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Research Promises Drastically Increased LiOn Capacity
daem0n1x writes "Could this be the breakthrough we've all been expecting that will finally make the electric car a reality? Researchers of Northwestern University USA discovered a new way to build lithium-ion batteries that changes dramatically both the charge time and capacity [original paper, paywalled]. Guess what it involves? That's right, graphene."
Graphene. Is there anything it can't do?
Stay in the car!
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What if I am still running Snow Leopard?
Just in time for the cheap, ultra efficient solar panels that will be available then
This is a must read article on the subject. Electric cars fail because batteries are too expensive, and because they required infrastructure of charging stations. This company however solves both these problems. You make an electric car without the battery, which is cheaper than a standard car and more reliable to boot. Then this company leases you a battery, which costs less per month than gas. And they handle the infrastructure, which includes stations that swap your battery out for a fully charged one. You never wait to charge your battery, and they can swap it out since you don't own it.
http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi?currentPage=all
Part of this model is the assumption that battery technology still moves along rapidly. So the company can phase in newer, better batteries and you aren't tied to a battery you purchased when you bought your car.
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I don't even comment on /. anymore.
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Flying cars are already a reality. They are just expensive and inefficient.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Interstellar travel is already a reality. It is just expensive and inefficient.
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That's right, bacon."
More appealing answer.
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If we could combine all the tech from all of the battery stories we've read in the past year, we could power an interstallar craft for a year with a single AAA battery and recharge it by rubbing it on a fluffy shirt for a few seconds.
Having read the article (*gasp*) as well as a few others it seems these batteries do NOT hold 10x more power. They degrade 10x slower on on drain/recharge cycles and can be charged 10x faster. BUT this is not the same as having 10x more POWER per cycle. Gonna have to wait some more before you get an cheap electric car that can go 500 miles before charging (though charging 10x faster is nice).
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... they'll fit right into the steady curve of slowly but steadily increasing battery capacity. People assume that all these battery advancements we keep hearing about never pan out. Well, some of them do, but once the researchers silly claims are brought down to be a bit more realistic, and after the years go by before they actually hit the market, they're just incremental improvements on what was available before they came out.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Yes, we've progressed from not having invented it to having solved some interesting research problems. Next stage is cancelation.
or duke nukem forever...
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Although it is subtle, battery technology has improve energy density steadily over the years. For lithium-ion, the trend has been about 5-10% / year for over a decade now. The battery pack from my ten-year old laptop (yeah, it's sittin' in a box somewhere) has just over half the nominal capacity of a battery of similar volume today. It's not Moore's Law, but it is there.
On the other hand, with the exponential increase in transistor count / computing power has some a corollary effect of decreasing energy needed to do that computation: Koomey's Law. So if I take a look at the battery pack from my 5-y.o. flip phone and compare it to what's in an iPhone, they are roughly the same volume. But the newer battery has more capacity, and the newer phone does jumping jacks around my old feature phone, and has about the same amount of talk time / standby time, if not more.
Call me an optimist, but I think that in this regard we're still coming out ahead.
That's quite affordable for a car that runs on electricity which is far, far cheaper than gas, and requires much less maintenance.
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Will this improve the battery life on my cell phone, laptop, and tablet?
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The confusion is because the paper linked in the summary is incorrect.
The Northwestern paper is titled "In-Plane Vacancy-Enabled High-Power Si–Graphene Composite Electrode for Lithium-Ion Batteries (pages 1079–1084)" and the summary linked paper is titled "In Situ Generation of Few-Layer Graphene Coatings on SnO2-SiC Core-Shell Nanoparticles for High-Performance Lithium-Ion Storage".
Can people mod me up or have the summary corrected?
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
The Northwestern paper is titled "In-Plane Vacancy-Enabled High-Power Si–Graphene Composite Electrode for Lithium-Ion Batteries (pages 1079–1084)". The article linked in the summary is titled "In Situ Generation of Few-Layer Graphene Coatings on SnO2-SiC Core-Shell Nanoparticles for High-Performance Lithium-Ion Storage".
Can people mod me up or have the summary corrected?
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
If there's one event that tipped us into the Singularity that should be the invention of the integrated circuit in the late 1950s.
Or maybe the invention of the scientific method, but that happened centuries before, too much could nave happened in between.
Still, the main use case they are touting in the summary is cars. Faster charging, higher storage density batteries are a huge deal in that space. One of the big complaints with electric cars is that they take much longer to charge than a gas powered car takes to fill up, so faster charging is a big deal. More power density means either a) you can store the same amount of power in fewer batteries (thus theoretically reducing the weight and cost) or b) can get much farther on the same sized battery.
Right now electric cars are right on the cusp of being really commercially viable. If they become a hair cheaper, a hair longer range, a hair quicker to charge... it could put them over the top. This has the potential to do all three, and if the research is accurate increase all of them by more than a hair.
Plus, you know, I wouldn't complain if my iPhone went 3 days without a charge.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
That seems like a problem in your argument. There is no electric car+battery combination which costs $16k. The figure you cite is less than half the actual retail cost of an electric car+battery. Even the prius plug-in, due next year, costs over $30k, and the battery pack only provides a 10 mile range.
Retail electricity for residential consumers in states which don't burn coal is about $0.14/KwH, not $0.10. If we burn coal to generate electricity, then we've negated any environmental benefit of electric cars, so we should use the $0.14/KwH price for electricity. Electricity from renewables would be at least 50% more expensive than even that.
Let's try a comparison with these figures. The Nissan Leaf costs $35,000, and an approximately equivalent Nissan Versa Hatchback costs $15,000. If we drive the versa for 150,000 miles with $4/gal fuel at 35 mpg, we pay $17,142 for fuel. If we drive the Leaf for 150,000 mi (which is the rated life of the battery pack), the fuel (electricity) would cost $8,400 (leaf has a 24 KwH battery pack which costs $3.36 to recharge at $0.14/KwH and takes us 60 mi on average, for a per-mile charge of $0.056, *100,000 = $8,400).
We must also include the cost of financing. Interest at 3% above inflation for 5 years would cost $2250 for the Versa and $5250 for the Leaf. Even if you pay using cash upfront, you are foregoing interest you could have earned by investing the same money, so it's an opportunity cost.
There will also be different insurance costs, for insuring a $15,000 car against theft vs. a $35,000 car. But let's ignore that now.
Of course the government will give you a $7,500 tax break right now if you buy an electric car, but will only do so for a small number of buyers until the incentive expires, so let's ignore that now because it's not generalizable.
The total cost of the Versa for 150k mi is $34,392, and the total cost of the Leaf for the same distance is $48,650. It costs about 41% more to drive a similar electric car at present, not counting insurance or limited-time government incentives. It is not cost-competitive.
It's possible that an electric car will become competitive if gasoline costs far more in the future and batteries cost less. If the Leaf costs $30k in the future and gasoline costs $7/gal (in 2011 dollars), then the Leaf would be approximately cost-competitive with a gasoline-powered car. This circumstance is definitely possible within the next 15 years.