicles all over the country. Even very "dirty" methods of producing such power can always be upgraded over time to be less polluting anyways, or possibly even migrate towards emission free power generation. Also, this migration does not have to be instantaneous either, as an incremental change is often much more economical and practical than a single large change anyways. This sort of upgrading would be completely impractical for individual automobile.
Also, it reduces dependancy on foreign oil.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The idea of replacing the batteries in electric and hybrid electric cars is not a new one. BMW was at one point determined to use ultracapacitors in it's hybrids, rather than batteries, because without chemical reactions taking place, the storage of electricity is much more efficient than batteries. BMW has apparently abandoned that in their alliance with DCX and GM on their hybrid system, but since BMW hasn't announced any of their own hybrids, we can't exactly tell yet. I believe also that it would allow greater maximum output from a car, if one were so inclined to let a couple/few hundred kilowatts go to the electric motors.
The problem is that the ultra capacitors haven't been quite ultra enough yet. I'm no expert on capacities of capacitors, but you're limited by size/surface area in the capacitor and 'they' seemed to 500 miles is quite a claim, and unless they have a specific car, it's not a usefully specific claim. And if they do have a vehicle, it's best to make sure it's not a lightweight go kart like an Elise (or the new Tesla car, which is an Elise), as those cars tend to not please typical automotive tastes.
There is still potential out there to make much more effective capacitors. I believe MIT students/professors/people of some sort came up with a Carbon Nano-fiber fuzzy capacitor that multiplied many times the surface area inside a capacitor on which the charge is built up by making the charge holding surface out gagillions of those little fibers. That sounded like a hilariously expensive proposition to me, but perhaps it's not as expensive as my imagination makes it out to be, or it could even inspire others to find similar and less expensive ways to make significant advances in the field of ultracapacitors.
At the very least, companies who make outrageous claims like this one bring awareness to different technologies and methodologies such as capacitors vs. batteries. I'll be interested to see if/when someone brings a capacitor driven car to market, be it these guys, or BMW, or whoever.
you cannot dodge the quad laser. jumping is useless.
At what cost per kWh does it require 1.21 gigawatts?
Why is there always such resistance to this?
It's poetry with a beat behind it! And guns! They're like beatniks with automatic weapons.
Many people just don't have the capacity.
-S