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U.S. 5X Battery Research Sets Three Paths For Replacing Lithium
dcblogs writes "One year ago this month, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $120 million plan to develop a technology capable of radically extending battery life. 'We want to change the game, basically,' said George Crabtree, a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a physics professor who is leading the effort. The goal is to develop a battery that can deliver five times the performance, measured in energy density, that's also five times cheaper, and do it in five years. They are looking at three research areas. Researchers are considering replacing the lithium with magnesium that has two charges, or aluminum, which has three charges. Another approach investigates replacing the intercalation step with a true chemical reaction. A third approach is the use of liquids to replace crystalline anodes and cathodes, which opens up more space for working ions."
Year-old news, right here on Slashdot!
What about Carbon nanotube Super Capacitors? MIT Nanotube Super Capacitor
Magnesium?
Who doesn't like a 3,100 C fire in his pants!
Another liquid battery concept for grid storage was mentioned here: http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/511081/ambris-better-grid-battery/
OK, Lets use an Enerdel 12s block. 3000 cycles by 1300 watt-hours gets us 3.9 million watt-hour-cycles.
The cost is $711. So 3.9 million w-hr-cycles / $711 is 5485 w-hr-cycles per dollar. What is the w-hr-cycles of gasoline again?
Depends on where you live. In Phoenix we're powered by hydro and nuclear, and even have enough electricity to spare that we sell to California who has a shortage. Ironically we're also probably the last place you'd look for hippies or "greenies". I think the main thing is that we just don't have NIMBY syndrome (meanwhile the federal government seems content that we be the kidnapping capital of the world because they won't allow us to take the border situation under control because it bothers the hippies, who themselves would never allow a nuclear plant anywhere near them.)
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
I think we should call it Obamabattery and have IRS fine anybody who doesn't use it.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Is that the little basket with buns wrapped in a towel you get in good restaurants?
Mostly random stuff.
OK, Lets use an Enerdel 12s block. 3000 cycles by 1300 watt-hours gets us 3.9 million watt-hour-cycles.
The cost is $711. So 3.9 million w-hr-cycles / $711 is 5485 w-hr-cycles per dollar. What is the w-hr-cycles of gasoline again?
That's an interesting question:
Gasoline gives us only one cycle.
$ units
You have: (114000 btu / gal) / (3$ / gal)
You want: W hr / $
* 11136.701
Sounds bad... but car engines are only about 20% efficient and electric cars are more like 80% efficient.
If we normalize that way, the gas car is 2227, and the batteries are 4388.
Looks like the batteries win, even with current temporary lull in gas prices.
In part, you are right. Batteries have to be competitive with traditional fuels. While some people may want EVs for "green" reasons that only they can understand, they do not represent any significant part of the market. I bought my car (Prius) not because I wanted to save the planet, but simply because I needed a new car, and Prius was a very good choice in many aspects - comfort (CVT rules!) and mieage, and reliability, and price, and cargo space, and passenger seats, and cost of service. Saving the planet? Not on my salary. Let Al Gore do that on his.
But moving pollution elsewhere, in itself, is not such a bad idea. First of all, even if the volume of pollution is unchanged, moving it away from cities helps already. However large power stations are more efficient, such as they produce less pollution per kWh of energy, compared to a car. It remains to be seen what effect the transmission losses have; but the losses are present in both cases; an ICE is not very efficient, and it is largely heating the Universe. At the same time, charging of an EV is not a lossless process either, and the batteries do not last forever - they contain polluting chemicals, and they need energy to be produced and recycled.
Remote power stations have yet another advantage - they can use cheaper or cleaner fuels. Coal is cheaper, and is plentiful. Sunlight, hydro, wind, geothermal, tide, etc. are cleaner. Those are options that you can exercise. You have no such options with gas-powered cars; they only can run on oil products by definition - and supply of oil is, apparently, limited.
OK, lets try the math:
Battery:
(1 kWh/ $500) * 1000 cycles / (300 Wh/mi) = 6.67 mi / $
Gasoline:
(1 gallon / $3.50) * (30 miles / gallon) = 8.57 mi / $
There seems to be lots of uncertainty on battery cost. Several car makers say their packs are under $500 / kWh (One article said Elon Musk expects sub-$200 "soon"). The Tesla Model S 60 kWh battery is warranted for 125k miles, which would seem to be at least 625 cycles is expected.
This certainly seems to me like it is within a factor of 2 of gasoline. A 5x change like talked about in this article would make gasoline not at all competitive.
The Germans are spending tens of Billions getting batteries into homes to smooth out solar power. Their idea is simple; by encouraging people to actually buy the stuff it will create a market and get the companies moving on research and development. I am willing to bet that 90% of the American money will go to a select group of companies and universities that lobbied hard for that money. Then over the next few years we will read in Popular Science and here on Slashdot about "BATTERY BREAKTHROUGH! New battery tech is 100x better and 100x cheaper!!!" but when you read the article it will be a pile of hype over a test-tube battery that is the size of a postage stamp that can barely power an LED and requires 3 hours of CERN LHC time to make.
The real (boring) article will be about a German factory employing 8,000 people that is selling 3 billion in home batteries per year that work quite well and provide good value to their customers.
I think we should call it Obamabattery and have IRS fine anybody who doesn't use it.
"If you like your current battery, you can keep your current battery!"
1.3KWh * $0.12/KWh * 3000 cycles= $468
468+711 = 1179 cost. 3.9E6/1179 = 3307. 3307*0.8 = 2643 vs gasoline's 2227, so electric still wins.
Or w/ California electric costs the figure for EV is 2270 so even at their electricity prices EV squeeks past gasoline. (though their gas may be more than $3/gal)
This is, of course, before you account for the externalities of pollution.
Car engines may be more than 20% efficient in the best case, but in real world operation including idle and jack rabbit starts, probably not. That's why they introduced hybrids: you pay extra for some batteries in order to keep the engine closer to its theoretical maximum efficiency.
IIRC, the electricity to power a car is well under half the cost of gas per mile, especially if you meter it at off-peak hours. So it would still come out ahead. The car costs more to buy mainly because of the batteries, which is the cost that we were analyzing in the first place.
The limited range is probably the main show stopper for electric cars right now.
I bought my car (Prius) not because I wanted to save the planet, but simply because I needed a new car, and Prius was a very good choice in many aspects - comfort (CVT rules!) and mieage, and reliability, and price, and cargo space, and passenger seats, and cost of service.
I bought my car (pure EV Nissan LEAF) for similar reasons. I needed a new car, I liked the LEAF, and it was cheaper than any new hybrid or ICE vehicle I compared it to, and I compared a lot of them. Yeah, the LEAF costs more up front, but I estimated that, given my driving patterns, I'd break even in just under six years due to the much lower fuel cost -- and that's without considering tax credits. With the tax credits (which which I disagree philosophically, but that's not going to stop me from reducing my tax liability in any way I legally can), the break-even point was just over two years. And I didn't even consider the much lower maintenance costs (the LEAF's maintenance schedule is hilarious... basically you rotate the tires every 7500 miles, and every 15000 miles you have someone look it over to make sure nothing is wearing or breaking).
Of course, the EV isn't usable for road trips, and there are a number of other limitations. But that's okay because I need more than one vehicle anyway. It does a great job in the role it fills, and it's cheap to own and fun to drive.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I am a battery scientist, and while I think that Argonne is one of the places where great work is done, they have set very ambitious goals for themselves.
1) Replacing Li with Mg is a lovely idea, but currently there is no fully stable electrolyte and as far as I know nobody has good candidates for electrode materials. Don't even get me started on Al.
2) Lithium-air batteries have been debated to death also here on /.. The current status is again that there seems to be no stable electrolyte, no clear idea of what exactly happens, and if we factor in the weight and complexity of adding various components to the battery assembly to make a real device out of it, the great theoretical energy density of Li-O2 is reduced to Li-ion levels, if not even less.
3) The liquid slurry electrode is an interesting concept which at least recycles materials that are available and known to be working. This is more of an engineering problem than a scientific one, and could see quick advancement in 5 years.
I hope the community as a whole will be able to find the breakthrough to finally have people stop cursing batteries.
Batteries: you hate them since 150 years!
This is Slashdot, where it is trendy to hate on anything America does. Also there's the risk that the DoE might succeed (the DoE has some top research labs, Ames, Argonne, Fermi, Livermore, Los Alamos, NREL, Oak Ridge, Sandia, to name a few). In this case Argonne is leading the battery project, working with Berkley, PNNL, Sandia, and SLAC. There are also some public universities participating as well. So gotta get that hate in now!
As you say, the reality is that all this battery research is beneficial. Doesn't matter where it is developed, it'll be sold to the world. Nobody is going to drop millions or billions in the tech and say "Ya, that was neat, no reason to sell it though!"
Bear with me now. A gallon of gasoline, depending on blending and the amount of ethanol has a high heating value (HHV) of about 120,000 BTU per gallon. At 100 percent conversion efficiency, 3400 BTUs gives you 1 kWHr, so 100% conversion of a gallon of gas gives 35.3 kWHr. That is what the EPA means by "eMPG" -- the EPA is assuming 100% conversion efficiency, but that is counteracted by the eMPG rating being artificially high because of that assumption.
Apart from arguments on whether EPA mileage reflects actual mileage, and whether an electric vehicle (EV) takes a "bigger hit" in efficiency in cold weather than a gasoline car, the gasoline MPG combined with the MPG gives you the cents-per-mile; the same holds true for eMPG combined with the kWHr rate according to how eMPG translates into kWHr -- as supplied to the plug connection to the EV. Thus we have "real word" fuel consumption numbers on current-gen gas cars, "real world" kWHr consumption on current-gen EV's, and we don't have to get tied up in knots over figuring all the energy losses in gasoline cars and in EVs.
That Enerdel battery "costs" 18 cents/kWHr, and my Midwestern power company sells me electricity at 14 cents/kWHr. That is, the electric cost is 32 center/kWHr or $11.30 per "electric gallon", but for an EV getting 100 eMPG, that works out to 11 cents/mile.
For gasoline at 4 dollars/gallon (it is cheaper now but will probably climb in price next summer), that works out to 13 cents/mile.
OK, I am sold, that at least from a policy perspective, that if this price on batteries holds up or improves, and if gasoline keeps getting more expensive, a given but you never know for sure, and if electric rates don't increase, not really a given with current policies, or if through Smart Grid that EV owners are given a "deal" for charging at night or other off-peak times, this new battery tech is at least putting the EV "in play."
The other consideration is that $4/gallon is what I pay at the filling station and 14 cents/kWHr is what I pay at home as a retail electric customer. Is this $711 the retail price of that battery pack, or is it the wholesale price to an automobile manufacturer? If I want to replace a 30 kWHr battery pack in a LEAF, do I pay 21 grand or do I pay twice that amount at the Nissan parts counter?