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Charge in 5 minutes, Drive 500 miles?
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 Ultra-Capacitor storage products. The claim being that you charge the ultra-capacitor in 5 minutes, with approximately 9$ (~$.45 a gallon) of electricity and then drive 500 miles."
This time around I have thought of something to say.
As we strive for higher energy density in our laptop computers, electric cars, mobile phones, etc; we are creating devices which can potentially release much of their stored energy in a short space of time. It doesn't have to be a chemical explosion. I have in my workshop a melted bicycle tail light and four cooked NiCD batteries from cycle commuting years past when I put two batteries in the wrong way and created a short circuit.
So IMHO battery/capacitor explosions are the way of the future, certainly much more than the backyard LPG explosions we get from time to time here in Australia (LPG is a cheap substitute for petrol, but a bit volatile.)
How is Alan Cox going with his hair? Is it growing back yet.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I've submitted a few stories over the last few years, none of which /. editors are
were ever accepted. (Ok maybe your standards are higher than mine?)
But THIS? For crying out loud this story is such a DUPE it appears
TWICE on the same web page!!!!! This proves the
smoking bananas!
How long until they're bought out and run to ground ? Last time we had a chance at EV cars, GM bought controlling share of the batterie technology and used their Delco crap. The higher performance batteries never really made it in the cars, just a few got the first line issues. And when GM got out of the EV business, they sold that controlling share to Texaco/Mobile, or was it exxon ? They want us to go Hydrogen and Biodeiesel next. The Electric car won't see the light of day until the Big Oil Profiteers get UberUber Mega Rich... Sad that we let them supplant technology and lie to us... Watch the film "Who killed the Electric car"...and the rest.. Cheers
End of Line.
I think the parent makes a valid point. A lot of the emphasis here seems to be on how tricky it would be to safely entirely charge one of these from empty in 5 minutes. However I have to wonder how much that is actually the requirement. Most people pulling up to a service station don't have totally dry tanks. In addition, when you can go home and trickle charge over night why would you try to fill it completely at the service station? Filling it enough to last the remainder of your expected use for the day would seem more likely. There is also the question of how frequently most people would actually need a service station given that their vehicles get topped off every night and they start full each morning. If you think about that, it is a markedly different fueling pattern from what we are used to with gas powered vehicles. Moreover, what is to say that you couldn't add an extra boost to the range by starting to integrate solar cells into the tops of the vehicles? They wouldn't be enough to run the car, but they might be enough to give that extra bit of range that gets most people over the charge threshold beyond which they almost never need a service station at all and certainly don't have to fully fill the car while there. Ask yourself how many miles you really drive in a day, then ask yourself why you are trying to fit an electric car into the same fueling patterns that you have with a gas powered one.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that's what the 5 minute at recharging stations are for. Probably running 440 or 480 directly off the power lines? At home I'm sure it will take longer. I also recall seeing something mentioned or implied about a "battery swap" at those stations, so perhaps the charging time is considerably longer, and the swap only takes 5m?
;).
;)
I also checked their patent, which seems like a reasonable decent use of a patent for a change provided it actually works. Think of the Tesla using this instead of 6381 exploding Sony batteries
But more importantly, does this remind anyone else of the batacitors from Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld? If you could only charge them with lightning strikes - free power!
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I was quite skeptic initially, but I took notice at the VC firm backing the project.
Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers were early investors in Amazon, America Online, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Google, Macromedia, Netscape, Quantum, Segway, Sun Microsystems (just to name a few). Looks like it is more serious than virgin snake oil.
A good way to mitigate this surge in power demand at home, it would be smarter to have an equivalent capcitor sit at home and charge over the course of an hour or two and then unload it's charge to the vehicule's capacitor.
With this method you could even schedule your capacitor to cahrge during the night where electricity is cheaper (at least here in europe).
What are the advantages vs a battery? Well your local Shell station could be running massive capacitors for you and you could just plug-in real quick without the need to wait hours at a time to fuel up.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
Of course, they could use larger versions of the capacitors at the fueling station to store a "charge" of 52 kWhs. 52kWhs * 3.6 MJoules = 187.2 MJ. The vehicle gets pulled into a stall, the driver gets out, large copper or gold rods drop from the ceiling into sockets which are directly connected to the capacitor. You have a bank of capacitors which switch on in succession, ramping up current (this minimizes switching problems, since 2700A is not fun to switch) with some type of diode in the middle to prevent back flow. In 5 minutes, the car is charged. Meanwhile the capacitors are recharging from mains current. Green light comes on, next car comes in. To make it work, you'd need something a little beefier than a 220 home circuit, possibly a 12.5kV line which is pretty common in commercial areas. You could probably do at least one car at a time, more if you could increase the charging capacitor capacity (which would be fully charged overnight or during off-peak times).
As far as costs, of course the cost of electricity is going to go up for everyone. However, with transmission lines, you build them (once) and then the power keeps coming. So after the initial investment, you are going to save money over gas. Gas has to be brought in by truck, which costs money in labor and fuel and truck insurance, etc. Then you have pump maintenance, etc which is no longer necessary. On the other end you have a regional distributor who takes a cut, a refiner who takes a cut, a global distributer who takes a cut of the crude oil, and then a producer who takes a cut. Not to mention the people doing the transporting between each of these middle-men.
With electric, you are going to cut out a lot of middle men. The utility, if fossil powered, will buy in large bulk quanities that will be delivered to one location, probably by ship. So, just by moving energy by transmission line we are cutting back on the total energy use required by the country. It's all a big chain reaction.
I hope they can make this thing work.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Don't get excited until they tell you how long it holds a charge while you're not using it.
$9 to go 500 miles seems like a great deal (we're talking about cash here, not the environment. That $9 of electricity was probably generated with coal. Renewable sources can't even cover what we use *now*, so they don't stand a chance if we signifigantly increase our electricity usage), but if you only drive 20 miles and then park for three days only to come back to a discharged cap, then you can keep it and I'll stick to my chemical energy storage.
Energy is energy.
Have you ever seen a capacitor explode? Have you ever seen a large capacitor blow up a screwdriver that shorted across its terminals?
It doesn't matter if it's gasoline, Li-Poly, Li-Ion, Hydrogen, etc. We use it because it's easy to extract energy from it. It's easy to extract energy from it because it's very reactive. There are many ways to blow up a fuel tank - but we've had a century of design information and now they rarely go up like they could (except in movies). When we have a few decades of experience behind us with these other technologies then they'll be about as safe as we consider gasoline to be.
Expect to see exploding laptops in movies long after we've solved that problem.
-Adam