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Nanotech Battery Claims to Solve Electric Car Woes
rbgrn writes "A123 Systems claims to have invented a Lithium Ion battery that not only can discharge at very high rates of current but can be recharged very quickly without damage to the cells or overheating. From their website: 'A unique feature of A123Systems' M1 cells is their ability to charge to high capacity in 5 minutes or less. That's a significant improvement over traditional Li Ion, which typically requires more than 90 minutes to reach a similar level of charge.' Using this technology, General Motors has announced a plug-in hybrid SUV and Venture Vehicles is developing a fully electric 3 wheel vehicle. Politics aside, the main technological hurdle to mass adoption of electric cars has been a fuel station replacement when driving distances beyond a single charge worth of range. Will we finally be seeing high current recharge stations in the next decade?"
On the other hand, overnight charging of the batteries (when power stations have spare capacity) is an extremely good idea, and indeed the dual hybrid concept good at good write up last year.
So my suggestion is: Yes, this is a really good idea, yes it is progress in terms of better flexibility of power supplies, yes it goes some way to resolve the problem that you cannot easily store electrical power by allowing it to be stored in a big distributed network of vehicles - but ten years is for too soon for it to take over as a technology.
The progressively replacement of gasoline engines by Diesel in Europe has been going on for over 20 years now, and that's probably a realistic timeframe. 20 years to get market penetration of battery vehicles, and then, only if renewable fuels turn out to be a failure, the progressive development of very high power charging stations.
Pining for the fjords
I believe the problem with nuclear power has a lot more to do with disposal and storage than with the safety of the reactor. Plus if the CO2 emissions are centralized at power stations rather than spread across the entire country (as is the case with cars) emission reduction techniques will probably be a lot easier.
While this is interesting, I have to wonder about the cost of these batteries. I've seen many of these stories before, about some wonderful electric vehicle that's going to replace the gas-burner real soon. Except that the batteries needed cost more than any vehicle currently on the road. But it'll be practical "as soon as we get the costs down!"
I'll get excited when someone announces a reasonably priced, high-density, quick recharge battery. Until then, I'm going to regard it as yet another prototype - an interesting idea, but one of many.
>Finally, if you want to make your power plant cleaner at some point in the future it is a bit easier than retrofitting a large number of cars.
Also, the power plant is not sitting in traffic on the street next to sidewalks and apartments full of people. Even if the only benefit were to relocate pollution, even if none of the other advantages existed, there'd still be a benefit.
So the question becomes "How much range does this electric car have?" (If the batteries are good enough, then on-site storage DOES become an option, at least as a hefty ballast load.)
I wonder how much charge a tanker-truck sized truck could carry as cargo? This might actually be cheaper than maintaining lines if the losses were lower than line loss. (Don't know how to figure that?) (And depending on how expensive the batteries were.)
Also, the obvious way to go, if one can work out the mechanics, is to charge the vehicles by swapping batteries. It might not be the best...but also it might. This would, however, require:
a) standardization of size, shape, and connections, and
b) a meter built into the battery which would display how many watt-hours it was storing.
This probably won't happen because any economic benefit would probably be marginal, and also because getting companies to agree on a standard is...dubious.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This may be a noob question, but why can't electric cars run on a system (especially now), where gas stations become changing stations, like what is often done with propane? We show up, replace an existing battery (which would have to be made easier to replace, I admit), with a freshly charged battery and pay the station for the service.