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Developing Battery Replacement Infrastructure For Electric Cars
FathomIT sends in a NY Times profile of Shai Agassi, owner of a company named Better Place, who is working to build the infrastructure to support large numbers of small-scale charging spots for electric cars, as well as fast, automated battery swap stations.
"The robot — a squat platform that moves on four dinner-plate-size white wheels — scuttled back and forth along a 20-foot-long set of metal rails. At one end of the rails, a huge blue battery, the size of a large suitcase, sat suspended in a frame. As we watched, the robot zipped up to the battery, made a nearly inaudible click, and pulled the battery downward. It ferried the battery over to the other end of the rails, dropped it off, picked up a new battery, hissed back over to the frame and, in one deft movement, snapped the new battery in the place of the old one. The total time: 45 seconds."
That's interesting, since a co-worker bought her Prius in 2002 and got a surprise battery replacement in 2006. (She hadn't noticed any problems, and isn't the type to ask questions; she took the car in for routine maintenance, they told her they'd replaced the battery and weren't charging her anything for it, she said "Cool!")
I don't know how prevalent this is, but for my N=1, I'm seeing a 100% replacement rate at four years.
Of course, the weasel words "due to wear and tear" let them get away with anything.
They will be batteries because battery is what we call something that stores chemical energy and releases electrical energy. They may not be LiIon or whatever, but they will be some form of chemical storage of electrical energy. You raise an interesting question about the recharging mechanism, however. It may be that you can more efficiently recharge some batteries using a large charger - especially one that can replace the electrolyte with something different while recharging. I expect that if this takes off, we will start to see a lot of battery-swapping stations generating their own power. Think about all of those interstates where you have hundreds of miles of road with not much of interest along it. You could buy a few acres of land in the middle there quite cheaply, put solar arrays and / or wind turbines up and use it to charge batteries while there is power (i.e. during the day, or at windy times). You may even be able to sell battery power for less than the equivalent fossil fuel cost, because you don't have to ship the fuel out to the middle of nowhere.
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I don't know about propane bottles, but CO2 bottles have to be checked periodically and recertified that they can hold air at the specified pressure. The tank itself doesn't go bad often but the control nozzle that screws into the tank will have to be replaced on occasion. The company I swap with handles that recertification. I presume if we were to go to a swap system for electric car batteries the company handled the swapping would be required to periodically make sure the batteries were tested and approved for safe and reliable usage.
Manual? Are you serious? What are we, weightlifters?
A lot of battery pack swapping proponents have no clue how big and heavy EV batteries are. Let me be specific: picture an internal combustion engine. Now double its dimensions and mass. Give it high voltage connections that must be firm to prevent arcing, and keep it securely in place so it doesn't shift around. Now go manually swap that.
And no, a battery is not a battery is not a battery. Go try to shove a laptop battery pack in your flashlight or a AA in your car's engine or a lead-acid battery in your laptop. Different vehicle size, shape, weight distribution, price, performance, and technology profiles have different requirements of size, shape, chemistry, wiring, fuses, and series/parallel cell arrangements in an EV's battery pack.
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