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Long In Development, Toshiba 'SCiB' Battery Debuts
relliker notes Toshiba's announcement of the SCiB, a battery we have been following for years. (As usual, use NoScript to avoid the incredibly annoying timed begging popup on Gizmag's site.) Here is Toshiba's SCiB site. The battery's specs claim 6,000+ charge/deep-discharge cycles with minor capacity loss, safe rapid charging to 90% in 5 minutes, and enhanced safety regarding overheating or shorting out. It could make its way into electric vehicles before long.
SCIB = Super Charge Ion Battery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-titanate_battery
If I had to bet, I'd say it's "22".
...when does my laptop get one?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
CAN I HAS for my mobile phone please?
Seriously, it's a problem in the winter.
.: Max Romantschuk
i would not mind getting a electric trike for those "short" trips around the local area.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Toyota? Or Toshiba?
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Is Toyota really involved or do all Japanese companies look the same to you?
My original post's title did not have the company name in it :)
A 2kg battery pack is 24V for 4.2Ah. That's ~100wh
To match the Chevy Volt's 16Kwh You'd need around 160 of these. That's for a tiny 40mile range. These aren't going to be the main power source of a car any time soon
Catch is 6000 charge/deep-discharge and rapid charge in 5 minutes.
Though my girlfriend is not impressed with those figures.
hilarious
According to Wikipedia, the disadvantage compared to Lithium Ion batteries is that they store less energy in a given space/weight, which is why this tech may not extend to small devices such as laptops.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
According to this page they state "SCiBTM is a well-balanced battery that combines high power output and large capacity with power density almost equal to that of capacitors":
http://www.scib.jp/en/product/detail.htm
Also on this page, they state 96 watts per kilogram (12 volt x 8 amp):
http://www.scib.jp/en/product/spec.htm
Only 96 watts per kg? That's not close to a capacitor which is about 1000-10000 watts per kg. Maybe I'm missing something but what gives?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
The electric motor beats the combustion engine in every way: Simpler, more reliable, much more efficient, more powerful, smoother and leveler output of power over a wider range of RPMs, quieter, smaller, lighter weight, and much less expensive. The big reason we don't use them everywhere is lack of a way to store sufficient energy that is 1) cheap, 2) lightweight, 3) quickly refillable, 4) durable, 5) not bulky. The humble gas tank is far better than the batteries, fuel cells, ultra capacitors, and other things (like flywheels?) that we have now. Solve these problems and bring the battery to the point where it is at least competitive with the gas tank even if still a little inferior, and powering cars with gasoline will be history so fast that the oil companies won't know what hit them.
Overhyped breakthroughs that really aren't are legion. But often it really does happen. 2009 was the year of the LCD. I'm still astonished at how quickly the CRT vanished last year. Over the last decade, the incandescent light bulb was pushed into niche applications as compact fluorescents took over But seems they won't reign long with LEDs steadily improving. The 1980s was huge, with the shift from vinyl records to CDs, the microwave oven, and the PC. The 1990s was even bigger with the Internet and the gigantic leaps in hard drive capacity. Doesn't seem there will be a year of the Linux desktop, more like a decade.
But this change seems very likely to be real. We've had electric motors on the sidelines for more than a century, and we know they work great. We've also had batteries a long time, so maybe we should be more cautious and skeptical about breakthroughs. But what we haven't had all that long are all these new battery materials such as lithium-ion. So I think that even if Toshiba's advance is less than it sounds, many others are working hard on the same problems, and we'll see huge improvements soon. Like LCDs were 5 years ago, batteries are on the cusp, and it really won't take much more to make the battery + electric motor combination better, much better, than combustion engine + gas tank. I'd be hesitant to buy a new car with a combustion engine. Might be obsolete very quickly, the way CRTs went last year. Combustion engine powered cars still have a few years, perhaps, the only question is how many?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Less voltage per cell than ordinary lithium-ion, lower capacity than ordinary lithium-ion, and the fact that supplying enough volt-amps to fast-charge a car-sized battery pack remains decidedly non-trivial.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Charging the suckers for one thing...
If you think a few windmills can screw up the electrical grid, imagine a couple of hundred thousand electric cars hopping on the grid to charge...
I sure as hell wouldnt want to be in charge of the grid *cringe* even with timed charging functionality in the cars.
Not that it is a problem yet.. most households lack the fusing to allow such large loads.. not something I expect to change fast as it requires a lot of expensive upgrades
Aren't they all just Nakatushi Industrial Conglomerate anyway? *ducks*
Pretty soon, except those without their own garage.
When you can charge up enough for ~2-3hours driving in ~15 minutes with an hour or so between possible recharges, this will be fine for long distance driving.
If you drive less than 2-3 hours to work (actual moving, so traffic jams don't count) and have your own garage, it's good NOW.
If you don't have your own garage, then unless you drive off specifically to recharge, they still don't work.
Unless there's a way to get your home electric power to the car on the main street without someone jacking in to your tarrif, or most workplaces have a work recharge station, those without garages are going to be in a pickle.
From the above wiki link above, the tradeoff for fast charging is low voltage and capacity:
Just a thought, but depending on the size, what if they were interchangeable?
If that were the case, you could roll in to a refitted petrol station to exchange your battery, and the system can manage with the grid when it juices the batteries up.
If you had enough batteries in rotation, you could even charge them during low usage periods, but you would still be able to rapidly charge in times of high demand.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
If this takes off your at home charge station will probably be a larger battery bank which gets topped off overnight rather than direct power from the grid.
Everyone plugging their charger into their vehicle and then starting to do cooking, laundry etc. after work is going to create some horrid spot prices for power in the late afternoon.
the fact that supplying enough volt-amps to fast-charge a car-sized battery pack remains decidedly non-trivial.
that caught my eye right away, sure the battery might be able to handle 90% in 5 minutes, but good luck setting up infracstructure that can deliver that amount of juice, say a car would need 30kw to maintain motorway speed (say 50, for ease of calculation), and ranges 200 miles, that means you need 120 KW/h of stored energy, pack 90% of that in five minutes, and you end up with roughly 1.3 Gigawatt of drain sustained over 5 minutes...
IT'S OVER 1.21 GIGAWAT!! (yeah i know, i got my meme's mixed)
People, what a bunch of bastards
having 5 minute recharge was needed to get away from the battery-swapping trick, as that has the nasty side-effect of giving you a battery which may or may not be as good as your old one, with scrapping of old ones being the responsability of the power-stations (which wont ever scrap one, if they can rent it out for a few bucks)
People, what a bunch of bastards
There goes my pithy slogan: "Toyota: there's no stopping them now!"
Someone explain why we can't refill batteries with 'charged' chemicals (drain quickly first) as we would petrol.
With an energy density of 1/4 to 1/5 that of a lithium ion battery (in terms of volume and weight), I don't see this going too far.
Not that it is a problem yet.. most households lack the fusing to allow such large loads.. not something I expect to change fast as it requires a lot of expensive upgrades
Comment above says you'll need 1.3Gw.
My 220v 200A service gives me 44Kw, right?
I don't believe my electric company is going to put the kind of capacity into my neighborhood to let me recharge at home like that.
A battery recharging station next to a substation would work. The only problem is that there isn't a substation on every corner, like gas stations.
BTW, how big do the wires have to be to handle 1.3Gw without getting too hot to touch?
What is the energy density of SCiB? And what is the energy density of a conventional battery? Thanks.
Use electricity from overhead lines instead. Hauling energy around costs energy and slows your vehicle.
say a car would need 30kw to maintain motorway speed (say 50, for ease of calculation), and ranges 200 miles, that means you need 120 KW/h of stored energy, pack 90% of that in five minutes, and you end up with roughly 1.3 Gigawatt of drain sustained over 5 minutes...
IT'S OVER 1.21 GIGAWAT!! (yeah i know, i got my meme's mixed)
That would be 30 kW (not kw), 120 kWh (not KW/h), 1.3 MW (not GW) ;-)
So no, it's not over 1.21 gigawatt, just a factor 997 lower...
oh frack, MW not GW...
Don't know whats up with me, missing three orders of magnitude.
(and point taken on the capitalization, been too long since my physics prof had a word with me)
anyway, 1.3 MW, still a enormous amount of juice
People, what a bunch of bastards
Everyone knows The Answer is really "42"
Read TFA carefully, and you'll notice they never guarantee 6000 cycles AND 5-minute recharge at the same time.
Also a 5-minute recharge is NOT going to be very economical-- a significant fraction of the applied power is going to be lost as heat.
In a real car, you'll need a few dozen of these little bugers, and when you stack them, heat dissipation will be a huge issue. A real design ... and they don't mention really important details, such as COST, or reliability or what kind of warranty they will provide.
will require a very fancy liquid cooling system to keep the thing from melting down during charge and discharge.
And of course there is no way, not by a factor of FIVE, to get enough electrical power to recharge a nation of these.
To put it like this:
Kollsnes Gas Processing plant in the western Norway treats and compresses 150 million s3m of gas for the european market per 24/hours.
They have 6 compressors in use... 5 are 40MW, one is at 50MW..
A few years ago they had an operator mixup and 4 compressors were set to start in parallell... The hydro-electric plant supplying power cut the transmission line supply due to the fact that they detected the load as a dead SHORT of the lines.
Yeah... I dont think we want 1.3GW loads :p
The spinel structure of LTO has a three dimensional network for lithium-ion conductivity and allows fast charge and discharge. The problem with lithium titanate anodes (Li4Ti5O12, LTO) compared to carbon anodes is the higher potential (0.2 V for carbon, 1.5 V for LTO) leading to lower voltage for the battery and lower energy density.
The upside of the high potential is that LTO is within the stability window of all the usual organic electrolytes used in lithium-ion batteries. This means the electrolyte doesn't decompose on the surface of the anode during use and leads to a much higher cycle life. Toshiba is advertising 6000 cycles for this SCiB battery, a typical lithium-ion battery with the C/LiCoO2 chemistry only lasts 1000 or so. LTO is also safer as there is no danger of metallic lithium dendrites forming on the surface at such high potentials.
The low energy density and voltage mean that LTO is never going to replace carbon in applications such as laptops or mobile phones where energy density is much more important than power density. I would also imagine C/LiFePO4 batteries will be much more successfull in electrical vehicles. LTO is probably well suited for hybrid cars, however, since those require high power density and high cycle life. The cathode in SCiB is still LiCoO2 as I understand it and that might mean safety, environmental and price issues. LiFePO4 cathode would solve those but then the voltage and energy density would be even lower.
This would be a boon to auto makers pushing electric automobiles. They have very poor resale value due to the fact that the battery must be replaced after a few years, and they are prohibitively expensive. Some stating they lose as much as 60% of their value compared to their combustion counterparts.
In other words:
Less voltage than Li-Ion, lower capacity than Li-Ion, charging doesn't scale easily, lame.
It's even got a misplaced lower-case "i" in the name.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
GP obviously has units confused.
If this takes off your car will trickle-charge to 100% directly off the grid overnight the vast majority of the time, when power demand is at its lowest. You get home, you plug it in, and if you know you are going back out soon you push a "charge the car now, I know it'll cost me more" button and it'll draw whatever it can get to load up the batteries as quickly as possible.
Most of the time, you'd plug it in and the charger would start itself at 10PM or whenever you get better rates, and it would know it had 6 hours or whatever to charge the batteries, so it would use a more efficient charging method.
The 5-minute charge will only be used at charging stations for long drives, which will probably be located where gas stations are today - in more industrial areas where more power is available. They'll probably charge up capacitors or batteries or use some similar technology to level out the load where possible.
A 5-minute charge is hugely convenient for long trips. But for most users, the car would rarely be charged that way.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Normally I wouldn't mind so much, but further down in the thread, people are quoting your GW number, and basing their conclusions on it. ;-)
And I think your physics prof would take more offence from the nonsensical kilowatt-per-hour (that's a factor of hours squared off!) than from the capitalization
Anyway, in the end you are right, more than a megawatt _is_ a lot of power.
Easy solution to this. Gas Station can become 'charge' stations. You could use your credit card which could be tied to your home 'electricity' account. The station will charge a % premium for using the facilities but the actual electric rate should be the same as your home's. Regardless, electric will be the way to go for the majority of commuters in the next 2-3 yrs.
how do you mean nonsensical kW/h?
if a car does 200 miles at 50mph, needing 30kW to sustain that speed, how does that not make the total energy needed 120 kW/h? charging 90% of that energy in 5 minutes would need ~1.3 MW right?
And honestly, i didnt fuck up my calculations, i just sort of forgot there is a Mega between Kilo and Giga... (as i said, dont know whats wrong with me today)
People, what a bunch of bastards
That would make the total energy 30 kW * 4 h = 120 kW * h, not 120 kW / h.
The units are multiplied / divided the same way as the numbers.
If you would have a power that was linearly increasing from zero to 30 kW in 15 minutes, then you would have an increase of 30 kW / 0.25h, or 120 kW/h.
As you see, the unit kilowatt per hour is rarely encountered.
When you speak of energy, you have kilowatthours, not kilowatts per hour.
You need 1.3MW - the comment above was three orders of magnitude off, the guy, on a techie website, forgot that there's a "mega" between "kilo" and "giga"!
Anyway, your car can trickle charge overnight (although you'd still need an updated power feed), or you can go into a "gas" station to get faster charges. These places aren't going to go away, and they will update their offerings as required.
Because you can charge in 5 minutes, doesn't mean you have to charge in 5 minutes. The fuel station can have local battery storage that evens out the load on the grid, and the charge time can be upped for a more reasonable charge rate. You can also have trickle chargers in parking spaces that deliver the energy at a much slower rate. A "charge while you shop" or "charge while you dine" sort of deal.
But the biggest benefit of a fast recharge will be recovering energy from regenerative braking. Currently regenerative braking has limits placed on it, because so much energy is created so quickly and then there is no place to put it. The current battery technology can't absorb the charge quickly enough. This technology will help relieve that particular bottleneck.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Yes. This makes it almost useless for cars. I would love a laptop SCIB.
These have terrible energy density.
A current battery, limited to using 80% capacity, is much better than one with 25% capacity being able to use 100% of that capacity.
There are lots of interesting battery tech that has either long cycle life, fast charging or high energy density. We need one that has some intersection of these abilities.
Energy Density is especially important. With it this low, I consider this a non starter for cars.
You generally wouldn't do fast charging at home, you'd do slow charging at normal household power levels (though probably from a large appliance-type socket rather than a regular outlet) It's cheaper for the power company and causes less wear on the battery.
If this really becomes an issue more power companies might move to load-based pricing of power to further discourage power usage spikes that aren't necessary.
that's not clear. The question is why a person would or would not buy an electric car. I think that most people would be concentrated on the day-to-day issues rather than the long term value. so, they would care more about the fact that the distance you can travel would be less (60 miles versus 90) than the fact that it would last 8 years rather than 5. (I totally made up these numbers). The average consumer is terribly short-sighted.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
Ah right i see the error, writing kW/h instead of kWh... got it, sloppy writing
Thx for the corrections, where is a physics prof to keep you sharp when you need one eh?
People, what a bunch of bastards
One idea I've seen floated is making the charging station + car act as a local battery for the power company. The user would have a set of preferences set up letting the charging station know the desired charge level for the car, and the station would charge when power is cheap and discharge when power is expensive within those limits.
So a typical usage scenario might actually be "Driver arrives at home and plugs in car during peak power usage time, car discharges further (down to some limit to cover things like "crap, I need X for dinner") until peak power usage ends, then trickle charges back up to some nominal level, and fully tops off at some low power usage point during the night."
Obviously the system needs to be adjustable on the fly for things like "I'm planning on going out tonight"
You need 1.3MW...
I thought as much, but it doesn't change much. My electric company still isn't going to provide my neighborhood with that kind of capacity.
And yes, I knew I could trickle charge overnight -- we can do that now. But in an article about batteries that can take a full charge in five minutes, that's rather beside the point, don't you think?
I don't think it's beside the point. The bash on electric cars is usually in regards to road trips. That is where the fast recharge comes into play. The trickle charge at home is an advantage over gasoline powered cars (for those of us who do not have a gasoline pump at home).
yeah i know, i got my meme's mixed)
That would be 30 kW (not kw), 120 kWh (not KW/h), 1.3 MW (not GW) ;-)
So no, it's not over 1.21 gigawatt, just a factor 997 lower...
Mwahaha, you fell victim to my sig...
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Not so. The values being quoted for electric batteries are putting a real damper on sales.
http://rumors.automobilemag.com/6659473/green/will-battery-costs-bring-down-ev-resale-values/index.html
A $12,000 battery is nothing to sneeze at for replacement costs. If this tech proves to be as good as it sounds, it will make adoption of electric cars that much more feasible. Recharges in 5 minutes, and a huge improvement in total charge cycles, which means a huge savings for the owner, as well as better resale value.
Distances being another big concern, BUT, when someone invests in one of these cars, I would imagine they will either buy a car with a combustion backup engine like the Volt (can fall back on combustion engine to charge battery), or they have a second vehicle which is not electric. They could also fit a scenario where they simply don't travel that far and will probably fall back on rentals when needed for the occasional long trip.
I have an electric bicycle, made in China (which China is your guess) by EzEE . The model is the Torq II . It has a 350 watt front-wheel brush-less motor. Its battery is a 40 v. 14 aH 'lithium polymer' unit .. gives me about 30 miles
on a 12cent 5-6 hr charge. The battery weighs 3 kg, is removable. The control
unit is built-in to the bike.
The main advantages i see to the SCiB are its longevity and quick-charge ability. Today, I'm sure such longevity come at a price .. and the site makes no mention of any real economics comparison.
When you add up the likelihood of 'high price for the bleeding edge' , plus the fact that
each unit has a built-in controller, well, this is gonna be 'one expensive mother!'
Of course, the advanced safety features, too, are especially important to automobile applications.
Yes, the low-temp performance might be better than mine (which exists today, not 5 yrs
from now), but Ive not ridden any bike in -30C degrees, either.
Don't get me wrong: I highly endorse efforts such as this to advance our planet's power options.
At my age, though, I won't be seeing this design mod'd for my bike anytime!
"There are 11 kinds of people: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who could not care less!"
I'm pretty sure Catch-42 is that you have to know The Question to get The Answer (unless you're Deep Thought), and you have to know The Answer to get The Question.
Everyone that complains about electric cars always seems to quote that there's a 10% electrical loss between the power plant and your house, but I've never heard anyone do a study of how much gasoline is lost between the refinery and your gas tank. Between spillage and evaporation, I'm willing to bet a 10% loss there as well.
Then there's the fact that a gas-engine is only 25% efficient. Most of the energy of the ICE is wasted as heat, either going to the radiator, or blown out the exhaust.
And if everyone could get solar panels on their roofs, we'd make up that 10% loss, even on cloudy days. I'm not sure how you get back the 10% loss of gasoline.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Best catch there is.
Um.
Maybe I'm missing something important here, but:
Why are folks talking about a garage as if it is a necessary thing for recharging an EV? Does the car sound an alarm, and loudly yell "OMG! You can't charge me without a roof over my head! Buy yourself a garage! Pwn!"
Is there some compelling reason why I could not simply park the car in my own driveway, and plug it in there?
Kid-proof tablet..
Unfortunately, these things are useless for most use cases. Anything use case that cares about size or weight will favour higher density batteries.
These things provide up to 67Wh/kg (the smaller cells provide 10.08Wh in 150g cells). Lithium ion batteries can provide up to 250Wh/kg (I'll admit I'm grabbing the upper limit of what's possible from Wikipedia).
An electric car that has 100kWh of capacity would require 1492kg of SCiB batteries, or as little as 400Kg of Li-ion batteries. That pretty much rules them out for electric cars, and those kind of recharge speeds in electric cars are useless anyhow since you can't get enough power to the battery to charge them anywhere close to that fast (charging a 100kWh battery to 90% in 5 minutes would require 1.08 megawatts of power).
The only thing that I can think of where these things might be useful are UPS. These already use lead acid batteries, which don't go over 40Wh/kg to begin with. I don't believe that lead acid batteries can be charged very quickly. Providing 500kW to a consumer UPS (on top of load) for charging is not unreasonable, and a consumer UPS providing 100Wh is also not unreasonable, so being able to charge that UPS in 12 minutes is probably a big step up over what we have now.
how about looking at it as a problem with the grid and not with the loads on it. Making the grid more flexible has other benefits as well. It makes it more fault tolerant(see east coast blackout). You do understand that there are but a few, super high voltage to high voltage switching stations in the country? did you also know that they are protected by a simple fence and a master lock? So yes the grid needs to be more tolerant.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
range, oven, dryer, water heater, heater, are all natural gas here. So it shouldn't be that much of a load, also if you charging station is smart enough to know to wait until 11pm to start charging, or has some other means of slow charging something all day/night and using that to rapidly charge your car when you get home, it shouldn't really be an issue.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
That'll never work. I'm not going to let you put some loser's beat up POS battery in my beautiful new car.
Comment of the year
Sure, one of the posters above you already said it - park your car in your driveway or on the street and plug it in, assuming you can get the electricity to the car to begin with, and you run the risk of some asshole coming along while you aren't watching, seeing that you're plugged in, and tapping into that electric supply, or perhaps just unplugging your EV as a prank.
Park and charge in a garage, assuming you have one to begin with, and you run far less risk of the above, if only because it isn't obvious that you're plugged in.
One way to practically prevent this does come to mind though:
Key-locked mains plug, flexible steel-jacketed cabling, and an encrypted data channel between the car and the mains panel that offers a simple authentication and power-metering protocol.
If the panel sees more power draw than the car says should be the case, within some small margin of error, the panel could interpret this as someone having tapped into the cable, and could shut the power off, and perhaps set off the car's alarm (but without the "OMG! ..." bit). If the panel sees a different car than what should be there, refuse to turn the power on until some additional step is completed, such as entering an 8-digit security code.
It isn't hack-proof, but then again neither are the locks on your doors. It just needs to be good enough to stop Joe Neighbor from sponging off of you. Those who could break into this would probably also be the kind who would just steal the car outright anyway.
Where are my mod points when i need them.
Mod parent UP.
That's a good idea. I'm interested in your commentaries may i subscript to your feed?
include $sig;
1;
IT'S OVER 1.21 GIGAWAT!! (yeah i know, i got my meme's mixed)
Im sure that in 1985 plutonium is available in every corner drugstore, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by. I'm sorry. But the only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning. Unfortunately, you never know when or where it's ever gonna strike.
1. The Tesla Roadster has to go nearly 85mph to consume 30kW to maintain speed. At 50mph, it takes about 12kW. The Roadster is approximately equally efficient as the Leaf and Volt; it has a small cross section but a much higher drag coefficient.
2. A general number used to represent highway consumption for a typical efficient EV is 250Wh/mi. 200 miles range * 250Wh/mi = 50kWh. 90% of 50kWh in 5 minutes is 540kW. Aerovironment makes an 800kW charger. Now to be fair, most rapid charging systems don't exceed the lower hundreds of kilowatts, and some of the lower end ones (like Nissan is installing for the Leaf) are in the tens of kilowatts. The rough cutoff point for what is considered "rapid" charging and what is not is around 40kW.
3. Notice how dramatically different of numbers you got, despite your using 120kWh instead of 50kWh? You had a three orders of magnitude math error.
4. To go ahead and pre-empt it: No, you don't want to have everyone drawing hundreds of kilowatts straight from the grid. That would be a big grid destabilization and require massive hookups. The typical approach for such high power charging involves battery buffers, sized to ensure that you can statistically guarantee a given percent availability (99.99% or whatnot). And to pre-empt *that*: No, they're not prohibitively expensive. Neither are the chargers, although you do need (very roughly) the sort of utilization rates found at gas stations to justify their cost (a station of rapid chargers sharing a common buffer costs about the same as a gas station with a similar number of pumps). The chargers have the advantage of less maintenance, no need to take "fuel deliveries", and a dramatically cheaper "fuel". They have the disadvantage of lower throughput and the possibility of lower consumer price acceptance (since they're used to charging for so cheaply at home). You can also only support fewer stations from the same number of vehicles, since most charging is done slowly at home or at work.
5. To preempt something really stupid that gets mentioned every time: no, you don't rapid charge at home. Why would you need to be able to charge in 5 minutes at home? Can do you that with your gas car? Rapid charging is only needed for long trips.
6. Yes, 10 or 15 minute charges (a more realistic target for rapid charging of EVs, and ones that some EVs like the BYD F3DM and the Subaru Stella support) are slower than filling up a gasoline car. But not as much as you might think. The actual filling of the tank only takes about two minutes or so (depends on the pump, but there are legal limits to the maximum flow rate). But there's a lot of overhead to *every* type of fillup -- finding an offramp, slowing down, driving from the turnoff to the station, turning in, pulling up to a pump, turning the car off, unbuckling, getting out your money, getting out, taking off the gas cap, connecting the vehicle, selecting the fuel type, selecting the payment method, starting filling, stopping filling, reattaching the gas cap, hanging up the pump, paying, taking the receipt, getting back in, putting your seatbelt back on, and all of the driving/decel steps in reverse, plus a lot of little random things. I timed it for a while and found that the whole process sets me back an average of about 9 minutes. So going from a 2 minute fill to a 10 minute fill isn't a 5x increase in time; it's only a 2x increase in time. And fillup time consumes the tiniest fraction of your total trip time. If you combine fillups with your normal breaks (food, bathroom, rest, etc), which you're supposed to take every two hours or so anyway, there's no difference in distance you can travel per day with rapid charging versus gasoline.
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.
1) Their numbers were inflated approximately 3-fold even when you account for their math error. Unless you're talking an electric Yukon or something.
2) Why would you rapid charge *at home*? The point of rapid charging is to allow for long trips.
3) That's what battery buffers are for.
To go with $150/kWh and 10,000 cycles out of a Vanadium-Redox battery buffer: that's ~67 kWh delivered per dollar of batteries, meaning a battery buffer capital cost of 1.5 cents per kWh of electricity you sell. Eminently affordable.
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.
Replaced after a few years, huh? Then why are both Nissan and GM offering 8 year, 100,000 mile warranties on their non-titanate battery packs? And you don't *have* to replace them when the warranty runs out; that just means that's when they'll cover it for free.
People did the same sort of fearmongering about the Prius's battery. All unfounded.
I think the reason people always focus on battery lifespans is that they assume that all batteries behave the same way. But it's just not true. The reason that the batteries don't last long on your laptop or cell phone is that they're not engineered to last long. It's not expected that you'll have the device that long, and they know that consumers are more concerned with things like minimizing the size and weight of the battery pack. As a consequence, they use high energy density, low cycle life/longevity chemistries. They have no cooling systems (and often are put right next to heat sources). They use very high depths of discharge. They do little to no charge rebalancing between cells. And so forth.
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.
you don't want to have everyone drawing hundreds of kilowatts straight from the grid.
Boy, talk about your rolling brownouts... <rimshot/>
Just junk food for thought...
Charging the suckers for one thing...
If you think a few windmills can screw up the electrical grid, imagine a couple of hundred thousand electric cars hopping on the grid to charge...
I sure as hell wouldnt want to be in charge of the grid *cringe* even with timed charging functionality in the cars.
Not that it is a problem yet.. most households lack the fusing to allow such large loads.. not something I expect to change fast as it requires a lot of expensive upgrades
Electric cars will draw current like turning on an oven, a heater, a air conditioner. It will be highly uneventful if the grid has the capactiy.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Surely this would just make a primary role of the recharge station be to smooth out that load? eg. a few giant banks of capacitors or similar could keep enough charge to smooth out the peaks?
having 5 minute recharge was needed to get away from the battery-swapping trick,
Two other things about it:
- Rapid recharge means you can capture more of the energy from regenerative braking for later use. Braking pulls energy from the car MUCH faster than acceleration adds it (because you can load ALL the tires to just under the point where they lose traction.) You'd like to capture maybe 400+ HP to use later. That's about a third of a megawatt.
- The rapid charge is possible because the battery structure has very low losses due to very low internal resistance and other parasitics. This means the batteries don't slag down if you drive extreme currents into them. But it also means they don't overheat when you pull extreme currents from them. And the two together mean that the batteries are VERY efficient at storing power - giving back nearly all you put in rather than burning it into heat.
So the design improvement that gives you fast charge also gives you high acceleration, rapid regenerative braking, and high energy efficiency as a bonus.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That scenario negates the big feature of the new batteries. Rapid recharge.
If rapid recharge is not required then of course it will not be a problem :p
I know all too well how fragile the grid is :(
Unfortunately improving it costs money. Money which wont be spent unless something catastrophic happens...
I do like the way it is done here in Norway. A state owned and controlled company owns the main high voltage transmission lines and the various utilities, power plants etc lease/rent capacity.
Amusingly it is a heck of a lot easier to get spending approved through government budgets than to improve something deemed "good enough" by profit-hungry privae parties ;)
...when does my laptop get one?
The wikipedia article says that, on July 7, Toshiba announced a prototype laptop battery using the same technology.
That was two days before TFA about the car battery appeared in Gizmag. (Perhaps they were both announced the same day?)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Far too complicated.
Easier to live in a decent neighborhood where you don't have to worry about stuff like that.
For instance: I don't lock up my garden hose. I have electrical outlets on the outside of my house. I don't worry about whether or not my cars have locking gas caps. Nobody runs away with my lawnmower. I can leave a expensive ladder outside, and it's not touched.
No big deal.
YMMV, I guess.
Kid-proof tablet..
The average consumer is terribly short-sighted.
i think you're right, why else would they all be thinking that auto-mobility has a future?
look sig is kool
Better idea - really big flywheels.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.