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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?"
While i'm all for new tech, let's take a second to re-examine this. We're going to take electricity and power our cars... ok but this has to come from somewhere right? And it isn't like we're going to generate it on the spot. So we're going to put MORE strain on the existing power grid to power these recharge stations.
The power itself is made from something, usually not nuclear because "oh noes it's unsafe!" [note the sarcasm] but instead things like coal. So now we're gonna have to burn more coal (which pollutes more than nuclear) to power this. Keeping in mind the entire process is lossy.
I'm all for electric cars, but we'll need a lot more than a good battery to make it practical.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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
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.
Personally, I doubt that will ever happen in USA and here's why:
Huge influential oil companies like EXXON-MOBIL made profits of close to US$90 million per day in profits last year. Racking in almost US$33 Billion for the year. Now, who in their right mind can allow such a revenue stream to get suffocated by so called new technology?
I am of the opinion that we'll begin seeing this in "more pragmatic" Europe than here in these United States.
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.
These A123 cells are already in production and use. They are standard in the DeWalt 36V industrial battery pack. Most of the model airplane guys find it cheaper to ebay these and pull 'em apart for the cells than to buy them individually from A123.
They do perform extremely well, with about 2/3 the energy density of Li-Po, but with the dis/charge abilities of a good Ni-Cd. They are also supposed to have a very good service life, over 1000 complete charge cycles. At about 1/2 the price of Li-Po's I'm looking at picking some up for an upcoming EV project.
http://www.a123systems.com/html/home.html
http://www.a123racing.com/
My EV project:
http://www.easyracers.com/pod/
Gabe
The model airplane guys are on the bleeding edge of battery tech.
9 /
Check 'em out,
http://www.rcgroups.com/batteries-and-chargers-12
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.
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?
Insulate the fucker. 1kW is more than I use to keep my entire apartment heated (an 800W space heater with a thermostat, plus a fan). Try 100W or less to heat a space the size of a car, assuming you put a little extra money into some decent glass (insulating the non-glass parts is trivial).
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/
EEStor is not working on batteries, but ultracapacitors. While I am not certain about them, they have perkin Klienes (Sun, Google, and others backing) backing. I would guess that those folks have done their work and believe that it has merit. They are supposedly going to deliver this year.
Personally, I would skip the solar for a residence. They really do not make sense. For starters, you are generally at work with your car during the time that Solar is working. That means that you will send the majority of your energy to the grid. But you will be paid bottom dollar for it. Why? Because nearly all states set the rate and it is heavily waited in the advantage of the power company.
Instead, invest that 15K into alternative energy companies. For a sure bet, check out any of the top wind producers. They will all make money for years to come.
Offhand, I would look into any company that is trying to address the storage of Energy (except for hydrogen). One that I am fascinated by is Skyfuel.org. Basically, save solar as heat and use it to heat salts that are then driving a generator. What is lacking is that they can pair up with Power plants and use the waste heat to increase the initial amount of energy. From there, solar can "top it off" or they could even use extra power from the plant during their night cycle (rather than seeing them slow down the systems). This can also be paired with Wind so that the nighttime electricity is captured as heat and then turned to electricity during the day (i.e. when they are getting 2-5x the rate).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There's an intersting point.
I live in quite cold climate(last week's high was -15F), and getting gas powered cars to start and warm up is a challenge. The number ONE problem we have is batteries going dead overnight in the cold. You can trickle charge them or put a warmer on them to prevent it, but if the entire car runs on battery I would imagine the battery life to be very poor.
Then, tack on the heater issue... Sounds pretty infeasible around these parts. Although, a possible solution would be to do what is currently done with gas cars, and pipe whatever excess heat is made by the motor into the cab. I'm not sure how much that would produce, but it would increase the efficiency a bit.
I've seen a few cold weather tests for hybrid and turbo desiel around here. The hybrids seem to crap out about -10F to -15F and a few of the TD seem to drop out about -35F. The gas, assuming it starts, don't have issues running in cold.
Of course you if you had fueling stations you wouldn't rely on just tapping the grid in real time, you'll install big batteries to charge continuously. Then you only need scale up your batteries and electrical service as business scales upward. You know, like how they store Gas in the ground to fuel your car instead of materialize it instantly when you fill up.
Yes they'll be additional efficiency losses, but initially these stations will only have to service a few people that normally get their charge at either end of a commute. Once demand really takes off we'll think of something else more efficient.
Letter To Iran
Umm... what? You're just wrong here.
Long-distance (100+ miles) electric transmission is quite common throughout the US. Link
In most states, you're rarely more than a hundred miles away from the nearest power plant, of one kind or another. Another link.
Yes, a commercial recharging station on a major interstate would probably need it's own substation. But the paper mills in northeastern NC I drive past on the way to visit my parents every few months have their own substations. The electric load from those is much higher than any electric roadrunner would ever need. It's not a particularly hard problem, or one that hasn't been solved before. It would put more demand on the electric grid, that's true. And if everyone in the US bought an electic car eventually, we'd definetely need to build more power plants.
But it's not lack of a technical innovation,nor a conspiracy, that is preventing that from happening - it's the chicken/egg problem. Few people will buy electric cars before the infrastructure exists, few companies will set up infrastructure while there's few customers.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
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.
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.
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.
The better that I was talking about is that when you brain fart and run out of gas
Nowdays most cars have gas gauges. I think VW was the last to get one, and that was in 1962. I think that in all the years since them, I've run out of gas once. Because I was a moron and pushed my luck. If I'd had to pay $100 for a service call, it would have served me right.
You really think we need to have our transport system designed so that people who are being idiots won't be put to any additional expense?
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