Experimental Batteries Charge In Minutes

Zothecula writes "Of all the criticisms of electric vehicles, probably the most commonly-heard is that their batteries take too long to recharge – after all, limited range wouldn't be such a big deal if the cars could be juiced up while out and about, in just a few minutes. Well, while no one is promising anything, new batteries developed at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign do indeed look like they might be a step very much in the right direction. They are said to offer all the advantages of capacitors and batteries, in one unit."

Comments

Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[elrous0]

Considering the hassle I had just getting a 220-volt outlet to power my dryer installed at my house, I'd hate to think what the electrician is going to say when I tell him I want an outlet that can deliver enough power to drive my car 100 miles--and deliver it in just a few minutes. Poor bastard is going to have a heart attack.

I apologize in advance for my lack of electrical knowledge. But would anything resembling modern standard household wiring even be able to handle that?

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[drinkypoo]

I apologize in advance for my lack of electrical knowledge. But would anything resembling modern standard household wiring even be able to handle that?

Nothing resembling modern standard industrial wiring will handle that. On the other hand, you could have a flywheel or another type of battery bank (a very broad, shallow one, if you catch my drift - lots of cells) in your house that charged only at night or from altpower and which charged your car whenever you liked. Sounds expensive to me, too. Flywheels are probably the logical choice. You bury them to prevent runaways in the case of failure. You float them on maglev bearings to make them efficient. The power company should be putting them underneath substations but there's room for them in a residential context as well. It's being done now but not enough IMO (and MO is worth every penny you've paid...)

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[slim]

I think the idea is probably that you'd charge (or swap out your battery) at somewhere analogous to a petrol station, rather than your home.

However that means those places will need a *lot* of power.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[slim]

Don't you realise your crackpot flywheel plan could slow down the planet's rotation until we all FRY!?!

Think of the children.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Nameisyoung007]

Dr. Emmett Brown: [running out of the room] 1.21 gigawatts? 1.21 gigawatts? Great Scott!

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Tim C]

MMmmm, fried children...

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[jkeelsnc]

The answer is NO, definitely not. 220V would not be good for rapid charging. But why do you need to recharge at home that fast in the first place? Now, out at rapid charging stations where you can stop and recharge in a few minutes they will likely have 440V circuits that can deliver that kind of current. If you have a 200 mile battery you will probably be able to recharge at home in 4 hours (on 220V) anyway which should be enough after you get home from work to charge up for the next day. If you are at a place where you need a quick charge then stop at the quick charge station. Adding the kind of infrastructure it would take to have 440V circuits in every house plus substations and distribution network for every house to handle that much power for rapid charging is unreasonable except for at targeted locations that have quick charge stations. Even then I like the idea of the other poster of using fly wheel storage systems (where a flywheel spins on magnetic bearings) for quick charge stations. A station could have have several of the flywheel systems that are running at all times (large ones). So that as people charge quickly it slows down the flywheels a bit but then when no one is charging (maybe over night or middle of the day etc) then the flywheels speed up again and are ready for more quick charging at the station. Also it would allow for even higher voltages and currents than a 440V infrastructure can provide and make it less expensive to provide a power connection to a station.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[elrous0]

Maybe each gas station could build an adjacent nuclear reactor.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Sure, but then we just keep them going until the earth starts spinning in the opposite direction. Yeah, the sun will rise in the west and set in the east, but it's better than frying, and it won't really make that much of a difference anyway.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Marty McFly: What the hell is a gigawatt?

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[billrp]

Modest electric cars need about 10 kW per hour. So that means if you want to charge your battery in 10 minutes, you'll need a 60 kW pump. At 220 volts that's about 300 amps. With four way parallel charging that's about 75 amps each, which requires heavy-duty cables and connectors but it's doable.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[hey!]

Wise man say: what goes around, comes around. The point is to give that angular momentum back. Nobody will be the wiser, except the guys at the naval observatory. When was the last time anyone thought of *them*, I ask you. First we take away their clubhouse so Dick Cheney can live there (well, OK, Nelson Rockefeller was the first), then we play bloody hell with the ephemeris.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[drinkypoo]

Don't you realise your crackpot flywheel plan could slow down the planet's rotation until we all FRY!?!

Duh, everyone knows that you can solve that problem with counter-rotating flywheels.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Drethon]

Just run normal wiring to a capacitor with some VERY heavy connectors, the charging station would need time in between vehicles to charge up but for a home station this would be fine.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[xaxa]

We estimated that a car driven 100 km uses about 80 kWh of energy.

80kWh / 5-10 minutes ~= 1000-500kW.

Hmm. That's roughly the power draw of a small electric passenger train (e.g. an old subway train).

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[burisch_research]

Yeah actually doc brown said "jiggawatts". Marty's got a point, what the hell IS a jiggawatt?

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[hey!]

Well, let's suppose the batteries are cheap enough to put in your car. Clearly they can handle a lot of current, in fact I'll bet they can discharge at high rates as well as charge. So what you do is you install a similar battery in your house and trickle charge it. At the "gas station" you'd have a massive flywheel that stores energy off the grid. That's how the Plasma Fusion Center at MIT does it. Some of the experiments they do would knock out the power grid if you tried the get the current spike they require directly from the power lines.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[MightyYar]

I apologize in advance for my lack of electrical knowledge. But would anything resembling modern standard household wiring even be able to handle that?

Older houses are often wired for 60 Amps, and they don't stand a chance.

Some newer houses with big AC units go as high as 200 Amps. More typical I think is 100 Amps. The Nissan Leaf has a 24 kW-h pack. To "quick charge" that in an hour with 100% efficiency would require 24kW (duh). At 240 V that is 24kW / 240V = 100 Amps. So a newish house could do it if it had a separate 100 A 240V feed just for charging the car. I figure that would set you back about $3000, so it's not out of the question. :)

More likely, you'd pull up to a charging station that has a big industrial feed at a higher voltage so that you don't need a copper wire the size of your arm.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[robot256]

We worked all this out the last time a battery article came up. You can slow-charge at home, or fast charge at filling stations. Filling stations will install banks of capacitors that recharge in, say, 15-30 minutes from a dedicated high-power line. You drive in, dump a capacitor into your car, and go. It will take a good bit of work to get those power drops at every gas station, though, and capacitors are expensive. But then you don't have to worry about filling the fuel tanks or anything.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

I think that "jigga" is the prefix used to indicate a one followed by umpteen zeros.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

So 80kWh/100km at $0.10/kWh = $8/100km, which is MORE than what I pay for gas in my car.

In addition gas is heavily taxed, they claim it's for roads, so maybe we should add a road tax onto our electricity rates.

I think I'll just keep burning oil thank you very much.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Kunnis]

I googled for what the Chevy Volt takes for a recharger (It's just what jumped to mind, I've seen too many ads for it) A statement on in this page http://gm-volt.com/forum/showthread.php?6307-HOW-TO-ORDER-YOUR-HOME-CHARGING-STATION says it's a 16 Amp, 220V plug. A normal "dryer" plug is a 50Amp, 220v plug. So if you had the ablity to use something as large as a dryer plug, It'd let your car recharge about 3x as fast. But to do that, you also need a larger electrical service in some cases. Some older houses don't have a very large service, and so you'd end up causing problems (either your main breaker tripping, or worse a fire) if you tried running your dryer, your household heater (or A/C) and charging your car at the same time.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Should have called it googolwatts then.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Chris Burke]

Duh, everyone knows that you can solve that problem with counter-rotating flywheels.

Oh no, I've already had enough of this "Contras will fix everything" philosophy.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[pz]

We estimated that a car driven 100 km uses about 80 kWh of energy.

80kWh / 5-10 minutes ~= 1000-500kW.

Hmm. That's roughly the power draw of a small electric passenger train (e.g. an old subway train).

Rescaling, the figures become 0.5 to 1.0 MW. That's a highly non-trivial amount of power to transfer electrically (ignoring the massive electromagnetic fields that level of power transfer creates). Not something that's going to be done in the home.

Recall, a consumer-grade hair drier is in the 1.0 to 1.5 kW range. We're talking about operating about a thousand of those at the same time for 5-10 minutes. Personally, I don't want to be anywhere near that. Moreover, even if it's wildly efficient at 99% transfer to the batteries, that's 0.01 x 1 MW = 10 KW of loss that needs to be dissipated. I am not familiar with materials found in the home that can provide safe, reliable, tamper-proof thermal isolation from grasping a cable / connector package that is glowing hot.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[cpu6502]

>>>in your house that charged only at night or from altpower and which charged your car whenever you liked

The most likely answer is that electric cars, like gasoline cars today, would only be fast-chargeable at fueling stations. Just as you need specialized services to hold the gasoline (and government-regulated to make sure it does not blow up), you need specialized services that can handle dumping 90 kilowatt-hours into a car in just 5 minutes.

Let's see. 900,000 watts == IV == 3700 amps at 240 volts, or 90 amps at 10,000 volts.

Not exactly safe. I think I'd rather convert from gasoline to hydrogen-fueled cars, and avoid the electric ones.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[mscman]

"Jigawatt" is a correct pronunciation of "gigawatt." You can use a hard and soft 'g' interchangeably in this case.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[chocapix]

I think you mean your hypothetical car needs 10kW in average to move about, which means that (assuming 100% efficiency) 60kW is enough if you're okay charging your car for 10 minutes every hour you drive it.

Taking a real life example, the Tesla Roadster has a 53kWh battery pack, so a full charge in 10 minutes is roughly 300kW. Probably a piece of cake in a distant enough future, but right now, I think the plugs you'd need would be too heavy to be practical.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[afidel]

Yeah, it's "doable" except for the fact that when you work at those kinds of power the leads have to be huge and the connections perfect and well greased or things go boom. Oh and charging your car for one hours drivetime isn't what most people would consider reasonable so more like you'd need 300A x4 at 480V which gets into crispy end user territory.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[eggled]

kW per hour is a meaningless metric. If they're right in saying that electric cars consume 80 kWh per 100 miles, your 60 kW "pump" will charge the car in about 80 minutes. You're off by an order of magnitude.

Assuming a 200 mile battery (minimum useful in my opinion), we're talking about 160 kWh dumped in over the course of 10 minutes, is 960 kW - or about a megawatt. At 220V, that's about 4500 Amps, and normal home service is usually not more than 200 amps. So, if you got 20 of your closest neighbors together, and wired all their houses into one giant charging station (and shut down all appliances, computers, lights, heaters, and stoves), you could charge your car in 10 minutes.

Not seeing this working with our current power grid...

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Guspaz]

Fast charging is nice... It's not practical for home EV charging (the Leaf's 240v home charger requires a 30 amp circuit, and expecting more in a home is unreasonable), but it can be useful for fueling stations and consumer electronics (filling a 60Wh laptop battery in 3 minutes is doable on a standard 120V AC circuit).

A far more useful thing would be improved capacity, though. Charging your car's batteries in five minutes sounds nice, but if you're driving a long distance and have to stop every hour to charge the battery for five minutes, it's not very practical. Battery capacity is also the primary limiting factor in the performance of mobile devices such as laptops and smartphones.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

For the high-discharge, full-discharge circumstances, a flywheel apparently works well - it would be a good way to charge these new batteries, quickly. My understanding is that a slow, persistent draw cannot be maintained on a flywheel, though, so they aren't yet usable in say, homes and cars. For context, IIRC, one place they are used well, are in mobile cranes (un)loading ships/trains/trucks. A dropping container spins the flywheel up, and the full amount of energy in the flywheel can be consumed to assist in lifting the next container.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

*sigh*

Please look up the definition of "googol", then look up the definition of "umpteen".

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[vlm]

We estimated that a car driven 100 km uses about 80 kWh of energy.

80kWh / 5-10 minutes ~= 1000-500kW.

Hmm. That's roughly the power draw of a small electric passenger train (e.g. an old subway train).

100 km in 5 minutes implies 1200 kph which is roughly the speed of sound at sealevel.

There have been supersonic cars, and they require well over a mere 1000 horsepower or so.

1000 HP will barely achieve 250 MPH.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[vlm]

Err, you were probably writing about the input side not the output side.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[hood8263]

until a capacitor goes and sounds like an explosion :P

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[jonbryce]

A typical 100A household supply will in 5 minutes give you the equivalent energy of 171ml of Diesel. To get the equivalent of the 10l/min or so my local petrol station pump manages, you are going to need a 30kA supply, and you would need about 200 standard electric cables to carry it.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

> So a newish house could do it if it had a separate 100 A 240V feed just for charging the car.

You are assuming a 1-hour charge time. If you cut the charge time down to 5 minutes, you multiply the current by 12.

Add in a 50% charging efficnency, and you are looking at 2400 Amps.

That's something a charging station on the side of the hihgway could manage, but that a home could not. OTOH, I will probably plug in for a lot more than 5 minutes at my home.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Kunnis]

200A services are actually common where there is electric central heat and electric water heating. It has nothing to do with "New big AC units" They are actually much more efficent then 20 year old ones. I replaced my Mid-80's Outdoor unit with a modern high-efficency unit, and the breaker went from a 50A to a 20A. That's a much lower expected power useage.

And a new service is more like $1500 to have one of the big-chain companies do it, last time I checked.

100A wire is smaller then my pinky, but it costs a few dollars per foot (and you want a 220 plug?, that means you need a black, red and white wire at that size, plus a smaller ground wire)

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[burisch_research]

Lies!!!

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

That isn't suggesting that these cars are going 100km in 5 minutes. It's suggesting that recharging in 5-10 minutes the power required to go 100km is a massive amount of power use.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[jtownatpunk.net]

My old house is wired for 200 amps. But it was also built at a time when there was no easy way to get gas for the appliances in that area so it was designed to handle two electric water heaters, electric dryer, electric stove, electric oven, electric heaters in the bathrooms, etc. And, back then, everyone was expecting to get a nuclear reactor in their basement within the next decade so they wanted to be ready to have heater vs. AC battles to use up all that extra power.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're at home, it's probably going to be assumed you're going to be staying there a while, so can go with the trickle overnight charge approach.

When I want to recharge in minutes is when I'm 100 miles up the road. Commercial units could have the expensive fast charge equipment installed.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[cpu6502]

Their estimate is 80 kWh for just 62.1 mile range which is not enough for Americans. They like to see 300 miles between fuel stops, or ~380 kWh.

~4 million watt draw for 5-6 minute fuel stop.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what else they could do? use paragraphs....

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[xaxa]

We estimated that a car driven 100 km uses about 80 kWh of energy.

80kWh / 5-10 minutes ~= 1000-500kW.

Hmm. That's roughly the power draw of a small electric passenger train (e.g. an old subway train).

100 km in 5 minutes implies 1200 kph which is roughly the speed of sound at sealevel.

("km/h" is preferred, "kph" is confusing.)

I was suggesting that in order to drive 100km someone might wait 5-10 minutes for the battery to charge, so the power needed is 500-1000kW (roughly many hundreds of electric room heaters or kettles, or a single old electric subway train -- the latter obviously using special cables etc, and supporting only a few trains at once in a small area).

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[landoltjp]

Good idea. It would allow energy to be stored up from 'off peak', one would hope, to charge the car up when needed.

I'm just thinking out loud here; no complaints, just some observations. The risk here that I see would be that every house has this battery "tank" of potential energy. I wonder how safe that would be? Granted, 50-80 years ago the houses where I lived all had oil tanks outside, and I can't see them being all that safe either.

As for the gas stations, their current potential energy is stored in gas tanks underground. Still a risk there, but I imagine it's been mitigated by safety designs of some sort. And they would be less likely to be impact-related safety concerns. Do you imagine they'd have a flywheel above ground, or below? Would heat buildup / dissipation be a concern?

And someone else (a post below here, I think) made a good point; if you're at home with your car, odds are you're not in need of a quick charge, or a 440Volt power pull from every house. Leave 110/220v at home, and the 440 stuff at gas (energy?) stations.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Joce640k]

You could trickle charge an ultracapacitor in your garage all day then just dump the accumulated electrons into your car in a couple of minutes, no 30 amps required.

Re: "stop every hour"

I'm pretty sure even today's electric cars can drive for a lot longer then that....

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[ion]

What if your home had some sort of device to temporarily store the needed energy? Like a battery or a flywheel? This device could then slowly be charged up from the electrical power network until next time you needed 2400 Amps in a few seconds.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah actually doc brown said "jiggawatts". Marty's got a point, what the hell IS a jiggawatt?

It's a racist description of an African-American watt.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Joce640k]

62.1 miles is actually more convenient for most car usage - you don't ever have to go out of your way to a gas station.

The Chevy volt has a gas engine which takes over if you do more than that.

The PROBLEM with electric cars today isn't really the range, it's the price.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[compwizrd]

Better efficiency on your new unit, and it's quite likely someone actually did a heat-loss calculation and calculated the proper size.

30 years ago, if you really needed 60,000 btu, they'd take a wild guess that you really need a 100,000 and tack on a 20% fudge factor, giving you a 120,000.. or the homeowner would complain their old unit wasn't cooling the house effectively, and then upgrade from there.. or just replace with the same unit you had before.

With modern houses it's much easier to figure out the most efficient size.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[mooingyak]

Their estimate is 80 kWh for just 62.1 mile range which is not enough for Americans. They like to see 300 miles between fuel stops, or ~380 kWh.

~4 million watt draw for 5-6 minute fuel stop.

Yeah, very impractical in the US, outside of local driving in population centers.

I drove to visit my sister last month, who lives about 900 miles away. Needing to stop for 5 minutes every 60 miles would be absolutely maddening. It would add over an hour to the trip just for recharges. Plus there are places where it's more than 60 miles between consecutive gas stations, so we would need recharge stations to be significantly more frequent than gas stations.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[drinkypoo]

Not exactly safe. I think I'd rather convert from gasoline to hydrogen-fueled cars, and avoid the electric ones.

Okay, multi-account troll boy, there's nothing inherently safe about hydrogen (although it may arguably be better than gasoline) and electricity is a typical intermediate step for making hydrogen in the BEST case. Virtually all hydrogen burned in the US is produced from natural gas at some expense in both money and energy, which is why it is expensive even though we breathe it constantly.

Just as you need specialized services to hold the gasoline (and government-regulated to make sure it does not blow up),

I don't need anything special to handle diesel fuel, though. False dichotomy, sucker.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[xaxa]

Their estimate is 80 kWh for just 62.1 mile range which is not enough for Americans. They like to see 300 miles between fuel stops, or ~380 kWh.

~4 million watt draw for 5-6 minute fuel stop.

I picked that only as a minimum. If fossil fuel continues to increase in price Americans might be forced to change, or else pay much more for the convenience.

Many people already wait 5-6 minutes for the next bus or train to take them 5-10-20km, so if we can get the power to the recharging place I don't think this would be unworkable.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have a second battery at home that slow charges all the time and use it to quick charge your car daily

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[SharpFang]

The answer is a standad, "slow" overnight charger at home and a "fast charge" fuel station.
If you're rich, you can always buy extra cells to store the energy for fast charge, but normally you plug the car in for the night at home and "fast charge" only if you go more than 100km/day.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it'd just be so much better to actually have a nuclear powered car! you won't have to refuel for the life of the car! think of how much oil independence we'll have! laugh at all those ppl with their gasoline fueling stations. with this nuclear powered car, there's no flammable fluids, ZERO co2 emissions! and it doesn't have 50 pounds of potentially explosive lithium batteries! or dangerous lead and acid batteries! totally CLEAN energy!

*end sarcasm*

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't make sense of your units: 10 kW per hour? I think you mean 10kW-hours (i.e. capacity to provide 10 kW for 1 hour). But while 10kW-hours might be good enough for a plug in hybrid (i.e. Chevy Volt, whose battery pack is about this size) you will need about five times that (like a Tesla's) for a pure electric with reasonable range. That means you need a 300 kVA supply to charge in 10 mins.

I agree with other posters that this is probably not practical at home (but also unnecessary) while it is slightly more practical in an industrial setting with 440V 3 phase power (e.g. at a "filling" station.) But even with that infrastructure it would be challenging to hit 5 or even 10 minutes.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[dakkon1024]

Can you really slow charge at home? I mean honestly even if just 5% of the population was charging cars at home during a hot summer night I think it might overload our production/delievery capacity. The underlying expense to route that much additional power is going to be rather extreem. Not saying we shouldn't, but it's really not in place at all at the moment.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[LoudMusic]

[quote]W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.[/quote]

What?

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[elrous0]

Adds a whole new element of danger to a fender bender. I like it.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Black Gold Alchemist]

That number is wrong, because it calculates the energy in the gas that goes into gasoline cars. 80 kWh/100 km is 1,287 watt*hours/mile, five times higher than the average EV highway energy rate of 250 watt*hours/mile - electric cars are 5 times more efficient at using energy than gas cars. At low speed (city driving), a EV consumes around 150-160 watt*hours/mile, similar to the Japanese rail system, which gets 150 watt*hours/passenger-mile.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Low Ranked Craig]

The example you cite is not for an electric car. Using the Tesla Roadster as an example. 53 kWh for full charge == 300km == .1767kWh/km. Where I live electricity is about 11 cents/kWh. .11*53 == $5.30 == $1.76 per 100km. On the other hand gasoline cost almost $4 a gallon ($1.05/l) my car gets about 25MPG (9.4l/100km) So. if my math is correct, electricity will cost $1.76/100km and gasoline will cost $9.87/100km.

What is an acceptable charge time? To charge in 10 hours would require drawing 5,300 watts for 10 hours, or 24 amps over 220v, which is probably acceptable for home charging. For commercial charging let's say 10 minutes. You'd need 53,000W for an hour, so you'd need 318,000W for 10 minutes, or 50 amps @ 6,300V, or 100 amps @ 3,200V, or 200 amps @ 1,600V. That's moving a lot of energy very quickly, but I think it could be set up to work safely assuming you had access to that kind of power.

maybe someone can check my math. I've only had one cup of coffee so far.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Black Gold Alchemist]

That figure is inflated by a factor of 5 - it's really 16 kWh/100 km or $1.6/km. In the USA, needs to tax gas at $0.60 a gallon to pay for roads (it currently taxes it at $0.40~ish).

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Black Gold Alchemist]

That number, posted above, is inflated. It is really 25 watt*hours/mile.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

You won't have to worry about grasping the cable because it won't be exposed. Since a cable that can transfer 1MW (say, 1000A @ 1000V) is too heavy to manipulate, you'd have to have some sort of machine/robot do it for you. As long as you have a machine doing it, there's no reason to expose the innards of it to humans (at least not while operational).

dom

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[idontgno]

Now look back at the definition of "googol". It's on a horse.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[beelsebob]

To be honest, 10 minutes to one hour is the right ratio – at 20 minutes for 2 hours driving you're actually sitting bang on the recommended break times for long journeys anyway.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[JosKarith]

Unlucky Fried Children...? Could be good for an alternative food source.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[JosKarith]

No - time will run backwards. I saw it on this old documentary about a cape wearing UberMensch.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[TheCRAIGGERS]

The problem with that approach is that you have all that energy stored in your garage overnight. Have you ever seen a capacitor bank at a power station blow? It's not pretty. Or rather it is, in a 4th of July sort of way.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[BlitzTech]

Okay. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[ladoga]

("km/h" is preferred, "kph" is confusing.)

Not only that but kph is plain wrong as it doesn't tell the unit at all. Kilo means thousand. Thousand of what?

Abbreviation for kilometre (1000m) is km. So correct abbreviations for kilometres per hour are km/h or kmph.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw that! Mine will need 100 kW per hour! I can't wait for an electric sports car!

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[jgagnon]

Extra Crispy or Original?

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[eggled]

Depends on the car. The numbers here seem pretty accurate: http://www.ecoworld.com/energy-fuels/electric-car-cost-per-mile.html - they claim 2.9 miles per kWh, or 350 Wh/mile.

Considering a 100hp engine peaks at 75kW, and a (generous) peak speed of 220 mph, we'll assume a 10kW constant load at 30 mph, which gets us 330 Wh/mile (awfully close to the above!), or 33 kWh per 100 miles. You're off by an order of magnitude, unless you're referring to an electric moped.

So, divide my numbers by three. 1500 Amps, and you'll only need 7 of your closest neighbors to donate their power, assuming you drive a truly wimpy car.

A nice electric car, with some get up and go, should line up with my numbers fairly closely (a 200 hp/ 150 kW car).

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[isopropanol]

I know from experience that 240V/60A outlets are standard stock items at home depot and other building centres. I also know from experience that only some of the designs don't require bending the wires.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Black Gold Alchemist]

Yeah. I was trying to type 250 watt*hours/mile, not 25. Ironically, 25 is right for a moped. Leaf has a 24 kWh battery pack and goes 100 miles/charge, so I think were in the ballpark.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Tumbleweed]

Don't you realise your crackpot flywheel plan could slow down the planet's rotation until we all FRY!?!

Think of the children.

The easy solution to that is to destroy the Sun, which I'm pretty sure we've been yearning to do since the dawn of time.

It's so simple, when you just take the time to THINK about it. Geez.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[xaxa]

Thanks, that's important.

The Tesla is apparently 15kW/100km (from the same site), so with a single passenger that's roughly the same as the Japanese rail system. Presumably the engineering that went into making efficient motors for a super-efficient car will eventually be used in new trains, and we will see the train far ahead in the efficiency figures once more.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's possible to build a molten salt battery in a deep hole, potentially kept hot by geothermal energy.
It'd be a big 2.7V 90Wh/Kg monster. Like a huge lithium battery, but safer (it's buried) and more economical (Sodium is readily available).

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[MightyYar]

It's an old Dr. Seuss book from waaay before the current www.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Tumbleweed]

Duh, everyone knows that you can solve that problem with counter-rotating flywheels.

Oh no, I've already had enough of this "Contras will fix everything" philosophy.

I loved that game as a kid.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Chris Burke]

We all did, but once we grow up, we have to realize that not every problem can be solved by liberal application of the Spread Gun.

Though I'll admit it's at least worth trying.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[hawguy]

I apologize in advance for my lack of electrical knowledge. But would anything resembling modern standard household wiring even be able to handle that?

Nothing resembling modern standard industrial wiring will handle that. On the other hand, you could have a flywheel or another type of battery bank (a very broad, shallow one, if you catch my drift - lots of cells) in your house that charged only at night or from altpower and which charged your car whenever you liked. Sounds expensive to me, too. Flywheels are probably the logical choice. You bury them to prevent runaways in the case of failure. You float them on maglev bearings to make them efficient. The power company should be putting them underneath substations but there's room for them in a residential context as well. It's being done now but not enough IMO (and MO is worth every penny you've paid...)

Just because you *can* recharge the battery in 5 minutes doesn't mean you have to -- instead of charging a flywheel storage mechanism overnight you could just charge the car at whatever rate your household wiring can support.

Charging the 24KWh Nissan Leaf battery over 8 hours would take around 24 amps at 120V, which is easily achieved with a 30 amp residential circuit (though a 240VAC circuit would require smaller wires). Charging the same battery in 5 minutes would take 2400 amps which is not reasonable, not even with 240V 3 phase power which is typically the highest voltage you'll find in a residential house in the USA.

Leave the high speed charging to refueling stations - which could also mean mini charging stations in shopping malls and office parks since much of the danger and expense of gas stations is gone - no underground storage tanks, no gas spills, etc. Large office and shopping facilities already have large power feeds, so there's little incremental cost to adding a charging station.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[fahrbot-bot]

Considering the hassle I had just getting a 220-volt outlet to power my dryer installed at my house, I'd hate to think what the electrician is going to say when I tell him I want an outlet that can deliver enough power to drive my car 100 miles--and deliver it in just a few minutes. Poor bastard is going to have a heart attack.

Of course, with your 220v line, some paddles (or jumper cables) and gel, you'll be ready for that. :-)

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[MightyYar]

LOL, I grew up in a house like that -but it had a second service and meter for the subsidized electric stuff.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[lgw]

Just the heat released by that power transfer (at any believable efficiency) would be immense. The magnetic field would be impressive as well: wad your car into a tight ball, and then melt it.

Just trickle-charge a normal car battery pack, then swap the battery packs when you get home (a bit of powered mechanical aid would be needed, of course). Do I have to think of everything?

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[MightyYar]

I'm old enough that a house built in the 80s still sounds new :)

I didn't mean the 100A wire would be as large as my arm - I meant the "5 minute charge" wire that would have to be, what, 600-1200 A? The 100 A DC receptacle on the Leaf is not that absurd, but it is meant for a 80% charge in 30 minutes. Sorry my comments were all over the place :)

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Shotgun]

It would be plenty enough if they would change the train system to make it easy to load/unload electric cars. Load the cars sideways and in parallel, possibly even in a double-decker fashion. Then I could drive a few miles to a special train loading station. Drive up onto it like I'm climbing onto a roller coaster. Let the train pull me to the vicinity of my destination, where I drive off and onto regular roads for the last of my trip.

The problem with trains is the last mile issue. The problem with electrics is the middle "multiple-miles" issue. The two fit together like peanut-butter and chocolate.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Tumbleweed]

We all did, but once we grow up, we have to realize that not every problem can be solved by liberal application of the Spread Gun.

Though I'll admit it's at least worth trying.

In the immortal words of Jack Burton, "You never know till you try!"

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Black Gold Alchemist]

Actually, the train is already maxed out in efficiency. People don't understand how efficient electric vehicles are. Well designed ones, such as that Japanese train and Tesla Roadster are 90% efficient or more. There's not much room for improvement in either case. Many people are building their homemade electric cars on A/C induction motors which are used for industrial equipment and trains - one electric motor that powers on axle of a train can easily power a car. It might actually be more efficient (but not by much) because oversized motors are used at lower current, which reduces cooling and gives the car more HP, which is always good.

This really demonstrates the fact that switching to alternative energy sources (switching from gasoline to electric) can have better effects than conserving energy by switching from one mode of transit to another.

BTW, in the USA, there is an average 1.54 passengers per car, so to make it fair to the car, the car uses 100-170 watt-hours/passenger-mile.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[sjames]

It wouldn't HAVE to be charged that fast, it's just that it can be.

At home, stick to the overnight charge. When out and about, use the specialized quick charge station.

To get your house up to the quick charge task, the mods would have to go all the way back to the electrical substation you're connected to at least.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[RulerOf]

Extra Crispy or Original?

At the rate we're running out of oil, they'd likely be grilled instead.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[leaen]

Kenlucky Fried Children...? Could be good for an alternative food source.

FTFY

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[maxwell demon]

Are you sure it's not "... who was washing ..."?
I don't know the book, but "is" doesn't start with "w".

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just a matter of how much energy is being stored, its a matter of how its released in the event of a failure. Unless you atomize that tank of oil its going to release the energy through failure (a fire) much less violently than if a large capacitor bank of some kind decides it's going to go under.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[jkeelsnc]

9 sentences? If it was a page long I could see it. Then again all the other posts in here that have "paragraphs" don't even have 3 sentences minimum to form a proper paragraph. What the h are you talking about? If it was a book I wrote I'd understand. Go hide under a rock or something. Besides, you posted as anonymous coward which says something already. :)

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[ridgecritter]

Big capacitors required. I mean, BIG capacitors required. Using the 80KWHr energy storage in an earlier post, and assuming a 2KV capacitor operating voltage at full charge, we're looking at about 144 Farads (that's Farads, not microFarads) of capacitance required to store this energy. To my (admittedly incomplete) awareness, there's not a capacitor technology even in the laboratory development stage that could hope to provide this combination of high voltage operation and high capacitance in a package small enough to fit in a vehicle for a price that consumers would be willing to pay. I think we'll be using chemistry (combustible fuels, batteries) as the energy storage medium in vehicles for a long time to come.

E = (CV^2)/2 = 80 KWHr = 288,000,000 Joules. C = 2E/V^2 = (2*288,000,000)/4,000,000 = 144 Farads.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[hesaigo999ca]

I have a friend who is an engineer in charge of the local power co installing charging stations for people with electric cars, they are going through the testing phase, and will be offering some possible formats for house charging too....they are thinking of everything, dont you worry, they will be able to come to your house, and install within a small time frame something to let your car (with specific charge plugging extensions) to charge within a certain time frame based on the technology they are looking at....

I am not sure of all the details, but i can tell you that they will nothing when it comes time to implement this technology...you wont be hearing of last minute recalls (like toyota) of cars exploding when attached to a charging station, or setting your house on fire, they are taking every precaution

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[danlip]

This comes up every time rapid recharge cars are mentioned. The bottom line is you don't need to charge so fast at home. At home you can charge slowly overnight. At work you can slowly charge during the day in the parking lot (if they provide a connection). However if you are out on the road you might want a rapid recharge at a filling station - it's very useful in that context, but they only places that need the wiring for rapid recharge are the filling stations (i.e. "gas stations" but for electric).

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Altus]

High speed charging at home really isn't all that important. It seems to me that high speed charging would be more important on the road, at places like gas stations that could, conceivably, have a large battery bank or fly wheel to charge up electric cars quickly. At home I think a 4 hour charge on 220 would be fine.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no electrical engineer but wouldn't you tie that kind of draw straight into the power line? Sure you'd have to step the voltage down (this thing can't take 14KV, can it?) but if filling up only took a few minutes there wouldn't be a need to run the power into your house. Just have a little filling station near your electrical pole with a key or access code. I would imagine though that that kind of draw (probably centered around 8:00AM & 6:00PM) would make life difficult for utilities. It might prod utilities to entice people to start using load balancing systems. I kind of like the flywheel suggestion, It looks like some companies are actually building systems around flywheel energy storage as well. My only concern with that methodology would be the losses in the conversion from one medium to another.

http://www.vyconenergy.com/pq/VDCtech.htm

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, you wouldn't have to do a super charge at your house; just at charging stations

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

How fast does the gasoline pipe in your garage refill your tank?

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could trickle charge an ultracapacitor in your garage all day then just dump the accumulated electrons into your car in a couple of minutes, no 30 amps required.

Yes! Someone finally got it. This is the only practical way to do a fast charge at home. Have a home "charging station" that stores the energy locally (in an ultra capacitor or fast battery pack) for fast delivery, but recharges over a longer period of time for reasonable current draw through standard house-hold wiring. In fact, commercial charging stations would likely operated the same way.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[MightyYar]

LOL, yup - I have the quote right. I suspect the good Doctor had his reasons... He probably felt strongly about keeping his tenses consistent.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[denzacar]

they'd likely be grilled instead.

LOLWTFBABYQ?

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[xaxa]

Actually, the train is already maxed out in efficiency. People don't understand how efficient electric vehicles are. Well designed ones, such as that Japanese train and Tesla Roadster are 90% efficient or more. There's not much room for improvement in either case.

The Japanese train figure is the average for the whole system. I wasn't really thinking of high-speed trains when I wrote that, which are already efficient (similar to the Tesla when both are full, but much faster), but everything else.

The normal mid-distance trains round here (UK) aren't aerodynamic in the slightest -- they have a flat front (examples), yet they often go at 150km/h! Newer trains also tend to be heavier than the old ones -- they have comfier seats, air conditioning, double glazing, lots of electronics, etc.

It should come down to
- rolling resistance, which rails will be better for
- weight, which the train loses by far
- energy conversion losses, which the train wins (no battery, high voltage transmission)
- air resistance; lots of room for improvement for some types of train here, although presumably not for high speed trains.
(For each of these the train obviously needs sufficient people to balance out the extra wheels, larger vehicles, ...)

This really demonstrates the fact that switching to alternative energy sources (switching from gasoline to electric) can have better effects than conserving energy by switching from one mode of transit to another.

Well, round here that means we need better cars and better trains. It would be a mega-megaproject to make the roads needed for a million extra cars to drive round London every day, and it wouldn't be popular (the last attempt to build big roads in London was cancelled decades ago). It would be feasible to add extra railway lines in the city (we are), but cars/vans will still be very important.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Altus]

Your house will have a device to temporarily store the energy, its called an electric car, it comes with a bank of batteries and it sits in your driveway every night for 8+ hours where it can accumulate that charge.

Why would you install a separate fly wheel just so you can charge your car in 5 minutes in the morning?

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stopping every hour or so to pee and get a candy bar seems like a small price to pay for being able to do that trip for substantially less money than it would cost with gasoline.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[MightyYar]

Are you replying to me? I said it's likely you'd pull up to a charging station.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Altus]

The car comes with just such a battery and it sits in your driveway all night? why on earth would you buy a second one?

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Belial6]

Of course for many of us the cost of the electricity is off as well. Here in CA you would be paying more like $0.32/kWh or $5.12/100 km which is more than I pay for gas. Cost comparison between powering a gas and electric vehicle is highly dependent on your local electric rates.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[mekkab]

and did these UberMensch appreciated being worn by a cape?

-and was this cape Canaveral? or cape cod?

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Yvanhoe]

Couldn't you have a battery in the house, a big, heavy but cheap battery that would store the energy, would charge off-peak and then recharge the car battery ? I think that if weight and size are not a concern, you can get a decent amount of battery for $3000

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[drcesteffen]

My mini-van has a 200 horsepower moter. I believe it gets that at 5000rpm (might be 4000 or 6000). Normal driving is at 2500rpm. This is about 50 percent of 200 hp which is 100hp. The conversion to watts is 746 watts/hp * 100hp = 75kw. So if I drive on the freeway for 1 hour, I expend 75kwh to go 70 miles. At 240V * 200Amps = 48kw. So it will take 75kwh / 48kw = 1.56 hours to recharge using the full capacity of the supply lines to the house. Trickle charging a extra battery to dump a surge into the car or overnight charging seem to be the only ways to reduce the time.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Belial6]

This is what I have been saying for years. The other option for transitioning to electric is to mandate the basic car to be all electric, and have a standard electrical connection and mounting system for the power source. This way, the source of the electricity could be changed at a fraction of the price of the whole car. Only driving in town? Run with the battery pack. Planning a 900 mile drive to visit relatives in another state? Slide in the gas generator and have at it. Commute 80 miles to work, and happen to know that there are hydrogen or methanol stations on the way? Slide in the appropriate generator and your good to go. Heck, a spike in the cost of a particular fuel due to a particularly bad storm? Just use a different one until the problem is resolved.

You would probably even see equipment rental companies renting out the alternate generators. I might run on electric 90% of the time, and when I plan to head out on a road trip, I just go rent the gas generator from the local equipment rental, the same way that I rent a jackhammer if I want to break up my front walk.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[GameboyRMH]

Maybe flywheel stations will be the future's gas stations? You don't have a gasoline pipe running to your house right now, after all. And you can't trickle-fill your car at home.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Dragonslicer]

We all did, but once we grow up, we have to realize that not every problem can be solved by liberal application of the Spread Gun.

Speak for yourself.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[celtic_hackr]

That's funny, I could have sworn my furnace was hooked up to a pair of 25 Amp service breakers. Here, let me check ... Yep, sure 'nuff my furnace can draw up to 50 Amps right off my grid. I know some only using 40. It wouldn't take much to run 500 Amp service like that or more.

The trick is in how you set up your battery array in the vehicle, and the charging coupling. Instead of using one big 0000 cable, you run multiple 20, 30, 40, 50 amp cables. Those cables could connect to a single "connector", while still maintaining isolation. You then charge in parallel with each wire drawing no more than the amp rating, and the battery charging happens spread out over the array, in parallel. No big super hot cables or coupling devices.

This is not rocket science people. It just requires the right design on the part of the people making the cars. Drawing power from multiple smaller cables is the logical home choice. Instead of one big 80kWh battery, use twelve 7kWh batteries, or 24 3.4kWh batteries. Sure even then you won't be able to hook up and charge in 5-10 minutes. But my AC draws 3.5kWh, and my furnace draws at least twice that. So with either of the two later scenarios of batteries, I could charge a car in an hour. The time it takes me to make and eat dinner.

Lastly, on capacity, I rarely ever drive more than 2-3 hours without refueling. While stopping every hour would be an inconvenience, doubling that would have almost zero impact on most people's driving habits. So, being able to get 250-300 mile range on a charge is plenty of capacity. There was one commercial EV that had that capacity, until they pulled it from they market. So it's doable.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Sitnalta]

No. Not by itself. But if you installed one of these batteries in your home (of equal or greater capacity than the one in your car) then you could charge your car without much fuss.

That's how an electric "gas station" would work. They'd have a large bank of these batteries underground so that they could spread the load over a 24-hour period instead of demanding huge amounts of current from the grid in spikes.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Belial6]

I'm not complaining either, as it is a valid path of discussion.

I would say that while it sounds really dangerous, we currently have dangers in our homes that would seem perposterous to anyone not used to them. Consider that we have wires run through almost every wall of our house that carry enough electricity to kill us. Not just one or two walls, but almost every single one of them. Our 'safety' codes even require that there be outlets every 12 feet, which 99% of the time consist of pieces of plastic with holes in them that open directly to the bare wires of the electric system.

Consider also that we have gas lines leading to many homes that if leaky will kill you through inhalation, and are designed to burn. There is nothing to stop these lines from dumping an unlimited amount of gas into your home. They have no 'fuse' to blow if there is an uncontrolled leak.

That isn't even counting the fact that we let people have kitchens. The number of injuries and deaths in the US due to kitchens is extemely high. Much higher I expect than would ever be caused by car charging stations failing.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[MightyYar]

Yeah I think that's the conventional wisdom. Of course, for $1500-3000 you'd have a one-time charge for the service to your house, whereas the battery would be a recurring charge.

Personally, I'd probably just plug the car in for a 5 hour charge each night, which would only require a 20 Amp circuit. A dryer outlet is 30 Amps, so this shouldn't be a big deal. If I needed a quick charge, I'd probably stop by a service station with a quick charger - you could get a lot of charges for $3000!

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[wealthychef]

Who says you have to charge it at home? You don't fill your car currently at home.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Belial6]

There you go. It seems odd that people think fueling at home is a requirement for electric. Fueling at home is a benefit, sure, but if fueling stations can charge your electric car as fast as they can fuel your gas car, you have reached parity on convenience.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Well I saw mine on a newer documentary about life in the 31st century.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[celtic_hackr]

Take the Chevy Volt for example. The EPA average range rating is 35 miles. Not open it up , pull out the the 1.x L gas engine, and replace that dead weight with 6 of the same batteries currently installed. Your pure EV now has a range of 245 miles. Thirty five miles less than my current vehicle, or at an average speed of 60 mph, four hours of driving. Pull out the gas tank and add up to 6 more batteries and your range is now up to over 420 miles or seven hours of driving. That should be enough for everyone except SPCK (Spring Break College Kids).

I say up to because I don't know the size of the battery pack used, or if you could fit 13 of them in a Volt. Not even sure 6 will fit in the engine compartment, but from pictures it seems quite certain you could get at least six in somehow. So a ~250 mile range is very doable with a modified Volt.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Viperpete]

Agreed, I think this quick charge application would be best saved for recharge stations and not for home use.

The best usage of this technology would be for solving the long distance traveling problem of purely electric cars.

Trickle charge for home use and fast charge at refueling recharge stations for long trips.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Rei]

The US residential average just recently broke 10 cents per kWh. Even California's is half of what you quoted. Yes, some isolated places pay out the nose, but it's what most people pay that matters, not you poor schmucks.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Chris Burke]

If violence isn't solving your problems, you just aren't using enough of it!

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Rei]

1) Flowing DC creates a magnetic field, but it's static. Only flowing AC makes a propagating electromagnetic field (RF). Batteries don't charge on AC.
2) If you have a cheap battery pack for the vehicle, you can get an equally cheap, slightly higher voltage pack for the home. The grid doesn't need to deliver that kind of power; it can go from pack to pack.
3) The numbers are totally wrong. A Prius-like vehicle at low to moderate highway speeds on flat terrain uses about 250Wh/mi / 150Wh/km. 80km = 12kWh. In 10 minutes, that's 72kW. Not 1.0MW.
4) Even if you did have 10kW waste heat -- nearly 14 times as fast charging -- that's 6MJ of waste heat, 1.4Mcal, or enough to raise about 12 gallons of cooling water by 30C (assuming the water doesn't cool at all during the charging). Oh noes!

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Rei]

A *passively cooled* cable (with a current flowing for long periods) would be. For EV chargers exceeding about 50kW in output or so, you have to start actively cooling the cable to keep it manageable in size. But cooling can easily take you through the hundreds of kW, potentially even into the MW range.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Rei]

Really? Swap something that weighs hundreds of kilograms, with connectors at hundreds of volts, which forms the structural backbone of part of your vehicle and is critical for its weight balance? At home? Really?

See my comments earlier about power transfer and RF.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Rei]

People, please stop quoting these numbers; they're absurd and not even close to the real world. A Prius-like vehicle uses about 250Wh/mi at low to moderate highway speeds. Perhaps an electric monster truck would use power like that, but not your average passenger sedan.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Rei]

Most people don't realize that the reasons trains get disappointing mileage is because they average being extremely heavy per passenger once you factor in the empty seats, not-seating cars, etc. They get superb results for well-loaded cargo trains, mind you.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Man I just ate and you made me hungry already. Do you have any good recipes?

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Rei]

You really think that you expend half of your engine's capability just to maintain speed on the highway?

Try again.

The RAV4EV (an electric RAV4) took about 300-350Wh/mi for low to maintain moderate highway speeds.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not familiar with materials found in the home that can provide safe, reliable, tamper-proof thermal isolation from grasping a cable / connector package that is glowing hot.

OVEN MITTS!

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Rei]

You know that not all capacitors are the same, right? Just because it's "a capacitor" doesn't mean it's going to behave like whatever particular type of capacitor you're thinking of.

Anyway, I've met with some of the people at the University of Illinois who are working on energy storage. This is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg compared to what's being worked on there. Their physics department is taking advantage of quantum effects for energy storage. We're talking theoretical electrical energy storage densities near that of nuclear reactions, and practical energy densities from some of their earlier designs which still put chemical fuels to shame. I don't want to go into the things that they haven't published about yet (although they're really, really cool!), but if you want to see some of their older work, look up "digital quantum batteries".

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[dsouza42]

I'm guessing even if your house isn't wired for that it wouldn't be a problem. Usually, when you're home, you tend to stay several hours so you can live with slower charging at home. In practice the fast recharging would mostly be needed when you're away from home and likely available at a service station that is built specifically for that.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Rei]

If all vehicle transportation energy shifted to electric, it'd increase our production needs by roughly half. This is well less than our current surplus capacity which is designed to cancel out day/night differences, so if it was predominantly at night, it'd barely be noticed. So needless to say, power companies are hugely on board with this -- extra sales with little new infrastructure. Their main concern, the thing they need to deal with, is "last leg" delivery. Some of the smaller neighborhood substations may not be able to handle the extra charging at peak charging times and will need to be upgraded. But this is no big deal; it's just something that needs to be monitored and dealt with as necessary.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Belial6]

You are misinformed. The use of "average" is useless in the calculation. The average is calculated using the $0.12 "baseline" rate, as well as the "$0.38" above "baseline" usage. The thing is, that every kwh that you add to your bill by adding a car is going to be chaged at the high rate. The lowest rate offered here is $0.12. You only get that rate for the first 387 kwh a month that you use. At the 388th kwh, the rate goes to $0.14. that rate only last for another 113kwhs. At the 501st kwh the rate over doubles to $0.28kwh, and at 757kwh, the rate goes to $0.33kwh. The rate continues to jump at about every 100 kwhs to $.38 and $0.42. The highest I have had personally is $0.42, so I don't know if the rates rise forever, but our rates for additional electricity isn't even close to $0.10kwh, or even $0.20kwh.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Rei]

I've watched a layer nanometers thick charge up to over 50V and discharge with a loud, bright spark when it finally arced. What's being worked on in the laboratories right now is damned impressive.

Also, an 80kWh pack will take a Prius-like vehicle about 300 miles if you don't drive too fast.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Rei]

What are you trying to prove, except for the fact that you pay absurd rates for electricity, several times more than most Americans pay?

I pay 8.5 cents per kWh for each incremental kWh.

The US national average for residential electricity, all buys together, is now up to 11.04 cents per kWh. That's residential; commercial and especially industrial are even cheaper (industrial is 6.59 cents per kilowatt hour).

Sorry to have to tell you that you're getting ripped off.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Smidge204]

We estimated that a car driven 100 km uses about 80 kWh of energy.

Your cited website is entirely bogus for this discussion since it applies only to gasoline powered vehicles.

80 kWh/100km translates to 0.75 mi/kWh. This is absurd for electric vehicles - if a modern EV gets less than 3.0 mi/kWh it's either a pile of shitty engineering or you're driving it on a drag strip. Hell, even on a drag strip you'd probably get better than that.

In reality you're looking at about 20kWh/100km, which is consistent with real-world driving experiences as reported by Nissan Leaf owners. ~120-240kW. That's still way too much power for untrained personnel to be handling, and certainly more than any typical household service could provide... but still, your numbers are way off.
=Smidge=

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[c 0xFF]

You must have had a deprived childhood.

--
U..u..U - Uncle Ubb's umbrella and his underwear, too!

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Black Gold Alchemist]

The main issue with public transportation energy efficiency is occupancy. Trains and buses in a "walk-on" schedule are not guaranteed to be fully occupied. Airlines and highspeed rail operators manage demand so that trains and planes are often up to 70% occupied. However, walk-on buses and trains often have under 20% occupancy. What this means is that cars do a lot better except in rare, properly-managed, high-density scenarios. Here in the USA, outside of a few urban areas, such San Francisco and New York, there simply are not the densities needed for successful public transport operation. In these cases, the automobile (and motorcycle) are actually more efficient because of occupancy.

Case in point. A 55 passenger advanced hybrid passenger bus gets 5.5 MPG city. With all seats full, it gets 300 pMPG, which is really good. But, this almost never happens. Why? Because the average number of people on a bus in the USA is 9 (UK is 10). What that means is that the bus gets 55 MPG. A Prius with one driver gets 50 MPG, which is similar. A Prius with 5 people packed in gets 250 pMPG, similar to the bus (I'm sure the Prius would do better if it was a diesel hybrid).

In a suburb, or in a rural area (like most of the US!), most of the trains would be empty. Rail also has very high costs (much higher than building a road and running the cars) associated with it if it cannot be fully utilized. Should people live in suburbs in rural areas or should they give them up and live in a city because of transportation efficiency? That's a different question. What we do know is that cars are the best way to deal with suburbs and rural areas, and buses are a necessity for those who cannot afford to own cars or cannot drive cars because of disability. In the future, if robotic cars become a reality, we can have robo-taxis instead of buses for the disabled.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[mikehunt]

Actually, I was thinking of charging my Tesla Model S with the long-range (85KW/h) battery pack in 15 minutes...

Some 1,500 Amps at 220V!!!

Personal sub-stations anyone?

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Princeofcups]

I apologize in advance for my lack of electrical knowledge. But would anything resembling modern standard household wiring even be able to handle that?

Silly person. No one is going to power up your house for charging. That will be set up at your local charge station, owned by BP or some other large corporation, where you will pay with a credit card to charge up your car in about 3 minutes for approximately $40 per charge. You can also pick up some snacks while you are there.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[russotto]

Nothing resembling modern standard industrial wiring will handle that.

Not so; it's only in the megawatt range. Just head down to the local aluminum smelter to see wiring easily capable of that.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[shadowfaxcrx]

The problem will be that a lot of homeowners are dumb. In my college days when I worked for an electrician I saw all sorts of stupid crap. Frayed extension cords either left as-is, or in one great case, "fixed" with scotch tape. Tines from a fork used as the end of an extension cord after the original end had broken off. Cords pinched in doorways, stretched across swimming pools, plugged in to the wall, nothing plugged into the end, and sitting outside in a snowbank, all sorts of really stupid crap. The reason people doing stupid stuff like this didn't kill them was partially luck and partially that 120V/15A isn't all that much, and so when something went wrong the breaker tripped before someone got killed.

Throw all that out the window if you're trying to suck enough power to charge a whole car in a few minutes. Forget the cost, forget the unwieldy wiring, forget everything except basic safety. The general rule of thumb for product safety is that if people can do something dumb with it, they will. Hence the dumb warning labels on everything. I guarantee that even if you solve the cooling problems and the flex problems and the money problems, some idiot will fray his charging cable, or make it longer by duct taping extension cords to it, or try to run his Christmas lights off of it, or in some other way do something incredibly stupid, and off himself. And while that might be good for the human gene pool, the resulting product liability suit will bankrupt the company that made the charging equipment.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Geminii]

Or you'd have something in the garage which trickle-charged overnight and on weekends. (Induction chargers would be fun; you wouldn't need to remember to plug them in.) Even if you were burning through the entire range of the car every day, ten amps would be enough, and if you weren't, you could get away with proportionally less.

I suspect that people will use a combination of garage chargers and top-ups from public chargers at first, until the grid and fledgling garage charger industry adjust to swing things more that way and the electric vehicles start needing even less juice.

What could be interesting is it might boost interest in solar panels for charging - solar patches on cars, garages, houses, and car parks. This in turn could increase demand and interest in solar technology. It might also be interesting to insulate cars and put a thermocouple between inside and outside to harness the thermal effects of being parked in the sun.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[linuxpyro]

More likely, you'd pull up to a charging station that has a big industrial feed at a higher voltage so that you don't need a copper wire the size of your arm.

This. This sort of technology would be great for the "gas station" type of scenario, but in a general scenario without too much evening driving, as long as you remember to plug the car in when you're done with it for the day, you're good. No need necessarily to have it charged that quick and then just sit there for the night.

Also, I'm not sure how this new approach affects the battery's lifespan, but in general batteries last slightly longer if you don't charge them as quick. In other words, if most of your charges are slow charges as opposed to a fast one, the pack will probably last longer as opposed to having all fast charges. The quick option would still be great to have though.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the inevitable solution, I think. Hydrogen "batteries" that hook up to a fuel cell and convert hydrgen to water and back again in a closed system. You can swap them entirely at a fueling station, or slow-charge them at home. In a controlled environment, water could be extracted and replaced with hyrdogen, allowing mass production of hydrogen directly at power plants, to avoid transmission losses.

Last time I checked, electroloysis was very effecient when employing nanotechnology to dramatically increase the surface area of the electrodes.

Generate the power in a breeder reactor in a remote location. Carbon neutral and as green as we'll get in the next 50 years.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[lgw]

Yep, if the car were designed for it (as I said, you'd need powered mechanical aid). Sliding a battery pack alog a low-friction ramp into a charger, then sliding the charged pack anoung the same ramp into the car (both with the aid of the electric winch built into the charger), where locking it in place is mechanically part of making the power comections.

If all the parts were made by the same manufacturer, this would all be easy, and likely cheaper than the second battery pack. Standardizing across manufacturers would be hard, of course.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Rei]

Changing a battery pack is like changing your car's frame. Only that if you wear down the connections between frame parts, you don't get arcing, melting, and fire.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Belial6]

The context of this thread is the cost of running electric cars vs. gasoline cars. I added my costs on the two to the conversation which is relevant to the conversation. You claimed that my statement was incorrect. You did so by making a non-sequitur comment about the AVERAGE cost, which has nothing to do with the conversation, as no one in California would be paying the AVERAGE cost to charge an electric car.

So, what am I trying to prove? Just that my pertinent statement is correct.

My question is what are YOU trying to prove by lying? I initially assumed you were just not thinking about what you were saying when you commented on Average price of electricity in CA, but given that your mistake was pointed out, and you follow that up by implying that the correction isn't a valid comment, one can only assume that you are intentionally lying.

So, again, what are YOU trying to prove?

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[somerandomdude]

It would be bigger than a 200 amp service to a house. Fast charging batteries are great, but a simple system with standardized battery packs to allow battery packs to be swapped out at a "charging station" by a robot, and exchanged for a charged one would also solve the issue of getting cars back on the road within minutes. Pull up, a robot pulls the pack out of the back of your car, places it in a rack, and puts a fresh battery in your car. Total time, 1-2 minutes. Then, the discharged battery is charged overnight at the station, and is ready the next day. Batteries as a service. Much like renting DVDs. And it solves the "I don't want to own or maintain an expensive battery pack in my electric vehicle" problem as well. The cost of the battery wear is included in the cost of paying for a charged battery pack each time. Seems simple to me.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[lgw]

But it doesn't have to be, is the point. The battery pack can be a self-contained rectangle with connection points for the DC power leads. The problem can be broken down into:

- How to shift the heavy weight to and form the car safely.
- How to reliably secure the heavy weight (so that it can't shitf while driving) each time it's swapped.
- How to safely connect/disconnect the power coupling (low DC voltage, with no power draw at the time it's (dis)connected).

None of these are new or hard problems, aside from the very real difficuty of industrial standards.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[robot256]

You misunderstand. The capacitors will be in oil-drum-sized containers beneath the filling station, and they will provide the power to charge the car's chemical battery. The goal is to charge the car in a matter of minutes or seconds (dictated by the battery chemistry) without demanding huge load transients directly from the power grid. Capacitors were chosen because they can provide thousands or millions of charge/discharge cycles at very high currents with very little maintenance. The investment cost will be offset by the near-constant use in a public facility.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Guspaz]

That's funny, I could have sworn my furnace was hooked up to a pair of 25 Amp service breakers. Here, let me check ... Yep, sure 'nuff my furnace can draw up to 50 Amps right off my grid. I know some only using 40. It wouldn't take much to run 500 Amp service like that or more.

The trick is in how you set up your battery array in the vehicle, and the charging coupling. Instead of using one big 0000 cable, you run multiple 20, 30, 40, 50 amp cables. Those cables could connect to a single "connector", while still maintaining isolation. You then charge in parallel with each wire drawing no more than the amp rating, and the battery charging happens spread out over the array, in parallel. No big super hot cables or coupling devices.

This is not rocket science people. It just requires the right design on the part of the people making the cars. Drawing power from multiple smaller cables is the logical home choice.

The "multiple cables" thing is largely transparent to the user, because they'd all be in a single sheath anyhow. Nor would a charger require multiple cables in order to tap in to multiple circuits.

Instead of one big 80kWh battery, use twelve 7kWh batteries, or 24 3.4kWh batteries.

Nobody makes an 80kWh battery (or at least, if somebody does, they're rather rare). Battery packs are made up of many battery cells. The Nissan Leaf's 24 kWh battery pack is made up of 48 blocks of 4 cells, or 192 battery cells in total.

Sure even then you won't be able to hook up and charge in 5-10 minutes. But my AC draws 3.5kWh, and my furnace draws at least twice that. So with either of the two later scenarios of batteries, I could charge a car in an hour. The time it takes me to make and eat dinner.

Your math doesn't hold up here. If your furnace draws 7 kW (I assume you don't actually mean 7 kWh, since that doesn't make sense), and you charged a Nissan Leaf at that rate, it'd take you ~4 hours to charge it assuming unrealistically high efficiency. If you took the hypothetical 80 kWh car that seems to be under discussion here, it'd take you ~12 hours, again assuming unrealistic efficiency.

Lastly, on capacity, I rarely ever drive more than 2-3 hours without refueling. While stopping every hour would be an inconvenience, doubling that would have almost zero impact on most people's driving habits. So, being able to get 250-300 mile range on a charge is plenty of capacity. There was one commercial EV that had that capacity, until they pulled it from they market. So it's doable.

I don't know about you, but I value being able to drive from Montreal to Toronto in 5 hours without stopping. Sure, it's not a big deal to stop halfway there, but it's nice to have the option not to. The Nissan Leaf's 24 kWh battery back gets you roughly 100KM of capacity. Driving to Toronto, you'd have to stop five times (about once an hour) to refuel, with an estimated charge time of 30 minutes using a fast charger (which actually only gets you to 80%, but let's ignore that). Even if you could get that down to 5 minutes, that's still a waste.

EVs are really neat, and they can certainly replace cars for many driving needs, but I figure it'll be at least 10-20 years before battery technology is sufficiently advanced to replace them for all purposes. Look at the 2009 Toyota Yaris. The EPA rates it at 6.5L/100km, and it has a 42 litre tank. That means you can go 646KM on a single tank. So we're not quite there yet. The Tesla Model S claims future "larger battery packs" that will do 480KM, which is very nearly there, but the cost (of the model S and the extra large battery pack) and weight of that are not necessarily practical yet. So give it 10-20 years, and that sort of range in an EV should be affordable.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[dzimney]

Yeah. Better to keep things the way they are. Innovation never helped anyone anyway.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[dzimney]

Rescaling, the figures become 0.5 to 1.0 MW. That's a highly non-trivial amount of power to transfer electrically. Not something that's going to be done in the home.

I doubt this is intended for home use. The idea being that charging on the road is difficult, while it's easy to charge a vehicle at home overnight.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[mob)barley]

While that was an interesting point, the most memorable part is your quote. That triggered a bellowing guffaw.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[bill_mcgonigle]

There you go. It seems odd that people think fueling at home is a requirement for electric. Fueling at home is a benefit, sure, but if fueling stations can charge your electric car as fast as they can fuel your gas car, you have reached parity on convenience.

The barrier isn't even that high.

I expect this will be a concession service, like those 75 cent air pumps at gas stations or the Blue Rhino propane tank rentals at big-box stores.

A business (say a restaurant) signs a deal with a concession company to maintain charging stations on its premises for some cut, maybe 1/3 or profits. The concession company takes care of all of the infrastructure and payment.

The customer, parks his car at the restaurant, plugs in, either runs his credit card, or more likely something like EZPass gets in on the action as a payment processor, or a cell phone is bumped - whatever - and the customer then goes to eat dinner. When he's done, he unplugs at whatever level of charge he's got in that time. Give it a few years, the cars will automatically dock and exchange billing information.

The kinds of workplaces that have juice bars for their employees will have charging stations as well. You just always charge at work, rarely elsewhere.

In short, you don't need a very-quick-charge battery to replace gas-station fuelings, because going somewhere special to fuel your vehicle will become a cute anachronism of the 20th/21st centuries.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[mr_mischief]

Another option is a charging rail or inductive loop in the roads, but that doesn't seem at all practical. The car ferry replaces the need to rent an unfamiliar car at the far end, move all your bags from car to train to car, pay for parking your car at the train station, and plan ahead for the rental. It's a great option I've also been pushing for years, including to that silly White House "give us your ideas" website Obama had published when he first took office.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the hassle I had just getting a 220-volt outlet to power my dryer installed at my house, I'd hate to think what the electrician is going to say when I tell him I want an outlet that can deliver enough power to drive my car 100 miles--and deliver it in just a few minutes. Poor bastard is going to have a heart attack.

I apologize in advance for my lack of electrical knowledge. But would anything resembling modern standard household wiring even be able to handle that?

The answer is 370 Volt 3-phase in every home, just like in The Netherlands. Look at all the electricity this can save by switching most or all household motors to 3-phase.

Henry Keultjes
Microdyne Company
Mansfield Ohio USA

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[MightyYar]

Also, I'm not sure how this new approach affects the battery's lifespan

For what it's worth, the Nissan Leaf has a 100 A DC plug that lets you get the battery to 80% in 30 minutes. They warn that the pack will not last as long if this is used.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[mr_mischief]

If you're using more than 35 or 40 horsepower to maintain cruising speed, you're doing something wrong or your minivan is especially broken. You use your torque mostly in low-end acceleration and your horsepower mostly in high-end acceleration. Many smaller cars require half of that to maintain speed once it's achieved, even with heavy steel frames and inefficiencies in planetary gearboxes, transaxles, and rear ends differentials. Your horsepower, unless otherwise stated, is at the engine crank for one thing. Electrics can drive the wheels directly without a clutch, gearbox, transaxle, and another set of gears.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

The far greater threat is the if the core of the planet stopped, anyways.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[MightyYar]

It might also be interesting to insulate cars and put a thermocouple between inside and outside to harness the thermal effects of being parked in the sun.

I don't think thermocouples would work... they are only like 5% efficient. A sterling engine? :)

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[mr_mischief]

You don't even need anything particularly special to produce diesel fuel. A few filters and readily available chemicals to treat some vegetable, grain, or nut oils is all it takes. Just don't drink the lye. ;-)

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[mr_mischief]

One option is to use household current (including alt sources like wind and solar) to do electrolysis on water and have a hydrogen fuel-cell car. That way you get to have electric drive and fast fill without dumping high voltages across a charger. There's a little more household infrastructure for the storage tanks and such, and hydrogen fuel cell cars are rarer than plug-ins even though both are around.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[mr_mischief]

Getting that sort of service into every home is going to do wonders for utility capacity planners. They'll be heavily recruited millionaires in no time.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am not familiar with materials found in the home that can provide safe, reliable, tamper-proof thermal isolation from grasping a cable / connector package that is glowing hot."

I just use a condom.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can run a 50 amp circuit with romex (some stove outlets), which should give you 2/3rds more power (5/3 total) than a 30 amp circuit. (3 wires) If it was a new home that had three phase power (unlikely, but possible) you could get 50% more power on a total of 4 wires for a total of (5/3)*(3/2) = 2.5 times as much power as a standard 30 amp outlet. (3 hot, 1 ground). Incidentally, household wiring to a stove is typically 4 conductor, although in that case there is also a neutral, which is not needed here. The biggest issue here is making sure the car is not drawing power when you unplug it, but at any rate, wiring such a connection would not be any more difficult than wiring a stove outlet. Of course, I would likely limit things somewhere around there, since if the wires get any bigger they become challenging to plug and unplug. For that matter, stove plugs are not that easy. I also don't see upping the voltage between any two wires above the 240 we typically see. It just gets too dangerous for consumers, although I do kind of wish three phase was commonly available since some large users of electricity like heating and cooling are simpler, and potentially slightly more efficient.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[danomac]

Nah, every other house will have them spin in the opposite direction.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[trentblase]

jigga what? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frIA7tuBqqY)

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Eclipse-now]

If we all spin them with the planet, then maybe we can speed the planet up! I've had it with 24 hours, let's see if we can cut it back to 23! ;-)

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[celtic_hackr]

The problem here is you are using oranges to compare with apple. Most of the EVs on the market are hybrids., Tesla excepted. Secondly everyone always wants to compare the weight of a EV with the dry weight of a gasoline powered car. The gasoline actually weighs something though and some people keep their tanks full. The weight of all that gasoline and the gas engine are significant. If you remove the gas and the gas engine from the Chevy Volt you could gill up that space with batteries and wind up with an EV with many times the original capacity and a comparable weight. The Tesla is an anomaly, it's a sports car. I'm betting the Toyota Yaris isn't a sports car. I doubt you'd bet much range from a Maserati. While you may like driving 5 hours straight, and I've done more than twice that, most people stop every two to three hours for a break or whatever. Any fuel stop is likely to take several minutes. I know it takes me at least three minutes to fill my tank. I timed it once. Five minutes to charge an EV is not going to be noticeable to most people.

I didn't say I have a 7kW furnace. I have a 48,000 BTU furnace, roughly 14kW, connect to a 60A (I was wrong the twin breakers are 30A not 25A) 240V (14.4kW) service connection. I'd be surprised if my furnace ever pulled 14kWh, but it could conceivably. It might be hotter than Hell in the house if it did.

Nor did I say that I would use a single 3.5-7kW connection, in fact that was my whole point use many smaller circuits rather than one large one.

I was merely stating my existing wiring for AC and for heat can draw those amounts from a single connection existing standard home wiring scheme. Using that as a basis for determining the wiring needs, I could install ten 30 Amp, 220V circuits in a new box giving me a 600 Amp service box producing 13.2kW of charging power. That would charge a Chevy Volt, 12kWh battery in an hour. Nope, nothing wrong with my math. I simply didn't give my math. Just an overview.

The reason batteries are not affordable is because of patents.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many of you have a Gas-pump at home?

This makes a lot of sense to use the same way as ordinary fuel pumps. If they can just get 2h drive on a ~5 min charge the EVs would be highly competitive.

I have a volvo bifuel with a 20m gas-tank. I get about 250km per filling. Thats 2.5-3h on highway. And with some of the old charge station it can take up to 5 minutes to fill the car. I think thats perfectly fine to do a leg stretch every 2h if you can spare the environment and pay a lot less for driving.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

if you don't know anyrhing about electricity, how then can you make such a sweeping statement? Anything is possible in this days and if it is not yet then it will soon be! Cheers and have good day>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Smidge204]

The Volt's battery pack takes up the space under the rear seat as well as the "hump" down the middle of the vehicle. If you strip out the ICE and gas tank, and sacrifice what little there is of the cargo space, you might be able to squeeze two more of similar capacity into the vehicle.

Part of the problem is the Volt's battery pack is thermally managed, which adds considerably to the volume. Another part of the problem is the Volt is shitty as an EV to begin with (likely because it was designed to be a series hybrid, not an electric vehicle).

In short, no; a ~250 mile all-electric range is NOT doable with a Volt. It's doable with EVs in general, like with the Tesla Roadster, but not the Volt.
=Smidge=

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Smidge204]

That's where it makes the most sense to do it, though.

If charging from a 120V outlet, you'll probably get 2-3 miles worth of charge every hour. So it makes sense that you would charge during the times you aren't using the vehicle... which, for most people, would be overnight at home.

End point charging is a crucial difference in habit that a lot of anti-EV people have difficulty grasping. The notion that everyone will always be using dedicated, commercial recharging facilities as they do gas stations is absurd - there may be a market for such facilities, but they would be rarely used by any one individual.
=Smidge=

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Designing the battery pack like that makes designing the rest of the car harder. If you don't have to worry about removing the battery then you can spread it's weight around the car, putting battery cells where useful to help the weight balance, you can also fit them in parts of the car where there would otherwise be wasted space. Asking a car designer to make something as big and heavy as the battery pack easily replaceable is like asking them to swim with both hands tied behind their backs. It can be done, but makes it a lot harder.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Neil Boekend]

The Loremo EV uses 6 kWh per 100 km. Of course this is a factory estimate, so you should double that for real world, but you'd have to mishandle it a lot to get to 80.
6 kWh in 5 minutes is 72 kW. My power outlets (three phase) are 480 V, so that would mean 150 A. Still a lot, not something my home could handle, but you wouldn't charge it high speed at home. You'd go to a "gas" station, conveniently positioned at a crossing between power lines and highways, with a large capacitor bank. At home you'd use a slow system: There is no reason I couldn't draw 3x 25A at 480V at night (when electricity is cheaper). This would charge the banks in 2 hours. Most houses in NL have 3x 16A readily available. This would charge it in 3.125 hours.

Slightly offtopic: Has anyone a clue as to what happened to Loremo? Their site seems offline and the last I heard was they needed investors. Is it a (long running) scam?

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Guspaz]

The problem here is you are using oranges to compare with apple. Most of the EVs on the market are hybrids., Tesla excepted. Secondly everyone always wants to compare the weight of a EV with the dry weight of a gasoline powered car. The gasoline actually weighs something though and some people keep their tanks full. The weight of all that gasoline and the gas engine are significant. If you remove the gas and the gas engine from the Chevy Volt you could gill up that space with batteries and wind up with an EV with many times the original capacity and a comparable weight.

I never mentioned any hybrids, so I don't know why you think it's an "apples to oranges" thing. All I've mentioned is pure EVs and gasoline cars. I'm not sure where you're going with this. The Leaf's 24 kWh battery pack weighs 300kg, giving the car a dry weight of 1521kg. Compare this to the Yaris, a similar sized car, which is 1048kg. The Leaf is already a very heavy car for its size, there isn't terribly much headroom to cram more batteries in there. Tesla's approach in their upcoming cars is to use lithium ion cells that are a lot further ahead on the capacity curve.

The Tesla is an anomaly, it's a sports car. I'm betting the Toyota Yaris isn't a sports car. I doubt you'd bet much range from a Maserati.

No, it's not. The Tesla Model S is a full-sized four-door sedan. Should I be comparing a sedan to a compact? Maybe not, but since the Tesla Model S and the Nissan Leaf are the only two large-scale series production EVs between $30k and 60k expected to be on the market any time soon, to my knowledge, I think it's pretty relevant. The Model S is 1735kg with a 42 kWh battery capacity, which is pretty impressive considering it's not a compact.

I believe you're thinking of the Tesla Roadster, which is a completely different car.

While you may like driving 5 hours straight, and I've done more than twice that, most people stop every two to three hours for a break or whatever. Any fuel stop is likely to take several minutes. I know it takes me at least three minutes to fill my tank. I timed it once. Five minutes to charge an EV is not going to be noticeable to most people.

Sure. But the Nissan Leaf isn't going to be able to drive 2-3 hours at 100-120 KM/h. It'll probably do that for about one hour. The Tesla Model S should be able to do 2-3 hours at that speed, possibly with one of the optional higher capacity batteries, although the Model S does cost about $20k more than the Leaf. The Tesla car after the model S is expected to hit that sub-$30k pricepoint, and if it has the same capacity, it might be the first EV to cost $30k or less that can drive 200-300KM, but it won't be out for years. Which sort of goes to reinforce my primary point: EVs aren't ready to replace cars in every use-case.

I didn't say I have a 7kW furnace.

But my AC draws 3.5kWh, and my furnace draws at least twice that.

3.5 x 2 = 7

I have a 48,000 BTU furnace, roughly 14kW, connect to a 60A (I was wrong the twin breakers are 30A not 25A) 240V (14.4kW) service connection. I'd be surprised if my furnace ever pulled 14kWh, but it could conceivably.

A kilowatt and a kilowatt hour are two different things. You appear to be using them interchangeably. Regardless, your point that you can do more than 240*30 in a home environment is taken, although it doesn't necessarily change the problem of charging long-range EVs, which even at 240*60 would still require five or six hours to charge.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[badkarmadayaccount]

s/violence/XML/

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[badkarmadayaccount]

A well designed flywheel is much safer.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[badkarmadayaccount]

And that is where the stickers come in: as legal disclaimers.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

No problem; gas stations just need to install nuclear power plants.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fast charge stations use much higher voltages so that you don't need so much current.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[shadowfaxcrx]

Yeah, you'd think. But stickers only work if it's obvious that you shouldn't do something, and to be obvious it usually has to be something of general experience to a large swath of the public. As an extreme example, if I sold you a nuclear reactor, putting a "Do not allow this to melt down" sticker on it wouldn't protect me from liability if you screwed up and had a meltdown.

The trouble with a power cable carrying that much juice is that the average person who is not a lineman for the power company has never dealt with anything approaching that much power before, and so even if you put a bevy of stickers on it, they might hurt themselves just handling it, and then you'd get sued.

Also keep in mind that lawsuits do not have to be successful to sink a company. In addition to the negative publicity they generate, just mounting a defense against them is prohibitively expensive and can bankrupt otherwise financially sound companies.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[jwhitener]

Or if car manufacturers could standardize on battery packaging and connectors, you could pull into a 'battery swap' station and an attendant could hoist out your battery pack(s) and put in freshly charged ones ~5-10min.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Low Ranked Craig]

I'm all for that.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[drinkypoo]

Nothing resembling modern standard industrial wiring will handle that.

Not so; it's only in the megawatt range. Just head down to the local aluminum smelter to see wiring easily capable of that.

If you go rent a building in a business park you are not going to have that kind of connection to deal with. Only a higher-grade connection can do that. Hence, not standard industrial wiring. I forgot this was slashdot and I have to be SuperPedant(tm).

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[drinkypoo]

My mini-van has a 200 horsepower moter. I believe it gets that at 5000rpm (might be 4000 or 6000). Normal driving is at 2500rpm. This is about 50 percent of 200 hp which is 100hp.

STOP RIGHT THERE. Your math is probably fine but your logic is total bullshit. Your vehicle is capable of making peak power at a given RPM. It doesn't do that unless you mash the throttle, and the stars are aligned — it is likely that your vehicle will never make its peak published power numbers in actual driving because those numbers are based on cold, moist air and perfect fuel from Chevron that is better than anything they ever deliver to the pump. Fuel consumption is based on engine load. In a fuel injected gasser you control the throttle butterfly valve (if that) and the PCM figures out how much fuel to deliver based on the output of the O2 sensor thermocouple.

While cruising on the freeway a sedan uses maybe 25 HP if all is well. Your minivan might use 35 due to wind resistance. My F250 might use 50 but only over 65. Aerodynamic losses tend to mount up over about 55 or 60 mph for anything roughly the size and shape of a vehicle.

You're still right about "trickle" charging (not a trickle for your circuit) or overnight charging, of course. But your math is based on nonsense.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[drinkypoo]

One option is to use household current (including alt sources like wind and solar) to do electrolysis on water and have a hydrogen fuel-cell car. That way you get to have electric drive and fast fill without dumping high voltages across a charger. There's a little more household infrastructure for the storage tanks and such, and hydrogen fuel cell cars are rarer than plug-ins even though both are around.

That's a TERRIBLE idea. Hydrogen has even worse energy density than a good battery, in order to store it at even that density you need a heinously expensive storage tank. When you burn the hydrogen you have to use [relatively] exotic alloys to avoid hydrogen embrittlement. Nothing in your house runs on hydrogen, but a storage battery for your car could also be a UPS. A hydrogen leak in your garage would be a serious problem. Hydrogen fuel cells are perpetually ten years away from practicality. Hydrogen fits into our energy landscape in exactly one place; currently we make hydrogen from natural gas in an energy-intensive process, and we could be using our excess base load from power plants which cannot be spun down at night to make hydrogen during those hours. I imagine it is only not happening now because of entrenched interests which produce hydrogen from natural gas today. Hydrogen is necessary for a variety of tasks including some types of welding so there is a need for it, it simply makes zero sense to use it in cars.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[drinkypoo]

A car ferry also requires at least an order of magnitude more fuel than a ferry for the people that go in those cars. What we need is functional public transportation in congested areas so that you can meaningfully avoid driving into them.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[badkarmadayaccount]

And that is why before purchase of such dangerous equipment, the customer signs away all rights to complain if he screws up in a long and precise legal document, providing effective estopel, making sure that any idiots with a chip on their shoulder won't even get to court, and might even be sued for slander, netting a nice top-off for the profit.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[mr_mischief]

Fuck congested areas. It's easy to solve the mass transit problem for high-density areas. How are you going to run a train or bus around a town of 30,000 or smaller and make that economically feasible? People don't only travel to big cities.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[mr_mischief]

There are plenty of things around your house that could run on hydrogen. It's a decent heating and cooking fuel. It's safer to have a 50-gallon tank of hydrogen in your house you can recharge nightly rather than a 1500 gallon tank of liquified petroleum gas sitting just outside it, filled twice a year by truck.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Shotgun]

I agree, drinkypoo. 100% and without reservation.

However...

It don't matter how efficient the train is if people find it so damn inconvenient that they refuse to ride it. People in big cities like to toute how efficient their trains are, because the area they live in is so congested that the cars are inconvenient. Everything they need is within a short walking distance, and moving a car through a congested city is a PITA. I know when I get a speeding ticket, I don't think "Oh crap, I gotta pay $120". I think, "Oh crap, I gotta drive downtown to deal with this crap."

People in big cities also have the convenience of the trains running around the clock. If I decided to take the bus, I have to plan my life out for a stop every two hours, at least a mile walk on each end, and the last bus leaves work at 5:30. Sorry, but I'd rather drive.

Get out of the city center and your vehicle becomes an extension of you. Everything interesting you will want to do involves your car, and you become unaccustomed to the smell of the pissed stained homeless drunk in the next seat. People (at least in the US) like their freedom to move at will, and won't give it up easily.

The car ferry is a compromise on what we have to work with. People are allowed to stay mobile, but at the same time move to a more efficient mode of transportation than what we have now.

And...

[Quiet_Desperation]

Six months from now no one will remember these, along with all the other "revolutions" in battery tech.

Me? Cynical? Not nearly enough, actually.

Re:And...

[somersault]

Final nail in the coffin? If anything, I now have more faith in nuclear power. Previously, I didn't even consider what would happen if one were hit by an earthquake, but I think they've done pretty well compared to, for an obvious example, Chernobyl. Future designs will only make things even safer.

Re:And...

[Hartree]

It's incremental progress. Right now nanomaterials for power applications are a hot topic.

But I'd give Braun more chance than some at actually turning up something that'll make it into use.

(Disclaimer: I'm biased. He's an affiliate professor in the deparment I work in.)

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

The media (mostly American) injects FUD for hype and ratings. The uninformed public gets scared shitless, and thus the politicians fall in line. Politically, nuclear is DEAD!

Re:And...

[Chris Burke]

An huge earthquake, then a huge tsunami. And hell, past designs (just more recent than the damage reactors) would make things safer.

But don't fool yourself. Just because you have more confidence in nuclear power, you better believe most people aren't going to see it that way. The people that already think Three Mile Island proves nuclear is too dangerous are going to see this -- which is indeed worse than TMI -- as ultra-super-undeniable proof that nuclear power will kill us all.

All because -- ONCE AGAIN -- we (human kind) are too cheap and short-sighted to do something expensive today that will avoid a vastly higher expense in the future. Oh sure this old reactor design requires active coolant pumping at all times, but between the reactor itself and the backup diesel generators, we've got that covered! Sure it'd be a disaster if something somehow knocked out all power, like a giant earthquake or a tsunami or something, but what are the odds of that? Fixing the "problem" would cost too much!

Re:And...

[Quiet_Desperation]

Er, did you reply to the correct post?

And, yes, my pants are rather smart. Thank you! :-)

Re:And...

[elrous0]

Solar and Wind is such a drop in the bucket, it's a joke.

But the hippies told me it would work, dammit!

Re:And...

[elrous0]

But I'd give Braun more chance

I'm sorry, but I just don't trust former Nazis.

Re:And...

[hedwards]

Perhaps in the US, but given the greed and incompetence of our politicians it was essentially dead years ago. The governor of WA had to refuse further shipments of nuclear waste to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation until the feds actually cleaned it up. As it was much of the waste was sitting in leaking containers and leaching into the ground water.

We have largely been stuck with it since the Manhattan project back in the 40s as it was the source of the first full scale plutonium reactor in the world.

Re:And...

[rmstar]

More than the earthquake, the danger lies in the cynical and greedy nature of the corporations running these things.

Whether nuclear energy can be safe when done well (and it has to be done really well, it seems, for it to be safe) is besides the point, because it is just not done well in reality, there is no reason to trust those on whom it would depend to do it well to get their act together, and there is no political basis anymore to endow corrupt corporations with such a level of responsibility. Tepco (which ran fukushima) has admitted to falsification of data from the very same reactors that are causing trouble. How this kind of thing is going to play out in the kind of libertarian dystopia the US is trying to convert into - I don't want to even imagine.

Re:And...

[somersault]

Yeah, by "future designs" I guess I meant "future builds". Thankfully in places like Japan they seem to have their heads screwed on slightly better, and so they might be able to lead by example in rebuilding things with the newer convection-based cooling design.

Many people without a sense of perspective will be against it, but thankfully not all places are inhabited by easily panicked morons. It was amazing to read stories and watch videos of how calmly everyone took things in Japan. Compared to the rest of what has just happened to their country, a few cases of radiation poisoning are going to seem like nothing to them.

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I don't trust current idiots.

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, wake me when the other 20 techs that claim the same thing actually come to market.

Re:And...

[khallow]

More than the earthquake, the danger lies in the cynical and greedy nature of the corporations running these things.

Japan has 55 such reactors. If "cynical and greedy natures" are really more dangerous, then you'd see a lot of meltdowns and other horrible accidents stemming from such causes. You don't.

The truth is that this danger is grossly exaggerated by lazy people who can't be bothered either to come up with real arguments or alternatives. Nuclear power happens to be an excellent means for providing base load power. And the corporations have shown themselves capable of running these plants.

Further, I think it's very healthy for the private sector to have real responsibility. It reduces our reliance on government.

How this kind of thing is going to play out in the kind of libertarian dystopia the US is trying to convert into - I don't want to even imagine.

For the last ten years, the US has gone through a progression of clusterfucks with politicians doubling-down on prior bad bets with future idiotic bets (all using OPM). Now that a significant minority is trying to return the US to some semblance of fiscal responsibility, you're complaining about "libertarian dystopia". Here's my suggest, rather than your spineless and infantile hand wringing, how about you STFU until you have an alternative?

Back in 2000, the US was doing pretty good. We didn't need more taxes. If that had continued for another ten years, then libertarianism wouldn't have a chance now. But the ball was dropped in late 2001. Since then, there's been a lot of backsliding. Things have really collapsed since 2008 with deficits well above a trillion dollars for the past three fiscal years. I can't even imagine the level of delusion required to assume that a modest degree of fiscal prudence is a greater danger than the current era of grotesque irresponsibility.

Re:And...

[Quiet_Desperation]

My razor is made by Nazis!!!1!2!!!? Eek! Eek, I say!

Re:And...

[rmstar]

Further, I think it's very healthy for the private sector to have real responsibility. It reduces our reliance on government.

Haha, yes. Like with your banking sector. Nice idea! Give them the power to make whole states inhabitable for decades. How do you call that? A "short idea"?

Get a clue, man.

Re:And...

[mcrbids]

Sitting in front of me is a ground-pounding, fire-breathing Intel Core i7 laptop with 8 GB of RAM and 500 GB of Hard Disk. It alone has more computer processing power than EXISTED worldwide in 1980. Even with those amp-sucking specs, it's able to run for about 2 hours on internal batteries.

Currently, I'm using it to post a message.

These are NiMH batteries which have an insane power density in order to pull this off. Those prototype batteries which were announced 10+ years ago and have been incrementally improved ever since.

I have an LED flash light on my keychain that will run for days on end with nothing more than a couple of watch batteries. I remember when flash lights never lasted more than a few hours, even with "D" batteries. Something the size of my pinky throwing as much clean, white light (or laser!) as my little key chain penlight would have been James Bond material in my youth.

I use this amuse my cat. (Doh!)

The problem with the "revolutionary" technologies is that the changes they wrought are incorporated into our lives and we just stop thinking about the miracle of technology that brings it all about.

Re:And...

[khallow]

Like with your banking sector.

Yes, like that. And your point is?

Give them the power to make whole states inhabitable for decades.

Thanks to private sector, the whole US has been made inhabitable.

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but I just don't trust former Nazis.

not even funny ...

Sure

[Shivetya]

Stretch a cable between two lamp posts, run another cable to the clock tower and then recharge only during thunderstorms.

problem isn't so much power per se

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is peak demand on the supply side. Users expectations for getting fueled up are for a quick stop at the 'fuel' station. Your home garage won't need a dedicated 500Amp service if you are willing to charge all night.

For quick electric fill-ups at home though, some kind of intermediate storage that _can_ be charged all night will be needed to avoid massive peak demands on the power company.

Re:problem isn't so much power per se

[slim]

Surely the approach should be to keep a float of charged batteries at the "gas station". Pull up there, your flat battery is removed, and a full one is inserted in its place. Your flat battery goes to the back of the charging queue. The charging queue absorbs the peaks in demand.

Re:problem isn't so much power per se

[rmstar]

Nice idea. Now what happens when you get a bad battery? Or do you think all those batteries are going to the same quality, capacity, and form factor?

You are probably saying we will all share the batteries. I see more than just one issue with that.

Re:problem isn't so much power per se

[andrewbaldwin]

I've mentioned this before -- you don't need a rapid recharge at service stations if cars were fitted with standard sized batteries - just swap out your flat ones for fully charged units and let the garage charge them up overnight (or whenever power is lower cost in your vicinity).

In effect run your car on giant versions of an AA cell. If the form factor were suitable (with a convenient handle, relatively low weight and idiot-proof one-way-only fitting) then this could be run as a self service system -- customer drops their old battery in a dispenser, swipes their card and a new one pops out -- the dispenser could even route the flat battery to the charger units.

Suppliers can differentiate their products on the basis of capacity and max discharge rates.

Of course you'd either have to mandate standard battery sizes [through an independent organisation] or face each manufacturer making batteries with different form factors (so they can charge more money for them and use patents to stifle competition**) and then waiting for years for market forces to reduce variation.

This development could help the service stations reduce costs if it truly is possible to charge up more batteries in a shorter time.

** Cynical ? me? -- I've just been reading Slashdot for too long

Re:problem isn't so much power per se

[semi-extrinsic]

customer drops their old battery in a dispenser, swipes their card and a new one pops out

Say what? Customer drops old battery in a dispenser? Even if you get battery energy densities as high as for petrol (which would be amazing), you're talking 60-80 kg batteries (or about the weight of a human being). Sure, let me just drop that in the dispenser over there.

Aluminum-air

[McGregorMortis]

That's one of the interesting properties of the aluminum-air battery. The aluminum plates can be replaced quickly and easily. Just pop out the spent plate, drop in a new one, and off you go.

The reaction products (aluminum oxide) can also be captured and recycled into new aluminum.

A nifty idea, but there are assorted problems that have to be solved before it can be practical.

Re:Aluminum-air

[Black Gold Alchemist]

Aluminium also contains 2x as much energy as gasoline by volume.

Re:Aluminum-air

[McGregorMortis]

It feels like the aluminum is being consumed as fuel, like gasoline, but it's not.

Recycling the aluminum oxide back into aluminum is done using the same electrolytic process that is used when smelting aluminum (which is also oxide.)

It requires a great deal of electricity to do it. In that sense, the aluminum is just being used as a storage medium for electrical power, just like a regular battery, and can be expected to put the same kind of burden on the electrical supply.

I don't know how much energy ends up being wasted in this cycle either.

Similarly, hydrogen is best viewed as an energy storage medium, not as a alternative fuel.

Re:Aluminum-air

[Belial6]

People keep making that statement, but could you please explain what fuel ISN'T just a energy storage medium?

Re:Aluminum-air

[nedlohs]

gasoline.

Sure in terms of thermodynamics and chemistry they are all the same, but that isn't the domain being used.

In order to use hydrogen as a fuel in a car we have to make the hydrogen, this requires the same amount of energy as the hydrogen will provide to the car (well a bit more since there'll be losses).

In order to use aluminum as described, we have to make the aluminium, this requires the same amount of energy as the aluminium will provide to the car (well a bit more since there'll be losses).

In order to use gasoline as a fuel, we extract oil from the ground and process it. This takes less energy than the gasoline will provide to the car.

Re:Aluminum-air

[McGregorMortis]

The other difference is that the energy storage medium is reusable or recyclable in some way, whereas burning fuel is a one-way process. We have no practical way to turn the combustion products back into fuel again. Nature can do so, over a long period of time, but we can't.

In the case of hydrogen, we don't typically bother to capture the water vapour to turn back into hydrogen and oxygen. We could do so, but it's easier to just release it into the environment, and grab new water somewhere else.

Re:Aluminum-air

[Geminii]

Could be fun. Pull up to a station, buy a new cylindrical plate/mesh, unlock and pull the old one out of the side of your car, shove the new one in and twist to lock, throw the old one into the recycle bin next to the car, drive off.

You could even carry a spare one in the car itself, if they were small and light enough.

I wonder if it would be possible to lock the reactants into place inside the replaceable cell so that they wouldn't move around after oxidation and could therefore be more easily recharged? Garage power cell rechargers might be an option, then...

Re:Aluminum-air

[Belial6]

OK, you are not saying that there is a difference between fuel and an energy storage, but just that because of our current capabilities, you should view them that way. Fair enough.

Re:Aluminum-air

[nedlohs]

It's not really anything to do with out capabilities. It's whether we get out more energy that we put in. In we don't then it's "storage". If we do it's "fuel".

If we could dug up metallic aluminium (as opposed to oxides) then the suggested thing would be a fuel suddenly. But that's nothing to do with our capabilities that's just what exists on the planet.

In minutes?

[MikeDaSpike]

My phone's battery charges in seconds! ~7200 seconds.

Re:In minutes?

[human spam filter]

On a more serious note, what does "in a few minutes" even mean? You can already charge commercially available lithium polymer batteries in about 15 minutes (4C charge rate). So the actual number of minutes would be nice to know.

'Easy' fix for power

[Baron_Yam]

With rapid charge / discharge, it seems to me that residential installation of these batteries under the control of the power company would be ideal - when the grid is under used, your battery takes up the slack and draws juice to charge. When the grid is over used, your system can either supply local power (like quick charging your car) or supply power back into the local grid.

This would smooth out the power demand at the central generating stations.

Of course, I think we should also have community thorium reactors (and thought so before the recent publicity from the Chinese, BTW). Decentralize the power generation, increase redundancy in the grid.

Re:'Easy' fix for power

[Shotgun]

Great, I get in my car to go to work, and the power company just had to take a generator offline and hour before. I find the battery half depleted. Not enough to get to work.

Thanks, but I'll pass this time.

Re:'Easy' fix for power

[Baron_Yam]

If you install a system in your house that will deplete the battery below the minimum you need... you bought the wrong system.

We should see practical applications

[mekkab]

in 5 to 7 years from now!!

Anything more than 3 years out is a complete WAG.

Still going...

[Onuma]

Think of what this will do to the Energizer Bunny, you insensitive clods!

I thought the main problems were elsewhere

[NtwoO]

It might be caused by a bias in what I read, but I thought the electric vehicle had 2 other more serious problems. The first problem was the resources required in their production. Many of the materials used in EV is causing shortages in these resources. The second problem is that the electricity network is not designed to handle the extra distribution involved in a mass scale up of EVs. Batteries that charge quicker puts more load on the network when for instance people get home on a work day.

Re:I thought the main problems were elsewhere

[h4rr4r]

1. This is just supply lag, it will catch up.
2. Electric companies would love to have EVs. They currently have to do all kinds of fancy tricks to deal with the extra power at night.

Re:I thought the main problems were elsewhere

[Geminii]

Well, it's a shortage in those resources or a shortage in oil. Which one are various countries able to handle better?

The networks can be upgraded, too. And at least it's a centralized problem then. Perhaps it could be at least partially funded from the savings in road wear (tanker trucks and people driving to/from gas stations) and environmental costs?

That's great, but...

[JustAnotherIdiot]

...what's the average lifespan for these batteries?

Re:That's great, but...

[EdgeyEdgey]

and the power/weight ratio?

Natural Gas Vehicles

[corychristison]

I would like to see vehilces manufactaured that run on natural gas. It burns clean with virtually no emissions, and is pretty ubiquitous (some places even have natural gas filling stations - my town of 30K people has one)

Extra points if they would make them plugin hybrids.

Most forklifts run on natural gas or propane and are safe to use indoors because of the lack of harmful emissions.

I know its another natural resource but I think it's a much cleaner alternative to gasoline. The electric grid isn't there yet in terms of rapid charging and the batteries aren't there yet in terms of range for people who go on trips longer than 150km.

So far Tesla's model S is looking pretty promising in terms of the range and all that but is out of reach for most consumers. And there is still the problem of longer trips, if I want to drive 1800km in two days it's just not going to happen. With natural gas it could be possible provided I plan out all of my filling stops but that is up to me.

Re:Natural Gas Vehicles

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean LPG? Here in the Netherlands there are 230,000 people driving such a vehicle (on a total of 8 million).

Re:Natural Gas Vehicles

[Shotgun]

Make a hybrid that runs on NG, and you have the best of both worlds.

Re:Natural Gas Vehicles

[Anonymous Coward]

The Model S is being designed with a modular battery pack that can be swapped out in 5 minutes. Charging stations would swap out your spent battery for an already charged one, then your old one would be charged and passed on to the next guy. In this way, it's no different than replacing the propane tank for your grill.

Re:Natural Gas Vehicles

[Geminii]

If they can work out a quick-charge method, it'll be a lot easier to roll out to absolutely everywhere. All an electrical refuelling station would need would be a capacitor or battery bank. It could be placed anywhere at all which was on the electrical grid, including any place where fuel trucks couldn't necessarily get to and any place which didn't have room for a huge set of underground tanks. You could have recharging stations in car parks (including multistory), in rented vacant lots, in private residences if you really wanted. Moving a gas station from A to B wouldn't involve six months' construction at point B, it would just be a semitrailer forklifting up the capacitors from A, trucking them to B, and dropping them off. One connection to the grid and a cheap modular micro-mart later, and you could be up and running in 24 hours.

A trickle-charge point (every bay in a car park, for example) would be even easier. One power point with retractable cord (and driveaway tension protector), one credit card swipe machine, that's it. You could manufacture and sell drop-in conversion units so carpark operators could convert one bay at a time.

Re:Natural Gas Vehicles

[Em Adespoton]

...and since Natural Gas is just a fancy name for Methane (allbeit with a different smell added), many people in rural areas have a ready-made supply :)

Re:Natural Gas Vehicles

[corychristison]

Lithium Ion has a limit on how many times it can be recharged, as well, if I just bought a new car and went to a battery swap station and got a 3 year old junkie battery, I'd be pretty pissed.

People wont want to swap out a multi-thousand dollar battery pack every few hundred kilometers on long trips. You never know how old of a battery you will end up at home with.

Re:Natural Gas Vehicles

[corychristison]

Rapid recharge is also not a viable solution and wont be attainable for a while. Even if it is, you're looking at hundreds of Amps and really high Voltage, you'll need licensed electricians filling up cars. No more hiring 16 year old students for minimum wage.

As for battery banks and all that, it just doesn't seem viable. You have to get that electricity from somewhere, even coming off the powerlines the amount of power coming from there is not enough to keep up with the power banks. I've seen lineups at current gas stations of 6-8 vehicles per pump, when there is 6-10 pumps available. You'll need a HUGE battery bank, and would require more than a forklift and semi truck to move it (why would you want to move a fuel station, anyway?)

Someone else mentioned a flywheel buried under ground would be the most efficient method for storing huge amounts of electricity, but then you are back to burying things underground. :-)

Here where I live (Saskatchewan, Canada), Propane tanks at fill stations are above ground. The one Natural Gas station we do have in town has a reserve tank similar to the propane tanks, but it is tied right to the Natural Gas grid that goes to all of the homes in the area.

Perhaps I am just thinking that everywhere has natural gas lines? Virtually every home in Canada has a natural gas line coming into the home (with the exception of the few who have Geothermal heating or another alternative, but the number is virtually a fraction of a percent).

Re:Natural Gas Vehicles

[corychristison]

Lucky of you.

Here where I live, the local Natural Gas company (SaskEnergy) has converted most (if not all) work related vehicles to Natural gas.

What I am speaking of is I wish the large North American vehicle Manufacturers would start producing Natural Gas Vehicles for the masses.

Re:Natural Gas Vehicles

[Kakari]

To be a touch US-centric, why not the Honda Civic NGV?

Re:Natural Gas Vehicles

[Anonymous Coward]

Around my parts GPL doesn't stand for a software licence, but for "Liquefied Petrol Gas" (well, the topic is different in Romanian, obviously). Basically natural gas used to run cars.

You can buy the whole kit plus the installation for $300-800, and it runs just fine. My dad had one in his car some 25 years ago, and right now there's plenty of refueling stations. Predictably they're quite popular among taxi drivers, as the fuel price is much lower.

Re:Natural Gas Vehicles

[corychristison]

I live in Canada, and it is not available here, unfortunately.

But yes, I did find that shortly after I posted my comment. Thank you for bringing it up. I think it's a step in the right direction, if they could build a hybrid version I think they could have a real winner, plugin hybrid would be best, but I'd settle for a regen-braking hybrid.

Just put inductors in the roads

[Viol8]

To really get decent performance from electric cars putting induction chargers in the road would be best because the car could drive along and pick up power as it goes and when stopped probably charge its battery just as is proposed for new wireless charging stations.

And before anyone says thing of the disruption - well think of the disruption when new water mains, gas pipes, cable TV is being installed. The induction points would only need to be on main roads and highways , not down every little back street where the cars could run on battery power alone.

Yes it would cost a lot but how much does oil exploration - and cleanup - cost now?

Re:Just put inductors in the roads

[slim]

Don't cross the road if you have a pacemaker.

Re:Just put inductors in the roads

[daid303]

You forgot the step where you added the magic pixie dust to power the induction points. Power still has to come from somewhere, and induction power transfer has a huge loss. Electric cars are only good for the environment when you are more efficient at making and transmitting the power then a car engine. As a large part of the world electricity is still generated by fossil fuels. Also, oil is not just used for gas, it's also used to make tons and tons of other products.

Also, how do you charge the people for charging? Make it free, or fixed fee and people will abuse it.

And cutting loops in roads make the roads wear out faster. Also the induction loops will break because roads expand and contract due to heat/cold and cars breaking on them.

Re:Just put inductors in the roads

[Viol8]

"You forgot the step where you added the magic pixie dust to power the induction points"

What do you think powers the street lights and buildings right next to the road? And the source of that power is not relevant to this discussion.

Also induction might be inefficient but so is charging a battery.

"Also, how do you charge the people for charging?"

Who cares? I'm talking about the technology , now how beaurocrats will charge for its use.

"And cutting loops in roads make the roads wear out faster. Also the induction loops will break because roads expand and contract due to heat/cold and cars breaking on them."

What , like all those traffic light detection loops in the roads? Yeah , I really noticed a huge breakup of roads around those.

Re:Just put inductors in the roads

[Anonymous Coward]

How many pedestrians have you seen crossing highways anyway? :p

Re:Just put inductors in the roads

[slim]

In some countries, we walk sometimes.

Re:Just put inductors in the roads

[Bomazi]

Warning: don't cross the road with remaining heart.

Re:Just put inductors in the roads

[Anonymous Coward]

The fundamental problem with this idea, which is probably physically sound, is this:

Who supplies the power to the roads that charge the cars, how do they collect from the drivers/owners of those cars?

Re:Just put inductors in the roads

[daid303]

"You forgot the step where you added the magic pixie dust to power the induction points"

What do you think powers the street lights and buildings right next to the road? And the source of that power is not relevant to this discussion.

Also induction might be inefficient but so is charging a battery.

Electricity, generated by coal/oil/gas 85% of the time. I don't care how you get the power there. What you should care about is how you get the power, and how efficient you get it there. Because that's how you effect the environment.

"Also, how do you charge the people for charging?"

Who cares? I'm talking about the technology , now how beaurocrats will charge for its use.

Charging for use has little to do with getting money for it. It's about getting money to pay for it, and reducing abuse. Because high abuse effects the environment.

"And cutting loops in roads make the roads wear out faster. Also the induction loops will break because roads expand and contract due to heat/cold and cars breaking on them."

What , like all those traffic light detection loops in the roads? Yeah , I really noticed a huge breakup of roads around those.

Yes, and those effect road quality. And they break. (I work with these things so I might know a thing about loops in the road) For power transfer you would need much much thicker loops then they use for detection, effecting the road quality even more.

Re:Just put inductors in the roads

[Geminii]

Easier to put them in the few yards of road leading up to traffic lights, and in parking spaces. Cars are more likely to be sitting there for minutes or hours, and it won't involve digging up every mile of main road.

Some toll roads might consider putting in linear inductors during construction, but only if they were hugely cheap per mile, didn't leak power to anywhere but cars, and there was a way to track and charge individual vehicles which drew on the power (and a way to deny it to anyone without authorization).

Still, a way to recharge at 80mph, especially on long interstate trips, could be very useful. If only there was a cheap way to do it - tearing up and retrofitting a million miles of highway ain't cheap. It's a pity that there isn't yet a type of road marker paint which could do the job. A strip of transparent, hardwearing, solar-absorbing, inductive-recharging-from-two-feet-away paint down the middle of each lane of blacktop might be just what the doctor ordered.

Re:Just put inductors in the roads

[Smidge204]

Electricity, generated by coal/oil/gas 85% of the time.

Closer to like 66% of the time (total % of electrical power from coal. gas and oil), according to the 2009 LLNL Energy Flow sankey diagram. Been decreasing slowly but steadily for several years now, too. But hey, using Google is much harder than pulling numbers out of your ass I guess...

Tangentially related, "Electric car owners prone to going solar".
=Smidge=

Re:Just put inductors in the roads

[Em Adespoton]

To answer the "making people pay" question... this is actually quite easy for the most part -- make an induction-powered transmitter part of the loop. Your car will be tracked by ID all the time it is using induction points, and the telemetry will be associated with your insurance number and a public key. As a result, every place that provides this service would issue bills for use similar to traffic tickets, and abuse for faking the transmitter ID would be curtailed by the public key. The coils would have to be triggered by the transponder to avoid freeloaders who have modded their kit. The only remaining issue would be the rate at which the user is charged. This could be handled on a per-coil basis by including an activation handshake where you set your own min/max limits on energy pricing for the day/location, or optionally, such data could be transmitted to all the GPS mapping companies, and you could choose your route based on the fees.

Alternatively, the roads could just be toll roads with a minimum speed limit; in order to get on the road, you're billed the price of an average charge along that stretch. You'd get people being ticketed for camping on coils most likely... but that's neither here nor there.

Re:Just put inductors in the roads

[daid303]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_energy_usage_width_chart.svg
There you go, not my ass, wikipedia's ass.

Re:Just put inductors in the roads

[badkarmadayaccount]

Why cover the road - special charging sections, with RFID billing would do the trick. They would be god sent at red lights.

It would cause problems to transfer enough power

[maxm]

The required current would be really high.

But I guess that you could just have an extra battery pack that is charged untill it is full, and then charge the car from that. That would also make solar and wind power better alternatives, as you could store power in cheap periods.

Re:Niggerdicks!

[ginbot462]

Give us more inane babble about bullshit please. And then smoke another one.

Is it really bullshit? I mean, maybe Nelson Rockefeller WAS the first.

Electrons over a wire

[srussia]

For some reason, technologists always overestimate potential throughput.

It might be a good idea never to underestimate the energy transfer capacity of a hose pumping gasoline (into a station wagon, in my case).

Re:Electrons over a wire

[Anonymous Coward]

I think our big, upcoming problem is that we've been overestimating the supply of that gasoline you're talking about.

Re:Electrons over a wire

[srussia]

I think our big, upcoming problem is that we've been overestimating the supply of that gasoline you're talking about.

I know--I made the same mistake about the supply of tapes for my station wagon.

Interchangeable batteries?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe this's been discussed elsewhere already, but wouldn't the best solution with current technology be to use intechangeable batteries?

Imagine having battery modules in your car, that can be easily removed/exchanged. 1 module would be enough to power a scooter, 10 modules for a small car, 20 modules for a sporty SUV. Instead of charging the batteries you'd just drive to your local battery station and pay them to exchange the modules in your car which would take only a few minutes. The battery station would then take the old ones, charge/equalize them as quickly as the curent technology allows and give them to someone else. The battery stations could be virtually anywhere since the electricity distribution is kinda solved already with power lines running almost everywhere.

As the battery technology evolves, you'd get better (more capacity and power output) batteries gradually, the old ones would be discarded or used elsewhere. As long as the voltage remains the same, I can't see why car manufacturers couldn't agree on one format of the battery module and go this way.

Sure, the price for changing the battery module would be higher than charging it yourself (cost of extra batteries the stations would need to keep, maintenance costs, etc.) and you'd probably have to pay more for new batteries with higher capacity, but it's still the most convenient solution to date I can think of.

New approach needed

[low profile]

Why are we not looking at making a standard for a swappable battery? You could then pull into the equivalent of the gas station and swap your near dead battery for a freshly charged one. This fixes 2 problems. 1. range anxiety, I don't want to get stuck waiting 2-4 hours for a charge while I am doing some errands on my way home from work. with a battery swap this would only take 5 minutes 2. sticker shock in a few years when the batteries need replaced and their cost are not being subsidized by the government. Since I would be swapping batteries, battery replacement would be part of the "gas station's" business model.

Re:New approach needed

[jkeelsnc]

THIS IS a good idea. Excellent idea really. It would require stations that could change the battery out jack spratt and on the dime. People aren't going to wait more than about 2 minutes to swap the battery. It can be done. However, you'd have to have one or a very few standard size batteries. One size for small and medium size cars and one for trucks and larger cars. It could be done though. Interesting idea. Obviously you would pay a charge for the replacement battery. The cost of electricity to charge the battery would be part of the price as well as the cost of labor to keep up with them all the time not to mention buying the batteries. There would have to be a national battery exchange program as it is unlikely that only one company or service station system across the country would handle them. The people handling these batteries would have to be licensed and certified for such. You don't want just any DA rolling batteries around. And you want to make sure they know how to connect the batteries correctly and not drop them, etc. One DOWN side I see with this is that it would not likely be a self service installation! You would almost be going back to the model of the full service station to have an attendant "fill up" with a recharged battery. Each station would have the business of keeping up with them. Testing, replacing, inventory, ordering, moving, transporting, distributing, warehousing, etc all of which are pretty well understood. For that matter the stations would be in a good position to deal with the recycling of worn out batteries so that they don't wind up in the bottom of a landfill one day. I could see a business in this. Just don't expect the oil industry to jump right on board! :) There is one fact about this though. It is still not as cheap or as convenient as filling up your own gas tank and jumping back in the car. If they could find a way to do that then maybe. But I don't trust people to be honest with self service battery replacement. Not to plug it in right and to deal with moving batteries, damaged batteries, defective batteries, etc. People that pay a full price for a battery but then the station didn't know it was defective and an argument ensues at the next station over a refund and yet the battery didn't come from the same company that owned the station that installed it last time. Talk about a SERVICE nightmare. Some way would have to be created to deal with his problem. We live in a sea of DA's. :)

Re:New approach needed

[low profile]

Just to keep expanding on this model: - batteries would be certified by some authority and batteries could meter their use. This would prevent arguments about getting a bad battery for the service station. Certification would be via controlled pass/fail test equipment on site. service stations would handle the recycling of expired batteries. since you are exchanging batteries, the cost of new batteries can be amortized over the life of the battery. The hardest parts would be 1) to get car companies to standardize on a small set of battery types. and 2) design a battery compartment that could be both easily accessed for swapping, and securely locked at other times.

Re:New approach needed

[tophermeyer]

A criticism of that approach would be the inherent difficulty of getting a single "standard" that all the big players will agree on. To use America as an example, you will need to create standard that every State Government will agree to with no exceptions. US States can't even agree on consistent guidelines for motor vehicle insurance and regular safety inspections, it will be a tough battle to get them to agree on a standardized battery technology.

Plus, I barely trust the swap process for my BBQ's propane tank. I'm going to have a really hard time accepting that the battery I pick up at Hank's Charge 'n Go in the middle of nowhere has been properly evaluated and is not nearing failure. Most ICE cars will run on bad gas, but a battery failure could straight up destroy my car.

Re:New approach needed

[Smidge204]

http://www.betterplace.com/the-solution-switch-stations

In trial phase in select cities around the world.
=Smidge=

Re:New approach needed

[CyberDragon777]

This seems pretty nice:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHHvjsFm_88

Re:New approach needed

[badkarmadayaccount]

Cheap smart card in the battery controller - tamper-evident, if not tamper-proof casing. Done.

Green Energy

[Bengie]

Would a large bank of these be what's needed for a "smart" grid with fluctuating power levels from green energy like Solar/Wind? Large dump of power on the grid, charge the batteries, wind stops or a cloud and now you need to pull power out of the batteries.

Is there any inferred efficiency with the batteries if they can charge faster? Less resistance so less waste heat? Just asking.

I would see these being useful for hybrid cars. You can dump momentum faster into electrical storage, so the actual breaks get used less.

Still dangerous

[S-100]

Whether you are "re-charging" your car with gasoline or electricity, the procedure of transferring all of that energy is dangerous. With liquid fuel, there are the obvious flammability issues - nobody would ever consider putting a fueling station inside their home. And while electric charging is much safer, it is not perfectly safe. There are potential fire and explosion hazards from electrical malfunctions, incorrect or damaged batteries, cabling and connectors, interference from foreign objects, including rain, snow and other chemicals, and in-home hazards from wiring inadequacies and overloads. I for one would not sleep as soundly knowing that there is such a highly powered energy transfer going on in the garage attached to my house every night. Adding supersonic flywheels or redundant battery packs just increases that risk. Right now, electric vehicles are rare, and so are EV battery "events". The potential of these mishaps occurring will always be part of the risk of owning one.

0 to full in 60 seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a power screwdriver that charges in 60 seconds or less. It's kinda cool when it goes dead and you plug it into the base and watch the gage fly from dead to full.

True, it's only a screwdriver but the technology is coming along.

Re:0 to full in 60 seconds

[Chris Burke]

Dude, it should only take 60 seconds to refill your screwdriver if you've already thrown back a half dozen.

Link to Nature Nanotech article

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nnano.2011.38.html

sell & install them in pairs

[way2trivial]

Counter rotating pairs, same as helicopters!

then you just have to track failed units to make sure & maintain the 1/1 ratio necessary to keep the earths magnetic field from dissipating!

Oops

[Anonymous Coward]

One can just imagine what's going to happen to the grid at 5:30 when people stop on the way home to charge up the car and all try to suck down 50 kwh EACH in a matter of minutes.

Scary amount of power

[kheldan]

I don't know about anybody else, but I have an electronics/engineering background, and while many things (jumping out of an airplane, being on stage, etc) don't bother me, the mere thought of being in the immediate vicinty of apparatus capable of delivering that much power in that short a period of time makes my hair stand up on the back of my neck in a fashion similar to being caught out in the open in the middle of a thunderstorm.

Re:Scary amount of power

[Hartree]

Well, there is something that can deliver even more energy in a short time.

It's called a gasoline tank.

We're used to it, but gasoline is a definitely dangerous thing. We just have learned the rules for how to deal with it most of the time.

Re:Scary amount of power

[BitZtream]

Contrary to popular belief, gasoline is rather stable. It generally doesn't explode, even if they do it in movies. Hell, it doesn't even burn for shit, the vapor does but thats really not important since the vapor is always around the gasoline itself.

However, if you've ever seen a high current battery of any size dump its current quickly, you'll be rather afraid.

Re:Scary amount of power

[Hartree]

Believe me, I've seen both a gasoline vapor explosion and what a high current battery does when it's shorted. I'll take the battery any day. It's more localized even though it's violent.

But even just touching off gasoline in liquid and letting it burn when it's dispersed in a thin sheet on a floor is pretty impressive for rate of energy release. Yes, it's got to be in vapor form, but most things are that way for normal burning.

Fire related things in movies tend to be among the most bogus science wise. All cars in wrecks burn, and apparently in movies radiant heat doesn't exist because action heroes can have huge waves of fire go just inches away from them with no burns.

Re:Scary amount of power

[dogsbreath]

Contrary to your opinion, gasoline is extremely dangerous. You obviously have never had to deal with a fire caused by a static discharge by someone filling a plastic gas can. It is true that as a liquid without vapours and oxygen, gasoline is not a problem. We can drive down the road and as long as the car's tank maintains its integrity, we are ok. Of course, things can happen. It still took us (people) a long time to remove gas tanks from pick up truck cabs, and to place them inside the frame instead of outside. Not to mention flaming Pintos (the car). And don't be reaching into your vehicle for your ringing cell phone while fuelling. Another good way to create a static discharge and fire.

Simplistically, the potential explosive danger in a situation is proportional to the amount of stored energy of the device/product in question.

The risk is the likelihood of a bad thing happening.

Standing near the base of the Hoover dam would put myself in the path of a more powerful potential energy dump than any battery or car gas tank but I would feel pretty comfortable about the risk of the dam collapsing.

OTOH, both gas tanks and powerful batteries are fairly risky. However, we tend to ignore the risks because we like the convenience and we have mitigated the risk sufficiently to maintain the veneer of comfort.

Why houses?

[Anonymous Coward]

There seems to be tons of comments about the viability of these in houses, but why should they be located there? We don't have petrol pumps in our houses, so why would a high power delivery system be in our house?

It would seem to me that a gas station could be replaced by a high power recharge station, since it also seems that the recharge time is about the same as fuel-up time.

Re:Why houses?

[O('_')O_Bush]

There seems to be tons of comments about the viability of these in houses, but why should they be located there? We don't have petrol pumps in our houses, so why would a high power delivery system be in our house?

It would seem to me that a gas station could be replaced by a high power recharge station, since it also seems that the recharge time is about the same as fuel-up time.

I forgot to log-in before posting this. Quoting for visibility.

Anyone read...

[acmwallace]

Phillipe Jose Farmer? "To Your Scattered Bodies Go" - Bacitators!

Re:Anyone read...

[JackSpratts]

loved that book and have been waiting for them since.

There are millions of cars

[bugs2squash]

some of them wind up getting soaked in sea water from time to time. The occupants would not stand a chance. I think the solution is going to have to involve generating power on-board from something relatively benign rather than storing power in a battery or capacitor.

Re:There are millions of cars

[Xacid]

There are millions of cars. Some of them wind up catching on fire from time to time. The occupants would not stand a chance. I think the solution is going to have to involve avoiding getting in situations that'd blow up the car than storing power as a fuel in a tank.

Really - I do see your concern, but I don't think it's beyond our engineering capabilities to accomodate for such.

Re:There are millions of cars

[rubycodez]

waterproof power connections are very simple old tech. As the other replier to your post has implied, carrying around tens of liters of explosive fuel is more dangerous, far more energy in that stuff than in electric car battery system.

I'd rather have my own nuke

[wsanders]

Really, I'd rather have a well-designed nuclear reactor under my house than a rapidly spinning contraption with 50 kW of stored kinetic energy.

Unless I could train my cats to spin it up somehow.

Re:I'd rather have my own nuke

[cheater512]

Cats are not very effective at spinning up flywheels.

Now hamsters on the other hand.......

Re:I'd rather have my own nuke

[hidave]

You probably meant 50 kWhr. KW is a unit of power, not energy. In any case, I'd prefer a flywheel that held about two or three times that, so I could "charge" it from my solar or wind system, rather than house current, then use it for running my house and re-charging my car. That is, if I had solar or wind power.

Forget home charging

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh. You will pull into the Mobile station and drive up to the blue pump, swipe your card, push in the big plug, run inside for Snickers and diet cola, and then take out the plug, get the receipt, and drive off another 200 miles. Who wants home charging anyhow?

Experimental? They're already here!

[JackSpratts]

Gizmag said so. http://www.gizmag.com/lithium-ion-battery-breakthrough-mit/11244/

Don't need fast charge at home

[AC-x]

If anything it doesn't matter in your home because if you're parking it up in the garage you can just leave it charging overnight.

Where this would be handy is fast charging stations, where like petrol stations you can pull in and "fill up" in a few minutes. They can have specialised supplies installed capable of the high current needed.

Right!

[denzacar]

Just like jiggabyte is the correct pronunciation of gigabyte.

See also: nucular. I.e. It is an American thing.

Alternatively...

[denzacar]

Simply put a plutonium powered nuclear reactor into your car.

Granted, the usual suppliers of that particular fuel may be unreachable at the moment, but I am certain that the "invisible hand" will provide.

You do what any red-blooded American would do...

[denzacar]

Now what happens when you get a bad battery?

You sue. What are you, some kinda commie?

Electric Vehicle Range VS Hybrid Cost

[sjbe]

The PROBLEM with electric cars today isn't really the range, it's the price.

No the problem is range more than cost. I could afford to buy a Nissan Leaf but I would still need to either buy or rent another vehicle for longer trips. It's not remotely unusual for me to drive more than 150 miles in a single day. Not every day but often enough - at least 2X per week. (I drive about 30-40K miles/year) Current electric cars are really cool but they are only usable within a fairly short radius (30-60 miles). Now they have other charms (quiet, efficient, etc) which I definitely like but range is a BIG problem if you actually drive a lot. Don't get me wrong, I'd be first in line for a electric car that fit my needs but their battery packs just have a log ways to go yet. Absent some major advances in batteries and/or battery replacement technology, I just don't see electric cars being more than niche products. I'd buy a Tesla Roadster but only as a second vehicle.

The problem with HYBRIDS is cost. My daily driver is a pickup and the only hybrid pickup I'm aware of (Chevy Silverado) costs $20,000 more than my current ride with similar features. All for only 4-5mpg improvement. Even with tax breaks that's just way too expensive. I think hybrids are the future of automobiles but economies of scale need to kick in and bring the cost down.

Think out of the box

[vegiVamp]

Renault is proposing an entirely different idea for quick recharges: they design their electric vehicles so that you can drive into the "gas station", and the empty battery is mechanically taken out through the underside of the car and replaced with an already-replenished one. Takes mere minutes, regardless of capacity; ensures your car always has a good battery as the aging ones can be taken out of circulation at the station, and would also allow for running upgrades to higher-capacity batteries as long as they keep the form factor.

Yes, a power station would need quite some input to keep their banks charged, but nothing that isn't already provided to the industry already. Hell, one or two of Toshiba's (or was it Mitsubishi) portanuke thingies should do nicely.

I can't possibly fathom why no other constructors are signing up for this idea - it's hard to imagine that Renault would keep the licenses to themselves if they stand to gain more by widespread adoption and sharing of development and implementation costs.

Re:Think out of the box

[somerandomdude]

This is a great idea. I had it just earlier when reading the story! It makes me feel good for all of humanity when I think of a good way to solve a problem, and see that someone else has already done it. To know that there are like minded individuals out there is wonderfull.

Bacapacitor

[scharkalvin]

Philip José Farmer dreamed this up in his Riverworld novel series. In it Mark Twain built an electric riverboat powered by a "Bacapacitor" which Farmer described as a battery-capacitor hybrid.

change the electrolite

[scharkalvin]

Do you know where the charge in a battery is stored? It's actually in the electrolyte fluid NOT in the "plates".
It should be possible to design a battery where the discharged fluid is drained and replaced with "charged" fluid.
Recharging would then be just like refueling.

Re:change the electrolite

[WorBlux]

There are already some batteries like this, however charge concentration is less than your standard lead-acid, as well as being toxic or expensive (with Vandium or Chromium ions in solution.

Re:change the electrolite

[Smidge204]

SOME batteries store energy in that manner, but the most battery types do not.

Using lithium as an example, the energy is indeed stored in the electrodes. During charging lithium is freed from the chemical structure of the cathode and the Li+ ions travel across the cell to chemically bond with the anode material. The energy is stored as the difference in oxidation states between the anode and cathode chemistries.

Even a lead-acid battery, where the electrolyte actively participates in the chemistry, can not be recharged by simply replacing the electrolyte.
=Smidge=

Chicken and Egg Problem

[istartedi]

No reason to build inductors in the road without inductive cars. No reason to build inductive cars without inductors in the road.

Followed by, "cost a lot" is an understatement.

Car happy, alternative loving California is broke. Otherwise, we'd probably be the first to try it.

Then of course, nevermind installation. Maintenance... whooo boy... everybody wants to ride the lane that isn't broken. Oh, and billing.

There are more problems than you can shake a drumstick at.

Re:Chicken and Egg Problem

[Thing 1]

The slow lane could be the inductive charging lane; after all it's not powering the vehicles constantly, just charging them -- which of course would mean that it would need to charge them faster than they are depleting the charge in order for it to be effective. Well, I suppose it would still be "effective" even if it didn't charge as fast as it was being drained, because the extra energy would provide for longer range.

But anyway I agree, adding a significant cost to our infrastructure doesn't make a lot of sense. Now, putting this on toll roads, that might.

But I think burying the smaller nuclear plants, like the Toshiba 4S, and this one, makes even more sense. The math from that link says $25 million for the plant, and it generates $12 million of electricity per year (at 10c/kilowatt hour). And it needs to be refueled every 7-10 years, so even if we say 6 years, it basically triples its investment in that time. And refueling likely will cost a fraction of the expense of the entire plant, so "it gets cheaper over time". I would invest in a fund that invested in these plants. Heck, I might even create one.

And with a nuke in everyone's back yard, filling your car up will be simple. :)

Why short recharge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it possible instead to look for a super high density, relatively small profile, battery or capacitor that could take a long time to charge, but be swapped out relatively easily at gas stations?

OK I don't get....

[Valcrus]

I don't get why everyone seems to be assuming that you would need an instant charge when you pulled home. Maybe its just me but if I could stop at a gas station and in a few mins charge a charge a car that I could do a few hundred miles on I would be ok with that. When I got home I would be fine with a charge that took a few hours. Right now I would love the cost savings but I want something I can take a 600 mile trip in and not need to stay overnight to charge until I get to my destination. Until I can do something like that I will keep burning my fossil fuels.

if you think they charge fast

[nopainogain]

you should see them drain 8^)

The sheer numbers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Being thrown around are without any consideration for the future of power generation. Under current conditions the spike in power would be ludicrous but with simply adding in solar power generation along with a change in our power distribution system we could easily move towards this. On top of it all, I am firmly with most of the crowd on this, change every roadside gas station into something more like the quick lube stations and we're set.