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IBM Creates 'Breathing' High-Density Lithium-Air Battery
MrSeb writes "As part of IBM's Battery 500 project — an initiative started in 2009 to produce a battery capable of powering a car for 500 miles — Big Blue has successfully demonstrated a light-weight, ultra-high-density, lithium-air battery. In it, oxygen is reacted with lithium to create lithium peroxide and electrical energy. When the battery is recharged, the process is reversed and oxygen is released — in the words of IBM, this is an 'air-breathing' battery. While conventional batteries are completely self-contained, the oxygen used in a lithium-air battery comes from the atmosphere, so the battery itself can be much lighter. The main thing, though, is that lithium-air energy density is a lot higher than conventional lithium-ion batteries: the max energy density of lithium-air batteries is theorized to be around 12 kWh/kg, some 15 times greater than li-ion — and more importantly, comparable to gasoline."
Your move, range anxiety crowd.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It'll get in the way of increasing fossil fuel prices, especially if the people get over nuclear anxiety.
Quick, manufacture an incident in the past, using our time machine!
The summary makes it sound like they've never used air in batteries before. Most small batteries, including hearing aid batteries, are zinc-air. This is why they come with a small sticker on one side - you remove the sticker and give the battery a minute or so to take in air. That said, I don't believe the zinc-air batteries "breathe" like how the article describes, and they're certainly not rechargeable so kudos to IBM.
The reason it can be lighter is because there is no cathode in the battery. Most batteries have an internal anode, cathode, and electrolyte. In this case, the cathode is replaced by ambient oxygen, so it saves weight. attn pedants: dont' lash out if i have my anodes and cathodes confused.
Assuming this can be productized in a relatively reasonable timeframe, this is a HUGE advance. And, if IBM is reporting it, it is more likely to actually be true. (As opposed to some random no-name startup with results that cannot be duplicated and just happens to be up for a round of funding soon...)
the oxygen used in a lithium-air battery comes from the atmosphere, so the battery itself can be much lighter.
When the battery is recharged, the process is reversed and oxygen is released
The article was a bit brief, but from this read it seems that as the battery is discharged, it gains mass, but I'm just not seeing how much mass it would gain.
Also, if that thing releases pure oxygen when you charge it, I'm not charging that thing in my garage.
How long does it take to recharge? Current li-ion cars can get to 80% charge in half an hour.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There liars,
there are damned liars,
and then there are battery chemists.
Does anyone remember the hoopla about aluminum-air batteries? A variety of problems kept them from going main stream. I don't know what will plague lithium-air batteries but I'm darn sure it will be something. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery
I have been touting electric cars for years now as the next big thing....this makes me look like less of an eco-asshole :-P
I've been with the "range anxiety" crowd for a while now... the current capacity of electric vehicles has meant you pretty much MUST own a second car, or you'll be renting a "real" car pretty often.
If my car can go 500 miles on a charge? The last time I was riding in a car that went that long without an overnight stop (which could be used for charging) was college. Now that I have actual money? If I'm going 500 miles, I fly. (And even if I was driving, I'd get a hotel room for overnight... straight-through shift driving is something I just don't do any more.)
The thermal energy in gasoline has to be converted to a more useful form of energy (i.e. turning the wheels), the efficiency of this is going to be ~20% for a automobile. The battery is supplying much more useful energy, the efficiency of converting electricity to useful energy is going to be something like 90% (or more). So a battery with the same energy density of gasoline actually has at least 4 times the useful energy of the same size (weight actually) gas tank.
According to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Common_energy_densities The energy density for gasoline 47.2 MJ/kg and Lithium air battery 9 MJ/kg. If five times less is "comparable" I wouldn't mind the li-air car cost of $4000 which is comparable to a regular gas car.
While oxygen isn't technically flammable, many materials that are normally flame retardant explode into flame when exposed to high concentrations of oxygen.
This sounds great... just like the dozens of other game-changing energy breakthrough articles I've read over the years. Until it comes to market and works as advertised I'm not going to get too excited.
This is from IBM, so it is intended for a laptop computer, right? The cathode may be ambient oxygen, but with the energy density involved, if I park this thing in the wrong place, I could burn by anode?
You know that funny thing that happens to all those special molecules on the far left of the periodic table. You know... the catch fire and scream part?
where were going, we don't need wire.
Now that leaving your car running in the garage will have the opposite effect (oxygen instead of carbon dioxide) I wonder if you could leave your car running in your garage and then exercise out there and work out harder because of the enriched oxygen atmosphere...
If your car drives itself, the 500 mile-human-body-barrier may not be as relevant in 2020. It seems like the driverless car and this battery are slated for a similar timeline.
How would that battery efficiency be affected by air pollution and low- high- density cases?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
the investors in Big Oil make money, not oil When other energy sources become available, they will invest in those. they know we're coming off of peak oil production and they want their money flow. they just want their big piece of the action.
Big Oil will eventually run out of oil and have no choice but to turn to batteries for cars.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
According to the video we won't see these batteries in cars until "2020 or 2030". That seems like a long way off considering the summary says "demonstrated a light-weight, ultra-high-density, lithium-air battery" As far as I can glean from the vague articles is that all IBM has done is demonstrate the fundamental chemistry on a supercomputer. As far as I can tell they have not actually built a working battery of significant size and definitely not one of a size that would power a vehicle. There have been may technologies that work well in pristine laboratory environments but fail when they attempt to scale and/or have to deal with the dirty environment. Sure the battery may even work on a small scale when exposed to pure oxygen but how does it deal with the other elements in the atmosphere? Take a look at this. I do not see where IBM shows how that deal with any of these issues.
You don't want too much oxygen, especially since it's flammable.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Remember that in the future the idea will be to charge your car in the car park or at home, not just on the road.
Actually, in the future, it is likely that you will be able to recharge while you are driving. Here is how it will works: automatic lane control and braking systems will enable cars to travel in "platoons", with just a few inches between cars. This will greatly extend the range of your car by reducing air resistance, but the cars can also be magnetically coupled, so they can push and pull each other. So if you are on a long trip, and your battery is low, the computer in your car can automatically negotiate with other cars in the platoon and purchase power. You can use this to coast without draining your battery, or even run your engine in reverse and recharge your batteries as you drive.
RnD is dead, ask anyone on /.
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Your gasoline powered engine has a maximum efficiency of 37%. Typical efficiency is 20% or less.
Given that, the energy that is convertible to motion is only 9 MJ/kg for the ICE (internal combustion engine) car.
A BLDC (brushless DC) motor is up to 90% efficient -- and that is also typical.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
But wait a minute, wouldn't this mean that your batteries would get heavier as you drive? (taking up oxygen) ...
So when they're fully charged they seem like the best thing ever. But when they're half empty, not so much
(right?)
AC because I moderated. No, conductivity varies as the crossectional *area* of a conductor, and therefore as the *square* of the radius, not "linearly".
so this explains why IBM has been getting out of the computer hardware businesses( PC, hard disk, printers, etc ) over the past few years. They're about to become an energy company. The other good thing that this is IBM and not some small company is, they are not likely to sell out to the existing oil industry and sell the patent so they can bury the technology.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Have gnu, will travel.
If you look at about 2:15 in the first video of the first link, you'll see IBM is claiming an energy density of about 1.5 kWh/kg to 2 kWh/kg. They don't claim 12 kWh/kg; that's a "theorized" limit that extremetech quotes without substantiation from IBM.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
There is one issue with these 500mi batteries I can think of, how do you charge them quickly? if you assume it takes about 30KW do push a prius sized vehicle at 50mi/hr then a 500 mile battery would mean about 300Kw/hr storage. I'm not sure if that is what is here or not, but let's assume yes. To charge a 300kW/hr battery in ten mites would require a 1.8MegaWatts connection for every car at the "pump". Sounds kinda dicey. do you really trust that every car pulling up is maintained so well that a bad connection would not explode if you put a megawatt into it?
Even swapping out batteries and charging them off line would not actually decrease the demand. If a "busy" interstate gas station typically had 5 people/ ten minutes filling up all day long then whether you change batteries or not, it is still a 9mega watt station. If you could charge them overnight when they were closed, then it is still a 4.5Mwatt station to maintain a ten minute pit-stop time.
So simply building a large battery does not entirely solve the range problem with electric cars.
What about charging them at home? same problem if everyone is your apartment building wants to go 500 miles every day.
But that's just it. most people in your condo are not going to go 500 miles every day. Electric cars still make sense for commuters rather than long range travelers. Commuters drive a tenth of that, so the power demand is a tenth. this makes charging them at home sensible.
so this is a big advance but it is still does not solve the 500 mile recharge problem.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
We would probably spend more on energy to charge the battery than we are spending on gasoline today. And if the grid energy isn't green to begin with, I don't see how it really got us anywhere.
From the linked video it states that a car sized batter will probably not be available until 2020 or 2030. I think the subtext to that is really "We don' think this technology is actually viable and hope that some new technology will be found within the next 8 to 18 years that will make our research moot but give us money now anyway".
You got the movement of the oxygen during the charge/discharge cycle backwards, but I see what you're trying to do there. However, you might make a case for a far less stinky way to kill yourself. Leave the car running in the garage, and instead of carbon monoxide poisoning, you'd just die of hypoxia.
Big Oil will eventually run out of oil and have no choice but to turn to batteries for cars.
Just as in the future Big Lithium will eventually run out of lithium and have no choice but to turn to ??? for cars.
You don't want too much oxygen, especially since it's flammable.
and corrosive.
Yes, because IBM will just sit on a multi-billion dollar discovery and on one else in the world could possible make another one.
Idiot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
can't wait to see blue logo-ed battery stations around the country.
where do you get this 200Wh/mile? Wind resistance and storage conversion (in and out) inefficiecincy are the dominant factors for highway travel. wind resistance is pretty much set by the size of the car's crossectional area. So irrespective of how light or efficient you can make the engine you are not going to beat that. I estimate it take 30KW to push a honda accord size car at highway speed.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
We are in for it now. Li-O reaching gasoline energy density will lead some to think that electric vehicles should not only be tolerated but encouraged, now that they are "practical". What a disaster. No one will think of generation and transmission inefficacies to provide recharge energy nor of the great fun of manufacturing the darn things. Another yuppie fanatic disaster about to be foisted on the public. Used to be one could rely upon the rich and the powerful to squash the idiot mob but now, witness IBM, they have decided to join in and simply grab most of the profit. Are the rest of you just too damn stupid to understand your own natures or those of your fellow beings?
I don't know why, but the article and videos only mention cars, not laptops, phone or other gadgets (portable convector heater anyone?).
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
How many people do more than 60 miles a day of driving (that is like a 25 mile/way commute with 10 miles of shopping around too.)
If you plan to go on a long trip, you could go to your local car dealer (or even the local uHaul) and rent a towable generator to take you on that long trip (assuming the car has a connector that can handle enough current to drive you at freeway speeds.) Better yet, they could build a vehicle like the Volt and this would just make the battery weight much less.
You are assuming that EV will simply replace the current engine and fuel tank with an electric engine and battery... This is not what has to happen.
Currently engines are big and heavy so you only have one. You then have to transfer the rotational energy of the engine to the wheels. But Electric motors are very light and tiny. So why not have 4?
Put a small electric engine in each wheel and you eliminate the entire drive train... no more drive train losses and EV's are back up to 90%.
Your 72% efficiency only applies to ICE cars that have been converted to EV's.
One wonders how this will affect the planets oxygen in general. Tree's a chopped down at a crazy rate which affects the earths carbon-dioxide/oxygen plus overpopulation. Imagine more people, less tree's + machines (on top of the engine taking air for combustion engine) taking more oxygen for batteries...I think I'm going to start investing in oxygen. People laughed at paying for bottled water....look now.
You don't want too much oxygen, especially since it's flammable.
Yeah and keep that di-hydrogen monoxide off my lawn too! Too much of that stuff will kill you!
High concentrations of oxygen aren't flammable without a fuel source at which point, the fuel becomes highly combustible with the abundance of oxygen.
Exactly! If this tech works some oil company will buy the patent and the technology won't see the light of day until the patent expires, just like Chevron did last time...
I.B.M. == Internal Breathing Mechanism?
It's Battery Magic?
Come up with something on target for a new battery company....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Not big on chemistry, are you? Oxygen is not flammable. It is the opposite of flammable. Flammability is the property of being combinable with oxygen in such a way as to produce flame. O2 does not combine with O2.
Many EV battery theories seem to work well until the expectation is imposed that you'll be able to use it all day and recharge it every night and do that without dropping in efficiency such that you are still using the same battery with ~80% of its initial range several years later.
I've read of at least 4 "breakthroughs" that fail the test of lasting long enough that their initial costs makes sense.
So come back to me when you have a battery that makes economic sense defined for me as its cost is comparable to the costs of gas over say a 5 year period.
No oxygen!
Wonder if the battery can be harmed by 2nd hand exhaust and / or smoke? I don't want my battery coughing (backfire?).
I simply need some of these not-yet-available batteries to power the flying car that I don't yet have.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I'm posting to cancel out a bad moderation.... yay :/
If it obtains oxygen from the atmosphere, how are they going to keep water vapor from igniting the lithium?
how many recharges? Seriously, I would rather have a car that have similar specs and costs to the leaf or the model S, but then be able to get 100K to 1M charges, rather than having a longer driving car, that only takes 1-2K charges. At that point, you can literally drive the car into the ground and still have a use for the storage.
If this takes another decade to come to market, there is a real good chance that super caps will dominate it by then.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's the equivalent of Gresham's law. If some gold coins get debased, then people will not exchange the good ones, only the bad ones.
Similarly, people will do the same with very valuable battery packs, the recently manufactured ones with full capacity will disappear from the changing station and only bad ones will be available. If anybody gets a good one in exchange by accident (some newbie), they would sell it at a high price, and buy a lower quality one and trade that one back in.
To be fair, the amount of current required to fast-charge a car in 1/2 hr (with a 500 mile battery, no less) is enormous. A whole parking lot full of those cars charging at once? That'd require the power feed the size of what you'd use to power a medium-size factory.
If charged in your garage, your house could be referred to as "a fuel source". Some people, like 3 former astronauts, consider that a bad thing.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Too bad Fiat already has the name 500, no one will be able to use it now!
If our entire transportation sector used these things, about how much atmospheric oxygen would be in battery use at any given moment? I'm hoping it would be insignificant, but that's how we start thinking about a lot of things.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Steve Jackson's Car Wars was ahead of its time.
Can I get a dualie pickup with a turret please?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Next, they need to make a flow battery version of this.
Drive down the road, turning fresh electrolyte (no peroxide) into spent electrolyte (with peroxide). You have one tank, with a non-permeable membrane between the two sides. Pull into a refueling station. Pump out the spent stuff, pump in the fresh stuff, over the course of a few minutes. Congrats. You just refueled. The station can deal with regenerating the spent stuff, so it can be reused. You don't have to worry about high-current or high-voltage electrical power being transferred to your vehicle.
They're already working with Zinc- and Vanadium-based flow redox batteries. They don't have a very high energy density, which is why you hear much about it. They were running a bus on such a system. Look here for more details.
At that point, all those whining about how long it takes to recharge will be out of excuses. Personal transportation can transition away from petroleum.
<sarcasm>
And there will be unicorns and butterflies for all.
</sarcasm>
When you step up to a plug-in hybrid with 30 mile range the battery weight is indeed substantial (Chevy Volt weighs 3781 lbs), but below that it isn't much of a factor and can easily be offset by high-strength steel and other weight savings. With its ~1.3 kWh 123 lb battery back the Prius weighs 3042 lbs, meanwhile a VW Golf 4-door weighs 3023 lbs. The Prius plug-in weighs 3165 lbs but only has a 4.4 kWh battery good for 11 miles all-electric.
=S
After depleting the battery, drive it into the garage, close the door, and recharge. In a few hours, the garage is full of about 90% oxygen. Light a cigarette, and it'll go off like a flare. In surprise, drop the cigarette onto a pile of sawdust, and KABOOM!
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If our entire transportation sector used these things, about how much atmospheric oxygen would be in battery use at any given moment? I'm hoping it would be insignificant, but that's how we start thinking about a lot of things.
No problem.. I hear Druidia has all the air we would ever need.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
Did anyone else notice that they have their anode listed as lithium metal?
So let me get this straight, the battery is essentially open to the atmosphere so if can get oxygen to run and the anode material, which seems that it will also be open to the atmosphere, is made of lithium metal... so the second it rains or you get to a high humidity area your car is going to explode...
Assuming their battery concept is the real deal and comes to fruition, why not come up with a system which retains the ability both to charge overnight and instantly fill up.
The swappable battery bank idea is silly. Charge deltas, consistency, fraud, monitoring... it is all too much work.
The design of the battery could be adept at being literally tanked up. Create an apparatus for purging the oxygen rich Lithium ions while replacing with full charged ones in some gas or liquid carrier.
The filling hose would need to have at least 3 lines and fit on sealed. One line in, one line out, and one for a purge liquid or gas (to get Oxygen out of the fittings)... I think liquid nitrogen would do the trick. Even the concept of Octane ratings could be maintained. Lithium certified at multiple levels of charge (relative to carrier fluid), 80%, 90%, 95%... etc. Gas stations could use their own large scale batteries to recharge the waste Li2O2 back to Li2 overnight, or in electrically remote areas, get it trucked in.
If we have the materials science to build the batteries, then containment, storage, and disbursement should equally be within reach.
The only real issue one could argue is the inherent danger in transporting Li2, but we've worked around that with gasoline (though it is substantially less reactive).
Heck, even fathers could still scald their children for running their batteries into the ground by not buying premium at the pump.
I would apply for the patent myself, but I don't really feel like doing the work to figure out the correct and safe working fluid for happy go boomy Li2.
I hope they remember to make the "Charge 5 Project" along with it, because when I'm down to 10% of the charge I'm still going to start having range anxiety.
'55 chevy?
If I remember correctly, Volkswagen Chairman Martin Winterkorn predicted that by 2020, an electric car about the size of today's Volkswagen Golf with a battery pack almost the same volume size as the Golf's fuel tank could go 800 km (497 miles) on a single charge, thanks to dramatic improvements in lithium-ion and ultracapacitor battery designs. If Winterkorn's prediction becomes reality, this will be the beginning of the end of the age of petroleum-fueled automobiles, light trucks and SUV's. By 2025, people will be looking back at the "quaint old days" of fueling up a personal vehicle with gasoline or diesel fuel. :-)
The battery will have to be in bellows as a self contained unit. Not an air breathing cell at all.
There is no way water vapour or any other reactive contaminants can get in contact with the lithium or risk losing it's efficacy.
The cell walls and the substrate also require porosity. This will reduce the charge density and the "air" will need a degree of active mixing due to its low density.
This is a short editorial to stir a wasps nest of thinkers and supposers like myself and everyone else here. There is no hand portable rechargeable lithium air cell that we can safely offer a warrantee to.
Plenty of unobtainium on Pandora. I'll wave you goodbye as you leave.
Your comment reminds me of: http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm
"An analogy will illustrate just how radical this trust really is. What if I proposed that we hand three sticks of dynamite and a detonator to anyone who asked for them. All an applicant would need is money to pay for the explosives. You'd have to be an idiot to agree with my plan -- at least based on the assumptions you picked up in school about human nature and human competence.
And yet gasoline, a spectacularly mischievous explosive, dangerously unstable and with the intriguing characteristic as an assault weapon that it can flow under locked doors and saturate bulletproof clothing, is available to anyone with a container. Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite. The average tank holds fifteen gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or dispensee. As long as gasoline is freely available, gun control is beside the point. Push on. Why do we allow access to a portable substance capable of incinerating houses, torching crowded theaters, or even turning skyscrapers into infernos? We haven't even considered the battering ram aspect of cars --- why are novice operators allowed to command a ton of metal capable of hurtling through school crossings at up to two miles a minute? Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone?
It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism. But almost all auto mishaps are accidents, and while there are seemingly a lot of those, the actual fraction of mishaps, when held up against the stupendous number of possibilities for mishap, is quite small. I know it's difficult to accept this because the spectre of global terrorism is a favorite cover story of governments, but the truth is substantially different from the tale the public is sold. According to the U.S. State Department, 1995 was a near-record year for terrorist murders; it saw three hundred worldwide (two hundred at the hand of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka) compared to four hundred thousand smoking-related deaths in the United States alone. When we consider our assumptions about human nature that keep children in a condition of confinement and limited options, we need to reflect on driving and things like almost nonexistent global terrorism."
Anyway, the new battery sounds like an impressive innovation if it proves out in production. There are many innovative peopel at IBM Almaden; it is truly an amazing accomplishment. With that, and hydrigen storage in metal hydrides, both useful for storing intermittent renewable energy, and maybe hot or cold (LENR) fusion, our society is well on its way to ensuring an abundance of energy for all for basic needs.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I live near a nuclear power plant that produces 1.9 Gw within a few miles of a large population center. Why can't spare batteries be charged there as well as any power distribution yards then trucked to distribution points just as fuel gets to gas stations? Nuclear plants produce surplus power at night and this one probably still uses its to pump water uphill to a reservoir that than runs water back down to hydro-generate power during peak periods. The new batteries may be a cheaper investment for a power company than additional transmission and distribution lines. Distributed power in batteries provide other advantages during power outages that gasoline in underground storage tanks at gas stations do not. Problems certainly exist, but if production and recycling costs are reasonable, this would be a great resource. Charged batteries pose hazards, of course, just like petroleum products, but can still be moved exactly the same -- train, boat, barge, truck, even planes -- and provide more opportunities by way of local charging from solar and wind. Maybe I can supplement my retirement in the country with a windmill that charges batteries I swap with neighbors? Wow!
All that lithium metal would make for a nasty hydrogen explosion if exposed to water.
that old nonsense? battery technology at the time was indeed not ready for practical use in automobile, woefully inefficient example from the last 100 years nonwithstanding. big oil investors will invest in something that can make money, not pie-in-the sky.
Not ready? BS!
The proof: Toyota RAV4 EV. Based on 14 year old technology this thing can go 100-120 miles on a charge. Some of the original battery packs have lasted 150k miles.
The battery tech was there. It worked. Hell, it is still working as 750 of these are still on the road!
If Lithium-Air vehicle gets to a price point that matches a eco-gas box over a 5 year life span, those that own homes may start the transfer from Oil to E. As long as the range is over 150 miles in cold weather (32 degs) it starts to make financial sense. And lets not forget the billions of your tax dollars going to fight wars over foreign oil deposits.
And for those in reasonable healthy shape, maybe the eBike will come of age when a long range bike hits a reasonable price point. You can get ~30 mph avg and 100 mile range now with selected pricy eBikes but their price compares to used eco-gas boxes which of course most are more comfortable with. The advantage of the eBike over an electric car however is you can take it in your apartment when the day is over and charge it on standard house current plug.
Don't write it off. Yeah, it's not ready for prime time but anyone that shrugs off the promise has little incite as to what a electric transportation device can provide when the power density and storage capacity closes in on gasoline.
http://www.betterplace.com/