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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?"
All of the schemes for a high capacity, fast charging battery paired with fast charging stations suffer from the chicken and egg problem. The car buyers won't buy cars until there are lots of stations to stop at, and the service station owners won't convert revenue generating gas pumps to chargers until there are lots of cars that need them.
The solution is to build hybrids with fast charging batteries. Then car buyers can invest without fear of getting stranded. Once a large fleet is on the roads, service stations will start to convert.
BTW, this all asumes that TFA and similar techs are not vaporware.
A couple comments referred to gas stations needing to replace their pumps. Actually, a car that runs primarily on electricity with gas/diesel as a backup would be ideally suited to get charged at grocery stores, movie theatres, shopping malls, restaurants, etc.
Plug in, order amount of electricity, go do your shopping/etc. and come back to a car ready to go. Employers could also do this at their offices, at first offering it as an employee perk and down the road as an additional revenue stream.
This could create competitive advantage in the near team and additional revenue long term for many companies.
> The amperage required is not any more than typical household service, particularly if you are willing to let it charge overnight.
> 220 volts is even better than 110 for charging cars, and it really doesn't take more than your house already has.
Yes it would add a hell of a lot of load to the grid if everyone had an electric car cooking at home every night, but that problem is probably managable, since night time is normally lighter loaded.
The big question nobody wants to look at is Interstate recharging. Take a look at a big fscking Roadrunner station with twenty plus 'pumps' recharging batteries in five minutes and run those numbers. Put the sucker out in the boonies between cities and ask yourself where they are going to get the power from? Now imagine everyone is running away from a hurricane/terrorist attack and those 'pumps' are going to have to be able to hammer away for 12 plus hours with a line at every pump. Onsite storage isn't an option for that kind of demand and the grid as it currently exists simply can't do it either.
Everyone wants to think it just because 'big oil' doesn't want electric cars that the infrastructure hasn't magically appeared. It isn't. Even if the demand existed to justify it, nobody currently knows HOW to build it. These are hard problems, but we do need to keep trying to solve them because buying oil from our enemies isn't the brightest idea even if you think 'global warming' is a communist plot.
Democrat delenda est
Cruising down the freeway takes on the order of ten kilowatts or a little less. As Flying Pig points out, getting a quick recharge puts you close to a megawatt.
Every electric drive system I've seen from the Prius to electric dragsters winds up at a design optimum of 200-400 volts. We're therefore talking 2500 to 5000 amps, which is out of wire territory and into busbar territory, before allowing for inefficiencies.
Which may be the real problem. Pump a megawatt through something, and every percentage point of losses means ten kilowatts of heat you have to manage somehow. Some battery charging technology brags of "up to" 95% efficiency. Is there any way to handle that without liquid cooling?
The point of the tech this article presents is that the battery only takes 5 minutes to recharge. You could just install a power outlet at the fuel station. Plug your car in, browse the shop during those five minutes (regular refueling isn't really faster than that anyways), and you're back on the road.
What if you could make a standard for the batteries themselves and fuel stations offered quick change (not charge) capabilities where you pull in and replace your battery. A measuring device could credit you back for unused power in the battery you came in with and you would get charged for the power you take. This type of thing would have to be standardized and regulated (proper testing of batteries, quick change system and process, standard interfaces, centralized billing). Another idea might be to make commercial trucks use the same overhead wires that cities use for electric buses. The city would provide the power for free and the trucks would carry a reserve battery to get them to and from places where the wires don't reach. These are two ideas that are within our reach as a civilisation from a pure technical perspective. If the electricity is cleanly generated (wind, solar, hydro electric), it effectively would reduce hydrocarbon emissions.
"Question everything, including this!" - http://technoracle.blogspot.com/
Two issues back my argument. First, gasoline is very energy dense. A single gallon of gas stores about 44 kWHr (of which a car engine maybe extracts 12-15 kWhr).
Second, we already have the gas delivery infrastructure - all those filling stations, refineries, and tanker trucks. You may be correct that aluminum electron pipes may be cheaper than big-rig tankers, but we don't have the aluminum pipes or the power plants to supply them yet.
The U.S. used 390 million gallons of gas per day in 2006. This means that to replace gas with electricity we need on the order of 5.4 billion kWHr per day. This comes to at least 225,000 MW of new generating capacity or about 450 more of those 500 MW chunks. It would require about a 36% increase in total U.S. generating capacity.
It can be done, but it won't be easy or cheap.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Another feature is that it is a passively safe design; meltdowns simply aren't possible. Anyways, the interviews in the external links of that wikipedia article are very interesting and informative.
This is surely going to get lost in all the replies, but nevertheless...
How are electric cars going to impact pedestrian safety? They run very quietly; you can get hit by an electric car without knowing it's right behind you, whereas with classic cars you can at least hear the combustion engines from some distance away and take notice. What about kids? Blind people? Even animals might have problems - they stay away from noisy roads, but if the roads aren't noisy anymore...
On a sidenote, it would be pretty cool not to have noise pollution. I imagine a city with electric cars and without smog would be a very nice place to live in for humans and small animals, such as birds and squirrels. Perhaps we'd see more rare bird species in such a city. The quality of life would definitely improve.
You have a small generator and fuel tank mounted on a trailer. For day to day commuting, it is detached, you run on batteries, recharge at home. For longer trips, attach the trailer, plug it in, start the generator. Stop and fill up with gas or diesel whenever. Additional empty cargo space as an option with a slightly larger trailer of course, making it normally useful.
See? Range problem solved. Call it the modular hybrid approach, instead of normal hybrids that tote TWO engines (ICE engine AND electric motor) AND a fuel tank AND batteries all in the same vehicle. No wonder there isn't enough room for enough batteries! they got two cars worth of drive-around do dads crammed into one car! Nuts. Make the vehicle pure electric, plenty of room for cheap batteries then, stick the fuel burning engine and fuel tank in a separate trailer. Make the genny trailer an option, maybe people would only need one a few times a year, they can rent it.
AC Propulsion has had that for their electric car, which gives it unlimited range same as any other car, and they came up with a "rigid" trailer that doesn't even flex, making it easy for n00bs to tow and backup with it.
With that said, towing a small trailer is *easy*, go out to the burbs any weekend, a lot of the vehicles are towing something around, so it shouldn't matter there, and having a whole house sized backup emergency generator sitting out in the driveway is an added + bonus good idea anyway.
Surely I'm not the only here to have seen that US documentary film about electric cars called: Who Killed The Electric Car? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/
Go watch it.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Sorry, don't agree, that's medium nuts swapping out heavy battery packs with a forklift as opposed to attaching a small trailer.I don't think folks want to gas up using a forklift and swapping out for a who knows how beat on used battery pack. I mean, c'mon now, I have both here where I live, forklifts, and trailers from single axle jobs I can lift and move with one hand all the way to serious road trailers. A small trailer with a lift wheel assembly is just not that hard to "attach". I'd take that and being able to just pump some gas at a normal gas station as opposed to pulling up and having a forklift come over, detach the conenctors, lift out a half ton battery pack and so on. that is WAY more hassle than using the gas stations we have now, that are built, work, paid for, anyone can use them (except I think oregon where they think you are a weenie and can't pump your own gas). And trailers, especially normal small ones? MILLIONS and MILLIONS of people tow a trailer every weekend around the US,using small 4 cylinder cars on up. Trailers come in all sizes, and one large enough for a little recharege geeny just wouldn't need to be all that big. egads man where do you live?? You've never seen this?? It's "normal human" do-able thing to do is to have trailers with all sorts of stuff, boat trailers, landscapers trailers, contractors, people moving from this house to that house, you name it. Every size shape config possible. Already out there, nothing weird and new that needs any billion buck government "study" about it. No "hydrogen highway" pie in the sky twenty years and twenty trillion dollars from now scheme needed..
The AC propulsion concept is even simpler as trailers go, as it is a rigidly attached trailer, its axle stays inline with the vehicle axle,it doesn't flex, which means even backing up is little different from backing up without it. And the car itself is a high performance sports car basically. The entire unit car+trailer still fits inside a normal parking place. The same idea could be equally applied to a less expensive less performance oriented normal commuter car and generator trailer, and as I noted, just the idea of having an emergency home back up generator is now highly popular due to the hurricanes/blizzards/ice storms over the past few years. The expression is "selling like hotcakes". Yes, most folks living in high rise condos or apartments wouldn't go buy a generator, that still leaves..*most* of the USA who could use one once in awhile. So it is a potential "same as" purchase, something they either have or are going to get anyway, so why not integrate it into the cheaper electric vehicle idea? Even those high rise folks might weant to own the electric car, and if they knew they could slide down to U B rentin it and get the genny trailer for the long trip to the beach or to see grammaw it might help them out and help get pure electrics adopted, because that is the one thing folks are hesitant on is range mostly, and the geeny/trailer modular approach fixes this. It's a natural!
Really, trailers in general are common, the tech is neither weird nor hard to pull off (pun intended), engineering-wise or legally. And electric brake hookups are common as well, and not even needed or required on light duty trailers. Nothing you mentioned is much of a problem at all, and as stated, it is a rather easy and practical solution for the electric commuter car then having longer range when you need it on demand. As mentioned in earlier articles and discussions, average commute in the US is 33 miles, and electric vehicles with a 50 mile range are very doable right now with non exotic and cheap batteries. Generators are *very* common, any size/config/fuel source you might want. Trailers are trailers, again, very common, cheap to very expensive.
If you are buying a hybrid system, you are still buying a generator, just with the hybrid cars now, it sucks as a home generator. You are paying a lot for something only useful as a car, wherwas a modular hybrid you can get both