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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."
I emailed the on-duty editor (regarding this being a dupe), like any good little /. subscriber. Unfortunately my e-mail bounced pretty much immediately. Normally I would resist the temptation to join in the /. circle-jerk that is shouting "OMG DUPE DUPE DUPE!!" but I wanted someone (ScuttleMonkey, etc) to note that the 'daddypants' email link is bouncing. ..ScuttleMonkey, if you want the full error, feel free to let me know where to e-mail it.
( ERROR: Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at... Line 126 )
On a sidenote, what seems odd to me is that not only is this a dupe that is currently visible on the index of slashdot, but that the article summary is almost identical to the earlier submission, and is even from the same submitter. Insert Matrix deja-vu quote here.
Mods, try to be on the lookout for copy and paste karma whores (man, plagiarism annoys me). Unfortunately with 700+ comments on the last discussion, this may not be easy, haha.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
I just hope they don't farm out making the batteries to the same company that makes them for Apple and Dell. A tank full of combustible liquide seems good compared to that.
Great Intellect...
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
Yeah, I expect there are a bunch of comments to this effect about the dupe.
What I'm wondering is why these guys call themselves editors. I'm frustrated that ad revenue and subscription fees go to these people who totally disregard all semblance of professionalism. I wish I had a cushy job like that, where I could sit back, press 'Accept' once in a while without even reading the blurb or the front page, and get paid for it.
[
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.
Also, I doubt they're hooking it to a regular outlet if they're getting $9 of electricity out of it in five minutes. Granted, you could make charge stations that are similar to gas stations (or add them to gas stations) but you really should list all the materials we would need when considering the cost of this alternative.
You mean like the "electrical energy stations" mentioned in TFA, from which a 5 minute charge may be obtained?
well... I thought it was an interesting article when I posted it the first (and only) time yesterday... However, I had nothing to do with the encore!!!... This is only the 2nd story I've ever submitted, and the only one to ever get accepted... (albeit twice)..
220V * 30amp = 6,600 watts * 5 minutes = 0.55 kilowatt hours. You're only a few orders of magnitude off from "$9 worth of electricity", specifically 52 kWhs for EEStor's product. To charge 52 kWhs in 5 minutes, you'd need to be chugging through ~600 kW of power, or about 2.7 kiloamps at 220V.
Bye, bye wall plug.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I meant to write this the first time the article appeared :-) I had originally thought that it wasn't going to work out; but getting to the end, it turned out they did. Oh well - now I've done it, you might be interested... for your viewing pleasure...
Supposition: 500 miles on a 5 minute charge, with $9 worth of electricity.
$9 worth of electricity = 100kWh
100kWh = 360 megajoules
500 miles = 804 kilometres
Force = Energy / distance
= 360e6 / 804e3
= 447 Newtons
(of course the above is only the average force available for that journey)
F_drag = 1/2 * Drag_Coefficient * Cross_Section * AirDensity * Velocity^2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_coefficient gives Drag as around 0.3 for an average car. Cross-section is probably about 3 square metres.
F_drag = 0.5 * 0.3 * 3 * 1.29 * v^2
= 0.581 v^2
55 mph = 24 m/s
F_drag_55 = 334 Newtons
Which is well within the average 447 available; and gives scope for losses. So; it turns out it's not crazy to suggest you can get 500 miles on $9 worth of electricity.
I wonder how far my house would travel a month...
Carpe Daemon
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2006/01
A breif run down:
-S
It is said that a child learns wisdom from the parent,
but the truly wise parent learns joy from the child
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.
Here's some hard data: these things are low voltage devices. E.g., Maxwell's data says 2.7V for theirs. They also have crap power density: 3-5 Wh/kg. (Yes, I didn't miss a "k" there.) They may have high capacity, but Q = C*V, so low voltage still puts a limit on it.
So if you want to store about 90 kWh in a bank of those, you'd need anywhwere between 18,000 and 30,000 kg worth of ultra-capacitors. Yes, between 18 and 30 metric _tons_. Not quite a commuter car, you know? I'll also go on a limb and say that buying whole tons of them will cost a pretty penny.
Also, transferring 90 kWh in 5 minutes means 1080kW power. More that 1 MW. So, yeah, I don't think your average power socket can do that. At 2.7V that means 400,000 A, too.
So, basically, it's just snake oil. It ranks up there with the promises to make energy out of water by changing the orbits of electrons in hydrogen. Some fraudster figured that he can get tens of millions of dollars VC to pretend to make such a thing. And given the IQ of some VC these days, they probably will too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
A dyslexic who likes anagrams. Vaugly disturbing and yet oddly appropriate.
-
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.
...now that you've explained how many gallons of electricity it is, could also please give us the equivalent Libraries of Congress of electricity? It seems useful somehow. ;-)
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
And what do they consist of? How will this affect the power grids of large United States cities? What are possible cost implications here? My point was that they're not listing the total cost of making this switch.
Stop thinking! No progress allowed! Be a team player! Team players get food. People who think and speak get fired! Be a team player! No progress!
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
But to be fair, is it just me or have they been doing a lot better lately? Certainly I've noticed fewer, and I've appreciated it.
I know it's more fun to bitch about people, but you ought to hand out some kudos every once in a while too. We could do with a bit more of that on the Intarweb.
Meh, they serve as many ads to people ranting about the dupe as they do to people reading the original. It's all good.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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
Slashdot editorial operations is a good old boy buddy system. I've been with this site since it was .org, and I remember the fuss when people's postings were DELETED because they indicated shall we say "room for improvement" with the site.
/. - it's just an automated news blog and there are better codebases for this.
Editors used to have recursive macro's to apply -1 moderation to controversial posts, so even if 50 users moderated something up the post would tank.
Today I think it's more benign editor abuse -- they simply MISUSE the "friend or foe" system so they can sometimes publish their friend's postings first. Sometimes they publish a sensational headline from someone who registered for Slashdot THAT SAME DAY.
There's no weighting for how long you've been registered, and how much you have participated. I must have a black mark on my account "never allow to moderate", so I stopped participating here. No metamoderation anymore. There's no need to fork
I happen to like the Digg site (although they are going the way of "big self-hype like Slashdot" so some foolish dot-com investor can buy Digg for one MILLION dollars).
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... I don't know about you, but my guess would be that maybe it's not a fish. In this case, if it "acts like a capacitor", then it _is_ a capacitor.
In fact, if you RTFP (Read The F***ing Patent), it _is_ a fancy capacitor, plus circuitry to get a constant voltage out of it. In fact, it's downright the most classical kind of a capacitor, with two surfaces separated by a thin dielectric material. Only they use a fine powder to achieve lots of surface.
So, yes, it _is_ a capacitor.
At any rate, if it "acts like a capacitor" then it's fair to compare it to the best ultra-capacitors available. And if what they're proposing ends up having to be 80 times better than the best existing ultra-capacitors, then I'm getting a tad suspicious. Sure, it could be that they're geniuses, but I'll hold the celebrations until I hear something about a working prototype.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
Ah, yes, the metric shitload. Much easier to work with than our antiquated American shitloads, based upon (but not matching) the old British shitloads...
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
Why does everyone get all stuck on what it would take to charge it? That's the easy part. What we are missing for electric cars is exactly this type of storage. Cost was never a problem (except for replacement, which this fixes). The issue was weight, range, and recharge time. Lead acid sucked for mobile applications. Lead isn't light, and neither is water. The batteries for the EV-1 were somewhere around half the weight of the car. Take the 1000+ lbs of batteries and change them to 100 lbs of capacitors, and you have suddenly increased efficiency, handling, ride, and helped with other design considerations. Make it so the very expensive battery plant will last forever, and you shut up all the people whining about the hybrids sucking for long term maintenance.
That leaves the two complaints: It will be bad in a crash, and it can't charge as fast as theroretically possible. You are on knee-jerk #2. The answer to that is, the grid *will* be improved to handle the load, as it always has been in the past for all other loads. Yes, California has enough power, they just don't have the agreements in place necessary to get the power where it needs to be sometimes. And, I can think of at least one way to charge this thing in 5 minutes off house power, with no modifications to the power line coming into the house. If you can't, the statement out of your mouth shouldn't be "It's impossible" it should be "I'm glad they took this step forward, I hope to see a implimentation that's house-wiring friendly." Just because you can't think of it does not mean it is impossible or even difficult.
Learn to love Alaska
No offence Insipid, but the irony is just too damn sweet.
In an discussion under a duped article we have a post that refers to Deja Vu that was modded Redundant! It doesn't get better than this folks!
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.